Running time: 100 minutes.

. . . .

IF IT wasn't for Angelina Jolie's famous rubber lips, you might not recognise her transformation to credible actress in this recreation of the 2002 kidnapping and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl. She plays his pregnant wife Marianne, whose steely composure holds out till the end. It is a riveting film, shot with the lively tingle of documentary in Pakistan's back streets. I'm sure Jolie will get a nomination come Oscar time. But why does she turn her back to the camera when a big emotional moment comes? The human dynamo that is Michael Winterbottom (he makes a film a year) strips the material of melodrama and sustains a mood of fraught tension. But he captures the wider picture too . . . the sheer confusion and political muddle of today's Pakistan, the new faultline of radical extremism.

(Tom Collins) Colm Meany, Donal O'Kelly, Brendan Conroy, Donncha Crowley, Barry Barnes, Sean O Tarpaigh.

Running time: 87 minutes.

. . .

THIS handsomely photographed, tough-edged Irish-language film casts a cold yet forgiving eye on the Irish emigrant experience in London and the fading power of old friendships. Director Tom Collins takes Jimmy Murphy's play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road and opens the material out.

He uncovers a raw seam in London's Kilburn. His gang of feckless Paddies are a sorry state, one step from an alcoholic abyss.

They gather at a wake after one of the group throws himself under a Tube. Drunken camaraderie sours to recrimination and humiliation;

guilt seeps up through cracks of memory. There is something too familiar about the Irish pub catharsis, but I enjoyed its depiction of the emigrant disconnect: when home is not where you live, but a long-lost chimera of the imagination.

(In Irish with subtitles) (Denis Duggan) Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel, Dan Aykroyd.

Running time: 110 minutes.

.ADAM Sandler and Kevin James star in this deeply insecure Kings I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry comedy inspired by Some Like it Hot. They play two straight-as-apole firefighters who get a civil union to enjoy legal benefits. The city authorities don't believe they're gay and both go to ridiculous lengths to prove otherwise. They end up as gayrights campaigners, but not after the film mines every homophobic joke in the book. It becomes a heavy-handed gay-issues movie, but Sandler still gets the girl. He and director Denis Duggan conspire every way imaginable to show us his character is really not gay. He emerges from his bedroom with 10 vixens. He reads porn magazines. The camera even gets Jessica Biel to bend over in a bikini so Sandler can drool on her backside. Not since Tom Cruise has a Hollywood star protested so much. Why play a character pretending to be gay if you are so insecure about it?

The Singer (Xavier Giannoli) Gerard Depardieu, Cecile De France, Mathieu Amalric, Christine Citti.

112 minutes.

. . .

IFHollywood now makes movies mainly for teenagers, the French continue to make films for adults.

This is great, but why the long face? This arms-length, beautyand-the-beast romance needs cheering up. Gerard Depardieu is a lonely middle-aged crooner;

Cecile De France a troubled real estate agent who falls for his charms once, but needs serious persuasion to go back for seconds.

He looks like the Massif Central;

her saturnine demeanour is a mountain of ice. Director Xavier Giannoli adopts an unhurried approach and shades the edges with French loves songs and middle-aged melancholy in the provinces. Down to the very last frame, he is determined to avoid the cliche of the romantic reunion.

I expect it will turn up on the Hollywood remakes-to-do list.

Evening (Lajos Koltai) Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy.

Running time: 117 minutes.

. .

HUNGARIAN cinematographer Lajos Koltai directed 2005's flinty but stunning Holocaust picture Fateless. He gets the director's credit here but Evening has the fingerprints of screenwriter Michael Cunningham's strained seriousness all over it. Is this The Hours 2? It is an ensemble drama adapted from the Susan Minot novel but the high-watt cast deliver low emotional impact.

Vanessa Redgrave plays a woman on her death bed, hallucinating about the one that got away . . . a bland young doctor played by Patrick Wilson. Her daughters (Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson) are troubled by what is uncorking from her past; while Claire Danes plays her younger self in what looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. There's hardly a fullydrawn male character in sight and its trans-generational female angst turns into an all-out wallow-fest.

Sparkle (Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter) Stockard Channing, Shaun Evans, Amanda Ryan, Bob Hoskins, Lesley Manville.

Running time: 100 minutes.

. .

THIS quirky, low-budget British romantic comedy looks like a daytime TV soap, while the dialogue is uncomfortably crummy. Yet the feelgood effect is greater than the sum of its rickety parts. Shaun Evans stars as a layabout who ups to London with his dotty chanteuse mother (Lesley Manville). He begins an affair with an older lady (Stockard Channing), she gives him a job, but then he meets a younger woman (Amanda Ryan) who steals his heart. Trouble is, she is his lover's daughter.

Directors Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter instigate a battle between hard cynicism and naive idealism. If you can overcome its contrivance, Channing is a delight, while Amanda Ryan as the daughter is engagingly vulnerable.