City Of God(18)<br></br>The Good Girl (15)<br></br> Innocence (12a)<br></br>City By The Sea (15)<br></br> Perfume De Violetas(15)<br></br>The Tuxedo (12a)

There is a brilliant and gruelling gang picture on release right now, but it comes from the streets of Rio, not New York. Fernando Meirelles's City of God takes its name from a notorious slum neighbourhood on the capital's outskirts where – the phrase, for once, seems chillingly evocative – life is cheap. The story it tells has at once a mythic gravitas and a horrifying immediacy, rather like the best of Scorsese, and it grips you in its jaws with the tenacity of a pit bull. Covering a period between the late 1960s and the 1980s, it roughly charts the fortunes of Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), the gentle narrator-figure, and Li'l Ze (Leandro Firmino Da Hora), a psychopath who launches his personal reign of terror while still in short pants: his raid on a local brothel is one of the most wanton acts of barbarity you're likely to see on screen.

The incident prefigures the film's two really disturbing elements. First, the fact that most of these gangsters are still children, and second, the almost offhand depiction of murder. Meirelles and co-director Katia Lund don't aestheticise violence in the manner of Peckinpah; these pint-size hoodlums (most of them played by non-professionals) just point and shoot, like a photographer, then move on. You barely have to time to catch your breath before the next round of killing begins. Based on a novel by Paulo Lins, the film is rather like Amores Perros in the way it hits the ground running and doesn't let up, flaying the senses raw as it hurtles towards a delirious climax. There is imagery here as nightmarish as Goya's, and once inside your head it won't budge. Brace yourself for it.

In The Good Girl Jennifer Aniston is terrifically engaging as Justine Last, a woman who aches from the tedium of her small-town Texas life. At home she's adrift in a childless marriage to a dim but likeable house-painter (John C Reilly), whose social orbit is confined to smoking pot on the sofa with his best pal (Tim Blake Nelson). At work she's numbed by the diurnal routines of a discount supermarket – until she falls for the tender but plainly disturbed overtures of a teenage malcontent, Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), who wants her to run away with him.

Written by Mike (Chuck & Buck) White, the film stealthily turns from an offbeat domestic drama into a morbid farce of deceit and derangement, enlivened by peppy minor performances (including White himself as a Bible-serious security guard) and a certain dark-toned glee. Announcing the sudden death of an ex-employee who stole from the safe deposit, the supermarket manager plays a tribute song over the Tannoy: "Who's Sorry Now?" That caught me right on the funny bone.

Paul Cox's lovely autumnal romance Innocence is remarkable, if only for its subject matter. When did you last see a film that dealt with the reawakening of sexuality between a couple in their late sixties? A widower for 30 years, retired pianist Andreas (Charles Tingwell) learns that Claire (Julia Blake), a woman with whom he once had a passionate affair in postwar Belgium, now lives in the same Australian city. He contacts her, they meet again, and fall back in love. This first provokes incredulity in Claire's husband John (Terry Norris), then anger when he realises that his wife is quite serious about her rediscovered lover; we too feel shock, and perhaps delight, that Claire and Andreas can still behave with the emotional rawness of teenagers. The brief flashbacks to their affair 50 years earlier are all the more moving for the way Kristine van Pellicom, as the young Claire, matches up with the sixtysomething Julia Blake. Does it stretch credibility as a story? Yes, but movies don't have to be entirely credible – just convincing. I'll be surprised if this isn't one of the best of 2003.

Robert De Niro, looking more heavy set than usual, plays Vincent LaMarca, a cop with all the trouble in the world in City by the Sea. Apparently based on a true story, this family drama is as glum as the neighbourhood of Long Beach, NY, a once bustling seaside resort gone to ruin. Here LaMarca's teenage junkie of a son (James Franco) is hiding out after a suspected double homicide, eerily echoing the fate of his grandfather, a child killer executed back in the late 1950s. The cop wonders: is killing in the DNA? Add a messy divorce to this burden of woe and you can understand why LaMarca's girlfriend (Frances McDormand) is somewhat freaked when the whole story tumbles out over cocktails one evening. The screenwriter Ken Hixon doesn't seem to hear the farcical notes he occasionally strikes, nor the blare of Forties melodrama in some of the later dialogue. It's heavy going, but you stick with it nevertheless for De Niro's disciplined playing, the quiet centre of a shrill misery-go-round.

Even less cheer, I'm afraid, in Perfume de Violetas, a tale of deprivation and violence from the dirt-poor streets of Mexico. Ximena Ayala plays trouble child Yessica, estranged from her loveless mother and victimised at school for her hapless crudity. When her step-brother connives in prostituting her to a local bus driver, the mood goes from disheartening to downright tragic. Sincerely meant, but a tough watch.

The Tuxedo pongs to high heaven. The point of a Jackie Chan movie is to watch him whirl, leap and kick like the virtuoso he is – the Fred Astaire of chopsocky – and not have his acrobatics "enhanced" by computer graphics and weird camera angles. In this spy caper, he puts on a tuxedo with consequences similar to those of Jim Carrey putting on a mask, except that The Mask was witty and inventive. Endearingly, though, Jackie still speaks an unintelligible English.