Parky at the Pictures (DVD I/9/2011)

Army helicopter pilot Jake Gyllenhaal is napping on a commuter train bound for Chicago when he engages in conversation with fellow passenger Michelle Monaghan. She seems to know much more about him that he does about her and his confusion is compounded when he fails to recognise his own reflection in the window. However, any attempt at making sense of his situation is disrupted by a violent explosion that decimates the compartment and kills all its occupants.

Gyllenhaal is surprised, therefore, when he wakes from this vision of hell to discover he's in the reassuring presence of captain Vera Farmiga, who explains via a video screen that he is participating in an intelligence experiment that allows him to relive the last eight minutes of the teacher victim of the bombing in order to trace the location of the device and the identity of the terrorist who detonated it. Senior Beleaguered Castle scientist Jeffrey Wright interjects to explain the theory behind the technology, but cuts to the quick to send Gyllenhaal back on repeated attempts to complete his mission and prevent the culprit slaughtering millions with a nuclear device that has been planted downtown.

Most viewers will spot the bomber long before Gyllenhaal does. But the whodunit is the least aspect of this ambitious hybrid of Murder on the Orient Express, Groundhog Day, Quantum Leap and Déjà Vu. Others will wonder why a corporation with the ability to employ parabolic calculus to exploit the afterglow of a dead person's brain cells cannot use CCTV images to find where the bomb was placed on the train and by whom. However, such quibbles don't seriously detract from a rattling good yarn that sees screenwriter Ben Ripley adroitly advance the storyline with each revisitation and enable Gyllenhaal to forge touching relationships with both the doting Monaghan and the compassionate Farmiga, who eventually reveals why the Afghan veteran was chosen for the task and what his future entails if he succeeds.

Having already tampered with time in Donnie Darko (2001) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), Gyllenhaal plays his broken hero with a credible mix of valour and vulnerability. The paternal patch-up sub-plot feels a touch superfluous, while Wright's scheming duplicity lazily castigates Big Science and the Military-Industrial Complex without delving into the ethical and political questions it raises. Yet not even this reluctance to trust the intelligence of the audience with a detailed explanation of the source code process can stop this being entertainingly disconcerting.

Gyllenhaal's eventual discovery of his actual physical condition finds echo in Alex Pettyfer's realisation that looks aren't everything in Daniel Barnz's adaptation of the Alex Flinn novel, Beastly. Part fairytale update, part teen parable, this is a resistibly shallow melodrama that appears to have only a superficial understanding of the moral of the Beauty and the Beast story and a deep attachment to cliché and caricature.

The son of newscaster Peter Krause, Pettyfer is prone to dismissing those not as affluent or attractive as he is. Thus, he surprises himself when he stands up Manhattan prep school classmate Mary-Kate Olsen to date wallflower Vanessa Hudgens, whose drug addict father has just gunned down the dealer whose brother is threatening Krause. But he pays a high price, as Olsen has the black magical powers to transform him from hunk to hulk. With his skull now shorn, corrugated and tattooed, Pettyfer hides away from the world in a Brooklyn apartment. Moreover, he will remain a monster forever unless, within the next 12 months, he can find someone who can love him for himself.

Despite some decent make-up effects by Tony Gardner and a couple of sporting cameos from Olsen and Neil Patrick Harris as a short-sighted tutor, this is a crass fantasy that suffers from clumsy scripting and a faltering lead. Considering they're supposed to be soulmates, Pettyfer and Hudgens lack chemistry and this sense of lethargy infects the entire humourless, mawkish and increasingly hypocritical enterprise.

The sorcery is of the more traditional sort in Leigh Scott's The Witches of Oz, a TV mini-series that re-imagines the L. Frank Baum stories that inspired the timeless 1939 charmer, The Wizard of Oz. However, those who know these things have drawn comparisons between the storyline and that of The 10th Kingdom (2000), in which a little girl had to venture into a chimerical world to restore the realms of Snow White, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood.

Dorothy Gale (Paulie Rojas) has just moved to New York from Kansas after publishing a series of successful children's books. However, no sooner has she arrived than she begins to wonder whether the stories she has concocted may not be based on suppressed memories and her suspicions are confirmed when the Wicked Witch of the West (Eliza Swenson) arrives to demand the key that will unlock the door that is preventing her from achieving world domination.

Naturally, Dorothy has to return to the not so merry old land of Oz and help the Wizard (Christopher Lloyd), Frack (Sean Astin), Nick Chopper (Billy Boyd), Princess Langwidere (Mia Sara) and a pair of good witches (Brooke Taylor and Noel Thurman) turn the tables on the cackling Swenson and her malevolent cohorts. But, in order to fulfil her mission, Dorothy has to rediscover the courage that she had been instilled in her by her grandfather (Lance Henrikson).

With its cheap sets and effects, dismal central performance and waste of a willing supporting cast, this ruination of a half-decent premise makes Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985) look like a magical masterpiece. Scott clearly knows his Baum and devises some neat twists on the original situations and characters. But he makes Dorothy so twee that it's hard not to shrug and side with the effervescent Swenson. Moreover, Scott's direction is ponderous and wayward in tone, with moments of darkness and frivolity tumbling in on each other in a manner that will bewilder younger viewers and drive grown-ups to distraction.

A shortage of pluck also jeopardises Rainn Wilson's bid to transform from a feeble diner cook into costumed vigilante The Crimson Bolt in James Gunn's eager, but undistinguished action comedy, Super. However, it's a lack of wit rather than mettle that enervates this would-be comic-book spoof, although Wilson's lacklustre display alongside the ardent efforts of Ellen Page as his juvenile sidekick and Kevin Bacon as his gold-toothed nemesis hardly helps.

Little has gone right for Wilson, ever since his father used to beat him for being a wimp. However, he is proud of having saved wife Liv Tyler from her drug addiction and is, therefore, bent on brutal revenge when strip club owner-cum-dealer Kevin Bacon spirits her away after the briefest of acquaintances. Inspired by the Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) on the All-Jesus Network, Wilson makes himself a red spandex costume and takes the advice of comic store clerk Ellen Page in selecting a pipe wrench as a weapon to compensate for his lack of a super power.

Initially, his bullying of people jumping the queue at the local movie theatre seems pathetic. But, once Page elects to join him and brings a touch more menace and muscle to the operation, Wilson decides to take on Bacon and bring Tyler home. However, his antics have started making headlines and not everyone considers him to be a good guy.

A graduate of the Troma School of B-making (he scripted cult favourite Tromeo and Juliet), Gunn made a promising directorial bow with Slither (2006). However, this muddled amalgam of Taxi Driver and Kick Ass is a decidedly backward step. Not only does it look awful (with its over-reliance on shakicam and coloured filters), but it also too often confuses subversive quirkiness with gratuitous brutality. Moreover, coming after documentaries like Sybil Drew's Your Friendly Neighborhood Hero (2008) and low-budget offerings like Peter Stebbings's Defendor (2009), it lacks original insight into either the current socio-cultural obsession with DC and Marvel publications or the reactionary mindset that gives vigilantism its legitimacy.

Compared to this unpleasant amassment of self-righteous sadism and twisted desire, David Schwimmer's Trust is a laudable attempt to consider the all-too-real threat of online stalking. However, the former Friends star proves unable to rein in the more melodramatic aspects of Andy Bellin's screenplay and eventually succumbs to a bout of moralising more usually associated with novelettish teleplays.

Fourteen year-old Liana Liberato lives in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette and is the middle child of advertising executive Clive Owen and his wife Catherine Keener. Distracted by son Spencer Curnutt leaving for college, they fail to notice the amount of time Liberato is spending on her new laptop and know nothing of her chatroom relationship with Chris Henry Coffey.

Unfazed by his admission to being 25 not 16, Liberato agrees to meet Coffey and accompanies him to his hotel room to try on some underwear he has bought her even after discovering he is actually closer to 40. Indeed, she would have said nothing about their tryst had a school friend not spotted her at the mall and Owen is enraged by her folly and his own inability to protect his child from a predatory paedophile.

The plot veers into implausibility when Owen breaks into an FBI office to steal some incriminating documents. But Schwimmer smartly tones down the thriller elements to focus on the domestic ramifications of what Owen and Keener consider an assault and Liberato sees as a rite of passage with someone who understands her more than her folks. He also makes shrewd use of the counselling sessions with Viola Davis to examine teenage concepts of privacy and independence and one of Owen's advertising campaigns to discuss the amount of casual sexualisation to which children are exposed.

The performances are solid throughout, with Henry making a creepily solicitous villain and Owen convincing more in his regretful impotence than his wounded machismo. But, even though Schwimmer makes inventive use of type to convey information and Andrzej Sekula's underlit imagery enhances the mood, the film never quite succeeds in explaining why Liberato would not have insisted on at least one Skype chat with Henry before meeting him and why someone with her evident intelligence would not have been repelled on the exposure of his seedy lies.

The menace lurks closer to home in Antti Jokinen's feature debut, The Resident, which was intended to announce the second coming of horror specialists Hammer before it was gazumped by Let Me In and Wake Wood. Boasting an unnerving cameo by studio legend Christopher Lee, this may not be the most novel variation on the old dark house scenario. But it is eerily designed by J. Dennis Washington, disorientatingly photographed by Guillermo Navarro and joltingly scored by John Ottman.

Newly separated from longtime partner Lee Pace, ER doctor Hilary Swank cannot believe her luck when she finds a spacious apartment in Brooklyn within her price range. Live-in landlord Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his best to dissuade her from moving in, but she insists the rattling trains will not disturb her as her hours are so long that she invariably sleeps like a log. Unsurprisingly, therefore, she begins to hear noises in the night and wonders whether Morgan's grouchy grandfather (Lee) is spying on her when she bathes and sleeps.

Swank confides her fears to stereotypically African-American workmate Aunjanue Ellis, who tells her to makes some nocturnal bumping of her own by vamping Morgan. However, Swank's lingering attachment to the cheating pace prevents a romance and she soon comes to realise that not only is Morgan a dangerous man to cross, but that he also has access to hidden passages around the property that had enabled him to watch her every move. He also has a very unhealthy preoccupation with her electric toothbrush.

Perhaps recognising that this was heading to becoming a predictable prowler picture, Jokinen seems to have decided to adopt the Alfred Hitchcock viewpoint that suspense is more effective if the audience knows that something dreadful is going to happen and then has to sit and gnaw its collective nails until it does. Thus, about a third of the way in, he makes it plain that Swank is being snooped upon and coerces the viewer into sharing the voyeur's gaze.

It would be nice to think that the Finn was making a feminist statement in re-evaluating the politics of the horror genre. But this is an unregenerately old-fashioned slice of chauvinist peek-a-boo which is not only beneath a dual Oscar winner like Hilary Swank but also a proud name like Hammer. Lee makes his usual impression, but nothing unexpected happens for the duration of the entire story and that can't be a plus point in what is supposed to be a disquieting study in paranoia and psychosis.

Considerably more thought went into Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, a mumblecore mix of film noir, domestic melodrama and wisecrack comedy that confirms the good impression made with Dance Party, USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007). Making splendid use of locations around Portland, Oregon and boasting some waspish byplay between its brother and sister leads, this is a deliciously seditious genre parody that strikes a decisive blow for low-concept film-making.

Having dropped out of a forensic science course in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes obsessive Cris Lankenau returns home to mope on the sofa reading crime fiction. However, sister Trieste Kelly Dunn refuses to let him wallow and insists he takes a job at the local ice factory, where he strikes up a half-hearted friendship with Raul Castillo. But it takes the sudden disappearance of old flame Robyn Rikoon to rouse Lankenau and he decides to put his amateur detection skills to the test in order to track her down.

Initially nettled by the fact that Rikoon had attended a Star Trek convention with Castillo, Lankenau takes the fact that she vanished without going to watch her new friend DJ as a signal that he alone can rescue her. But, for all his familiarity with Conan Doyle, Lankenau proves to be a flatfooted sleuth and it's more by luck than judgement that he ascertains that Rikoon was using a business trip to deliver some money to a photographer named The Cowboy, for whom she had posed naked for a pornographic magazine. However, the case containing the cash had been stolen and Lankenau, Dunn and Castillo snoop sufficiently to discover that it had been snatched by The Cowboy himself.

Employing the clumsiest of surveillance techniques, the trio follow their suspect to a diner and watch him rendezvous with an unknown contact. Determined to help Rikoon, Dunn snatches the bag and Lankenau punctures the tyres of their potential pursuers. But their getaway scarcely proves to be the stuff of high-octane thrillers.

Containing possibly the slowest car chase in screen history, this is a knowing debunk of hackneyed pulp traits that never once over-reaches in its efforts to be amusing and enthralling. The Rikoon aspect of the plot is essentially a MacGuffin, as Katz is far more intrigued by Lankenau and Dunn bantering with an affectionate sibling fractiousness that is as acerbically laconic as anything penned by Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich or Cain. But the shambolic manner in which they accumulate clues is hugely satisfying and Katz's smooth change of direction is perfectly complemented by Andrew Reed's moodily nimble imagery and Keegan DeWitt's percussive score.

Lankenau has more personality than the average mumblecore Joe, but he is outshone by Dunn, who has real star potential and it's to be hoped she gets to do more than TV-movies and little-seen indies like Brett Haley's The New Year and Doug Clark's Vacation! The same applies to Adam Scott and Joel Bissonnette, who headline Matt Bissonnette's droll bonding brothers saga, Passenger Side.

Four decades have passed since Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere. The country has changed beyond recognition since Easy Rider was released in 1969. But the road movie has scarcely changed course, as it continues to transport its protagonists to a greater understanding of themselves and their travelling companions.

Apart from the occasional nod towards the noughties, Passenger Side could easily have been made at any time during the intervening 42 years. It meanders amiably, stopping off periodically to pick up an eccentric from the kerb and deposit them in a better place before eventually reaching its own destination with a satisfying sense that definite progress has been made. But, despite a tape full of indie classics playing on the stereo, there is nothing kitschily retro about the journey undertaken by a pair of Canadian siblings. Indeed, this is as sharp a snapshot of contemporary Los Angeles and its environs as Alex Holdridge's In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007).

Awoken by the phone on the morning of his 37th birthday, novelist Adam Scott goes against his better judgement and agrees to ferry his recovering junkie brother Joel Bissonnette to a couple of job interviews. Calling his girlfriend to warn her that they may have to change their plans for the evening, Scott crosses the city to collect Bissonnette and they immediately embark on a quick-fire exchange about the technophobic Scott's to observe life rather than live it and the extroverted Bissonnette's supposed conversion to Scientology .

Scott starts to have misgivings about the trip at the first port of call, as ageing neighbourhood watcher Mickey Cottrell warns him to move along as he has a photographic memory. But when tranny hooker Vitta Quinn climbs into the front seat at the second stop and begins to turn a trick on herself, Scott is suitably spooked to drive Bissonnette home. Sheepishly, he admits that he is not looking for a job and, despite the seediness of buddies like Dimitri Coats, he is not seeking to score drugs either. In fact, he had a dream about longtime girlfriend Robin Tunney and is desperate to find her because he thinks they may have a future together.

Reluctantly, Scott hits the road again and they continue to criss-cross the city as Bissonnette follows up the clues to Tunney's whereabouts he picks up en route. Out near Joshua Tree, they accept a lunch invitation from Native American Penelope Allen, who unnerves Scott by revealing she knows he's guarding a secret. A few miles further on, they stop for Mexicans Víctor Martínez and Roberto Enrique because the latter has severed two fingers while chopping down a tree. Further on again, they rescue drunken neo-con Kimberly Huie and see her safely home before calling in on a Valley porn shoot involving actors Gale Harold, Maja Miletich and Rachael Santhon, director Greg Dulli and assistant Adam Balsam before liberating a stray dog from racist Travis Walck's backwater gas station.

Along the way, the siblings discuss technology, fiction, ice hockey and which members of the Bush administration they would rather sleep with. But, even with all these detours, few viewers will be entirely surprised by the final twist in the road.

Revelling in a slick script, Scott and Bissonnette banter breezily along to tracks that were often the inspiration for the scene. But, if the use of Leonard Cohen, Wilco, Evan Dando, Silver Jews, DOA, Superchunk and Dinosaur Jr sometimes feels a little contrived, Jonathan Cliff's views of the passing scene conveys the bustling impersonality of districts like Echo Park, Hollywood, Glendale and Long Beach and emphasises how much the brothers need each other, in spite of their differences.

As in Who Loves the Sun (2006), Bissonnette combines wit and melodrama with unassuming ease. But his writing is much sharper here, as he reins in the byplay of the awkward early exchanges to allow the siblings to broach more personal issues. Moreover, he achieves a more sympathetic chemistry between Scott and his brother than he managed with Scott and Lukas Haas in the 2007 outing. A couple of byways might have been left unexplored, but this is an enjoyable ride right down to its bittersweet conclusion.

By contrast, single-mindedness is the theme of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's My Dog Tulip, an animated adaptation of JR Ackerley's deeply affectionate 1956 account of his 15-year relationship with the Alsatian bitch who transformed his life. Determined to find her the right vet and the best mate, the fiftysomething Ackerley (who had never previously owned a dog) repeatedly goes above and beyond the call of doting duty. Yet, while the unconventional graphics often prove amusing, the 58,320 images will be remembered less for their artistic allure than for being the first to be drawn and painted for a feature film using entirely paperless computer technology.

Living alone in a flat in Putney, Ackerley (Christopher Plummer) has little to distract him from the daily grind until he learns that a family need a good home for an 18-month Alsatian. Immediately taking to Tulip, who had been confined in a coal-dusty terrace yard, Ackerley requires the assistance of a soldier to coax her into the train compartment home. He also takes some time adapting to sharing his space with a newcomer who was willing to please, but just as keen to have her own way. Thus, he puts a good deal of effort into finding her a suitable vet after the first banishes them because of Tulip's excessive barking and the second slaps her on the snout for resisting an injection.

However, Italian-born Ms Canvenini (Isabella Rossellini) proves a perfect fit and Ackerley comes to trust her as implicitly as he suspects the motives of his sister, Nancy (Lynn Redgrave), whose lengthy visit is seen as a pretext for alienating Tulip's affections by coddling her while he is at work and locking her behind bedroom doors at night. Indeed, Ackerley's encounters with anyone other than Tulip have a habit of turning sour, as accounts of a fouling incident outside a greengrocer's shop and a weekend stay in the country with old army buddy Captain Pugh (Brian Murray) ably demonstrate.

Unfortunately, things run no more smoothly when Ackerley sounds out Messrs Blandish (Murray again) and Plum (Peter Gerety) with a view to having Tulip serviced by their dogs Max and Chum. However, she seems more interested in Watney, the perky terrier who resides at the local pub, and is no more aroused by the prospect of Mountjoy, a strapping brute discovered near the holiday home that Nancy finds them in Sussex. Consequently, Ackerley abandons the scientific approach and allows Tulip to pursue her fancy for a mongrel stray named Dusty and seeks to atone by building her a special box in which to give birth to her eight puppies.

After so much close detail (particularly during the disconcerting post-whelping segment), it comes as a disappointing surprise for the story to end here, with the couple's later years being consigned to a hurried summation. But, by this stage, the Fierlingers had long since run out of novel ways of depicting Ackerley's fixation with Tulip's toilet habits and even Plummer's affably earnest recitation of the writer's drolly deadpan prose and the ceaseless jauntiness of John Avarese's score had started to lose their charm.

The cartoon-style anthropomorphising digressions presenting Tulip as a biped in a dress are highly resistible. But there is a sketchily simple watercolour beauty to the central narrative illustrations that are infinitely more interesting than the bland computer generations now dominating so many kidpics. Moreover, the tone suits Ackerley's tender erudition, which Plummer catches splendidly. However, no mention is made of the fact that he was both the long-serving arts editor of The Listener and openly gay at a time when homosexual practices were still punishable under British law. Perhaps the Fierlingers felt this latter topic had already been adequately tackled in Colin Gregg's take on the equally canine-centric We Think the World of You (1988), which starred Alan Bates, Gary Oldman and Frances Barber? But, as least, audiences are spared the truth about Ackerley's attempts to ease Tulip's adoring distress when in heat.