Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson, Alexandra Maria Lara, Joe Henderson.

Running time: 121 minutes.

. . . .

ICONIC rock photographer Anton Corbijn returns to the band that helped establish his career. Control retells the story of Ian Curtis, the troubled, brilliant lyricist of Joy Division who killed himself in 1980. The film is visually ravishing . . . each meticulously framed shot seems carved out of granite . . .while the biopic material is handled with unusual restraint.

Corbijn approaches the story with a grainy authenticity, eschewing both hagiography and melodrama. He even refuses to let the songs take over the picture. There is tragic inevitability to the tale, but it zeros in on Curtis's inability to balance celebrity with his Macclesfield working-class background, and how love literally tore him apart . . . caught in a triangle with his wife Debbie (Samantha Morton) and journalist Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara).

Morton transforms incredibly into Curtis's young love and later, ignored wife. But Sam Riley nails the part of Ian Curtis: he displays a intense, boyish vulnerability and sings the parts too.

The Heartbreak Kid (Bobby Farrelly):

Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Jerry Stiller, Malin Akerman.

Running time: 115 minutes.

. .

THE Farrelly brothers take a sewage hose to Elaine May's 1972 film of the same name, and coat it with their blend of dumb comedy, gross-out antics and schadenfreude. But they forget to spray it with killer gags. Ben Stiller no longer looks embarrassed, just faintly anxious, as perennial bachelor Eddie who marries the woman of his dreams (Malin Akerman) after knowing her for just six weeks. But the stunning, intelligent, virginal bohemian turns out to be a white-trash, thick, grasping devil of a woman. Eddie then spies Michelle Monaghan's Miranda, another female idealisation, and wishes he'd married her instead. It doesn't even reach the Farrellys' usual low-water mark.

The Kingdom (Peter Berg):

Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner.

Running time: 110 minutes.

. .

JAMIE Foxx is utterly wasted in this gung-ho Hollywood picture. It plays like a primary-school metaphor for the legitimisation of US military in the middle east.

Foxx heads up an FBI unit with Chris Cooper and Jennifer Garner . . . a crack team sent to Saudi Arabia to help investigate an al-Qaeda attack on a US base. The crew happen to be expert investigators, forensic specialists and foreign policy experts to boot, but treat diplomacy like a bad smell.

Of course, the Americans aren't welcome, but they insist on staying, patronising and disrespecting until the Saudis agree to do things the American way. Sound familiar? The FBI team then becomes the target of an al-Qaeda attack and the big guns come out. I found it very hard to ignore the show of arrogance.

Feast of Love (Robert Benton):

Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Selma Blair.

Running time: 102 minutes . .

LOVE in all its forms has always been Robert Benton's theme, winning him Oscar first for scripting Bonnie And Clyde and later for directing Kramer vs Kramer. So one can understand what drew him to Charles Baxter's bestseller Feast of Love. With Morgan Freeman as a retired professor providing fatherly observations on couples falling in and out of love in a small tight-knit Oregon community, don't expect the vulgarity of Peyton Place or the acerbity of a John Updike.

There's only one genuinely nasty character and that's because he's outside the amatory merry-goround. Surprisingly for this sort of bland feelgood material, the sexual scenes are sensually explicit and, in the case of Ms Mitchell, even full-frontal. All kinds of love are portrayed, from lesbian and predatory to doomed, but the tone never varies. Surely life is messier and more challenging?