by MATTHEW HAYS, JOANNE LATIMER and MARK SLUTSKY

Elephant Gus Van Sant's Cannes award winner is every bit as captivating and disturbing as you've heard. The film opens with a car careening through a Portland, Oregon suburb, driven by someone who's clearly bombed. It's a parent, as it turns out, the first in a series of misguided adult figures who blunder their way through role modeldom.

What's most fascinating about this Columbine-inspired feature is its structure: seemingly fashioned on a musical symphony, Elephant leaps back and forth in time, showing us various incidents as they unfold from different perspectives. Hypnotically told, the movie then builds to its horrific climax, told graphically and unforgettably. The kids are most definitely not all right, and Van Sant tells this story in a way that's refreshingly lacking in any didacticism. Though I must say, it's pretty bloody hard to believe his statements about the kissing scene in the shower, in which the two naked lads lock lips just before entering the school and blowing the hell out of it. Really, are we supposed to swallow that this male-on-male action is merely casual or arbitrary? Explosive, in the best kind of way. (MH)

Elf This strange concoction - a family Christmas movie directed by Jon Favreau (of Swingers and Made) and starring funnyman Will Ferrell - is happily one of the funniest, best-cast movie of the year. Ferrell stars as a human named Buddy, adopted as a baby by Santa Claus and his team of elves. When Ferrell grows up and realizes he's not actually an elf, he makes for New York City to acquaint himself with the human world. As corny as this sounds, it's Ferrell's performance that really seals the deal as a hapless, over-excitable manchild - the kind of thing he really does best. And check out the players: Ed Asner as Santa Claus (!), Bob Newhart as Ferrell's adopted elf father, James Caan as his biological dad, Zooey Deschanel as the love interest… now that's a supporting cast! Favreau also pulls some neat tricks with the North Pole stuff, making it look like a stop-motion animation Christmas special from the '60s. Funny stuff. (MS)

Pieces of April Peter Hedges' directorial debut (he wrote What's Eating Gilbert Grape, both the novel and the screenplay, and co-wrote the script for About a Boy) is about as indie-American-cinema as you can get. Set on Thanksgiving, the poorly titled film has Katie Holmes as April, an artsy New York ragamuffin type trying to get dinner together for her estranged suburban family. It's all here - the bitter dying mother (Patricia Clarkson), colourful ethnic neighbours, a tense road trip, crappy-looking DV cinematography - yet despite the movie's abundance of Sundance-friendly shtick, it somehow works. Maybe it's the understated, casual tone Hedges pulls off, or Clarkson's terrific performance (she plays the kind of catty mom you were always a little scared of as a kid), or the Magnetic Fields soundtrack, but Pieces of April, though no great shakes, is perfectly satisfying and funny. (MS)

The Singing Detective Ten minutes into The Singing Detective, you'll wonder why its impressive cast looks so happy to be in this stink bomb. Robert Downey Jr. plays the lead, Robin Wright Penn is his long-suffering wife, Mel Gibson plays his shrink, Katie Holmes is his nurse and the bad guys include Adrien Brody. They had fun making this pulpy noir film, but you won't have fun watching it. Despite its lineage as a Dennis Potter television series in Britain with a serious cult following, it's a crude failure on the big screen.

The tedium starts with the narrative device: Downey's character, an author, is terrorized by paranoid delusions about characters in one of his novels. Or, maybe he's projecting real people onto characters in his book. Either way, his skin flared out in a terrible rash and he's in the hospital, being foul and abrasive. The crux of his anger - directed mostly at women - is a childhood incident involving his mother's extramarital affairs.

Where does the singing come in? Haphazardly. There are a few lip-synched "numbers" and there are some golden oldies blasted out between vignettes. The cast does everything but lob stage winks while saying lines like: "If this were a movie, you'd be on the cutting room floor." This, we can do without - Dennis Potter or no Dennis Potter. (JL)

Elephant, Elf, Pieces of April and The Singing Detective open Friday, Nov. 7

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