A crushing sense of despondancy is made all the more unbearable by a fleeting moment of hope in Man Push Cart, a poignant slice of sidewalk life from Iranian-American director, Ramin Bahrani. Having lost his wife and been separated from his son, Pakistani singer Ahmad Razvi is saving towards buying his own coffee kiosk to make a twilight living in New York. However, he's recognised from his days as a one-hit wonder by yuppie Charles Daniel Sandoval, who promises him some decorating work and a nightclub gig before he moves in on Leticia Dolera, the Spanish news vendor who was also all alone in the big city before she befriended Razvi.

The performances and storyline are pretty perfunctory. But the nocturnal images of Razvi hauling his cart through traffic that barely notices his existence eloquently encapsulate the emigr experience and will make you look again the next time you make a purchase from a fast-food van.

A decent premise goes to waste in the muddled Anglo-Mexican conspiracy thriller, Rabbit on the Moon, which suffers from too many narrative contrivances and some indifferent performances.

Writer-director Jorge Ramirez-Suarez sets up his Hitchcockian 'wrong man' scenario efficiently enough. But things begin to unravel once Bruno Bichir is forced to flee to London after being implicated in a political assassination. Neither his alliance with wife Lorraine Pilkington's ex-lover, Adam Kotz (who just happens to be an M15 agent), nor her escape from the clutches of vicious politico Alvaro Guerrero (who deals drugs and launders money on the side) convinces for a second. And while Pilkington manages to conjure up some vaguely credible indignation and terror, her male co-stars rely solely on swagger and bombast.

The performances are just part of the problem with Brothers of the Head, a mockumentary adapted by Tony Grisoni from an illustrated novel by the Oxford-based writer Brian Aldiss. In chronicling the rise and fall of Siamese twins who enjoyed 15 minutes of rock fame in the 1970s, co-directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe manage the odd moment of inspired pastiche - most of which involve Ken Russell's supposedly aborted biopic, Two-Way Romeo, whose hilariously glossy artificiality contrasts brazenly with the ropey handheld footage shot by American documentarist Tom Bower at the height of Harry and Luke Treadway's brief notoriety.

But, notwithstanding cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's technical ingenuity and laudably outr acting by the debuting siblings, this audacious assault on political correctness, transient celebrity and the exploitativeness of disposable culture misses its step too frequently to excuse shortcomings that include the worst soundtrack you'll hear this year.

This curious misfire forms part of the programme of the 14th Raindance Film Festival, which is currently playing in London's West End. Among the highlights are Oliver Ralfe and James Bluemer's study of a Bob Dylan obsessive, The Ballad of A.J.Weberman; Eduardo Mignogna's El Viento, to which Federico Luppi contributes a typically imposing performance, as a Patagonian farmer forced to justify his dark past to estranged granddaughter, Antonella Costa; Goran Dukic's Wristcutters: A Love Story, an ingeniously conceived and cleverly designed afterlife fantasy that sees suicide Patrick Fugit hook up with accidental overdose victim Shannyn Sossamon, as he goes in search with his recently deceased girlfriend; and Clive Gordon's Cargo, an expos of the terrifying risks that illegal immigrants are prepared to take to reach Europe that stars Daniel Brhl as the stowaway who stumbles across a murderous secret aboard Peter Mullan's ship.