Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy, Wendy Crewson Running time: 110 minutes . . . .

CANADIAN actress Sarah Polley's debut film is a poignant study of Alzheimers and the difficulty of forgetting. It's based on an Alice Munro short story and Polley, who is still in her 20s, displays great sensitivity and maturity.

Julie Christie, now in her late 60s, plays a wife who first shows signs of Alzheimers by putting the frying pan in the fridge. Gordon Pinset is the husband who has to shoulder the burden. He reluctantly goes along with her decision to enter a retirement home. But things get complicated when she can no longer remember him and falls for another patient.

The film evokes a great unspoken love. Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier create a contemplative atmosphere of winter, while casting the retirement home in washes of strong light that make it look like a waiting room to eterntiy. There is something haunting too about watching a great film beauty such as Julie Christie fade away before your eyes. Gordon Pinset, in his silent suffering, is very touching as the husband who can't forget the memories but is forced to let go.

(Nicholas Mastandrea):

Michelle Rodriguez, Oliver Hudson, Taryn Manning, Eric Lively, Hill Harper Running time: 87 minutes .IF YOU are of an ironic bent, this could be one of the funniest films of the year, but only for just how dog-awful it is. It's Hitchcock's The Birds reimagined as a daft horror starring dogs. No, really.

When a bunch of twentysomethings arrive by seaplane on an uninhabited island to party, they stumble on a breed of rabid mutts. These Pedigree Chum castoffs display more cunning than the humans . . . or the film for that matter. Whichever way they turn, the humans are outmanoeuvred. Have the killer dogs been reading Clauswitz? By a series of daring pincer movements, they narrow the The Breed humans into an attic and then proceed to mark their territory all over the living room. Then the humans plan to escape by plane but the dogs execute a tactical preemptive strike, biting through the plane's moorings. They then lay in wait to ambush the startled humans. The highlight is watching the pilot swim for his life being chased by a panzer division of paddling dogs. Unbelievable.

(Dan Reed) Gillian Anderson, Danny Dyer, Ralph Brown, Kate Bunten.

Running time: 80 minutes.

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THIS voyeuristic revenge thriller is about as subtle as having your Straightheads face smashed with a brick. It stars Gillian Anderson as Alice, a highpowered London executive. She seduces Adam (Danny Dyer), the young man she finds asleep in her swanky apartment, after he has finished fitting it out with a surveillance system.

He gets to watch her undress on the TV monitor before she takes him to a posh party in the country.

But on their way home, by way of a raunchy appointment in the woods, an accident leaves them stranded. They are attacked and subjected to horrific treatment. A gruesome revenge is planned.

Anderson, with a hard accent and bloodlust in her eyes, is a cold presence. There seems to be no point to the ceaseless barbarity, which includes brutal violence, rape and an unspeakable act with a gun, other than to affirm the director's very bleak view of human nature: that men and women live on the brink of a moral abyss and that all men are potential rapists.

(Ben Garant):

Carlos Alazraqui, Mary Birdsong, Ben Garant, Kerri Kenney, Thomas Lennon, Wendi McLendon-Covey Running time: 84 minutes.

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Reno 911! : Miami THIS lightweight comedy comes from Reno 911! , a spoof TV series on America's Comedy Central. It's a composite of sketches which never gels into anything you could call a film but it is the kind of easygoing spoofing I'd happily watch on TV.

It's a blend of Police Academy and Cops, shot in a faux documentary style about the highjinks of the Reno sheriff department, "The dumbest group of people I've ever met who aren't legally retarded, " according to their lieutenant.

They go on holiday to Miami to a national police convention. But a terrorist attack leaves the city's entire police force stuck in a hotel.

The Reno sheriff department is put in charge and wreak havoc, somehow blowing up a beached whale and getting involved in a Scarface-like drugs cartel.