Laissez-passer (12A) <br></br>Orange County (12A) <br></br>Avalon (12A)

Bertrand Tavernier's tragicomedy about work and compromise in wartime Paris, Laissez-Passer, specifically focuses on Continental Films, a Nazi-controlled production company founded in 1940 by a German, Albert Greven, and functions as a pointed allegory of Vichy France. Are French technicians who work for Continental to be tarred as collaborators, or does it offer a hiding place "in between the wolf's fangs, where it cannot bite you"?

At the centre of a large ensemble cast are two film-makers struggling for breath beneath the Nazi yoke. Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) is an assistant director who takes a job at Continental ostensibly to support his wife and child but also finds it a useful cover for his Résistance activities. Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydes) is a screenwriter whose passionate nature rebels against working for "Fritz" and gets him into trouble with the three mistresses he entertains around town.

Tavernier is working from recollections gathered from his association with Aurenche and Devaivre, the latter still alive and apparently now at loggerheads with the director over money he believes he's owed and the misrepresentation of his wartime Paris flat – incorrectly decorated, he says. (Honestly, you make a friend the hero of your movie and this is the thanks you get?) I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of the décor, but where the Vichy years are concerned, even the mildest ambiguity of viewpoint always seems to cause a national outcry in France.

Not that it bothers Tavernier. Laissez-Passer finds him in almost ebullient mood, his camera constantly on the prowl through soundstage and screening-room, from secret assignations in railway cafés to audacious pilfering of documents from Nazi offices.

Its atmosphere of dread is very persuasive – if the Allied bombs don't get you, the Gestapo probably will. The fate of Parisian Jews is hinted at in oblique but telling detail: a dawn arrest, the glimpse of a bus on its way to the concentration camp at Drancy, the nervous flash of a yellow star on an overcoat. If there's a fault, it's to do with a lack of shape. At the start it divides attention evenly between the two protagonists, but Aurenche's story gradually falls away as Devaivre is sidetracked by the Résistance into liaising with British Intelligence, a comic interlude that goes on too long.

The same could be said of the whole movie, which lasts just shy of three hours without ever persuading us that every scene was vital to its composition. Absorbing all the same and (Devaivre's public conniptions aside) an honourable tribute to a few defiant souls.

What do you do if you're the son of America's most popular actor? Not go into acting is probably the answer, though on the evidence of Orange County, Colin Hanks has no reason to cower in the shadow of his famous father, Tom. He's very personable in this comedy about a Californian teenager who wants to be a writer after being bowled over by a cult novel called Straight Jacket. For some reason he believes this ambition can only be realised by getting a place at Stanford University; cue a farce about loused-up applications and a hopeless attempt to curry favour with the university admissions people.

Hanks is not the only famous scion involved here. His girlfriend is played by Schuyler Fisk, daughter of Cissy Spacek, and the movie is directed by Jake Kasdan, who has evidently used his father Lawrence's clout to fill out cameo roles with noteworthy faces: Lily Tomlin, Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase and, in the role of the cult novelist, avuncular Kevin Kline.

While Kasdan Jr hasn't quite matched the promise of his fine debut, Zero Effect (1998), and Jack Black does a manic turn I felt I'd seen before, the script by Mike White (Chuck & Buck) does serve up a few aces, most of them impeccably delivered by John Lithgow as Hanks's self-absorbed father: "Why do you wanna be a writer?" he asks indignantly. "You're not oppressed, you're not gay." Patchy stuff, but the kids are all right.

I was satisfactorily entertained by the virtual-reality thriller Avalon while not actually having the foggiest about what was going on. Set in a rain-lashed central European city, it concerns a fiendishly addictive computer game which has left certain players permanently brain-damaged; game expert Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) wants to know why.

Japanese animation whizz Mamoru Oshii first conceived the movie ten years ago, during which time The Matrix pre-empted its somewhat portentous commingling of the real and the virtual: shoot an opponent and watch him disintegrate into pixellated sections.

Nevertheless, the movie has a spiffy look: a lustrous sepia world of deserted warehouses, cramped apartments and cobbled streets – it was filmed in Poland – that will soon be filched for some splashy ad campaign. If you can figure out the technical talk of "Bishops", "Apostles" and "Class Real", good for you, but I've a feeling it won't be essential to your enjoyment.