Forty-five years to the month since they first charted with Love Me Do, The Beatles retain a fascination that extends way beyond film critics born in the same building as one of them. This year alone has seen the release of DVDs containing previously unseen footage, an anthology of Paul McCartney's greatest hits and an audiovisual souvenir of the Ecce Cor Meum piece he composed for Magdalen College Choir. But easily the most compelling outings have been The US vs John Lennon - David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's account of Lennon's battle to secure his Green Card in the face of Richard Nixon's implacable opposition - and Andrew Piddington's disturbing docudrama, The Killing of John Lennon.

Adopting a stylised approach to convey the tormented mind of Mark Chapman, this is a transfixing recreation of the events that persuaded a Hawaiian security guard that murdering a pop star would alert the world to the message contained within J.D.Salinger's cult novel Catcher in the Rye. Speaking lines taken verbatim from Chapman's journals and testimonies, Jonas Bell gives an extraordinary performance that chillingly shows how a delusional loser could turn on his idol for failing to live up to the principles espoused in the lyrics of Imagine. Having filmed in authentic locations, Piddington cuts Roger Eaton's visceral imagery to the rhythms of Chapman's seething psychosis. Yet he never wholly demonises a misfit whose rage was rooted in a stereotypically dysfunctional childhood and fermented in a self-loathing that he was too cowardly to endure in isolation.

Delusion is also key to Brice Cauvin's feature debut, Hotel Harabati. Raising countless questions, but providing few answers, this is the latest entry in the Cinema of Unease that is currently so modish in France. Indeed, echoes of Michael Haneke and Dominik Moll reverberate around the teasing action, which sees architect Laurent Lucas and voice-over artist Hélène Fillières become increasingly detached from reality after they decide to keep a bag of money left at a railway station by a Levantine-looking stranger.

But while Lucas's growing obsession with terrorism in his Parisian neighbourhood and Fillières's decision to barricade herself and the children in their apartment are initially as intriguing as the couple's mysterious trip to Venice, the eschewal of linearity and logic comes to feel more like self-indulgence than ingenuity. The mood is suitably disquieting, but the puzzle is ultimately more manipulatory than mesmerising and the Syrian denouement is a decided disappointment.

Rigoberto Castañeda's KM31 is equally guilty of prioritising style over content, as it draws the life out of the tropes that have made J-horror such a global favourite since the release of Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1997. Based on the legend of La Llorana (or The Weeping Woman), it starts shockingly enough, with Iliana Fox crashing her car after a naked child runs into a remote road. But her brutal killing merely unleashes a series of supernatural clichés which engulf Fox's identical twin and the two men competing for her affections, Raúl Méndez and Adrià Collado.

The domestic situation is largely devoid of interest, but things pick up again after Fox and Collado meet creepy crone Luisa Huertas in a cottage that turns out to have been empty for 60 years and she guides them to the Mexico City sewers to challenge both the spirit of an Indian girl who killed herself and her children after being spurned by her conquistador lover and the ghost of the siblings' suicidal mother. The special effects in the climactic sequence are piteously gruesome. But Castañeda's gift for exploiting atmospheric locations is not matched by his narrative originality.