Love and dementia

Julie Christie has her first starring role for 10 years in Away From Her (12A, 110 mins), playing a woman relishing the autumn of her life in a wintery small Canadian town. She has the same easy intimacy with her co-star Gordon Pinsent as she did with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, and a simple shot in which he watches her fix her hair, or in which she rests her head against him while he reads aloud, tells us almost everything we need to know about their characters' 50-year marriage. A marriage that is traumatically dissolved, along with her memory of it, after her Alzheimer's forces her to move to a nursing home.

Adapted from an Alice Munro short story by the young Canadian Sarah Polley, this is a study of love and grief in which each line is well-crafted, but the actors' gestures and careworn faces say even more. Polley was previously best known for starring in the 1994 Dawn of the Dead remake, which seems far removed from the adult, still and quietly forceful film that is her directorial debut. But the slow pans around the nursing home, in which semi-sentient people re-enact a cruel parody of their former lives, are infused with as much sadness and horror at the human condition as any shot in a George Romero movie.

Also adapted from a short story, but loosely, Next (96 mins, 12A) is the latest instance of Hollywood raiding the work of sci-fi writer Philip K Dick for a neat conceit for a big-budget chase movie - but jettisoning its philosophical subtext. Nicolas Cage gives another overly earnest performance as a man who can see a few minutes into the future; Julianne Moore plays the government agent who needs his help in foiling a gang of nuclear weapon-wielding terrorists. There's also a nuclear threat in Typhoon (15, 105 mins), a barely comprehensible North Korean action movie, in which a steely- eyed cop gives chase to a wild-eyed terrorist lunatic. Any political message it had has been lost in translation.

Naomi Watts and Edward Norton star in a handsome, Merchant- Ivoryish adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (12A, 125 mins), in which a cuckolded bacteriologist takes his haughty society wife away from the comforts of 1920s colonial Shanghai to an isolated village suffering a cholera outbreak. Norton proves he can do repressed Englishmen with a cruel streak easily as well as Ralph Fiennes, Watts makes you feel for her character far more than you anticipate that she could, and there's fine support from Toby Jones and Diana Rigg. The gorgeous design and cinematography don't distract from what is an engaging and interestingly structured tragic love story. Unfortunately, the undifferentiated Chinese villagers whose story you suspect is more tragic and interesting, do.

Straightheads (18, 79mins) is an unpleasant and unconvincing British rape-revenge thriller, in which Gillian Anderson and Danny Dyer are savagely attacked by three yokels on a quiet country road, then go after said yokels with an enormous assault rifle. It aims to take an ambiguous moral stance but only manages a confused one. The Breed (15, 87 mins) is a by-the-numbers horror in which irritating college kids in a remote cabin in the woods are picked off by a pack of guard dogs. The Puffy Chair (85 mins) is a perceptive microbudget American indie film in which irritating twentysomethings fret about their relationships over the course of an ill-advised roadtrip. Reno 911!: Miami (15, 84 mins) sends the officers from a spoof American reality cop show to Miami for a big-screen outing that's funnier than when the Police Academy recruits went to Miami in their fifth film, but similarly puerile. And Scott Walker - 30th Century Man (12A, 95mins) is a documentary about the Sixties boyband member- turned-recluse-turned-avant-garde torchsong artist that explores the music in depth, but not the man. Bowie, Eno, Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn are among the talking heads.

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