<preform>The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (15)</br> Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (12A)</br> Brotherhood (15)</br> Adam &amp; Paul (15)</br/> Moolaad&Atilde;&copy;, (15)</preform>

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (15)

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (15)

The cult comedy team make that difficult leap from television to cinema with a film all about how difficult it was for them to make the leap from television to cinema. Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith play themselves, three comedians labouring over the script of their debut movie, a 17th-century romp called The King's Evil. Meanwhile, the malformed characters from their BBC series, also played by Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith, realise that they're being shelved, and zap through a portal to the "real" world to confront their creators. The Gents keep the punchlines and the cineastic references coming, but the navel-gazing concept is hardly

likely to win over a new audience. Let's face it, Monty Python were never self-regarding enough to make a film about the lumberjack attacking Michael Palin, so the fond laughter elicited by Apocalypse could be drowned out by grumblings that they should have just gone ahead and made The King's Evil.

Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (12A)

The Symbionese Liberation Army was the revolutionary gang that hit the headlines in 1973 by kidnapping a newspaper heiress and converting her to its cause. Splicing recent interviews with archive news footage, Robert Stone replays the episode as a tragic farce. The "Army" was a handful of Californian college kids who got high on their own Robin Hood rhetoric, but they did a sensational job of manipulating the flat-footed American media. The trouble is, the story is so enthralling and unbelievable that this hurried documentary doesn't tell you more than half of it.

Brotherhood (15)

In Seoul, in 1950, two South Korean brothers without a political thought between them are drafted to fight in the civil war. The elder of the two is told that if he earns a medal his teenaged sibling will be sent home - so he throws himself into every dangerous mission available, and is soon proving to be a better soldier than he ever was a shoeshine boy.

Brotherhood rails against the madness of its countrymen destroying each other, but its appeal should be more than local: this is an exceptional epic that can compete with any war film made anywhere in the world. The post- Saving Private Ryan combat scenes are judderingly visceral, and yet they always serve a story that never stops flooring us with new twists, new ironies and new horrors.

Adam & Paul (15)

Adam and Paul are two homeless, hapless, clueless junkies who limp around Dublin from one catastrophe to the next, trying to beg, borrow or steal enough money to buy their next fix. And by rights the film should be just as doomed as they are. With no plot, a cast of unknowns (including its star and writer, Mark O'Halloran), and a setting that's gloomier than The League Of Gentlemen's Royston Vasey, it also has the colossal pretentiousness to imagine what it would be like to put Laurel and Hardy in an Irvine Welsh story adapted by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Give them time, though, and the bathos and pathos of these two clowns' misadventures become addictive. Rarely has such a relentlessly miserable little film left me with such a warm glow.

Moolaadé, (15)

African cinema has chronically been underpublicised, but this month audiences have a chance to rediscover its doyen with an NFT retrospective of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene. His new film Moolaa dé is set in a Burkina Faso village, where six girls flee the rite of genital excision and take shelter with a woman named Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly). She invokes the protecting mooladé, which, though just a cord strung between doorposts, seems to do the trick - up to a point. The film mixes severity with warmth and depth of character - especially in Dominique T Zeida's Renoiresque turn as a charismatic travelling pedlar. At 82, Sembene is still passionately invested in driving Africa into the future, and Moolaa dé is a tough, compelling statement.