FUNNY GAMES U.S. - who gets the last laugh?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. is Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 post-modern horror flick in which two polite teenage boys torture an affluent family for no reason other than to entertain themselves. The genius of the original film and this English-language remake is to create an atmosphere of stomach-churning tension without actually showing us any gory violence. Our imaginations fill in the blank between the scared reaction shots and the blood-spattered TV set. As a slow-burn thriller of almost unbearable tension, FUNNY GAMES is hard to beat. After all, what is more frightening than an evil that we cannot reason with? It's for this reason that I find the HOSTEL movies laughably unthreatening. If someone wants to sell me to a torturer, I'll simply offer more money. No, what's really terrifying is a situation in which I have simply no language in which to communicate with my kidnapper - no purchase on his conscience or on his wallet. The final shot of a torturer holding our eyes unashamed is brilliantly frightening.

On one level, we can simply watch FUNNY GAMES U.S. as a brilliantly executed thriller. But Haneke wants us to question our enjoyment of the experience. He does this by having one of the torturers break the fourth wall and directly question the audience. Not only is he torturing the couple, he is trying to make us feel bad for enjoying our voyueurism.

I have to say that I find this trite post-modernism rather simplistic and condascending. I feel no shame in enjoying a movie like FUNNY GAMES qua horror movie. I find it cathartic. I do not enjoy it as a voyueur but as an intelligent, affluent, comfortable woman who can empathise with the situation of the family in the film and who is working out her fear of social change through the experience. So who gets the last laugh? The director who tries to under-cut our enjoyment of his masterpiece with his hectoring, or the audience, who can choose to dismiss such foolishness and get a brilliant thriller anyway?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. played London 2007 and Sundance 2008. It was released in Canada, the USA and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on release in Finland and the UK and opens later this month in Israel, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Frnace and Sweden. It opens in May in Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands and Germany. It opens in Romania in June and in Spain in July.

I'M A CYBORG / SAIBOGUJIMAN KWENCHANA - Korean yodelling aside, this movie is a mess

Fans of Park Chan Wook's trademark Vengeance films will be bemused, but probably not amused, but his latest film I'M A CYBORG (BUT THAT'S OKAY). It's the story of a girl who is so traumatised when her granny is put in a mental institution that she imagines she is a cyborg. Her mission is to lose her sympathy so that she can kill all the doctors and give her granny her dentures back. I use the word "story" in its loosest possible sense. This movie has the thinnest of narrative arcs, and most of the time it feels haphazard and lacks momentum. The first hour was desperately boring and while the second hour did contain an emotional victory of sorts, the movie lingered on for a good 30 minutes after that. By the denouement, when the girl and her friend are sitting in a field, praying for lightning to strike, so were we, because at least that would mark an end to the movie. It would also have provided a far cooler ending than the limp scene Park Chan Wook actually offers up.

The really annoying thing is that I'M A CYBORG had the potential to be a really great movie. Not a classic Park Chan Wook movie, mind you, but a Korean Charlie Kauffman-esque voyage into whimsy and the imagination. The production design is beautifully imagined and rendered. There are flashes of comic brilliance: not leaast the Korean yodelling and the electro-static flying scene.

Still, for all that, even die-hard fans (among which I count myself) are going to find it hard to sit through this film.

I'M A CYBORG opened in South Korea in December 2006 and played Berlin 2007. It opened in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and France in 2007 and opened in Germany, Russia and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on limited release in the UK.

AWAKE - a one trick pony

Debutant writer-director Joby Harold constructs a thriller with a fairly obvious plot, even if you haven't seen the trailer. If you have seen the trailer, there's really no point seeing the movie, because the entire plot is given away: fain will you look for further plot twists. If you haven't, I guess you could check this out on DVD: it's probably not worth a trip to the cinema.

The premise is that a man is given a general anaesthetic, but while he looks numb he's actually still awake. As a result, he can hear that the surgeons giving him a heart transplant are actually plotting to kill him. How do you alert the authorities when you're apparently out cold?

Hayden Christensen, Terrence Howard and Jessica Alba do a decent enough job as the victim, his surgeon and his love interest respectively, but the only stand-out performance is from Lena Olin as the victim's mother. It's a pleasure to see her back on the screen.

AWAKE was released in the USA last year and was released in Russia, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, South Korea, Thailand and Spain earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and Brazil and opens later in Paril in Singapore and Iceland. It opens in Argentina in May and in Belgium and the Netherlands in September.

NEVER BACK DOWN - macho bullshit

NEVER BACK DOWN is a piss-poor movie in which Tom Cruise' mini-me and Volchok from The O.C beat the crap out of each other while Mandy Lane looks on adoringly. The movie tries to cast a veneer of Grecian morality over its fascist enjoyment of oiled up, buff blokes pounding each other senseless, and briefly hints at girl on girl fights, so that's okay with women's lib, right?! Wrong. I'm not sure what's more stupid: the ludicrous premise of this film; the fact that I fell for the free tickets and sacrificed 2 hours of my time watching it; or the people who actually take a vicarious thrill from watching what is essentially glammed-up happy-slapping on YouTube.

NEVER BACK DOWN is on release in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. It is released in Russia, France and Spain later in April and opens in Germany and Iceland in May.

STEP UP 2 THE STREETS isn't going to capture the teen imagination in the same way that its predecessor did

STEP UP 2 follows much the same formula as the original dance-school teen romance. A girl from a rough neighbourhood gets into a performing arts school and clashes with the classical dance curriculum. She leads a posse of renegade misfits into competing in a street dance contest, hooking up with a hunky colleague in the process.

The sequel is weaker than the original in several respects. Channing Tatum was far more convincing as a kid from the streets that clean-cut Briana Evigan: the writers seem to think that by rolling up one of her trouser-legs to her knee, she'll look credible!. The love interest (Robert Hoffman) is so bland as to be boring and the Evil Dance Teacher (Will Kemp) may well be a talented dancer but his acting is wooden. Overall, the central love story is not going to capture the teen imagination in the way that the first movie did.

For all that, STEP UP 2 THE STREETS is still well worth seeing for the brilliantly choreographed dance scenes and music mixes in the final contest. It's truly impressive, and it's nice to see popular dance taken beyond a 3 minute backdrop to a rapper and given it's own show-case and soom room to breathe.

STEP UP 2 THE STREETS is already on release in the USA, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Iceland, Lithuania, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Russia, Estonia, Greece, Poland, Romania, Germany, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand,Slovakia, Australia, Israel, the UK and Croatia. It opens in April in France and Italy; in Spain and Finland in June.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL - Don Quixote in Minnesota

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is an improbably wonderful drama from the director of the piss-poor Billy Bob Thornton vehicle MR WOODCOCK. It's about a young man (Ryan Gosling) who deals with stress by inventing an imaginary girlfriend in the guise of a blow-up doll. The movie challenges us not to laugh but to empathise, and even to enjoy role-playing ourselves. The small-town community in which Lars lives is a proxy for the audience. We might start off like his elder brother (Paul Schneider) - thinking it ridiculous and hoping for a quick fix. Or maybe we start off like his sweet sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer), playing along, hoping he'll work it out. But pretty soon, we're like the old women at church, the work colleagues and the friends at the mall. It's fun to play dress up with a real life doll - to cut her hair - invent social outings: the whole town falls in love with "Bianca".

With LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Craig Gillespie has done that rare thing: he's made a romantic comedy with substance; furthermore a film that feels as credible as it does incredible. He hints at how common delusion is with his reference to Dulcinea, but more widely he shows how far the whole community enjoys Lars' delusion. Ultimately this is a profoundly uplifting film - and not in the easy, saccharine manner of films like THE BUCKET LIST. It's a film about a bunch of people doing something a little bit silly because they love someone, and believe he'll work it out. And in a cynical, busy, impersonal world, that's a wonderful thought.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL played Toronto 2007 and was released in the USA and Singapore last year. It opened in Hungary, Italy, Israel, Greece, Belgium, Norway and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in South Korea, Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands. It opens in Australia and Spain in April and in Japan in June.