Match Point (12A)<br/>Running Scared (18)<br/>Just Friends (12A)<br/>13 (Tzameti) (15)<br/>Exils (NC)

Match Point (12A)

Match Point is the first Woody Allen film to be set in London, and if the Golden Globe nominations and glowing advance reports are to be trusted, his trip across the pond was just what his muse needed.

Regrettably, they're not to be trusted. With a story that's equal parts The Talented Mr Ripley, The Age of Innocence, and Allen's own Crimes & Misdemeanours, Match Point is a stilted drama which begins and ends by claiming to examine the role of luck in our lives, but which mislays that theme for two hours of repetitive scenes in the middle.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers appears in almost every one of those scenes as Chris, an Irish tennis player who's just taken an instructing job at an exclusive sports club. When he's not on the court he's reading Dostoevsky and quoting Sophocles, which might suggest that Allen hasn't met many tennis pros. Despite his sullen reticence, he's befriended by a young toff named Tom (Matthew Goode), and is soon a regular guest at his parents' country mansion. Tom's sister (Emily Mortimer) falls in love with him, and Tom's dad (Brian Cox), hands him a job in the City. But when he catches sight of Tom's fiancée (Scarlet Johansson), he's tempted to risk it all.

Chris's feelings about his social mountaineering are difficult to measure, as Rhys Meyers takes being aloof and mysterious so far that his emotions vanish without trace. Johansson isn't much more engaging.

Playing one of the unstable, shouty women who often feature in Allen's films, she's too young to convince as someone with a failed marriage and acting career behind her. Emily Mortimer and, especially, Matthew Goode, are far more impressive, but when Rhys Myers and Johansson are in conversation they sound like a psychoanalyst interviewing a patient.

How could one of the world's greatest screenwriters bring himself to type, "It would be fitting if I were apprehended"? Or, "Don't irresponsibly ride roughshod over this"? Or, "I hope my hesitation isn't upsetting"?

Maybe he thinks that that's how British people talk. Certainly, Match Point would have been easier to take if it had been made in French, with English subtitles, because then we wouldn't have been distracted by the unwieldy dialogue or the namedropping of tourist landmarks. It's not encouraging to hear that, since completing Match Point, Allen has already shot another film in London.

Running Scared (18)

The most obnoxious film of 2006 is here at last. This reprehensible tosh is a crime caper that desperately wants to be a Tarantino movie, or even a Guy Ritchie movie. But while it has more sadism, swearing, and affectation than anything directed by either of them, it has none of their humour or subversive intelligence.

It stars Paul Walker as a low-level gangster who is ordered by his boss to dispose of an incriminating handgun. Being exceptionally stupid, he stashes the gun in his own basement, where his son's friend immediately finds it. Now Walker has to locate the boy before the police or his fellow mobsters do, so he drives around a New Jersey suburb all night, meeting every single one of its pimps, vigilantes, crooked cops, child-abusers, and wife-beaters. And, for most of the time, his son is sitting in the passenger seat, thereby ensuring that the poor lad will be in therapy for the rest of his life. A grave disappointment from the director of The Cooler.

Just Friends (12A)

There's a decent comedy to be built on the notion of a woman insisting on being "just friends" with the man who loves her, but all this one gets right is the title. It begins with a high-school dork (Ryan Reynolds in a fat-suit) who dotes on a cheerleader (Amy Smart), but who can't get out of the "friend zone". Ten years on, he's remodelled himself as a lean, mean sex machine who knows every pick-up technique in the book, so when he returns to his home town for Christmas - yes, the film's being released a fortnight late - he reckons he has another chance with the one that got away.

Just Friends isn't helped by trailing behind Hitch, another rom-com about a lummox-turned-lovegod who turns back into a lummox when he's with his dream woman. But even if you ignore that comparison, the film is a mess, and Reynolds is so insanely smarmy that you can't help thinking that the cheerleader was right to turn him down in the first place. On the plus side, Anna Faris is quite fun as a helium-headed Paris Hilton-type.

13 (Tzameti) (15)

This stinging little thriller is a consummate example of how a hungry first-time film-maker can counterbalance a minuscule budget with a million-dollar concept. At the start it's so solemn and symbolic that it could be a parody of a black-and-white French art film, but once it gets to that million-dollar concept it grips so tightly that Brad Pitt must be begging for the remake rights.

Its hero, Sebastien (played by the 26-year-old director's younger brother), is a Georgian immigrant who works as a roofer in a seaside town in France. When his drug-addicted employer drops dead, Sebastien pinches an envelope from his house containing a train ticket and a set of cryptic instructions. Sensing that there's money to be made, he follows the instructions, but regrets doing so as soon as he finds himself in a gambling den, deep in a forest, where a crowd of underworld figures has gathered to indulge in a secret betting contest.

I won't specify what they're betting on: the less you know about the film before you see it, the more enthralling it will be. But Gena Babluani's masterstroke is to present a grandly evil activity as if it were as banal and seedy as a cockfight in the backroom of a pub.

Exils (NC)

A young Frenchman (Romain Duris from The Beat That My Heart Skipped) decides to visit Algeria, the country from which his family came.

Taking his wild-child girlfriend with him, he tramps down through Europe on foot, sleeping rough, drinking in folk-music clubs, working as a fruit-picker, and encountering people who are travelling from Algeria to France, and who can't believe he's going in the other direction. The performances are bold and uninhibited, but because of the film's tendency to lose track of its story, its real stars are the sharply-etched, unforgettable locations: an overgrown football pitch, a ruined factory, a neighbourhood of buildings tipped on their side by an earthquake.

n.barber@independent.co.uk