Irreversible (18) <br></br>Love Liza (15) <br></br>Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War (12A) <br></br>Real Women Have Curves (12A) <br></br>The Banger Sisters (15) <br></br>Derrida (NC) <br></br>Persona (15)

Gaspar Noé's new film Irreversible has already made itself infamous with a rape scene that caused walkouts all over the festival circuit. What I wasn't prepared for was the scene in which a man beats another man to death with a fire extinguisher: the sickening crunches of metal on bone seemed to go on for ever. This particular atrocity occurs in a nightclub dungeon called Rectum, a circle of hell which Noé's camera enters like a sailboat bucking on choppy seas; and though it opens the film it actually serves as the conclusion to the narrative, which runs its long individual takes in reverse. The man wielding the fire extinguisher is Pierre (Albert Dupontel) who, with his friend Marcus (Vincent Cassel), has come to the nightclub to seek revenge on the man who raped and battered Marcus's girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci).

If the film's only intention were to provoke and disgust, it could be easily dismissed. But Noe's backtracking tilts the emphasis from the wantonness of male violence to the tenderness of a couple in love: Cassel and Bellucci, married in real life, are gradually revealed to be so intimately at ease with one another that their preparation for the evening ahead becomes unbearably moving. Not since Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now has a bedroom scene felt simultaneously touched with rapture and doom; the more we know of Alex and Marcus, the more intolerable becomes our foreknowledge. For all this, however, you have to wonder at the sheer exorbitance of a nine minute rape scene. I can't conceive of a drama so important that it justifies such a prolonged portrayal of degradation. Noe will argue that rape is a brute fact of life, but so is going to the toilet, and you don't see anyone hurrying to film nine-minute scenes of up-close-and-personal bowel straining. The horror of the violation would not be diminished by the scene being half or even a quarter of its length, and if the board of censors can't see that then there seems no point in employing them at all.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, hitherto a master of small roles that steal whole films, gets a starring part in Love Liza as a man trying to cope with the fact of his wife's suicide. Reluctant to read the note she left him before destroying herself, Hoffman's character, Wilson, becomes a lugubrious addict of gasoline fumes, a habit he fuels by feigning an interest in remote-controlled aeroplanes. The prospect of Hoffman in every scene should be a recommendation in itself, but things never really fall into place. The script, written by his brother Gordy, makes Wilson seem not so much bereaved as utterly deficient in social skills, and in place of dramatic development comes an over-reliance on mood music. Scenes begin promisingly only to peter out, and its disjointed movement eventually becomes maddening. Hoffman is watchable, but one expects him to be so much more.

If you want to know why British cinema is one of the laughing stocks of the world, try sitting through Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War. Groan at the lamentable attempts at comedy, shudder at the abysmal script, wince at the arthritic pace – then wonder how it ever secured the finances to get made. Pauline Collins stars as a widow who leads a pensioners' revolt against the heartless regime of an old people's home and its corrupt beadle (played by Collins's husband, John Alderton – a family dishonour, this), offering by the bye a plea for charity towards our senior citizens. The so-called credits go to Ian Sharp (direction) and Malcolm Stone (script), who one must assume have both passed from old age into senility. Could this be why neither of them seems to have watched a comedy in the last 30 years?

Real Women Have Curves is a sincere but plodding rites-of-passage story set amongst the Hispanic community of Los Angeles. Ana (America Ferrera) is a bright 18-year-old whose ambitions to study at Columbia are held back by her traditional-minded parents; so she slaves away in her sister's dress factory and endures the sniping of her body-conscious mother (Lupe Ontiveros), a terrifyingly ignorant woman who can't tell the difference between pregnancy and the menopause. The film's title is celebrated in a scene in which Ana encourages her co-workers to strip off and be proud of their wobbly bits – this alone will scupper the chances of a Hollywood remake.

Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon play a female odd couple in The Banger Sisters, which turns out to be the nickname Frank Zappa gave the pair when they were groupies back in the 1960s. Free spirit Suzette (Hawn) hasn't quit the rock'n'roll circus, but Vinnie (Sarandon) has traded up to "Lavinia" and life as an uptight matron with beige wardrobe and bratty children. Reunite the old friends in a comedy of second youth and watch hilarity ensue – or rather a lessons-and-hugs fest that eventually tips from cringeworthy to plain insufferable. Geoffrey Rush plays a blocked writer whose muse is unloosed by one of Suzette's famous handjobs. Yes, that kind of movie, I'm afraid.

Jacques Derrida, the French writer, philosopher and pipe smoker, is awarded a whole documentary profile in Derrida, which belongs very much to the South Bank Show tradition of worshipful hagiography. The man himself says very little of interest during its 85-minute length, though with his noble profile and shock of white hair he could easily pass for a wonderful old matinee idol. Perhaps he should have a word with Frank Abagnale Jr.

Continuing the retrospective at the NFT, Persona is Ingmar Bergman at his most enigmatic. Framed as a movie within a movie, it charts the tense and fluctuating relationship between a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and her patient (Liv Ullmann), an actress who has forsworn the power of speech. Isolated on a remote island, the women's identities begin to shift and blur, an effect pointed up by their facial resemblance and the director's symmetrical framing. First seen in 1966, it retains a hypnotic and disconcerting charge, though I infinitely prefer the Bergman of Smiles of a Summer Night.