Rent or Buy

After years of being entered into beauty pageants by proud parents Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern, Texas teenager Ellen Page rebels and joins the Hurl Scouts roller derby team. Yet, despite being speedy, Page lacks the ruthlessness to barge and gouge her way to victory and it takes some time before she is accepted by gritty team-mates Kristen Wiig and Zoe Ball. Furthermore, before she can succeed, Page also has to make her peace with Harden (a former beauty queen, who had high hopes for her little girl), neglected best friend Alia Shawkat and wavering boyfriend Landon Pigg.

This being a rite of passage picture, one would expect Page to come through with flying colours on all fronts. But Cross's script is more grounded than many teenpix and Barrymore's direction further emphasises that nothing in life comes easily. Dividing her time between high school and waitressing at a burger bar, the bespectacled Page responds to this challenge with the punky spirit she brought to Juno (2007) and she is well supported by an eager cast that also includes a cameoing Barrymore and Juliette Lewis, as the leader of the Hurl Scouts's deadliest rivals.

With characters rejoicing in nicknames like Maggie Mayhem, Bloody Holly, Babe Ruthless, Eva Destruction and Smashley Simpson, this is consistently engaging and entertaining. Barrymore handles the sporting action less convincingly than the more intimate interludes, but her girl power message is positive without being platitudinous and while the kids are enjoying the action, the more ciné-literate grown-ups can appreciate the wit of Kevin Kavanaugh's sets and Catherine Marie Thomas's costumes, as well as the energy and expertise of Robert Yeoman's photography and Dylan Tichenor's editing.

Dysfunction of a more murderous sort blights the families in Derick Martini's Lymelife, a semi-autobiographical study in 1970s dysfunction that the debuting director wrote with his brother Steven. However, there are sufficient echoes here of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. (2001) to make this dark Long Island rite of passage feel somewhat overly familiar.

With mother Jill Hennessy duct taping him from head to toe to protect him from the wood ticks responsible for spreading the debilitating Lyme Disease, 15 year-old Rory Culkin makes a natural target for bullies, just as he is trying to tip his friendship with older neighbour Emma Roberts into romance. However, she only has eyes for a senior at school and is less than impressed when Culkin is pulped by a white trash thug and then follows up soldier brother Kieran Culkin's brutal retribution with a cowardly beating of his own. Indeed, she is further enraged when he starts an envy-fuelled rumour in their Catholic community that her morals are not all that they should be.

But Culkin's problems are only just beginning. Roberts has realised that mother Cynthia Nixon is having an affair with Culkin's father, Alec Baldwin, and that they are using their hectic real estate schedule as cover for their clandestine trysts. What's more, Roberts's Lyme-afflicted and drug-addled father, Timothy Hutton, has also discovered his cuckolding and he lets Baldwin know that he knows during a tense encounter at a local bar. But, worst of all, the long-suffering Hennessy has also learned the truth and she orders Baldwin to leave home, forcing him to move into the adjoining modern monstrosity he had commissioned without informing his wife, who misses her old block in Queens and loathes her husband's obsession with social mobility.

Staging the set-pieces around Thanksgiving and Culkin's confirmation, Martini coaxes solid performances from an able cast. Everyone has their moment in the spotlight, with Hutton's dishevelled disorientation contrasting barbedly with Baldwin's macho workaholism and the homely Hennessy and the manicured Nixon both succumbing to their pent-up disappointment to launch into seething diatribes to their selfish spouses. But it's Rory Culkin who steals focus, whether jousting with the older sibling whose heroic attempt at saving his parents' marriage belies his non-combative status in the military or allowing Roberts to take the lead after they patch up their relationship and retire to his bedroom to lose their virginity on the night he officially becomes a man in the eyes of the church.

In a nod to executive producer Martin Scorsese, Culkin even riffs on Robert De Niro's famous mirror monologue in Taxi Driver (1976). However, he is much more a child of the Star Wars generation and his reflected showdown with a life-size cut-out of Han Solo is much more in character. The teasingly ambiguous sense of period is reinforced by the splendid soundtrack and even though there seems something more than a touch anachronistic about the plot's insistence on the proximity of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Falklands War, Martini nevertheless generates a slyly satirical nostalgic yearning for a pre-Reaganite age of innocence when there was more to the American Dream than making big bucks by peddling sub-prime mortgages.

Julianne Moore is a fine actress and her very presence proves the biggest mystery in Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein's thriller, Shelter. At one point, her earnest medic mocks the concept of multiple personality as the invention of Hollywood screenwriters, but it's a shame that someone equally innovative wasn't entrusted with this promising premise, as the usually reliable Michael Cooney succeeds only in tying himself in knots in attempting to fuse Christianity, witchcraft, folklore, rationality and grief into a coherent whole.

Combining religious belief with scientific rigour, Moore has forged a reputation exposing killers who attempt to blame their crimes on schizophrenia. However, doctor father Jeffrey DeMunn wants her to take a look at Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as among his alternative personae is Moore's husband, who was murdered by muggers. Initially sceptical, Moore becomes intrigued by the facility and conviction of Meyers's transitions and begins delving into his past and her discoveries impact as much upon her own life as his fate.

As much a study in the consolation of faith as a psychological chiller, this twisting tale is so convoluted as to almost border on parody. Moore invests her role with laudable gravitas, while Rhys Meyers exceeds expectations in achieving such a range of personalities (one of whom is colour blind). But Cooney's script attempts to pack in too many half-considered ideas and few will be swayed by his evangelical stance and cumbersome attitude to mental and physical ailment. The Swedish duo directs steadily, but the backwoods episodes are patronising and Moore's relationships with DeMunn and daughter Brooklynn Proulx feel forced. Thus, while this may not be as dreadful as such Moore misfires as The Forgotten (2004) and Blindness (2008), it's still crashingly mediocre.

Sadly, the enduringly affable Jackie Chan fares no better in Brian Levant's The Spy Next Door, a lamely scripted and cartoonishly directed farrago that makes Arnold Schwarzenegger's mugging in Kindergarten Cop (1990) and Vin Diesel's similarly showboating efforts in The Pacifier (2005) seem subtle and hilariously inspired.

In order to cover his activities as a CIA agent, Chan masquerades as an Albuquerque pen salesman who takes mild-mannered to new levels of docility. Consequently, neighbour Amber Valletta considers him the perfect carer for her little darlings when she goes out of town. However, sulky teenager Madeline Carroll, pre-pubescent geek Will Shadley and winsome moppet Alina Foley don't share her high opinion and it's only when Russian crook Magnus Scheving comes after Shadley (who had managed to download the top-secret formula for an anti-bacterial chemical on to his iPod) that the trio realise that the nerd next door is actually pretty cool.

Rehashing gags from seemingly every babysitting bozo movie ever made, this is not only wearyingly unfunny, it's also sloppily made. The plotting is perfunctory, the performances barely serviceable. More comfortable bantering with sidekicks Billy Ray Cyrus and George Lopez than trading wisecracks with his charges or romancing Valletta, Chan struggles with the verbal comedy and seems strangely detached from the slapstick. Even the climactic fight sequence lacks his trademark balletic brio, with the consequence that only die-hard fans and kids who will watch absolutely anything will find much here to enjoy.

Shifting the action from Halloween to Christmas Eve, Robert David Sanders's directorial debut, The Blackout, similarly lurches between set-pieces with the aid of some clumsy exposition and several over-eager performances. Clearly shot on a shoestring, but occasionally demonstrating an admirable resourcefulness, this is strictly post-pub fare that will raise more guffaws than gasps.

As Barbara Streifel Sanders and Joseph Dunn prepare to sit down to dinner with brother-in-law Ian Malcolm, they realise that children Tyler Armstrong and Abigail Droeger are missing. Armstrong is down in the basement of their Los Angeles building looking for his presents, but, instead, he comes across a hole in the floor caused by an earth tremor. Before he can tell anyone, however, another quake cuts the power and all hell breaks loose when one of the party searching for the kids winds up dead.

Scenarist Jim Beck tries to juggle numerous characters, but none is given sufficient backstory to make anyone care a fig what happens to them. Moreover, they all seem to be either obnoxious or idiotic. Anthony Tedesco, the owner of the tenement, is a dullard radio ham, while superintendent Horace Martin is a jobsworthy caricature and couples Caroline Rich and Michael Caruso and John Gorman and Alexis Zibolis spend as much time bickering as confronting the intersteller termites intent on devouring them.

Sanders's sound design is decent enough, while cinematographer Mark W. Ross merits mention for his artful lighting effects . But, even though darkness is crucial to the conceit, too much happens in the pitch black for this to fire the imagination. That said, it becomes clear why Sanders was so reliant on shadow when one finally sees the monster, which is as ineptly executed as much of the computer-generated effects.

A sinister block, this time in London, provides the setting for Brad Watson's The 7th Dimension, a supernatural twist on the cyber conspiracy thriller that appeared in a handful of festivals under the title Beacon 77. Despite containing several implausible plot points, this is an ambitiously complex venture into Da Vinci Code territory that is played with laudable intensity by a cast largely drawn from television drama.

When best friend Lucy Evans heads to a creepy estate to confront classmate David Horton about the state of their relationship, student Kelly Adams insists on accompanying her. Once inside, however, she discovers that Horton is assisting wheelchair-bound hacktivist Jonathan Rhodes and girlfriend Calita Rainford in a bid to break into the Vatican's online archive in order to crack the code hidden in the Torah.

Zipping around a cramped room made all the more claustrophobic by the banks of computer screens, Rhodes explains that he intends unlocking the secrets of existence to pass through its different dimensions and attain god-like wisdom and power. And there's no going back for either Adams or Evans, when the former just happens to know the passage from the Book of Daniel that breaches the papal security system and the latter begins deflecting the thoughts of the psychic spies detailed by the Pentagon to sabotage Rhodes's activities.

Shrewdly using the ranting Rhodes as their mouthpiece, Watson and co-writer Debbie Moon make few compromises in discussing such weighty issues as religion, technology, intellectual responsibility, fate, the future and the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. But they push their luck in bestowing the resolutely ordinary Adams with the mental alacrity to challenge Rhodes's grandiose schemes. Moreover, they also struggle to interest the viewer in either Evans's crush on Horton or the devoted Rainford's sense of betrayal as Rhodes gets ever closer to his goal.

Nevertheless, Watson makes moody use of his setting and his editing of Tim Wooster's restless imagery is disconcertingly slick. He's also coaxes a fine performance out of Rhodes, although his rapid delivery and descent into smug derangement serve to expose the limitations of his co-stars. Yet, for all Watson's aspiration and ingenuity, this succumbs to the convolution and verbosity that has condemned cyber punk to being a misfiring sub-genre.

Quitting confined spaces for the great outdoors, Dean Francis's Road Train makes the most of the vast Australian wilderness, as it follows two couples on an Outback camping trip. However, Bob Morley decides to exacerbate the tensions inside his SUV by committing the schoolboy error of jousting with a container truck and stranding himself, new partner Sophie Lowe, buddy Xavier Samuel and his girlfriend Georgina Haig (who has just confessed to sleeping with Morley) in the middle of nowhere. But those expecting a retread of Spielberg's Duel (1971) or Richard Franklin's Road Games (1981) will be surprised by a twist that sees the quartet escape a gun-toting figure running towards them by hopping into the cab of the now driverless vehicle that takes them to a destination of its own choosing and begins imposing its will upon the suddenly demented and bloodthirsty Morley.

Clearly beholden to the Antony I. Ginnane brand of Ozploitation, this strives hard to avoid clichés and writer Clive Hopkins laudably makes the twentysomething foursome as resistible as possible. He also introduces one of the oddest canines to grace the screen in a long while. But the plot relies far too heavily on aberrant behaviour and snap decisions before Hopkins seems to throw logic and caution to the wind in a final quarter that becomes increasingly unhinged.

If this sojourn in Greg Mclean country attempts to pack too much into its modest running time, director Ian Fitzgibbon and screenwriter Mark O'Rowe seem content to get by on as little as possible in Perrier's Bounty, a Dublin-based variation on the cussing crime caper patented over a decade ago by Guy Ritchie in imitation of Quentin Tarantino. Structurally formulaic, motivationally bereft and yet capably performed, this might have been an amusing study of lowlife morality had the producers decided to commission another rewrite before illuminating the green light.

Bibulous waster Cillian Murphy owes loan shark Brendan Gleeson €1000 and henchmen Michael McElhatton and Don Wycherly threaten to do horrible things to his limbs unless he pays up within four hours. Rousing himself from his customary torpor, Murphy goes in search of Liam Cunningham to borrow some cash. However, a firearm incident involving lovesick neighbour Jodie Whittaker transforms the situation and Murphy is forced to bury Wycherly with the help of his father, Jim Broadbent, who has convinced himself he is dying and is willing to take risks to hasten the end.

Even though Gleason's attitude to Wycherly changes when he discovers he was MeElhatton's lover, he still wants his money back and a violently knockabout pursuit ensues. Yet, at no stage, do we discover the reason for Murphy's indebtedness or why Gleason is so intent on being reimbursed. Indeed, the only cogent things in this breezily wayward movie are Murphy's relationships with Broadbent and Whittaker - and they often make little sense, either. Narrator Gabriel Byrne (who is actually the Grim Reaper) promises at one point that the rationale behind all this drivel will eventually become clear. Well, he was fibbing.

Broadbent revels in his character's morbid eccentricity, but he places too much trust in wit that the script simply doesn't possess and the picture quickly falls apart after his demise. Murphy exudes lazy charm, Whittaker is kookily appealing and Gleeson goes through the motions with practised ease as the foul-mouthed mobster. But the casual brutality deals a fatal blow to a film that singularly fails to recast Sexy Beast in a Beckettian idiom.

David Baddiel's script for Josh Appignanesi's The Infidel could likewise have done with one last polish before the cameras rolled. As one would expect of an experienced sketch writer, there are plenty of sharp one-liners. But the narrative meanders in places and not even Omid Djalili's wholehearted performance as a lapsed London Muslim who discovers he's Jewish can prevent some of the more serious socio-political insights from feeling a touch platitudinous and slight.

When his mother dies, Djalili's North London family man finds his birth certificate among her possessions and not only discovers that was he adopted, but also that he was born a Jew. Ordinarily, this would not matter to the easy-going mini-cab driver, who long since ceased to live by the tenets of Islam. But son Amit Shah is besotted with Soraya Radford and needs to put on a zealous show to impress her father, Igal Naor, who is a firebrand fundamentalist preacher. Consequently, Shah is less than amused when he bumps into Djalili en route to an anti-Zionist demonstration and realises that his father is wearing a yarmulke beneath his kefi. Worse still, the garment catches light and Djalili ends up on the evening news.

Meanwhile, wife Archie Panjabi becomes convinced that Djalili is having an affair when, in fact, he is meeting with black cab driver Richard Schiff to take a crash course in Jewishness. But learning how to shimmy like Topol in Fiddler on the Roof (1969) leaves Djalili woefully under-prepared when the truth about his past finally emerges.

The message of toleration peddled here couldn't be more sensible or sincere. But this cosy sitcom is much closer in tone to Vadim Jean's movie Leon the Pig Farmer (1992) than Philip Roth's novel, The Human Stain (2000). Thus, while the Baddiel manages some acerbic observations and the odd piece of slapstick schtick, he seems to lose his nerve in the latter stages, as political correctness and sentimentality intrude. Moreover, he also clutters the action with cameos for the likes of Matt Lucas (as an aggressive rabbi), Miranda Hart (as a council worker) and Mina Anwar, as Panjabi's burkha-wearing friend, who is as happy leafing through Heat as the Koran.

That said, Djalili and Schiff bounce off each other amusingly and the pokes at Hanif Kureishi outings like My Son the Fanatic (1997) are spot on. Moreover, no film whose hero discovers that his real name is Solly Shimshillewitz can't be all bad.

Finally, this week sees the release of Jérôme Salle's Largo Winch (2008), which has been adapted from the first two volumes of a 16-part Belgian comic-book by novelist Jean Van Hamme and illustrator Philippe Francq. Intended to be a romp rather than a weighty treatise on corporate avarice, this is entertaining enough, but it lacks the spectacle and sophistication to engross.

Tycoon Miki Manojlovic told neither colleagues nor rivals about the son he adopted from a Croatian orphanage. So, when Manojlovic dies in mysterious circumstances, there is genuine astonishment in the boardroom when Tomer Sisley (who has just escaped a dank cell after being detained on trumped-up drugs charges) comes forward to collect his $20 billion inheritance. Acting director Kristin Scott Thomas remains confident that she can seize control. But she faces stiff competition from vice-president Benedict Wong, treacherous security chief Steven Waddington, ruthless Georgian arms dealer Karel Roden, and slinky operator Mélanie Thierry, who is quite prepared to do whatever it takes to secure her cut.

Switching between Sisley's unhappy childhood (when he is played by Benjamin Siksou) and set-pieces staged in Hong Kong, Malta and Brazil, this is an awkward mix of fiscal jargon and globe-trotting glamour redolent of a James Bond adventure. Sisley's stand-up background enables him to inject some offbeat humour into proceedings, while Gilbert Melki proves coolly resourceful as his scarred chauffeur and Scott Thomas provides some deliciously pantomimic villainy. But while it makes a change to see a thriller unreliant on special effects and stunts, this is a touch too tentative, with the notable exception of the slick island chase sequence.