This is always one of the busiest times of the movie year, as distributors rush out pictures on the back of their London Film Festival acclaim and in time for the various awards deadlines. A case in point is Michele Placido's Romanzo Criminale, an epic examination of the links between crime, terror and Italian political corruption from the 1970s to the early 1990s that charts the rise of three friends who mount a murderous challenge to the Roman underworld. Pierfrancesco Favino, Kim Rossi Stuart and Claudio Santamaria are suitably vicious, as the juvenile thugs, while Anna Mouglalis and Jasmine Trinca make the most of underwritten moll roles. But, once the gang have made it to the top of the world, there's only one way for the action to go and Placido never quite recaptures the orgiastic operatics of the bloodbath that accounts for the trio's most dangerous rivals.

A fascinating contrast can be found in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which is being reissued as part of the John Huston centenary celebrations. Shot with an almost documentary realism, this exceptional film noir has everything you could ask of a thriller. There's a scintillating plot (co-scripted by Ben Maddow and Huston from W.R.Burnett's novel), in which the perfect plan unravels with compelling inevitability; a seminal performance from Oscar-nominated Sam Jaffe, as the criminal mastermind; totally convincing ensemble playing from his bungling gang (including Sterling Hayden and Anthony Caruso); and superb support from Jean Hagen and Marilyn Monroe as the greedy gals. Add Miklos Rozsa's atmospheric score and Harold Rosson's gritty photography and you have a masterpiece.

Nothing else this week comes close, although it's impossible not to admire Bong Joon-ho's creature feature The Host, in which a tadpole bloated on discarded US Army formaldehyde goes on the rampage along a quiet South Korean river bank. For all their evident artificiality, the SFX are splendid and there's something touching about they way slacker Song Gang-ho, jobless graduate Park Hae-il and their expert archer sister, Bae Du-na, team up to rescue their abducted (and highly resourceful) niece, Ko A-sung. However, everything feels somewhat anti-climactic after the monster's first terrifying onslaught, which is as full of offbeat humour as it is visceral jolt.

Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore's Special and Hadi Hajaig's Puritan pale by comparison. The first fails to sell its premise, despite a valiant performance by Michael Rapaport, as a traffic warden who's convinced he's a superhero. Anyone familiar with Fight Club will be on to this rather self-satisfied conceit from the get-go. The last stars Nick Moran as a disgraced paranormalist whose resort to rigged sances brings him into contact with Georgina Rylance, who needs help dealing with her husband. Despite warnings from an elusive stranger to steer clear of her, Moran plunges into the case and, ignoring his pet theories about "the Fourth Dimension", embarks on a passionate affair under the nose of sinister self-help guru, David Soul.

Told with eerie assurance and secreting its twists with Sixth Sense-like dexterity, this is an occasionally disconcerting supernatural noir. However, it infuriatingly insists on tying up loose ends that would be better left to the imagination and, consequently, undermines much of its atmospheric mystery.

Although it trades heavily on the myth of Hannibal Lecter, Christian Alvart's thriller Antibodies is most obviously rooted in the Krimis style that has long dominated the German crime scene. However, what sets this bleak psychological two-hander apart is the sinister strain of biblical symbolism that ultimately tips it over into self-conscious melodrama. The duel between supercilious serial killer, Andre Hennicke, and part-time farmer-cop Wotan, Wilke Mohring, is played to the hilt; the line between good and evil becomes increasingly blurred as Hennicke taunts his inquisitor about an unsolved murder on his patch. But Mohring's capitulation to religious delusion undermines the credibility of an already spurious story, even though Alvart handles its twists with a knowing cynicism that leaves a discomforting sense of hopelessness that transcends the Grand Guignol theatricality.

Much more persuasive is Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem, a harrowing portrait of a naive Catholic girl, whose introduction to mid-1970s permissiveness at a provincial university results in a breakdown and the conviction that she's been possessed by demons. Far less sensationalist than recent mainstream pictures, like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which was based on the same true story), this shocking account of church arrogance and medical incompetence is held together by an outstanding performance by newcomer, Sandra Hller, who deservedly won the Best Actress Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.