Silence, We're Rolling ****
Dir: Youssef Chahine
With: Latifa, Ahmed Bedir, Ahmed Wafik, Magda Al Khattib, Zaki Abdel Wahab, Ahmed Mehrez, Mostapha Chaaban, Rubi
102 mins, no cert

The beating heart of show business pulses gloriously through this latest film from Youssef Chahine. It's a musical romantic comedy about the movie world, with a dash of Bollywood, Stanley Donen and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film is set in a westernised, cosmopolitan Alexandria, which with its hotels, musical theatres and beach scenes (some tongue-in-cheek back projections here) looks like bygone Hollywood's imagination of the Cote d'Azur. A super-successful screen actress Malak (Latifa) is being wooed by creepy Lothario and would-be star Lamei (Ahmed Wafik), an unreliable, gold-digging fellow with highlights in his hair. Meanwhile Malak's formidable mother is attempting to match-make her beautiful granddaughter Paula with her chauffeur's son, a radical, bookish intellectual.

It's impossible not to be carried along by the hellzapoppin' high spirits of Chahine's movie, which like all the best comedies is leavened with a touch of sadness as Malak's regular screenwriter, heartbroken by her infatuation with the unsuitable Lamei, reveals his own adoration - and then engineers Lamei's downfall with the aid of a hidden microphone, a device that certainly adds piquancy to the title. The happy ending has all the buoyancy of a Shakespearian comedy. A treat.

Divided We Fall ****
Dir: Jan Hrebejk
With: Bolek Polivka, Csongor Kassai, Jaroslav Dusek, Anna Siskova, Jiri Pecha, Martin Huba, Simona Stasova, Vladimir Marek, Jiri Kodet
123 mins, cert PG
www.musimesipomahat.cz

Earlier this month, Jan Sverak's movie Dark Blue World reminded us how shabbily Czech warriors against the Nazis were treated by their own country in the post-war Soviet era. This film, from director Jan Hrebejk, plays out similar horrible ironies, but on a more claustrophobic, interior scale.

A harassed, childless couple in a small Czech town under Nazi occupation, suffer from the agonies of barrenness and also divided loyalties. Josef, the man of the house, is friendly with a boorish Czech-German collaborator who affects a toothbrush moustache and cropped hair in imitation of his ultimate master. This earns Josef a noisome reputation among the townsfolk as a German-lover, but Josef is also secretly sheltering a Jew. And then, when the authorities threaten to billet a senior Nazi in their house, Josef and his wife realise that the only way to avoid this is for her to get pregnant, and the hidden Jew must do the deed.

This is a very striking black comedy about the cruelties and absurdities visited on civilian populations in wartime, and the terrible conflicting imperatives of survival and avoiding complicity with evil. It has a lot more bite and a lot more clout than movies twice its size.

Distance ***
Dir: Hirokazu Koreeda
With: Arata, Yusuke Iseya, Susumu Terajima, Yui Natsukawa, Tadanobu Asano, Azusa, Kenichi Endo, Seminosuke Murasugi
132 mins, no cert

At Cannes last year, a very great deal was expected of Hirokazu Koreeda's Distance, largely because his previous film, After Life, had been such a stunning success: his deeply absorbing and instantly accessible meditation on how we perceive heaven, eternal bliss, and what kind of transient happiness we hope for in this life, if we expect any happiness at all. With Distance, perhaps inevitably, he disappointed us, but not by so very much.

It is a broader, more diffuse film, more elusive in both its method and import, without anything like After Life's clinching, and very high-concept motif. The movie is set six years after a mass suicide committed by an extreme Japanese sect. Various relatives of the victim-perpetrators begin to turn up at the sinister group's woodland cabin headquarters, on the banks of a huge and unsettlingly tranquil lake. What are they all looking for? Is it redemption, or insight, or closure?

It is mysterious anyway, and becomes even more so when a former member of the cult turns up. As they question him, the old group dynamic and Thanatos instinct begin to re-emerge. The movie rambles, its sense of a group death-wish is oddly calm, and there is a weird absence of horror in its evocation of the original catastrophe; it does not have the power of Japanese movies on the same subject like Shinji Aoyama's Eureka or Hiroshi Shimizu's Ikinai. But there is something resonant about this movie's subtle melancholy.

Snow Dogs **
Dir: Brian Levant
With: Cuba Gooding Jr, James Coburn, Joanna Bacalso, Nichelle Nichols, M Emmet Walsh, Sisqo, Graham Greene, Brian Doyle-Murray, Jean Michel Paré
99 mins, cert PG

If you quite liked Cool Runnings, the wacky comedy about the Jamaican bobsleigh team at the Winter Olympics, then you'll quite like Snow Dogs, the wacky comedy about a dentist in sunny Florida, played by Cuba Gooding Jr, who journeys to Alaska to find his real dad, and gets caught up in the world of dog-sled racing in the brass-monkey-freezing weather.

Director Brian Levant, responsible for Beethoven, is clearly positioning himself in the Hollywood marketplace as someone who can extract the maximum comic potential from dogs. That isn't a hell of a lot, in my opinion, and the faces of the husky-team of dogs have been digitally tinkered with in the Babe manner to produce cute smirks and frowns - an irritating technique, lacking the skilled invention of proper animation, and obscuring the charm and dignity of animals' unadorned faces.

As for the humans, it's got game performances from some real veterans: Nichelle "Lt Uhura" Nichols plays Cuba's adoptive mom and James Coburn gives some ballast to the movie as the querulous, cantankerous old local with a vital secret. But really this is a bit of an uphill sleigh ride.

High Society ****
Dir: Charles Walters
With: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Celeste Holm, John Lund, Louis Calhern, Sidney Blackmer, Louis Armstrong, Margalo Gillmore
107 mins, cert U

The jury is still out on whether this musical has the lightness and limberness of the 1940 movie on which it was based: The Philadelphia Story, starring James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Maybe Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra are coarser, brassier talents. But this is still wonderful entertainment about a beautiful ice-queen (Grace Kelly) whose imminent wedding to a rich dullard is endangered by the arrival of Crosby, the ex-husband and Sinatra, the gossip reporter. There's a priceless contribution from Louis Armstrong, and the Cole Porter tunes put the movie on an unanswerable gold standard: High Society, Well, Did You Ever? and, of course, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? - a must-listen for those who think the question originated with Chris Tarrant.

40 Days and 40 Nights *
Dir: Michael Lehmann
With: Josh Hartnett, Shannyn Sossamon, Paulo Costanzo, Adam Trese, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Lorin Heath, Aaron Trainor, Glenn Fitzgerald, Monet Mazur, Christine Chatelain
94 mins, cert 15
www.miramax.com/40daysand40nights

A sex farce without the sex, 40 Days and 40 Nights takes its schematic slip of an idea and racks it up to an agonising length. Prompted by the sight of Christ on the crucifix ("Dude!"), Josh Hartnett's horny hunk vows total abstinence from the ladies for Lent and walks bow-legged through a San Francisco infested with hot chicks who get jiggy in launderettes, hand him photocopies of their butts and purringly enquire if he likes "pussy...cats".

Hartnett is hopelessly and haplessly miscast in the lead role: coarse-grained and brooding where the script calls for light and flexible. But the worst offender is director Michael "Heathers" Lehmann, who amps up the abstinence by punctuating each crisis with a crass camera zoom, and has his characters shouting and gesticulating wildly in enclosed spaces. By the end, such endless over-reacting has taken its toll on Hartnett, who looks hoarse, spent and exhausted. The final release can't come soon enough. Xan Brooks