Two films this week centre on men with guns. Neither quite works. Yet each has a quirky ingenuity that makes it watchable if never compelling and both boast strong performances by their seemingly mismatched romantic leads.

Tempering the foul-mouthed bravura that made his turn in Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast so memorable, Sir Ben Kingsley plays another man with a mission in John Dahl's You Kill Me. But, rather than rubbing out one of Polish mob boss Philip Baker Hall's Irish rivals, Kingsley's alcoholic hitman is sent to San Francisco to dry out, as he's becoming too unreliable. However, family loyalty brings him back into the firing line, despite his new attachments to gay AA sponsor Luke Wilson and laconic media sales exec, Téa Leoni.

Dahl has never recaptured the sinister sensuality of his biggest hit, The Last Seduction (1994). But this screwball noir has its moments, with the deadpan banter between the socially awkward Kingsley and the disenchantedly chic Leoni occasionally redolent of Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder. However, the constant cutting back to Buffalo to catch up on Baker Hall's feud with Denis Farina proves a distraction that isn't quite justified by the ballistic denouement.

The grandstanding finale is more adeptly accomplished by Frank Cappello in He Was a Quiet Man. But, again, it's what happens before the sleight of hand that makes this study of an outsider struggling with insecurity so intriguing. Pushed around once too often, office nobody Christian Slater is about to open fire on his colleagues when he's beaten to the draw by the nebbish at the next desk. Appalled that he's wounded the beauty he dotes on, Slater kills the gunman and becomes an unlikely hero. Moreover, the now quadriplegic Elisha Cuthbert is wholly reliant on him. But is she really over her affair with boss William H.Macy and why is grief counsellor John Gulager so insistent on seeing Slater alone?

With its talking goldfish and twisted insights into gender dynamics, this offbeat anti-love story sustains its blend of bleak comedy and disconcerting sweetness with some aplomb. Inverting the character he played in Heathers (1989), Slater makes a surprisingly credible underdog. Yet, the feeling that you're being manipulated is too pervasive for this wholly to convince.

Curiously, the same sense doesn't diminish Les Chanson d'Amour, a sublime piece of musical cinema that is only undermined by an implausible plot twist. Having celebrated the audiovisual audacity of the nouvelle vague in Dans Paris, director Christophe Honoré recalls the glories of Jacques Demy as he perfectly integrates 13 songs into a bittersweet storyline concerning Parisian Louis Garrel's struggle to cope with the sudden death of girlfriend, Ludivine Sagnier.

The musical is often condemned for persisting with the out-moded conceit of ordinary people bursting into song in everyday locations. But the often melancholic lyrics to Alex Beaupain's tunes have a psychological significance that make the characters more rather than less credible, with Chiara Mastroianni particularly affecting as Sagnier's sister lamenting Garrel's preference for both free spirit Clotilde Hesme and gay student Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet over her lonely self. Sensitively photographed by Rémy Chevrin and staged with a real understanding of the genre, this is simply delightful. And the enticing charm of cinematic contrivance is also evident in The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), which is on limited re-release in London.

Wojciech Has's audacious adaptation of Jan Potocki's labyrinthine 1813 novel all but disappeared after being savagely edited. But in 1999, Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia teamed with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola to restore its epic length and the tale of Flemish captain Zbigniew Cybulski's bid to rejoin his regiment in Madrid was hailed as a trippy classic.

Certainly dream, reality and surreality tumble in upon each other at regular intervals, especially once Cybulski reaches a manor where gypsy raconteurs outdo themselves in intertwining ingenuity. But the ominous presence of the Inquisition makes this less a Munchhausen-like fantasy than a dark, allegorical satire on life in the Soviet bloc in the mid-1960s, where no one and nothing could be trusted and truths could be twisted to suit the teller. It's fiendishly complex, but overwhelmingly compelling.