COMEDIES rarely win Oscars, and even more rarely get a laugh from American critics. Perhaps because Wild Hogs tampers with sacred movie motifs - road movies and the male mid-life crisis - it's been savaged more viciously than most, while audiences are turning it into the biggest comedy hit of the year.

It's probably deserving of neither accolade, offering no more that a low-level fun ride with its paunchy variation of teen gross-out humour.

A quartet of high-school buddies-for-life aim to rev up their jaded suburban lives by heading off for one last road trip on the Harleys that have been gathering dust in their garages.

There's frustrated dentist Tim Allen, hen-pecked house husband Martin Lawrence and gauche computer geek William H Macy who relates to his mouse better than women, while flashy John Travolta, who they admire for striking it rich, is in fact about to be divorced and sucked dry by his supermodel wife.

Swaggering into a remote bar for a Bud in the vast emptiness of New Mexico they run foul of a real motorcycle gang led by mean-spirited badass Ray Liotta who resents weekend poseurs usurping his territory.

Think Deliverancemeets Easy Riders - it's hard not to with Peter Fonda riding into the action - but playing out like City Slickers on wheels, with maybe a dash of High Noon as our unlikely heroes become the few good men who save a terrorised community from Liotta's biker bullies.

Ciaran Carty The Curse of The Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou) Gong Li, Chow Yun-Fat, Jay Chou, Liu Ye Running time: 114 minutes. . . .

ZHANG Yimou, China's most feted director after Wong Kar Wai, cranks up the glossometer for this epic feast of the senses - a Chinese melodrama of secrets and lies set in the later years of the Tang dynasty. It's the most expensive Chinese movie ever made, and nothing is spared: it's a sumptuous wash of gold, iridescence and spectacularly mounted set-pieces. Gong Li plays a feverish Empress in silent battle with her iron-fisted Emperor husband (Chow YunFat). She's been having an affair with her stepson, Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye); Wan is in love with the Imperial Doctor's daughter Chan (Li Man); while the emperor is having his wife slowly poisoned. Another son wanders the palace with silent intent.

Betrayal, revenge and incest course through its gilded veins.

It's like EastEnders filmed on a Faberge egg. Gong Li is all poise and dangerous cunning. Unlike his previous martial arts epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Yimou's balletic fight sequences do not take centre stage. But they still conjure terrible beauty:

shrieking, raven-like assassins who come in from the sky; army hordes like waves of insects. The plot is two-carat Shakespeare but no one quite choreographs it like Yimou. PL Shooter (Antoine Fuqua) Mark Wahlberg, Danny Glover, Ned Beatty, Kate Mara. Running time: 124 minutes.. .

THIS latest film from the director of Training Day blends the 1970s left-wing conspiracy thriller with the 1980s right-wing one-man army rampage: Three Days Of The Condor and Rambo rolled into one. It's certainly a new way to root out Washington corruption. Mark Wahlberg stars as Bob Lee Swagger, a retired army top sniper who can crack a target from over a mile away. He can weigh up improbable elements such as humidity and the curve of the earth to get his shot. But he cannot smell a rat in the form of Danny Glover's secretive intelligence agent. He is recruited to plan a theoretical presidential assassination, but instead becomes a patsy. So he takes them all on, uncovering a shady government cabal sponsoring mass murder in Africa for oil. Director Antoine Fuqua does his best Tony Scott impression; Mark Wahlberg does a good job at being Rambo - at least he is comprehensible over the din of homemade explosives.

PL Perfect Stranger (James Foley) Halle Berry, Bruce Willis Running time: 109 minutes.

.HALLE Berry's post-Oscar career has begun to look almost wilful in its terrible wrong turns.

Here's another dog (kennel it alongside Gothika and Catwoman) that she ought to have left well alone, a psycho-thriller in which she plays a reporter investigating the murder of a childhood acquaintance. Chief suspect is a philandering ad exec (Bruce Willis, barely rousing himself to smirk), for whom she baits a trap, first by working undercover at his agency and then by getting all hot and heavy with him in an online chat room.

A family abuse subplot bobs through the murk, ready to supply the story with a twist ending, though, chances are, by this stage you'll have zoned out in boredom or disgust - or possibly both.