THE FIVE BEST FILMS

All About My Mother (15)

Almodovar at his quirky, curious best. All About My Mother offers a soaring salute to mums everywhere, not to mention a nostalgic sayonara to the good old days of transvestite junkie prostitution.

Rushmore (15)

The high-school comedy hits its peak with this oddbod masterpiece about a gal (Olivia Williams), a guy (Bill Murray) and the monstrous schoolboy (Jason Schwartzman) who gets between them. A genuine one-off.

The War Zone (18)

Tim Roth's first stab at film direction results in a chill of incest within a brood of displaced Londoners. The dreamy visuals and acting cast a potent spell. See review, right.

Go (18)

Doug (Swingers) Liman spirits us through one wild weekend in the lives of a crop of California youngsters. Go stays one step ahead of its viewer; dropping clues, varying its rhythm. See review, right.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (15)

Kenny gets killed, Cartman gets shock treatment, Hitler befriends Gandhi and America declares war on the Canadians. Oh yeah - and it's funny too.

THE FIVE BEST REVIVALS

Chinatown (NFT, today, 8.20pm)

Private eye Jack Nicholson uncovers a rats'-nest of personal and political corruption in Polanski's soaring Los Angeles crime fable. Put simply, it's one of the best written, acted and directed films of the past 30 years.

Taxi Driver (NFT, Friday, 8.30pm)

Scorsese and Schrader's unstable classic cruises through a New York turned dark and sulphurous. Robert De Niro is the cabbie in crisis; Jodie Foster the teen prostitute who sets his meltdown in motion.

Live Flesh (Rio, tomorrow, 2.40pm)

Part love-triangle drama, part homage to a post-Franco Madrid, 1997's Live Flesh pointed Almodovar in a new, more mature direction. A rich and heady brew.

Diary of a Country Priest (NFT, Wednesday, 8.30pm)

Robert Bresson turns a gimlet eye on notions of faith and redemption in his typically spare saga of an ailing Catholic curate in rural France. This is cinema as meditation; as holy fast. You step out purified.

Jamon, Jamon (Metro, Wednesday, 3pm)

A dish of breasts and ham simmering in a hot Spanish sauce, Bigas Luna's sex-food-death comedy proves one of the highlights of the Metro's current Latin-American film festival.