Cert 12A, 115 mins
Having spent two films trying to discover who he really is, the final part of the trilogy series sees former CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) looking to learn how he became what he is.

It all traces back to Treadstone and its experimental reprogramming, flashbacks of which frequently incapacitate Bourne. He was the first, but since then a spin-off, Operation Blackbriar, has created more operatives under the control of an unanswerable covert anti-terrorist CIA unit headed up by Noah Vosen (David Strathairn).

In the name of homeland security, they’ve been targeting and in some cases killing, American citizens deemed to be a possible threat.

When reporter Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) gets handed classified information linking Blackbriar and Bourne, Vosen immediately swings into action to have him eliminated. But not before Bourne has made contact and acquired further pieces of the puzzle.

As Vosen assumes he’s going to blow the whistle, this also makes him a loose end to be tied up.

On the other hand, seconded to help by her new boss (Scott Glenn), CIA operative Pam Landy (Joan Allen) isn’t persuaded that Bourne’s a credible threat and would rather bring him in, thereby setting her and Vosen at opposite ends of the ongoing mission.

Returning Bourne Conspiracy director Paul Greengrass ratchets up the action to breakneck pace, starting as he means to continue with a quick film-bridging catch up sequence back in Moscow.

Then it’s a breathless journey from location to location as the plot snaps between Turin, Paris, London, Madrid and Tangier before the New York climax as Bourne comes face to face with his maker (Albert Finney) and finally learns the painful truth.

Greengrass hammers down the adrenaline with a series of set-pieces, including a nail biting sequence at Waterloo Station and heart in mouth chase across the Tangier rooftops, down its streets and through its windows with the cops in pursuit of Bourne in pursuit of a CIA asset (as they refer to their killers) in pursuit of minor agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), now also marked for termination after helping Bourne.

Although Bourne walks away from incidents with a superhuman invincibility and there’s moments that stretch credibility, for the most part Greengrass grounds everything in reality. The hand to hand fights are fast, brutal and bloodily raw, but so too are the character emotions that bleed to the surface.

Damon has made this his signature role and if, as he says, it’s his farewell, he wraps it up with his most ferociously intense turn yet. But both Allen and Strathairn deserve equal plaudits for their low key but steel reinforced performances.

Along with the thrills and crowd pleasers, there’s some deep character work and heavy themes that address identity, self-definition, moral choices and betrayals.

It’s also deeply cynical of the post-millennial paranoia that has rendered the planet one giant CCTV camera and let loose out of control agencies such as Voser’s with their use of rendition and torture in the name of democracy. "You can't make this stuff up," says Strathairn at one point. Frighteningly, you don’t have to.

Cert 15, 87 mins
In a nutshell, Napoleon Dynamite in New Zealand recast as a quirky romantic comedy. The world may be messy, it says, but there's lots of lovely bits.

That's the philosophy of gawky, socially inept Lily (Loren Horsley), a fast food cashier, or at least she was until they fixed it so she'd be the one made redundant.

Before she leaves she finally manages to talk to Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), the personality challenged nerd from the nearby games store.

He's not interested, but Lily's pretty sure they're made for each other. After all, they both have a mole on their upper lip.

Gatecrashing his "come as your favourite animal" party (he's a vain eagle, she's a sad shark), they discover another connection. She is, he declares, the best female video game player he's ever seen.

Before you know it, they've done the deed ("do you want to have sex?," he asks with the same enthusiasm as she'd say "do you want fries with that?") and he's invited her back to his hometown where he intends to challenge the guy who bullied him in high school to a martial arts fight.

Here Lily meets and bonds with his equally oddball family. And when self-absorbed Jarrod's attention shifts to training for the fight and trying to get off with his brother's ex-girlfriend, she stays around, looking after his grouchy wheelchair bound dad.

Played totally deadpan, there's moments of understated hilarity and such inspired dialogue as "my friend has a helmet, and he's going to let us chuck shoes at his head."

And while stretches drag, the animated sequences were a bad idea, and it's a little hard to warm to Jarrod who doesn't really deserve someone as irrepressibly optimistic as Lily, this remains a disarmingly sweet, touchingly sad fable of unconditional love.

Cert PG, 94 mins
A cheap looking, cheaply acted kids creature movie that harks to the distant days before CGI, this didn't get an American cinema release and it's hard to understand why it has here.

Mirroring his role in Firehouse Dog, Bruce Greenwood's again a father whose work causes him to disappoint and neglect his young son.

Postponing a promised trip, he hauls Mac (Daniel Magder) off to Canada when his oil company bosses ask him to recover a vital drill that's been lost in one of the lakes.

While dad and his team busy themselves with their mini-sub and the rival oil company bad guys plan further acts of sabotage, Mac chums up with a young Native American girl and discovers that local legends about a giant water creature called a mee-shee inhabiting the lake aren't just myths.

Directed by John Henderson who made the equally duff watersnake yarn Loch Ness, it cobbles together bits of Free Willy and ET with no noticeable charm while the animatronic creature – well its head anyway – looks exactly like the clunky plastic and metal puppet that it is. Dull.

DARATT * * *
Cert PG, 95 mins, Subtitled
U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha notwithstanding, there's been a dearth of African cinema in recent years.

But Abouna writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun puts an end to the drought with this haunting fable of forgiveness and reconciliation about a boy needing a father and a man wanting a son, set in the aftermath of Chad's lengthy civil war.

When an amnesty allows war criminals to escape justice, prompted by his blind grandfather 16-year-old Atim sets off to find and kill the man who murdered his father, before he himself was born.

However, while locating Nassara, now running a bakery, proves easy enough, pulling the trigger less so. Not least because the shaven-headed, scarred Nassara, who talks through a voice box following an attempt on his life, turns out to be a devout Muslim who gives bread to the poor, offers to teach Adim how to bake and even declares he wants to adopt him.

There's little dialogue, but the simple narrative plays out eloquently through the actors' expressive faces, its leisurely pace suddenly gathering speed for the breath-catching climax.

Cert PG, 101 mins
If Bratz: The Movie, the first live action film based on the best-selling dolls, truly speaks to the youth of today then we’re doomed.

Spouting cheesy platitudes as if they were the most profound universal truths, Sean McNamara’s film is a crudely constructed piece of merchandising propaganda, urging its young female audience to obsess about make-up and clothes.

Cloe (Skyler Shaye), Jade (Janel Parrish), Sasha (Logan Browning) and Yasmin (Nathalia Ramos) are BFF – best friends forever – who always put the interests of their group ahead of personal gain.

As they enter freshman year at Carry Nation High School, the girls ruffle the feathers of class president Meredith Baxter Dimly (Chelsea Staub), daughter of Principal Dimly (a slumming Jon Voight), and her entourage.

Meredith believes that students should remain in their cliques, a "flawless" system flouted quite openly by Cloe, Jade, Sasha and Yasmin.

However, the girls soon bow down to Meredith’s status quo. Two years pass and the enormity of the estrangement finally hits the pals.

Railing against insidious peer pressure and prejudice in its many forms, McNamara’s film trumpets female empowerment and social harmony, exemplified by the four lead characters who collectively bridge the ethnic, religious and class divides.

Bullies are vanquished by unwavering friendship, individuality trumps conformity, and pipe dreams of fame and fortune are realised with a last gasp performance of girl anthem "Bratitude" at the end of term talent showcase.

Screenwriter Susan Estelle Jansen, who co-wrote The Lizzie McGuire Movie, pilfers flimsy plot strands from countless other superior teen wish fulfilment fantasies, with casual nods to Coyote Ugly and McNamara’s previous film, the Hilary Duff straight-to-DVD yawn, Raise Your Voice.

There’s no place for subtlety here.

"Are you blind?" asks Yasmin as she bumps into a handsome student in the corridor.
"I’m deaf," replies Dylan (Nelson).
"You don’t look deaf," says Yasmin dumbly.
"You don’t look ignorant but I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover," he chides, delivering the lesson of the day about acceptance and understanding.

However, you can judge a film by its screenplay, and this one is BFF - big, fat failure. Flights of fancy and an incomprehensible truth



Until last year's Grizzly Man, it had been over two decades since (with Fitzcarraldo) Werner Herzog made any impression on the UK box office.

So, here's a chance to catch up on three documentaries. The oldest is 1997's Little Dieter Needs To Fly (15, 80 mins ***), the remarkable story of Dieter Dengler. Raised in Germany during The Second World War where he ate wallpaper to survive and developed an obsession about being a pilot, he became an American citizen, joined the US Navy and was shot down over North Vietnam in 1966. Captured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong, he was tortured and starved, at one point weighing only 85lbs. He also became one of the few Americans to escape from a prison camp and survive.

Herzog's upcoming Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale, is a dramatisation of events, but the documentary is even more incredible with Dengler returning to where it all happened to recount – and at one point re-enact – his harrowing experiences and how they affected his later life.

Equally fascinating but hard going is Wheel Of Time (15, 79 mins **) which documents the ritual during which Tibetan Buddhist monks are ordained. Featuring interview footage with the Dalai Lama, there's some mesmerising images and wry commentary, but it's all very specialist Discovery Channel programming.

Finally, Wild Blue Yonder (15, 87 mins ***) is a fake documentary that employs footage from Arctic deep-sea exploration and the 1989 Space Shuttle mission in a fable about a quest to find new worlds as Earth dies.

Intercut is Brad Dourif, standing in some ghost town, overactingly addressing the camera about how he's the last of a group of aliens who came here after their planet died, drawing parallels with their history and mankind's own ecological irresponsibility. Frequently incomprehensible, nevertheless in typical Herzog fashion it buries a stark truth in the heart of its madness.

Details of show times at