An exceptional performance from Jennifer Lawrence dominates Winter's Bone, Debra Granik's adaptation of a bleak Ozarks novel by Daniel Woodrell. Indeed, Michael McDonough's camera can barely pull itself away from her steadfast features to focus on Mark White's meticulous production design, which barely distinguishes between the dwellings occupied by the feuding families and the ramshackle outhouses surrounded by rusting junk. But this is far from being another clichéd backwoods melodrama, as the dealings are largely conducted by the womenfolk, who never seem to use more words than are strictly necessary.

With her father in jail for cooking methamphetamine, 17 year-old Lawrence takes care of her mentally fragile mother and dependent younger siblings. She gets help putting food on the table from neighbour Shelley Wagganer. But when sheriff Garret Dillahunt calls to inform her that her father has jumped bail after putting up their home as collateral, she has no option but to walk the mountains in the hope that somebody knows where he is hiding. Unfortunately, her father has made many enemies, including his testy brother John Hawkes, who advises Lawrence against meddling in matters that can only provoke trouble.

But, with best friend Lauren Sweetser offering to keep house in her absence, Lawrence ventures into a pitiless world of drink, drugs, ignorance and internecine violence to call in some family favours. Cousin Casey MacLaren tells her that clan chief Ronnie Hall is the only one who can help her, but access to him is firmly blocked by his doughty wife, Dale Dickey. Hawkes tries to convince Lawrence that her father died in a brewing blaze, but she refuses to accept the evidence of a torched shack and inevitably finds herself dragged back to Hall's estate to be taught a lesson in minding her business.

Although this is bound to invite comparisons to Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008), this unflinching saga is actually closer in spirit to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) and Lance Hammer's Ballast (2008). Lawrence is fearless in her deadpan determination to find her father, as much in a bid to salvage a last vestige of respect for him as to hold him to account for his reckless selfishness. Her showdowns with Hawkes and Dickey are particularly striking, both for their frankness and their simmering unpredictability. But she also impresses when teaching her siblings to fend for themselves in the kitchen and how to handle a gun in the wilds. Her triumph is never in doubt, especially when Hawkes decides to do his avuncular duty. But Granik never takes for granted the tenacity and mettle Lawrence has to display in order to stand firm in the face of unregenerate chauvinism.

Monica Keena also has to look to her laurels in order to be the Final Girl in Adam Gierasch's Night of the Demons, an innovation-free rehash of Kevin S. Tenney's little-seen 1988 original. Opening with distressed footage of a 1920s séance suicide and hurtling through the dispatch of several Halloween party guests, this is an efficient chiller. But it compounds the horror genre's current obsession with using computer-generated imagery to revisit its past.

Keena and pals Bobbi Sue Luther and Diora Baird are vamping up for a fancy dress bash in an abandoned New Orleans mansion that's been organised by local wild child Shannon Elizabeth. Escorted by lustful buddies John F. Beach and Michael Copon, they soon sense something is wrong when a hand reaches through the bathroom mirror and tries to grab Keena. But it's only when they find six skeletons in the basement that they realise how much trouble they're really in, as the house is linked to the legend that demons banished from Hell will claim dominion over the world if they manage to collect seven souls before dawn.

Naturally, the cops arrive to break up the shindig as an illegal rave and the quintet find itself alone in the darkness with Elizabeth and Keena's drug-dealing ex-boyfriend, Edward Furlong, who has to make a killing during the night or face the wrath of the mobster to whom he's seriously indebted. The mayhem starts when Elizabeth is bitten on the finger by one of the skeletons and transforms into a ravenous demon. Copon, Luther and Baird succumb in quick succession, but Keena, Beach and Furlong find sanctuary in a room whose walls are daubed with the incantations that socialite Tiffany Shepis and maid Tiffany J. Billiot used nine decades earlier to ward off the marauders.

Complete with a lengthy digression in an old slave tunnel and a grizzly set-piece with a lipstick, this is by-the-numbers horror that seems as intent on grossing out as scaring. Steve Johnson's effects make-up is decent enough and the cast enact their caricatures with brio, if not conviction. But the plotting is plodding and the ease with which the survivors are duped at the denouement is risibly implausible. Genre aficionados will recognise Linnea Quigley repeating her tush-wiggling antics from the original, as well as references to The Evil Dead (1981), Saw (2004) and Hatchet (2006). But less fanatical schlock fans should wait for this to come out on disc, which is really where it belongs.

Tracks by Type O Negative and Goat Whore boom out during the party sequence, but there's no bouncing ball across the bottom of the screen to allow punters to join in. Maybe it's as well, as the songs are pretty dreadful. But audience participation is pretty much de rigueur at screenings of Grease Sing-a-Long.

In February 1971, Grease became the first Broadway hit musical to be composed entirely on a guitar. It was conceived by unemployed actor Jim Jacobs and bra salesman Warren Casey at a party and opened with an amateur cast in a former Chicago tram shed. Originally designed to run for just two weekends, it was picked up by New York producers Kenneth Waissmann and Maxine Fox and premiered at the off-Broadway Eden Theatre the following year.

The reviews were lukewarm, but word of mouth ensured Grease's success and it was nominated for seven Tonys. Ultimately, it would run for 3,388 performances and, in 1979, it became the longest-running show in Broadway history.

Ralph Bakshi was the first to secure the film rights. But when his proposed animated version fell through, Alan Carr acquired the show for $200,000 in 1976. However, his plan to cast Henry Winkler as Danny Zucco came to nothing, as Winkler was keen to avoid typecasting after playing The Fonz in Happy Days, and the role passed to John Travolta, who had played Doody in a touring production. Olivia Newton John, however, was always the first choice for Sandy, although director Randal Kleiser - who was advised to quit the picture by Robert Wise, for being afforded insufficient rehearsal time - also scouted Carrie Fisher in case her screen test proved unsatisfactory.

Working with Bronte Woodward, Carr moved the setting from the city to the suburbs and interpolated some of his own schoolboy memories, as well as toning down the language and immorality. He also dropped such show favourites as `Freddy, My Love', `Magic Changes' and `It's Raining on Prom Night' and commissioned new songs from Barry Gibb (`Grease') and John Farrar (`Hopelessly Devoted to You' and `You're the One That I Want'), as well as contributing `Sandy' himself.

However, the new tunes felt more like 70s pop than 50s pastiche and Patricia Birch's energetic choreography felt similarly anachronistic. Indeed, the picture seemed to owe more to American Graffiti and Happy Days than the AIP drive-in fodder that had inspired Jacobs and Casey and the inclusion of such old-time stalwarts as Joan Blondell, Eve Arden, Sid Caesar and Frankie Avalon only reinforced the feel of manufactured nostalgia by proxy, which was designed to appeal to those who hadn't personally experienced the birth of rock`n'roll.

The critics picked up on this calculation and castigated the picture for smoothing away the original's rough edges in the name of family entertainment. But the indifferent notices proved an irrelevance, as the chart success of `You're the One That I Want' and `Summer Nights' guaranteed Grease's enthusiastic reception, especially as screen footage was culled for ready-made pop videos for TV promotion.

Consequently, the soundtrack album went on to spend 12 of its 39 weeks on the Billboard chart at No.1, while the thoroughly enjoyable movie grossed $153,097,492 on its first run - making it Paramount's biggest hit to date and the most successful screen musical of all time.

Although the 1982 sequel fared less well, Grease suggested to Hollywood that teenpix could save the musical and Fame (1980), Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984) and Dirty Dancing (1987) all followed. But their lack of originality and the fact that these were essentially dramas with musical interludes - like Saturday Night Fever (1977) before them - meant that they made a greater contribution to the evolution of the pop promo than the preservation of a declining genre.

Finally, this week - and rather cynically timed to coincide with Pope Benedict's visit to Britain - comes Darren Flaxstone and Christian Martin's Release. Laudably earnest and adept at atmospherically exploiting its budgetary limitations, this is a structurally complex, but ultimately melodramatic prison picture that succeeds only in offering superficial insights into faith, moral authority and love.

The writer-directors generate a modicum of suspense by manipulating the storylines to disguise the precise nature of gay priest Daniel Brocklebank's crime. However, his fellow inmates have little doubt that he has been jailed for paedophilia and are enraged when he is sent to share a cell with teenager, Wayne Virgo. When Virgo ends up in sickbay after attempting to slash his wrists, creepy psycho Bernie Hodges uses his contacts to put the frighteners on Brocklebank. But he has a protector in the form of gay guard Garry Summers, who exploits the fact that warden Dymphna Skehill has a crush on him to pay regular visits to Brocklebank's cell.

Hodges engineers a showdown between Skehill and Summers that sees the latter suspended for misconduct. But Brocklebank survives a savage beating and he is sustained through his recovery by Summers's letters. But, just as he is about to be released into a new life, tragedy strikes.

Despite the contrivances of the scenario, the performances are solid and Simon Pearce's photography is admirable, particularly during the disconcerting reveries and Brockleback's flashback's to his last hours with his ailing brother. But the dialogue is often awkward - none more so than during Brocklebank's meeting with senior cleric Dave Jones, in which the social and religious philosophising is dismayingly shallow - and, as a consequence, this represents something of a backward step after Flaxstone and Martin's admirable debut, Shank.