Alien Autopsy (Jonny Campbell) Think of This Is Spinal Tap as a mockumentary about UFOs. Ant and Dec are a couple of London chancers who get their hands on a US military film supposedly showing an autopsy being carried out on an alien from a crashed . ying saucer at Roswell in 1947. When it deteriorates on being exposed to the light, they fake a duplicate which to their surprise becomes a global news sensation.

The Dark (John Fawcett) Australian director John (Ginger Snaps) Fawcett conjures up a passable hauntedhouse thriller with echoes of The Wicker Man.

Maria Bello brings her sulky daughter Sophie Stuckey from New York to meet estranged husband Sean Bean, an artist who has moved to a remote Welsh clifftop house - straight out of Poltergeist - surrounded by lots of demonic looking sheep.

Transamerica (Duncan Tucker) A woman pretending to be a man who becomes a woman is perhaps the ultimate Hollywood . sh-out-of-water scenario but Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman makes the character of Bree touchingly believable. Writerdirector Duncan Tucker picks up her story just a few weeks away from surgery when her feminine nature is already apparent even if she still walks more like a man. Her therapist insists that before anything can be finalised she must meet a delinquent son she never knew she had.

Together they drive across America to visit her disapproving parents, in a road movie of hilariously quirky encounters that shouldn't be missed.

Shooting Dogs (Michael Paton-Jones) Michael Paton-Jones salvages his career after the execrable Basic Instinct 2, with this earnest examination of white man's guilt in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. John Hurt and Hugh Dancy star as two westerners trapped in a school which is surrounded by a raging Hutu mob who want to put their gleaming machetes to use on the 2,500 Tutsis who are protected inside by UN peacekeepers. The UN, however, don't do a thing to stop the impending carnage.

The White Countess (James Ivory) Merchant Ivory go to China. A sweeping period romance set in Shanghai in the 1930s reunites director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote Remains of the Day. Ralph Fiennes plays a disillusioned former American diplomat, blinded in an accident he refuses to talk about, who encounters an exiled Russian countess (Natasha Richardson). She supports her teenage daughter and disapproving aunt and mother-in-law by working as an exotic dancer for hire.

Inside Man (Spike Lee) Clive Owen raids a Manhattan bank and holds staff and customers hostage - but nobody can find out why and he's not telling. As the New York cops lay siege, tainted detective Denzel Washington tries to resolve the situation while a mysterious corporate troubleshooter, Jodie Foster, hired by the bank chairman Christopher Plummer, uses political clout to intervene and do a deal - but why? Spike Lee keeps the audience guessing with teasing flash forwards of police interviews with suspects and witnesses.

Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro) John Turturro attempts a musical slice-oflife drama set in Brooklyn that aspires to be Pennies from Heaven crossed with Moulin Rouge but falls awkwardly in between, despite a raunchy performance by Kate Winslet as labourer James Gandol. ni's bit of slap-and-tickle on the side.

Worth going out for

The Squid And The Whale (Noah Baumbach) Comedy about the deteriorating relationship between two New York intellectuals, writer parents Bernard and Joan, who have taken to using Walt and his 12-year-old brother Frank as pawns in their domestic warfare. Based somewhat on the adolescence of director Noah Baumbach, The Squid and the Whale boasts excellent performances both from Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, and suggests that American cinema may indeed - as the Oscars suggested - be . nding the courage to get up close and personal in the way true cinema should but too often doesn't.