Ararat (15) <br></br>How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (12A) <br></br>Ghosts Of The Abyss <br></br>Werckmeister Harmonies<br></br>Bulletproof Monk (12A)

Atom Egoyan's latest film, Ararat, is a tale of familial estrangement that dredges up mighty issues of history and commemoration. Its multi-panelled narrative circles around the massacre of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey in 1915, a national tragedy that has particular moment for Egoyan, himself of Armenian descent. One panel concerns a historical epic being made by a famous old director (Charles Aznavour, who is also Armenian) about the siege of the city of Van; another inquires into the private lives of certain cast members and their conflicted views on the film they're making; another has a guilt-ridden customs officer (Christopher Plummer) in Toronto, grilling an idealistic young Armenian (David Alpay) about a mysterious package he has brought into the country.

Egoyan, whose great films, Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), piece together a mosaic of insinuation, here takes on his most ambitious canvas, and while individual scenes feel properly weighted, its movement is sluggish and awkward. The concept of history being erased is pertinently addressed by Aznavour's director, quoting Hitler's chilling question when doubts about the Jewish genocide arose: "Who remembers now the extermination of the Armenians?" Says Aznavour: "Nobody did. Nobody does." Set against this horror, the various antipathies crackling between parents and children sound merely whiny and inconsequential. The film is tremulous with rhetoric ("People are vulnerable when they lose meaning"), when a few simple truths would be more involving.

Kate Hudson has become so smugly kittenish, I just want to hurl a tin of Whiskas at her. In How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, she plays Andie Anderson (ugh), a star columnist on a women's mag who, for an article, contrives to make all the wrong moves in order to get a lothario adman, played by Matthew McConaughey, to dump her, while he has taken on a secret bet that she'll fall in love with him: both arrangements to be completed in 10 days. I laughed once, when she drags him to a movie theatre to see a "chickflick marathon"; for the rest, it's Hudson being excruciatingly needy and clingy, and yes, I know it's a deliberate ploy, it just isn't very funny. The grind to the denouement is pretty purgatorial, and their duet on "You're So Vain" an unmitigated hell.

James Cameron just can't let go of the Titanic. His latest project, Ghosts of the Abyss, is an Imax documentary charting his personal voyage 12,000ft to the bottom of the Atlantic to nose around the rusting hull of the sunken liner. Using technology specifically designed for the expedition, Cameron and his crew get to investigate nooks and crevices of the ship unseen since the liner went down on 14 April 1912. The actor Bill Paxton, who accompanied Cameron, provides an awestruck commentary along the lines of "spooky" and "ethereal", but you can't blame him – that's exactly how it is. The film's 3-D effects are pretty unsettling, too, especially the moment when a mechanical claw seems to protrude right out of the screen into your face.

Werckmeister Harmonies, the latest from the Hungarian film-maker Bela Tarr (a "visionary" according to Gus Van Sant) concerns the strange events that follow the arrival of a circus in a small provincial town. The weather is bitterly cold, and the townsfolk hang around the main square, their faces as pinched and miserable as those surrounding Woody Allen in the train at the beginning of Stardust Memories (and, like that film, shot in black and white). The melancholy style might be easier to engage with if one could grasp a little of what's happening, but it stays defiantly elusive. What is the meaning of the gigantic stuffed whale in the middle of the square? What incites the townsfolk to ransack a hospital? After nearly two and a half hours, I was wearier but no wiser.

I've had a soft spot for Seann William Scott ever since his magnetically unpleasant turn as Stifler in American Pie. True, he has not exactly stretched himself since then (Road Trip and Dude, Where's My Car?) but he remains one of the most agreeable dopes around. As co-star in the chopsocky adventure, Bulletproof Monk, he makes a fine foil to Chow Yun-Fat (left), who's slumming after Crouching Tiger but imperially serene none the less as a Tibetan monk fighting off neo-Nazis, and showing Scott how to kick ass on his way to "true enlightenment". Sort of, Dude, Where's My Karma?