The film-makers try to gussy it up with an ambient guitar drone choppy editing and

The film-makers try to gussy it up with an ambient guitar drone, choppy editing and the occasional snatch of ZZ's voice in interview ("I imagine I can hear the ticking of a watch") but they illuminate their proud subject not a whit. And, as if to prove that they have no interest in football or drama, all 17 cameras contrive to miss the incident that leads to Zidane being sent off just before the end, foreshadowing his inglorious exit in the World Cup final a year later. As the TV pundit would say, they'll be disappointed with that.. Adam Sandler: two words that come around far too regularly in a film critic's life. Here he plays an overworked architect whose time is unevenly apportioned between his family and his hateful boss (David Hasselhoff), so when a nutty electronics guy (Christopher Walken) offers him a universal remote - a gadget that controls his whole universe - he starts fastforwarding through the boring and unsatisfactory bits of his life. As ever with Sandler, poop and penis gags alternate with a repulsive sentimentality, yet once his remote starts malfunctioning, the comedy takes a darker turn and ensnares the family man in an almost Faustian nightmare of helplessness. It can't last, of course, but just for a while the script (by Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe) threatens to become interesting - which would count as a first in a Sandler movie..

This slight but charming indie movie centres upon the literal coming-of-age - the "Quincea?" - of Magdalena (Emily Rios), the teenage daughter of a devoutly Catholic Latino family in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Pregnant by her flaky boyfriend, she is thrown out by her stern paterfamilias and goes to live with her great-uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonz?z), who has already taken in her firebrand cousin, Carlos (Jesse Garcia). The relationship between this unlikely trio drives along an essentially sweet-natured drama, which also manages to comment on class, race and sexuality - ambitious themes, quietly and unassumingly handled by the writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.. Thought you knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood? Not according to this digimation comedy you don't, which recasts the fairy tale as a criminal investigation complete with Rashomon-style flashbacks. Anne Hathaway voices heroine Red, a more worldly wise creature than we ever suspected, though who could have guessed that the big bad Wolf is an investigative reporter and that Red's grandma is a snowboarding ace? The script (by Cory and Todd Edwards and Tony Leech) is loaded with Shrek-style gags and riffs, some of them very droll and all of them preferable to the songs that regrettably punctuate the narrative here and there..

On the surface, a drama about the protection of the endangered Tibetan antelope doesn't sound too gripping. But Mountain Patrol is just that: photojournalist Ga Yu arrives in the remote camp of the legendary Kekexili hunter Ri Tai, whose band of men he will accompany in a gruelling pursuit of the poachers who slaughter hundreds of antelope and sell their valuable skins. Director Lu Chuan makes more than a chase movie here; he evokes the hardscrabble existence of the Chinese patrolmen and the ambushes that lurk in this savage, wind-scoured landscape. Some of the images have the implacable harshness of Goya, like the shot of vultures feeding on carcasses, or of a man agonisingly swallowed up in quicksand. Based on true events between 1993 and 1996, it's a thoroughly compelling story of survival..

The long virtuoso tracking shot which opens Fred Kelemen's movie prepares the way for a tortuously enigmatic meditation on remorse. Set in the dismal climes of Riga and shot in black and white, it concerns the attempts of a young clerk (Egons Dombrovskis) to trace the identity of a woman he passed on a bridge at night who, seconds later, jumped into the river. Tormented by his failure to act, he becomes obsessed by his need to discover why she destroyed herself Slow going, but not without reward.. Ashley Walters confirms that his brooding performance in Bullet Boy was no fluke. He has real presence as aspirant DJ Danny, the leader of a rapping crew in the council badlands of south London, where gun crime is just a fact of life.

Danny's romance with Carmen (Louise Rose), a blood relative of a vicious rival crew, causes a rift with his best mate Fable (Chris Steward), himself entangled in a painful search for his birth mother. The aggressive stage rap-offs carry more than a whiff of Eminem's 8 Mile, and the holy grail of a big record deal is corny, whichever way you cook it. Yet Ken Williams' script, earnest as it sometimes is, locates a seam of truthfulness about lives endured in difficult and unparented circumstances.. Oh please, not another movie about the rejuvenating magic of food.