Training Day ***
Dir: Antoine Fuqua
With: Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Tom Berenger, Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Macy Gray
120 mins, cert 18 trainingday.warnerbros.com
Good to see Denzel Washington get the meaty villainous role he deserves, and here he luxuriates in the part of Detective Sergeant Alonzo Harris, an undercover narcotics cop playing hardball on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles. When fresh-faced rookie Jake, played by Ethan Hawke, gets a "training day" with Alonzo, he realises that the accommodations his boss is making with certain bad guys amount to corruption and psychopathic self-deception.
There's much to enjoy in the way Alonzo smilingly messes with poor Jake's head: forcing him to join in with sadistically intimidating middle-class drug customers in their VW Beetle and improvising humiliating initiation rituals like smoking PCP in the car.
This is a showy part for Washington and he even gets a final setpiece speech denouncing his mutinous crowd of informants in the 'hood - tailor-made to be shown as a clip at award ceremonies. It's a good 20 minutes too long and outrageously reliant on a final coincidence. But this is a well-acted, competently executed piece of work from director Antoine Fuqua.
Shallow Hal **
Dir: Bobby and Peter Farrelly
With: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Jason Alexander, Joe Viterelli
113 mins, cert 12
www.shallowhal.com
The Farrelly brothers are fresh out of ideas with this dull effort, a kind of Farrelly Lite. They have replaced intentional bad taste with the unintentional sort, in a comedy based on the premise that ugly women are pretty on the inside. Jack Black is Hal, a totally shallow guy whose only concern is to date perfect-10 women. Well, maybe this sort of shallow attitude accounts for Gwyneth Paltrow (and many other beautiful women) being cast in Hollywood movies of every type: funny, unfunny, ironic and unironic. At any rate, this one has a wooden cameo from motivational speaker Tony Robbins who gives Hal the ability to see the beautiful natures of ugly people. So Hal falls in love with fatso Rosemary because he sees the inner babe - that is, Gwyneth, out of her hi-tech fat-suit. And with his new X-ray vision he sees everyone's inner loveliness, including badly disfigured kids at the children's hospital. Burn victims and "ugly" women: that's an equation that takes a lot of provocative chutzpah to carry off and in any case only makes sense in an uncompromisingly black-comic film - not this sentimental MOR exercise.
D-Tox *
Dir: Jim Gillespie
With: Sylvester Stallone, Charles Dutton, Polly Walker, Tom Berenger, Sean Patrick Flanery, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Patrick, Jeffrey Wright
92 mins, cert 18
Surely this is it for Sylvester Stallone. Surely it's time for him to do that sub-Mitchum, testicular-inflammation walk of his out of the cinema and far, far away from all our lives. Here he plays a tough cop, traumatised by a serial killer topping his fiancée. Oy. Can't Sly just market his own brand of salad dressing or something? Or maybe he can build his own theatre in the boondocks, like Andy Williams or the Osmonds, and beat people up twice nightly for the supper crowd? Or maybe beat himself up? Anything to stop him beating us up, for Christ's sake.
Atanarjuat - The Fast Runner *****
Dir: Zacharias Kunuk
With: Natar Ungalaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter Henry Arnatsiaq, Lucy Tulugarjuk
172 mins, no cert www.atanarjuat.com
A remarkable world first: the first movie written in the Inuit language, based on a legend of the nomad Inuit peoples, and set in the dazzling, featureless icescape of the Canadian Arctic. Part of its mesmeric quality is that its setting allows it to happen - to the non-Inuit observer, anyway - almost outside of time and place. It is pure myth, pure narrative: archetypes and emotions are sketched on a clean white canvas, with no observable historical baggage or furniture.
Atanarjuat is married to the beautiful Atuat; wicked Oki, the chief's son, is also in love with her and attempts to kill our hero while he sleeps. But Atanarjuat, famously fleet of foot, outruns his pursuers across the ice, stark naked. It looks naive, almost primitivist, but is blessed with lovely, nuanced performances from the mostly non-professional cast.
Nightshift ****
Dir: Philippe Le Guay
With: Gérald Laroche, Marc Barbé, Luce Mouchel, Bastien Le Roy
95 mins, cert 15
There aren't many films with the ability to grasp you by the intestines and twist inexorably, for an hour and a half. Nor, perhaps, are there many cinemagoers who yearn for the experience. But Philippe Le Guay's extraordinarily involving study of workplace bullying in a French factory does precisely this. It is, as the Hollywood suits say, a "tough watch".
Almost unbearably tense, it's all too real in its portrayal of a victim trying to convince himself that his tormentor is a good guy really. Marc Barbé is compelling as Fred, the charmless loser and boozer on the nightshift who bullies Pierre (Gérald Laroche), the popular new guy, out of jealousy - humiliating him in front of his son. This is rigorously observed emotional drama, with something of Robert Guédiguian, or Laurent Cantet's Human Resources. It also bears the dedication " à mon père " flashed up emphatically over the opening, rather than closing credits: so there is perhaps another equally harrowing, real-life story to tell. But this we can only guess at.
The Fluffer ***
Dir: Wash West, Richard Glatzer
With: Scott Gurney, Michael Cunio, Roxanne Day, Taylor Negron
98 mins, cert 18
www.fluffer.com
Since you ask, a "fluffer" is someone on a porn set whose job it is - hand- or blow- - to stimulate the leading male's flagging member. This quirky comedy from directors Wash West and Richard Glatzer endows the fluffer with a certain sickly, unwholesome romantic status. Sean is a young gay man in LA who wants to rent Citizen Kane at the video store, accidentally gets a gay porn film called Citizen Cum, and becomes obsessed with the leading man, Johnny Rebel (Scott Gurney), a straight hunk who does this stuff for cash. Sean gets a job as Johnny's fluffer, and suffers the agonies of unrequited love. It is a more modest effort than, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, but it is well acted, not obviously encumbered with PC assumptions and certainly repudiates Anderson's sentimental idea that porn companies are like "family".
Hidden Fortress *****
Dir: Akira Kurosawa
With: Minoru Chiaki, Susumu Fujita, Kamatari Fujiwara, Toshiro Mifune
139 mins, cert PG
Revered now as an inspiration for George Lucas, Kurosawa's amiable, forthright epic romance happens on a scorched, rugged landscape which looks quite a lot like an alien planet. At other times, the movie plays like nothing so much as a roistering comedy western. But it has a cleverly contrived relationship between the principals, including a fantastically brash and virile Toshiro Mifune. The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.
