FILM: ALSO SHOWING

What The #$*! Do We Know!? (12A)

William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente

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Like all great fakes, this movie flatters to deceive. What begins as an initiation into the mystery of quantum mechanics (ie, something worth watching) turns out to be a recruiting drive for New Age evangelism. It's also an opportunity for various quacks and 'experts' to sound off about mass meditation and self-awareness, theories that seem every bit as dodgy as the knitwear some of these characters sport.

Interwoven with the pseudo-science are vignettes in which a photographer (Marlee Matlin) travels towards enlightenment via a basketball court, a broken heart and a Polish wedding (the dream polka is a low point).

The film's success in the US, where it has overtaken Super Size Me in the list of top-grossing documentaries and won celebrity fans in Madonna and Drew Barrymore, provides a glum reflection on American credulity. It's a numbingly idiotic trip down the rabbit- hole of consciousness, and you should stay the #$*! away from it.

Mysterious Skin (18)

Gregg Araki

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Based on the 1995 novel by Scott Heim, this provocative, nicely modulated drama deals with a familiar subject, the trauma of child abuse, yet makes of it something moving and oddly chastening.

Shy 18-year-old Brian (Brady Corbet) is troubled by nightmares and nosebleeds, which he believes may be the result of an alien abduction 10 years before. Gay hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) grew up in the same Kansas town and knows what really happened, because he was a victim too.

Director Gregg Araki (The Living End) isn't one for making things easy, and even if you guess what's coming there are scenes that deliver a shock to the system. As the devil-may-care rent boy, Gordon-Levitt gives an instinctive, hair-raising performance.

A Common Thread (12A)

Elonore Faucher

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Nothing sensational about Elonore Faucher's drama of smalltown France, but plenty that is gentle, poised and sincere. A headstrong young French girl, Claire (Lola Naymark), finds she is five months

pregnant and, pursuing her passion for needlework, applies for a job with Mme Mlikian (Ariane Ascaride), an embroiderer who's mourning the recent death of her son.

The movie's light metaphorical patterning " a tear in the fabric can be mended " is matched to a pair of delicately understated performances as protge and employer become a surrogate family to each other.

Notre Musique (12A)

Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard is back with a characteristically abstruse essay on war. Modelled on The Divine Comedy, it explores concepts of 'Heaven', 'Hell' and 'Purgatory', mixing archive footage of conflict with film clips and parallel storylines involving two Israeli Jewish women and Godard himself at a writers' conference in Sarajevo. 'Challenging' would be the polite word; 'meandering' the honest one.

Only Human (15)

Dominic Harari, Teresa de Pelegri

ii888 This Spanish family comedy has been compared to early Almodovar, though don't take that as a recommendation. A Jewish woman (Marian Aguilera) brings home her boyfriend (Guillermo Toledo) to meet her family, then drops the bombshell revelation: he's a Palestinian.

Directors De Pelegri and Harari try hard to create the giddiness of farce " perhaps too hard. Political tension plus domestic hysteria plus outrageous coincidence equals total exhaustion, rather than the laugh-riot intended.

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