Anger Management<br></br>Dark Water<br></br>Fausto 5.0<br></br>Dirty Deeds<br></br>Day of Wrath<br></br>The Hunted

Jack does his wild-eyed thing again

You know how it is. You're in a perfectly good mood when someone tells you that you're not. You assure them, to no avail. And the more they go on, the more angry you become. This is the central conceit of the Hollywood comedy Anger Management (15), which surfs with gleeful knowingness the futile battle we wage with our temperaments.

Adam Sandler plays Dave Buznik, a man not only mild-mannered but positively inert when it comes to defending himself. After being wrongfully charged with assault, Dave is sentenced to a period of anger management therapy. Since his doctor is played by Jack Nicholson in crude, wild-haired and wide-eyed mode, it's obvious that he will be considerably more psychotic than his charge. The fun of the film, while it lasts, is in seeing how the barking mad shrink schools Dave, not in managing his anger - but in letting it out.

Last year Sandler surprised many with his layered performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, a much better study of repressed violence than this. Here he's back to the lazy territory of the put-upon innocent. Nicholson too is in default mode, though it's his testosteroned little devil act which gives the film much of its early juice, before the one joke wears excruciatingly thin.

When I first tried to watch Hideo Nakata's Ring, alone and on video, I had to stop half-way and sleep with the light on. It more than deserved its moniker as one of the scariest films ever made. Dark Water (15), his latest, can't compare, but still manages four or five moments when you feel, not so much a chill down your spine, as total immersion in a block of ice.

A young woman is struggling to retain custody both of her five-year-old daughter and of her seemingly precarious sanity. The pressure intensifies when they move into the apartment block from hell - a dilapidated concrete lump, grey, damp and short-circuiting; and haunted, it would seem, by another little girl.

The plot may be slight and the denouement too heavily signposted, but Nakata's skill is in creating an atmosphere seeped in foreboding. Some of the film's images are stirringly reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining; while the ghost girl in a yellow mackintosh is cousin to the red-coated nemesis of another water-logged chiller, Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. Like Roeg's film, Dark Water matches unbearable tension with a plaintive reflection on the pain and sacrifice of parenthood.

The winner of the audience prize at Berlin this year, the Israeli film Broken Wings (15), is also about family. Set in Haifa, writer/ director Nir Bergman's film is a gentle, well-observed day-in-the-life of a mother and her four children, struggling to cope with the father's accidental death. It's refreshing to see a story with such recognisable family dynamics, not least those moments when pain, loneliness and confusion hide behind hostility.

The bad boys of Spanish theatre, La Fura Dels Baus, shocked and titillated London audiences last month with their Sadeian romp, XXX. Fausto 5.0 (18), sees the group apply its visceral, kinetic, in-your-face style to the Goethe myth and the big screen with considerable verve.

This is a fabulously designed film, its near-futuristic setting both cinematic and theatrical, the most enticing set being a posh hotel draped like a work by Christo. Sadly, the plot (a doctor meets an old patient who persuades him to let his hair down, which means little more than some ill-advised sex) confirms the suspicion that the Catalans have flash in abundance, but little substance.

There is nothing at all to commend Dirty Deeds (18), a shameless and risible attempt at an Australian Goodfellas or Jackie Brown. Worse than a bad film is a bad film that is convinced it's cool. Director David Caesar throws in split screens, a kitsch Sixties wardrobe and funky soundtrack, but falls flat on his face attempting the blend of violence and humour that Scorsese, Tarantino and countless other Americans manage with their eyes closed.

Headlining the NFT's retrospective of the great Danish director Carl Dreyer, Day of Wrath (15) is a mesmerising account of love and witchcraft in 17th-century Denmark.

No previews were available of The Hunted (15), a grim-sounding chase thriller with Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones.