K-Pax **
Dir: Iain Softley
With: Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Mary McCormack
120mins, cert 12
www.k-pax.com
You'll Want to Believe Him, it says on the poster. Wrong. You'll want to slap his silly, smug face. Six months after its first outing here at the London film festival, Iain Softley's picture looks thinner and more unsatisfying than ever, working neither as sci-fi nor as psychological drama. And Kevin Spacey confirms the horrible suspicion he created with the recent dire version of The Shipping News: without a strong directorial hand, his style is just one long, supercilious smirk. Jeff Bridges plays a careworn Manhattan psychiatrist with a star patient, played by Spacey, calling himself Prot, and claiming to be from the planet K-Pax. He is no raging Jack Nicholson, content rather to raise a wryly tolerant eyebrow at psychiatric incarceration. Prot has knowledge of the heavenly bodies that no ordinary human could know about, but Bridges thinks he has the answer. Prot is actually an earthling, one Robert Porter, in deep trauma after killing an intruder who raped and murdered his wife and child. Prot's reponse puts the Spacey smirk into warp factor 10: "I will admit the possibility that I am Robert Porter if you admit the possibility that I am from the planet K-Pax" - thus proposing a coyly evasive, flabby new age equivalence between the rational and non-rational explanations, a cop-out that neutralises any real drama. Softley does a workmanlike job with this oddly stagey material, but it all amounts to hot air.
Bend it Like Beckham ***
Dir: Gurinder Chadha
With: Parminder K Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
114 mins, cert 12
Gurinder Chadha's third film is an undemanding, unambitious comedy about Jess (Parminder K Nagra), a soccer-mad teenage girl who outrages her traditional Indian family by idolising Becks and playing football in a local all-female team. It's entertaining, feelgood stuff, with mahogany cameos from Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen and John Barnes (though sadly the squeaky-voiced Greatest Living Englishman is represented only by a mute lookalike.) But loads of the culture-clash gags and situations now look very familiar from TV's Goodness Gracious Me, and indeed from Chadha's own work. Her movie is pretty superficial compared to say East Is East, or Billy Elliot, or especially Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, which all tackle similar themes, and in which comedy co-exists with power and originality. Those are Premiership films - and Chadha's is in Nationwide Division One. She could raise her game.
The One **
Dir: James Wong
With: Jet Li, Carla Gugino, Delroy Lindo
87 mins, cert 15
www.spe.sony.com/movies/theone/
Jet Li is back, punching, thrusting, wheeling, and perfunctorily emoting his way back on to the screen in this sci-fi martial arts action picture. He is a terrifyingly potent scofflaw in a hi-tech future Los Angeles, where the universe has been discovered to be a multiverse: one of any number of different realities where we all have parallel identities. Li, little tinker that he is, is zipping into these universes and taking out all his opposite numbers so that he can absorb their strength and become "the one" with godlike powers. But his last doppelganger is a tough, decent LA cop. Bad Jet Li kills good Jet Li's wife, and Li's scowling face - as he absorbs this terrible blow - resembles that of someone whose underpants are momentarily too tight. Then he gets on with the business of revenge. For fans only.
Revelation **
Dir: Stuart Urban
With: Charlotte Weston, James D'Arcy, Natasha Wightman, Terence Stamp
110mins, cert 15
www.revelation-movie.com
An occult thriller with something of the old Omen series about it - anguished priests and runic symbols hidden in far-off deserty places - and a rag-bag of extraordinary cameos. Where else could you see Ron Moody play Sir Isaac Newton? A revelation is in the offing about the second coming of Jesus through a supposed descendant - based, I am sorry to say, on some vulgar heresies about the, ahem, relations between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Catholic cinemagoers may well be pained at this, as also by this film's cheerful assumption that the Vatican is the natural locale for satanic conspiracy. The funniest bit is when the clean-limbed young hero has significant, ritual sex with a beautiful alchemist on a very important spot where the Book of Revelation was written. It is like the Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch about devil-worshippers: "We ravish each other passionately till dawn." "And this summons up Satan, does it?" "Who cares?"
Pauline and Paulette ***
Dir: Lieven Debrauwer
With: Dora van der Groen, Ann Petersen, Rosemarie Bergmans 78mins, cert PG
This gentle, bittersweet little comedy from the Belgian writer- director Lieven Debrauwer is finally given an almost English sense of sadness by arriving, in the final reel, by the seaside. Pauline is a mentally handicapped woman in middle-age who adores her sister, Paulette - a matronly woman and stalwart of the local opera society who runs a drapers' store. A pleasing, humane film - occasionally on the brink of sentimental naivety - with a touching performance from Dora van der Groen as Paulette, the innocent abroad.
Queen of the Damned *
Dir: Michael Rymer
With: Stuart Townsend, Marguerite Moreau, Aaliyah, Vincent Perez
101 mins, cert 15
www.warnerbros.co.uk/movies/qotd/
A posthumous Razzie is due to the late Aaliyah, playing the Queen of all the Vampires in this Anne Rice gothfest which is long, florid and ridiculous. Her voice has been overdubbed by her brother, producing a kind of Radiophonic Workshop sub-Dalek-klaxon (and she's only in it for a total of about seven minutes, despite what the posters and TV ads imply). Stuart Townsend is Lestat, the vampire who is allegedly so sexy and cool, but actually a very obvious prat. After the rocket-fuelled excitement of Blade 2, it all looks very weak, and my heart went out to the excellent Paul McGann, who has to play a occult researcher looking permanently appalled at what is happening. As well he might.
