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The story of Ang Lee's American Civil War drama Ride With The Devil is a straightforward enough piece about a young man getting caught up in the violence of the time. What surprised me most was Toby Maguire's performance as that young man. Before seeing this I had always thought of him as a decent actor for low key roles, but certainly not a leading man (I haven't seen Spiderman). But although he does occasionally look a bit too much like his dopey hitchhiker character from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, for most of this film he is spectacular. He pulls off his leading role with style and steals pretty much any scene he's in.

Another surprising performance comes from singer Jewel Kilcher. She's not exactly going to win any Oscars, but compared to most singer-turned-actresses (You know who you are Mariah) she's very impressive. Overall, Ride With The Devil is a decent enough film, made by a classy director, and starring a first rate class.

I haven't yet read the Kurt Vonnegut book this was adapted from, but I am familiar with some of his other work and was interested to see how it would be translated to the screen. Overall, I think this is a very successful adaptation of one of Vonnegut's novels. It concerns the story of an American living in Germany who is recruited as a spy for the US. His job is to ingratiate himself with high ranked Nazi's and send secret messages to the American's via his weekly radio show. But when the war ends he is denounced as a war criminal but escapes to New York, where various odd plot twists await.

If Mother Night has a problem it's that it tends to get a little too sentimental at times. But for most of the film the schmaltz is kept to a minimum and the very strange plot is carried through with skill and aplomb. And there are some fabulous moments of black comedy involving three right wing Christian fundamentalists and a very highly ranked Nazi in a prison cell. Very much recommended.

In my limited experience of them, I have not yet seen a French film with any redeeming qualities. And L'ennui does not halt that sequence, as it is without doubt the worst film I've seen since...well, since the last French film I watched. The story, as far as you could call it that, concerns a boring, selfish and distrustful university professor falling in ‘love' with a seventeen year old girl who seems to have no emotions. I've put ‘love' in inverted commas, because essentially they just do it a lot. And I've said that the girl ‘seems' to have no emotions. That was wrong of me, because it suggests that she has some hidden under the surface. She doesn't. She is possibly the most one dimensional character of any film ever. No attempt has been made to make her seem more human; she is just a non-stop sex machine. With bad dialogue. The actress who plays her might be superb at pretending to be emotionally dead, or she might just be wooden - it's hard to tell the difference.

The frequent sex scenes are, to be honest, a little grotesque, and the rest of the time is taken up by very long passages of question and answer between the two leads. The boring, selfish and distrustful man asks a general question about life, the 1D woman answers with `I don't know'. Every. Single. Time. So, all in all this is your stereotypical French art film. It's also an insult to anyone who likes intelligent cinema, that they think they can pawn (or maybe that should be porn?) us off with this vague, meandering, interest-free rubbish.

...A Clockwork Orange to be precise. Which is something of a bafflement, as besides the occasional coincidental similarity the basic story ears no relation or resemblance to the Stanley Kubrick film or the Anthony Burgess novel. And they don't try to shy away from the fact that they've ripped off the film - they even use the same piece of music at certain times.

So, inspired by the nadsat talk of the original and far superior film, the story is; Your Humble Narrator is only interesovatted in one lesson at the skolliwoll - Chemistry. He uses his knowledge to slowly poison his poor old pee and em but gets found out by the millecents and sent to Staja. There, he sucks up to the psychologist and gets an early release for being so horrorshow with the old chemicals. But once out, he begins poisoning the grahzny vonny malchicks and ptitsas at his firm, until they also figure out what he's up to and send him away again, O my brothers.

And if you understood that you're a better man (or woman) than most. The film has identical shots and similar scenes to Kubrick's film, but has none of the originality or daring subject matter of it. As A Clockwork Orange was still banned when this film was released, I can only assume they thought no-one would remember what it was like and would let this pass. It makes absolutely no sense, but it has created a talking point that the film otherwise wouldn't have, since essentially this is nothing more than another average British movie.

After the brilliant Alien, and the maybe even better Aliens, what was the obvious progression? That's right, Alien Cubed. That's something of an optimistic title though, as this is certainly not Alien to the power of three. Actually, the only real problem with Alien3 is that everyone involved in it, with the exception of David Fincher, Sigourney Weaver, H.R.Giger, and maybe Charles Dance seems to be completely useless. The acting is (with the exception of the above) uniformly awful, truly dreadful. The clunking dialogue is not helpful to their cause.

Fincher does a decent job with what he has to work with and his past in music videos doesn't make the film too flashy and disorientating. Particularly impressive is the scene with the alien's point of view while it runs along the ceiling. But the whole film is let down by the disappointing visuals. Where the first two films had darkness and dinginess, or just sheer scale to impress you with, Alien3 just has a rust coloured prison planet that looks like something from Dune. Only worse. This is the downfall of the film - if the visuals had been better, the films other many bad points could probably have been ignored.

The Deer Hunter - which the people on the Deer Hunter message board will happily tell you is not about war, in case you hadn't noticed - is in parts a very moving film. But at other times it tends to outstay its welcome by a long stretch. Particularly responsible of this is the opening wedding scene, which sets the scene, introduces the characters, tells us that they're going to Vietnam, shows us how mentally unprepared they are for the horrors of war - and then carries on doing so for what seems like an infinite amount of time. Scenes like this will doubtless put many off the film, and that's certainly a shame.

Another possible problem is that Robert De Niro actually doesn't appear to have been changed by the war to any great extent, bar the odd meaningful look of sorrow. While Christopher Walken stays in Vietnam, and the other guy ends up in a veterans hospital, scared to come back out, Bob still seems like he did before. This, along with their incredible length, somewhat dilutes the power of the non-Vietnam scenes, which is a problem when they're supposed to illustrate the main point of the movie. Nevertheless, The Deer Hunter is both an emotional and iconic movie which will be remembered for some time to come if only for the numerous Russian Roulette scenes and the chilling ending of Walken's character. If you can ignore the long running time then you should definitely give it a shot.

There is next to nothing in the way of a story contained in Baby. The film is based almost exclusively around the hypnotic visuals and sound, and it is very effective. Some of the shots set outside the swimming pool are a bit cliched (the pot smoking), yukky (the womans armpit hair - ugh!), or just plain indecipherable (the women in the street hitting him with inflatable phalluses), but when the boy goes swimming it's hard to tear your eyes away. It's a very sexual piece and offers no concrete questions or answers for anything but it's certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

Another early short from Aardman Animations of the Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run films. This one is something of a fantastic oddity - all it involves is a very large jawed man playing the 'she loves me; she loves me not' game with flower petals. At first he simply becomes a little depressed whenever he reaches 'she loves me not', but soon he is desperately having to avoid death from numerous angles. Even when he reaches 'she loves me' he has to dodge huge flying kisses. As usual, Aardman have made a brilliant animated short here - it's both humorous and looks great.

...which is something of a problem for a show that professes to be a comedy. In actual fact, Captain V seems mostly to be a spoof of low-budget Canadian sci-fi show Lexx. The captain is dressed identically, there's a talking robot head (though it's attached to a body here), and most of the effects seem to be deliberately similar, though even lower in budget. What the show lacks however, is even a fraction of the comedy that it's supposedly 'straight' parent show has. And to have a spoof that is less funny than the show it's spoofing is to not really have a spoof at all. Maybe. It probably doesn't help that very few people will actually have heard of the show it is so clearly trying to laugh at. Might be best to just leave it alone then.

Although Bullet In The Brain is, without question, superior amongst short films, it largely seems more like a short piece of writing than a film. And it is a little hard to feel too sorry for the teacher when his smart ass remarks get him shot. But after the bullet enters his brain we begin to understand a little bit about why he became so jaded with life in the first place. There is an awful amount of detail packed into this reasonably short film and this is what makes me feel that it should have been extended a little bit - it seems like there's almost too much to take in at once as the details come flying at you so fast. A slightly more relaxed pace and a less po-faced narrator in the final section would have benefitted this film a little bit. Despite these complaints, there is no denying that Bullet In The Brain is a quite stupendous work compared to many short, and even full length films. The makers should be applauded for trying to make such a basically emotional and literate film in the current climate of quick jokes and Hollywood action.

I know, I know, it's the story that should count more than anything. But the story is so bare bones thin that you end up concentrating on the animation for long periods during which very little happens. And the animation is atrocious - it looks like an amateur student film, if that. The one exception is the cat - who does look quite good - but everyone and everything else is just plain bad.

The film lasts for a full eleven minutes, which is far longer than is necessary for what is a one joke script. A woman gets drunk on her hen night and ends up sleeping with - the vicar! Hilarious. Actually, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't stretched out over such an interminably long period. An inauspicious start for the now great Aardman Animations and one that should have been severely edited down.

The actual tale told in Six Of One is really quite an interesting one, and for that reason alone it is worth watching. But I can't help but feel that it would have been better as a live action film rather than an animation, if only because they would have had to keep it a lot cleaner than it is.

The story is told from a number of different perspectives, with each one revealing things from a slightly different viewpoint and unveiling more and more of the story. This form of storytelling may be becoming something of a cliche but it's handled with a surprising amount of skill here, which makes it even more of a disappointment that the animation is full of such crude and off-putting sexual images. It is only this that stops Six Of One from being one of the best short films I've seen for quite a while, and it does indeed stand in its way. Just as you're getting immersed in the story you have to pull away and grimace at the primitive and childish drawings of genitalia. But unless you are likely to be very offended by this, I would still suggest giving Six Of One a chance, if only for the well thought out story.

OutTHERE is certainly not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you like to see incredibly weird movies from around the world then give it a go. And one of the bonuses is that you can then tell your friends that you 'discovered' it, because with the miniscule amount of publicity surrounding the show there's a very good chance they'll never have heard of it before!

All OutTHERE is consists of a collection of very strange film and TV clips presented by Eden (currently played by Emily Booth from Pervirella and the Bits TV show). In the past it has featured clips from such well known films as Cannibal!The Movie (which is actually fantastic), A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, Meet The Feebles, Babycart At The River Styx, and countless extreme sports videos showing people getting hurt while doing incredibly dangerous things. OutTHERE is, quite plainly, the oddest thing on British terrestrial television today, and it's so good it even had a small influence on my GCSE Media Studies film. What better recommendation could you ask for?

*****Some spoilers*****

I was actually expecting to like this quite a lot - although I hadn't thought much of Three Colours White I decided to give the series the benefit of the doubt and continue persevering because I had heard so many good things about this installment. It seems this was a mistake. Three Colours Blue is exactly the kind of film that action loving Hollywood film fans so gleefully laugh about. After a promising opening it becomes very slow and very little happens throughout. This is probably because it concerns a woman coming to terms with the death of her husband and daughter in something approaching complete isolation, but that's no excuse for making something as thoroughly uninteresting as this. Things do start to liven up a bit towards the end with the introduction of the husbands secret lover, but this is topped off by possibly the most horrible closing scene of any movie ever - it seems to start with Juliet Binoche having sex in a glass box full of water, then goes through a roll-call of all the characters looking thoughtful and deep. Overall, while this is far more ambitious than Three Colours White it does not pull off a success. Sometimes you have to drop a little bit of the subtlety to include something an audience can actually enjoy and engage with.

A decent enough, though slightly obvious, animation about aliens from the planet Zog who have their heads and their genitals in the opposite places to us humans. They arrive on earth, cut off their genitals (which look like heads), put them on their heads (which look like genitals), and blend in with the rest of the population. By a stroke of coincidence, the only human who ever sees them take off their heads to reveal their true selves is a redneck called Dwight Yokum, who takes it upon himself to save the world from these creatures.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that it's all a metaphor for racism and other prejudices, particularly with the fact that - despite all the talk of doom and the downfall of the human race at the hands of the Zogs - the aliens don't actually do anything wrong. They just live peacefully with the rest of earth and it's actually very difficult to tell the difference most of the time (so much so that Dwight accidentally marries a Zog). And the message is topped off by the 'surprise' ending. It's certainly not very subtle at getting its point across.

But the animation is quite interesting - lots of scratchy black and dark colours - and the slightly amateur look can easily be forgiven as the film probably only cost a miniscule amount of money to produce. At the end, the human rocketship that had been sent to invade the Zogs finally arrives at its destination. I don't know if this means there's a third part,but if there is I wouldn't mind seeing it.

eXistenZ combines director David Cronenberg's traditional love of blood and gore and exploding heads with the more confusing aspects of a reality twisting David Lynch film. And it actually works effectively. I won't bother trying to give even the bare bones of a plot synopsis here because it'll only cause more confusion. All you need to know is that the film is about a virtual reality computer game that is so incredibly lifelike that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between reality and virtual reality. The film almost seems to abandon its technology fearing point at the end, but then it throws in the final twist in the very last line of dialogue.

There's also some very gross sexual imagery based around the 'bio-ports' in the protagonists backs, as well as some very gross acting from Jude Law. He manages to come off as naive and stupid and boring and any other annoying habit you can care to think of. Jason Jennifer Leigh comes off much better, and everyone else can be called a supporting character, including Willem Dafoe in a functional, if unspectacular, role as a money-crazed mechanic. Overall, eXistenZ is a very effective sci-fi film about the possibilities technology can present and the possible consequences it will receive.

Quite brilliant animation about a woman who gets sent to hell for not keeping up the payments on her washing machine. Her skeleton then pops back out of the grave in order to collect her precious handbag. Then the devil comes back to reclaim her soul. Then it gets weird.

The animation is superb, and the whole film looks a little bit like that old favourite TV show Trapdoor. It's packed full of odd little details like the words on the contract or the newsreader on the television or the fact that the little girl is practically bald. The characters look fantastic, particularly the French style devil and the whole film is immensely enjoyable. And it ends with a scene very much like Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life, with the "waffer thin mint" becoming a chocolate eclair.

OK, that's not strictly true, but it grabbed your attention. And while Raging Bull is most probably a better piece of film art than Rocky, it's the latter that holds the title in the enjoyment stakes. And although Rocky is essentially one great big cliche, as Appollo Creed says: "A lot of other people are just as sentimental". And it's true, we are. And Rocky manages to stay just the right side of sentimental to stay charming rather than mawkish.

Stallone's script is surprisingly effective for someone who later wrote Cliffhanger and who is traditionally painted as nothing more than a set of muscles and a mumble. However, Stallone's actual acting ability leaves much to be desired, and it takes Creed's rearranging of his facial features to shift his one expression into something else. But it can't detract from the fact that Rocky is extremely enjoyable hokum. It may not quite be what I think of as a deserving Oscar winner (maybe the competition was weak that year), but it is certainly more than worthy of the praise it receives from my action film loving friends.

About as funny as it's ending is tasteless (that's "a bit"), Blessed Fruit shows a woman arriving in church to pray to God. But rather than the usual reasons for such an act: more money please, kill someone for me, etc., she's here to ask God to give her a sign as to how to get out of her predicament - she thinks she's pregnant and the father could be one of two people. Most of the film is taken up by slightly humorous vignettes of what could possibly happen to her if she chooses a particular option. She could end up as a single mother, she could get happily married to a man she's only met once, she could get taken to court and legally bound into a life of celibacy, and so on. But in the end it doesn't matter, thanks to a somewhat contrived ending.

Blessed Fruit tries to be edgy, but despite the ending and the occasional nativity spoofs full of swearing and heavy accents it doesn't really come off as shocking or challenging and there's really nothing else spectacular about it, so it's definitely something of a disappointment.

The fact that Black Hawk Down has such a high rating here has thoroughly depressed me. Surely anyone can see straight through this storyless, action packed jingoistic mess? Apparently not. Never mind, they're going to keep making films like this anyway so I suppose it doesn't really matter. Anyone reading this before watching the film needs to know just one thing: this film is exactly the same as you are expecting it to be. So if non-stop action, minimal characterisation and a lot of flag waving are your thing, Black Hawk Down will also be your thing. If you are more partial to films with a story, or at least some kind of depth, avoid it like you probably were already.

That sums it up pretty well, but what it doesn't express is that South Park actually manages to sustain the laughter over the length of an entire movie, something most TV-to-film adaptations fail. And although its critics will point to the incredible amount of swearing and other questionable situations the movie involves, what they miss is that this is actually far more intelligent than most movies aimed at the teen audience. After all, what better way to frame a satire on censorship than in a film completely packed with bad-taste moments?

South Park also marks a return to the musical genre of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's other brilliant movie, Cannibal! The Musical. The songs are actually very well made (I think one of them has a musical background) and anything that spoofs the awful, staid songs of traditional musicals is in my good books. If you're a fan of the TV show you've probably already seen this; if you're not, then I'd suggest ignoring all the negative publicity and giving it a go. If you can get past the foul mouths you might be suprised.

There's been a lot of moral outrage about South Park right from the very start. This has mainly centered around the fact that there's a lot of swearing. When there are positive comments in the media they usually focus solely on the fact that Kenny dies in every episode. This is doing a great disservice to a show that is essentially the second best animation ever.

The main thing that people seem to be mistaken over is the idea that South Park has no intelligence and is merely an excuse to make rude jokes for a teenage audience. In actual fact South Park is frequently very clever indeed and the constant flashes of surrealism mark it out as far funnier than the majority of 'worth' sitcoms. And South Park also has a surprisingly strong sense of morals - almost every single episode has some kind of moral, and occasionally these can be as preachy as the bible bashers that disparage it. In some cases the only difference is that one group has an incredibly foul mouth...and the other one consists of four young boys living in Colorado.

South Park is consistently funny and permanently smart. It quite honestly deserves almost as large an audience as The Simpsons (though obviously not the kiddies) as it is sometimes equally brilliant in its satire of just about everything in this modern world.

To be blunt - Armageddon might just be the worst movie I've ever seen. It's a horribly cynical cash-in, with every facet of the movie designed to maximise its profits amongst movie goers looking for a "summer blockbuster". Even more than most films of this kind. There's the utterly shameless flag waving attitude (topped off by the drunk Russian astronaut), there's the endless cliches you can see coming a mile off, there's the obligatory romance, there's the fact that they never stop playing that bleedin' Aerosmith song (*cough*nepotism*cough*), and there's the fact that, shame of all shames, Steve Buscemi's in it but it's still crap. How can you put Steve Buscemi in a film and still make it devoid of all and any value? The answer - make Armageddon, a film which is never, ever going to even approach respectability.

Avoid. Avoid as if your life depended on it. Please.

The actual plot of The Piano is a very straightforward love triangle, the only difference being that one of the three is mute. To recap it quickly: Harvey Kietel gets naked; Holly Hunter gets horny; Sam Niell gets mad; then Sam Niell gets less mad. What does make The Piano stand out somewhat are the brilliant visuals. The outside action takes place under a web of grey tree branches obscuring the downcast sky. The whole film makes a far more disturbing use of the New Zealand scenery than the over-hyped-but-pretty The Lord Of The Rings.

The Piano reminds me quite a lot of Japanese horror film Onibaba. The actual stories of the films are poles apart, but both have a feeling of detachment. Until the very end of the film you could be forgiven for thinking that The Piano is set in an alternate universe, so far away are the characters from any other humans. This love triangle is completely isolated, and from start to finish there is no possibility of any outside forces interrupting or for any of the characters to escape. It is this quality, along with the desolate landscape of the film, that give The Piano it's quality. Plus, the music's great.

It was difficult to decide a mark for this one. In the end I chose 1/10, because as a piece of film art it's atrocious, the lowest of the low, probably the most horrendously bad film I've ever seen. But parodoxically that makes it so damn funny that it could also be quite reasonably given a 10/10 rating for pure entertainment value. It really does have to be seen to be believed.

The acting? Wooden. Really wooden. Chuck Norris' expression doesn't change once during the entire film. The special effects? Awful. A lot of the time it looks like the actors are performing in front of a blue wall with another films effects projected behind them. The story? Fantastically funny. The most obvious and cliched script ever committed to screen and all the better for it. The slow motion action sequences? Perfect - in a really bad way.

Normally I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on a film bad enough to get a 1/10, but this really is essential viewing - it's a masterclass in how not to make a film, but also brilliant entertainment at the same time. If I could've given it nought I would have. And for that alone, you should watch it.