Cinema: Great cast, shame about the screenplay

Anyone who saw Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice on stage will quick-trot to see it on the big screen. The play was absolutely delicious and positive. Taxi drivers waiting outside the National Theatre complained that people were choosing to walk home afterwards, singing show-tunes in the manner of someone who had been at the cooking sherry.

Mark Herman, director of the beautifully dour Brassed Off, was one of these people. He has adapted Cartwright's play for the screen, calling the film Little Voice. It's all about a teenage girl called LV (Jane Horrocks) who lives in Scarborough and hardly ever speaks. Her shyness isn't pique - she's been silenced by her brazen mother (Brenda Blethyn), who likes to call her a "streak of piss" then disappear up the pub. LV is the opposite of her mother - fragile, mysterious, tender. She can also belt out a tune in the style of Monroe, Dietrich, a guns-blazing Bassey, Holiday and Garland. Her skill is intimate and accurate, and only comes out when nobody's looking. Mum's new boyfriend (Michael Caine) is a trashy agent. He's secretly a sod, and as soon as he hears LV crooning upstairs, is desperate to exploit her. The only person looking out for LV is the BT man (Ewan McGregor) who likes pigeons and wears a tie under his anorak.

All this sounds glorious - a virtuoso with baggage, a mum with a gusset, a swine with Brylcreem, a lover with moles. But what felt on stage like an utter yielding to fantasy is just remote on screen. Caine's trashy impresario is thrillingly heart-proof, but he cannot save the film from its slimness, its caricatures of working-class vulgarity, its unimaginative use of tatty old Scarborough. Few of the characters are real enough to touch. Blethyn squawks and wears patterned tights, and vixen rouge. She is cartoonish and grotesque. Horrocks, recreating the stage role that was actually written for her, sings all her own songs and does vacant, brittle-armed acting well enough, but is rarely given anything to do. This is frustrating because you want to care about LV, but the film is ceaselessly careless about her grave life. As she weighs up the world, feeling tiny and unlikely, you want to be able to eavesdrop on her. The film only ever socialises with us, it never confides.

If the television trailers for The Siege were anything to go by, it would just be another soupy Hollywood thriller. It's as though the distributors actually want us to believe the film is resolutely unclouded by thought. But not so. It has too many thoughts, and most of them are naive and muddled, but Edward Zwick's film is still audacious. Denzel Washington stars as the head of an FBI anti-terrorist squad involved in wresting New York from the bombs of Muslim fanatics. Annette Bening is a covert National Security Agency operative, and Bruce Willis an army general who is judicious one minute, then carving holes in young Arabs the next.

This is a very busy film. In two hours the FBI is blown up, New York angrily succumbs to martial law, the entire male Muslim community are herded into Madison Square Gardens, the Senate scraps, the Bill of Rights is wheeled out, and Willis never wipes that how-the-hell-can-this-be-happening smirk off his face. Zwick sees terrorism as a kind of branding iron, infernal and indelible - and usually absent from New York. Via the film, he gazes at Belfast or Tel Aviv, and tries to ask questions about motivation and utopianism, about what it is to have the power to inflict pain and terrify. He sees the terrorist as a political poseur whose enemy is life. Perhaps.

The problem is that Zwick covers his back so much, his film is accidentally suffused with enormous anxiety. He's full of moral and political indignation, and doesn't want to offend anyone (but inevitably he does). Most of the time, he slopes off to hide behind Washington. This is a good piece of casting. Washington has a tremendous aura of capability and always wears a white vest, like the hot-but-good guy in a Raymond Chandler. He looks like a man driven by muscular parenting to fairness to every living creature. He is probably only inflexible with liars and always puts the bins out. Bening is superb; she always is. Here she has an unusually complex role - part devious, part sweeping, part bleating - and she emerges again as an actress capable of both radical indignation and elegance.

The pair pad about like only the well-bred ever can, neither disturbing nor escaping the other, much like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, Howard Hawks's 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's worst novel. By the end of filming Bogart and Bacall were officially in love, and married soon after. This remastered, hand-me-down version of Casablanca is worth seeing, if only for Bacall, all 19 and liquid and nervous.

In Darren Aronofsky's award-winning curio p, a maths genius, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) goes to psychotic seed in a sooty New York apartment. His days are spent at his customised computer, trying to decode the numerical pattern behind the stock market. Cohen is misanthropic and wretched. He's on uppers and downers and adrenaline injections and fizzy pop. One day a pugnacious Wall Street firm tries to snatch him, and the next a Jewish Gematriac determines to involve Max in unlocking a numerical sequence in the Scriptures. But Max's mental state is deteriorating. The film even suggests some kind of alien implantation that gave Max savant powers as a child, at the cost of horrible headaches and hallucinations. Like Ted Hughes, Max "wakes with strengthless hands".

All this is shot on a mini budget in grainy black-and-white with an edge of absolute panic, much like David Lynch's Eraserhead. Sometimes it's an uncomfortable experience - like a maniacal violin performance or a home video that never lingers long enough for more than just a glimpse of something weird or tantalising. Later, you realise that everything about the film is controlled, including its woe and abandon. p works by alarming you into thinking. Over supper you'll imagine Aronovsky, concentrated and quiet behind the camera, thinking fugitive thoughts about symmetry and pandemonium. You'll worry about every conspiracy theory you've ever heard. You'll wonder if you'd pass GCSE maths if you had to take it again now.