When You’re Strange Director: Tom DiCillo Capturing the zeitgeist of ’60s America in heady fashion, When You’re Strange is the definitive story of The Doors, sonorously narrated by Johnny Depp and lovingly assembled by writer/director Tom DiCillo. Chronicling the group’s dizzying rise from garage band obscurity to the uppermost echelons of rock royalty, the film places The Doors at the fore of the counterculture revolution that had such a profound impact on Western society. With their inimitable free-jazz spirit and anarchic rock doctrine pulsing through every frame, When You’re Strange is a captivating time capsule trip that’s impossible to resist. Adam Woodward
Gainsbourg Director: Joan Sfarr First-time director Joan Sfarr charts the ‘heroic life’ of France’s iconic – and iconoclastic – singing star Serge Gainsbourg: a lizard-thin seducer of the great and good (including Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin) who is nevertheless haunted by his own ‘mug’. That internal dichotomy is evinced by Gainsbourg’s outlandish alter-ego, an oversized ‘ghoul’ straight out of a Tim Burton nightmare. It’s a bold gambit that doesn’t always work, and that’s true of this undisciplined, overstuffed biopic as a whole. Matt Bochenski
Brooklyn’s Finest Director: Antoine Fuqua Antoine Fuqua made his name with Training Day, a cop drama that reeked of whisky and gun smoke. But that was high school girl’s stuff compared to the testosterone haze that hangs over Brooklyns’ Finest. Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke and Wesley Snipes all compete for screen time as cops and criminals on the blurred boundary between law making and breaking. Get past the clichés and coincidences, and this is another old-school effort from Fuqua. MB
South of the Border Director: Oliver Stone After going one-on-one with Fidel Castro, Oliver Stone has expanded his mandate in South America, journeying across the continent to meet key political figures and examine the media’s persistent misrepresentation of what America contemptuously refers to as its ‘backyard’. Let’s hope the messenger doesn’t obscure the message, because this is vital stuff. MB
Trash Humpers Director: Harmony Korine An ‘ode to violence’ from enfant terrible Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers is an anti-aesthetic exercise that revels in the corruption and denigration of cinema as we know it. Grossly aged in prosthetic make-up, Korine and friends drink, fight and fuck garbage. But buried somewhere within this gruelling farce is a self-reflexive and perversely beguiling deconstruction of apocalyptic America. MB
108 HUCK