Kung Fu Panda posterYet anoth­er school hol­i­day looms and Dream­works’ attempt to cap­ture the anim­ated audi­ence (or rather ‘the audi­ence for anim­a­tion’) before Pix­ar’s WALL·E emerges in Septem­ber, is Kung Fu Panda star­ring the voice of Jack Black. Launched on the crois­ette at the Cannes Film Fest­iv­al only a few weeks ago, KFP has been acclaimed by crit­ics (88% at Rot­ten­To­ma­toes) and looks like it will be worth check­ing out this week­end. Read­ings, Empire, Regent.

The Para­mount con­tin­ues to slip inter­est­ing, single-print, releases into the mar­ket­place: this week’s entry is a John Boor­man (Deliv­er­ance, Excalibur) mor­al­ity tale, The Tiger­’s Tail, in which a self-made busi­ness­man (Brendan Gleason) dis­cov­ers he has a sin­is­ter double who seems to determ­ined to bring him down.

[The rest of this week’s new releases after the jump]

After sneak pre­views (and the dis­cov­ery of some ser­i­ously unac­cept­able used prints from Aus­tralia) last week­end, Sid­ney Lumet’s thrill­er Before The Dev­il Knows You’re Dead opens at Read­ings, Pent­house and Light­house Petone this week­end.

And finally, the Wachow­ski Bros return to the screen (fol­low­ing the Mat­rix tri­logy which was com­pleted in 2003) with the tv-remake Speed Racer, based on a Japan­ese cult series of the 60s. Into The Wild’s Emile Hirsch stars as Speed Racer (ser­i­ously, that’s the char­ac­ter­’s name) and he is sup­por­ted by John Good­man, Susan Saran­don and Christina Ricci. Read­ings & Regent.

All these films will be reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes next Wed­nes­day (and in print in the Cap­it­al Times on the same day).