The world is never short of decent blues guitarists, but Kenny Wayne Shepherd is a bit special, combining a deep knowledge of the form with a genuine Southern upbringing in a way which brings to mind Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Most directors would bask in the limelight of a Palme d'Or win, but Malick did what he always does – watch from the shadows. Luke Blackall profiles the reclusive genius

It's all very beautiful, but if film-man Figgis wants to direct opera he should pay his dues with the touring companies

Hollywood seems obsessed with synthetic female stars. Ben Walsh watches Katherine Heigl, Angelina Jolie and the rest, and pines for the days of Carrie Fisher and Teri Garr

This doom-laden cop drama comes from the director of Training Day, but while it has that film's urban toughness, it doesn't have the electrifying plot that went with it.

Things are far from fine in Antoine Fuqua's determinedly humourless policier.

The title, bleak with irony, refers to three Brooklyn cops whose individual stories crisscross through Antoine Fuqua's violent and overlong study of moral squalor.

It's a beautiful character," Ethan Hawke enthuses, "who in the first scene commits a murder, and in the second goes to confession and then can't confess. He feels he's got 200 pounds on his shoulders, a giant gorilla on his back, which is that he's failed his wife."

"I don't want to be arrogant, but I'm incredibly attractive," Ashton Kutcher's preening lothario, Nikki, assures us at the start of David Mackenzie's smutty morality tale. Nikki, jobless and feckless, targets LA's wealthiest single women, sleeps with them, lets them buy him expensive clobber (mainly, it seems, appalling scarves and, more horrifyingly, braces) and then lounges around their swimming pool. Anne Heche's glacial lawyer is his latest "victim". This flimsy look at shallowness and avarice in LA was captured much better in American Gigolo, and reminds you just how good a young Richard Gere was in these narcissistic roles.

Julianna came to Britain to work in the 'exotic' industry and fund her studies when she returned to Hungary. She may have been naive but few would have foreseen what happened to her

Bland beyond endurance. Based on a Japanese story of canine fidelity, this stars Richard Gere as a music professor (yeah, right) who picks up a stray dog on the way home from his railway commute.

This couple fulfil the desire to see own lives played out in glossy form

David Mackenzie, whose haunting 2003 mystery Young Adam promised so much, has gone to La-La land to tell the story of a young(ish) hustler in Spread.

Mira Nair (111 mins), starring Richard Gere, Hilary Swank