Lilya 4-Ever<br></br>Dreamcatcher<br></br>Welcome To Collinwood<br></br>Le Fate Ignoranti<br></br>Trapped

Lukas Moodysson's compassionate portrayal of a 1970s hippy commune, Together, was an international smash – so much so that the Swedish writer-director could have named his price, his budget and his cast for the follow-up. Good on him, then, for heading east to Estonia instead of west to Hollywood, to make Lilya 4-Ever (18). Its heroine (Oksana Akinshina) is a 16-year-old schoolgirl who lives in a dreary ex-Soviet state's most dreary town. Abandoned by her family, she is stuck in a stinking flat with no money, no prospects and no view from her windows except grey sky and rust-streaked concrete. Rape and treachery can't douse her fighting spirit, but her sink into prostitution seems unavoidable.

In short, Lilya 4-Ever is somewhat less feelgood than Together, and, indeed, nearly every other film ever made.

There's no reason why Moodysson shouldn't follow a warm-hearted hit with something so bleak and miserable, but with all due respect for the actors, and for the director's skill at composing images, Lilya 4-Ever contains very little apart from bleakness and misery. There's no ingenious plotting, none of the political weight of Dirty Pretty Things or In This World, and no scenes as ferociously powerful as the story demands – just a steady downpour of indignities. Unless you go into the cinema believing that life as a glue-sniffing, teenaged Eastern European prostitute is a barrel of laughs, Lilya 4-Ever won't tell you anything you don't know.

Dreamcatcher (15) is a horror film that's got it all – and I don't mean that as a compliment. Adapted by William Goldman and writer-director Lawrence Kasdan from a Stephen King novel, it starts as a film about four friends who struggle with their psychic powers. Then it's about their being menaced in a mountain cabin by a supernatural force. Then it's about an alien invasion that comprises flying saucers, possession, a virulent fungus, and toothy eels that burst out of your bottom while you're on the toilet. And did I mention the childhood flashbacks, the military conspiracy, the Ahab-ish colonel (Morgan Freeman), and the character who is locked in a warehouse inside his own brain?

Any one of Dreamcatcher's threads could have been spun into a decent film on its own. In fact, most of them already have. Even discounting all the references to Stephen King's own oeuvre, you're left with borrowings from The Thing, Alien, Hannibal and The Two Towers (Britain's Damien Lewis gets a schizophrenia scene that's just like Gollum's). There might have been room for all this lunacy over nine series of The X-Files, but squashed into one movie, it's an absurd monster mash.

Having remade Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney have now produced a heist film that could be a pastiche of it. The thieves in Welcome to Collinwood (15) are as dumb as Ocean and co were smart; as broke as they were rich; and as primitive as they were high-tech. They're not master criminals who want to walk out of a casino with $150m in their back pockets; they're three-time losers from a wrack-and-ruined Cleveland suburb who plan to rob a pawnbroker's safe by knocking down the wall of the flat next door.

The Soderbergh/Clooney connection has attracted some first-rate indie actors, including William H Macy, Luis Guzman and a show-stealing Sam Rockwell as a pretty-boy boxer, but this trifling caper doesn't really deserve them. The grating, made-up underworld jargon and the characters' pantomime idiosyncrasies serve only to highlight the inexperience of the writer-directors, Joe and Anthony Russo. And please don't trust the poster: Clooney himself has only a walk-on part, and as he's in a wheelchair, you couldn't even call it that.

In Ferzan Ozpetek's Le Fate Ignoranti (15), a woman learns after her husband's death that he had a male lover for the past seven years. Tracking down the man, she discovers a household straight (or rather not straight) out of Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City. Trapped (15) is a daft kidnap potboiler. I assume that Kevin Bacon, Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Courtney Love are willing, like the kidnappers in the film, to do almost anything for money.

n.barber@independent.co.uk