Its strongest suit is its Simpsons-like honesty about the complete worthlessness of vast swathes of American culture: the film’s dodgeball tournament is one of those ridiculous non-events that exist only to fill cable-TV schedules. The star performance comes from Ben Stiller as a posing, moustachioed fitness guru. A hackneyed target, to be sure, but Stiller’s take on it is irresistibly funny. Four stars
Edward Porter
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Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut
15, 134 mins
The director’s cut? So whose cut was the film when it was first released, in 2001? The studio’s? Michael Winner’s? The chief rabbi’s? Why not just say, this is a terrific film that you might have missed first time around? The director and writer, Richard Kelly, has added new songs and new visual-effects sequences, included deleted scenes and remastered the sound — and to be honest, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. This tale of teenage angst and time travel, set in the suburbs of 1980s America, is still one of the most comic and creative films made in years. There is no point in discussing the plot, because I still haven’t figured it out. But the wonderful mix of darkness and laughter, along with the winning performances of Jake Gyllenhaal and the rest of the cast, make it a treat worth seeing again and again. Four stars
Cosmo Landesman
Fear and Trembling
12A, 107 mins
From Sofia Coppola to Steven Spielberg (The Terminal), the theme of migration, of being lost in foreign lands, is all the rage. Now along comes the French director Alain Corneau’s Fear and Trembling, which evokes not only Lost in Translation, but also Secretary and the sunny surrealism of Amélie. This Amélie (Sylvie Testud) is a Belgian who longs to become Japanese. So, she returns to Japan as a translator for a large corporation and ends up under the high heel of her boss, the beautiful Miss Fubuki Mori (Kaori Tsuji). Jealous of the western newcomer, Mori piles on the humiliation, but Amélie refuses to quit. Corneau’s film neatly contrasts the romanticism of Amélie and the harsh reality of Japan’s office culture, with its power struggles and elaborate etiquette. This is a funny, inventive look at a clash of cultures — and the clash of two women. Three stars
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Cosmo Landesman
The Chronicles of Riddick
15, 119 mins
Richard B Riddick, the antiheroic hardman we first met in 2000’s Pitch Black, now has a movie all of his own. He is still played by Vin Diesel, and the presiding writer/director is still David Twohy, but whereas Pitch Black was a compact monster movie, this aspires to be an all-out sci-fi epic in the idiom of Star Wars and Dune. The universe, we learn, is being conquered by an evil race known as the Necromongers. According to prophecies, only a Furion warrior can stop them — and that, of course, is what Riddick happens to be. It’s ridiculous nonsense, even by the standards of such yarns. Diesel, who produced the film, is known to be a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and that kind of geekiness certainly shows in the story’s purpose-made mythology. Yet this is not what drags the film down. The problem is the action: a monotonous series of hard-to-follow brawls in dark caves and corridors. Two stars
Edward Porter
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Phone
15, 102 mins
I’ve heard of haunted houses and haunted cars — but a haunted mobile-phone number? This is the premise of the Korean director Ahn Byong Ki’s study of sex, lies and mobile phones. Ha Ji-Won is an investigative journalist who, having exposed a sex scandal, is receiving all sorts of menacing calls. She changes her cell number and things get really bad. When her niece, Yeung-Ju, answers her phone, the young girl becomes possessed. There’s a great stylistic verve to Phone — but, alas, not much else. The narrative comes across in a way that is more confusing than intriguingly complex. Instead of a gripping mystery, we get a lot of atmospherics in standard “scary” story settings: women alone in a spooky big house, mysterious figures in the rain and, of course, the ringing of that damn phone. Frankly, people who don’t turn off their mobiles deserve a good supernatural haunting. Two stars
Cosmo Landesman
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Soul Plane
18, 86 mins
When no-hoper Nashawn Wade wins a $100m lawsuit against an airline — for distress caused to his bowels and the death of his dog (please, don’t ask) — he decides to set up his own Afro-American airline, NWA. This one is a “get down with your funky black ass, momma” kind of airline. The kind where the pilot (Snoop Dogg) is stoned and there’s a party goin’ on all the time. The director, Jessy Terrero, has created a plotless romp that aspires to be a hip-hop remix of Airplane! But the gags — mostly of the booty, blunts and bigness-of-black-men kind — are just stale. And Tom Arnold, as the token uptight white guy, is no Leslie Nielsen. Given the crass stereotypes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the screenplay was written by the Ku Klux Klan and not two black writers. One star
Cosmo Landesman
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Raising Helen
PG, 119 mins
Kate Hudson’s Helen, a New York party girl, certainly gets some bad breaks in Garry Marshall’s film. Not only must she care for her sister’s children after they are orphaned by a car crash, but one of the kids she inherits is pudgy-faced Spencer Breslin, the most unbearable child star of the moment. A processed, cellophane-wrapped schmaltz fest, the film is even more pious in its sentimentality than might be expected. The story’s big fear is that the 15-year-old girl among the orphans will lose her virginity too soon, and Hudson’s love interest (John Corbett) is an actual pastor, or as he puts it — in what will surely prove the most embarrassing line of Corbett’s career — “I’m a sexy man of God and I know it.” One star
Edward Porter