13 ASSASSINS
Dir: Takashi Miike. Starring: Koji Yakuso, Takayuki Yamada and Yusuke Iseya.

Prolific Japanese maverick Takashi Miike occasionally makes perfectly conventional films, which act as a poke in the eye for detractors of his more extreme stuff because they're just so damn good.

With 13 Assassins, the director tackles the samurai genre, particularly the universe created by Kurosawa, with 7 Samurai being an obvious touchstone for this movie (along with the likes of Harakiri and many others).

Here, in the final days of feudal Japan, the Shogun's crazy sadistic brother is threatening the stability of the kingdom with his Caligula-like behaviour so a group of samurai are secretly dispatched to eliminate him. It's deliberately paced and classically structured, with the first long section defining the mission and assembling the squad. Then there's a bit of training and on to The Mission.

Lovers of Miike's excesses may be disappointed by the slow build-up, but the second half amply compensates with the climactic clash running for the last 45 minutes. Mucho spurting blood and massed samurai action ensues but the subtext about loyalty and the decline of the samurai code keep the film working on several levels.

While it's easy to be snobbish and mourn the debasement of the classic story of honour and derring-do, The Three Musketeers has never been taken seriously. When the most-beloved version stars Oliver Reed and Raquel Welch, you can't really hold up claims for high art. So there's no point in criticising this new effort (from the generally rotten Paul W S Anderson) for silliness. It's big bold fun, with extravagant swordplay, snarling (if slightly boring) villains and battles between flying ‘air ships' (stick a ship on the bottom of a blimp).

Eighteenth century Paris looks sensational and the pace rarely lags. Morgan Spurlock, the man who ate McDonalds every meal for a month and discovered that it wasn't good for him, is back – and considerably trimmer – with Pom Wonderful presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold . Yes, that really is the title. Pom Wonderful (100 per cent pomegranate juice) paid $1million to be the naming rights sponsor. It's a film investigating product placement and sponsorship, which Spurlock attempts to get funded completely through sponsorship and product placement. Along the way he interviews everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ralph Nader, but little surprising is revealed. Despite Spurlock's occasional narcissism it zips along.

Presented as episodes of imaginary TV show Paranormal Inspectors, Episode 50 is yet another collision of ‘found footage' and supernatural hi-jinks. We join the team on episode 49, a haunting they quickly debunk and explain, just like the previous 48 cases. Then a mysterious millionaire invites them to spend the weekend in an abandoned asylum, the ‘most haunted property in America'. As a caption helpfully mentions: ‘During the shoot, something went wrong'. It's short and cheap, with a confusingly inconsistent shooting style, dumb dialogue and frequent J-horror cliches. The crux is whether paranormal events are scientific or religious, but the film is too clumsy to make much headway.

Gantz is kinda silly, but I think that rather comes with the territory. Two young men fall in front of a train and are ‘kidnapped' by a large black sphere – yes, you read it right – given spandex suits (black, natch), and play a semi-posthumous ‘game' in which they and several other recently deceased people are forced to hunt down and kill aliens armed with futuristic equipment and weapons. Based on a manga – surprise! – the extravagant silliness of the baddies is quite fun and the sheer bizarreness of the whole thing is intermittently appealing. Apparently it's big in Japan; there's a sequel already out.