THE LAST MISTRESS, THE BANQUET, THE 39 STEPS
	10:13am Thu 10 Apr 08
	Catherine Breillat is one of France's most consistently controversial film-makers. However, she reins in her genius for provocation in The Last Mistress, a handsome adaptation of a novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly that ventured into the Dangerous Liaison territory of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In the vein of Jacques Rivette's recent Don't Touch the Axe, this meticulous picture combines a period aesthetic with a contemporary acuity to provide fascinating insights into both human nature and French society now and in the 1830s.

SHINE A LIGHT

10:12am Thursday 10th April 2008

While many rock bands have snatched their 15 minutes of fame then wilted into obscurity - or, worse still, attempted to recapture past glories by leaping on the reunion bandwagon - The Rolling Stones have defiantly refused to gather moss for more than 45 years.

	My Brother is an Only Child, Beaufort, The Book of Revelation and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK
	9:52am Thu 3 Apr 08
	In the 2003 epic, Best of Youth, screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli produced a chronicle of post-war Italian life that merited comparison with the German masterpiece Heimat. The duo revisits many of the same themes in Daniele Luchetti's My Brother Is an Only Child, a study of the political divisions of the 1960s and 70s that centres on two siblings in love with the same girl. This is more a domestic dramedy than an analytical snapshot of the times. However, its suggestion that conviction is merely a disposable lifestyle accessory is particularly apt for our own era of pick'n'mix values and soundbite ideologies.

	Son of Rambow
	9:49am Thu 3 Apr 08
	For those of us who lived through the 1980s (with tattered Polaroids to recall the glaring fashion faux pas), it was the decade of leg warmers and Space Dust popping furiously on the tongue. "Frankie Say" T-shirts were the political statement of choice, while men emulated the pastel linen suits of Miami Vice's Crockett and Tubbs.

You, The Living, Bunny Chow and The Go Master

3:56pm Wednesday 26th March 2008

The morbid hilarity of mundane existence is relentlessly revealed by Swedish auteur Roy Andersson in You, the Living, a deadpan follow-up to his wonderful 2000 comeback picture Songs from the Second Floor. Again adopting a non-linear structure and a fastidiousness to ludicrous detail that recalls Jacques Tati, Andersson flits between unlinked, inconsequential episodes in the lives of various downtrodden individuals whose self-obsession blinds them to the impending doom of the bigger picture.

	27 Dresses and Drillbit Taylor
	3:54pm Wed 26 Mar 08
	Grey's Anatomy surgical resident Katherine Heigl continues her makeover into fully-fledged leading lady with 27 Dresses, a frothy romantic comedy penned by Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada. Anne Fletcher's film waltzes down the aisle of predictability as the resourceful heroine seeks to rewrite the assumption that she is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Wedding bells peal loud and clear, but not before a great deal of soul-searching, self-sacrifice and a toe-curling best (wo)man speech that threatens to end in physical violence.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

4:03pm Wednesday 19th March 2008

The prayers of parents, desperate for something to entertain the kids during Easter, have been answered. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a rollicking fairytale full of magic and mystery, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, which reveal an alternative reality full of goblins and ogres.

	Flight of the Red Balloon and The Orphanage
	4:02pm Wed 19 Mar 08
	Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay and riffing on The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse's Oscar-winning 1956 short, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's most accessible picture to date. That said, it's also a typically measured and visually sublime treatise on our inability to communicate in an increasingly impersonal world, as well as an affectionate paean to the unique gift that children possess for being impervious to the gravest of events happening around them.

	10,000BC and The Cottage
	11:14am Thu 13 Mar 08
	Director Roland Emmerich has spent half his career trying to obliterate planet Earth and humankind with it in blockbusters such as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, a film which imagined the return of the Ice Age.

We Are Together, Water Lilies and Children of Glory

11:12am Thursday 13th March 2008

A South African tweenager slowly pulling tongues at the camera in Paul Taylor's We Are Together will be one of this critic's enduring images of 2008. It's not a rude gesture, but a charming sign of the growing confidence that Slidile Moya feels in dealing with the world outside the Agape hostel where she lives with 25 other children from KwaZulu Natal, who have been left orphaned by the country's wholly avoidable Aids epidemic.

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