Personal Velocity<br></br>The Rules Of Attraction<br></br>The Core<br></br>Cradle 2 The Grave<br></br>Life Or Something Like That

Personal Velocity (15) is sub-titled "Three Portraits", and that's just what it offers: three half-hour sections, each of them a vignette about a woman at a turning point in her life. Kyra Sedgwick is a battered wife who is nostalgic for her teenage years as the school slut; Parker Posey is a Manhattan book editor who's outgrowing her husband; and Fairuza Balk is overwhelmed by pregnancy and a near-death experience.

The thing that's best and worst about Personal Velocity is that it feels like a trio of short stories from an American creative writing workshop. That's no fluke. It was written and directed by Rebecca "Daughter of Arthur" Miller, and it's a faithful adaptation of three stories from her own anthology. An astonishingly faithful adaptation, in fact. A narrator reads out paragraphs from the text, and each tale flashes back and forth in time, so its structure is more prose-like than cinematic. Films usually try to move away from their literary source, but Miller goes so far in the opposite direction that it becomes a stimulating experiment in seeing how similar to a short story a movie can be. Even if the last third of Personal Velocity isn't as sharp as the others, the film as a whole is rewardingly unusual. And anyway, as Meat Loaf said, two out of three ain't bad.

The Rules of Attraction (18) is a misanthropic subversion of the campus comedy genre. Adapted from the Bret Easton Ellis novel, it's set, as all such comedies are, at a university where the chief admission criterion is modelling-industry-standard pulchritude, and where the students are too busy getting drunk and naked at frat parties to go to any lectures. But The Rules of Attraction injects rape, suicide and amorality into this milieu. It's not an improvement. The malicious characters are, of course, no more likeable than in a run-of-the-mill college movie, but they aren't any more believable, either. No one behaves the way everyone does in this film.

Roger Avary, the writer-director, also co-wrote Pulp Fiction, but you'd think he was an immature Tarantino imitator. He has a complacent belief in the inherent coolness of guns, swearing and show-off techniques (split-screens, reverse film, speeches to camera), whereas none of them gives The Rules of Attraction anything like the élan of Pulp Fiction or Trainspotting. It's slow and boring, and if I want to be bored by a gross-out college comedy, there are plenty available that don't have rape scenes.

As there's a war on, I don't know if you'll have the stomach for a disaster movie, but if you do fancy the devastation of a couple of cities and the impending extinction of the human race, then The Core (12A) is at least tongue-in-cheek, not too slushy, and nimble enough not to get bogged down in its own ludicrousness. It's very like Armageddon, except that in that movie they saved the species by drilling into a meteor left over from an old Star Trek set, while in this one they save it by drilling their way to the centre of a cheaply computer-generated planet Earth. Special plaudits go to a bewigged Stanley Tucci, who plays a preening scientist by impersonating Niles Crane from Frasier.

Cradle 2 The Grave (15) is a random assemblage of explosions and punch-ups. In one of its more reflective sequences, it intercuts scenes of one of its heroes (Jet Li) fighting 15 wrestlers at once with scenes of its other hero (DMX), on a quad-bike, being chased by the police into a building, up the stairs, and out of the window. If only the film had cracked a smile and owned up to being ridiculous, it might have been fun.

Angelina Jolie has always sold herself as carnality incarnate, so she's woefully miscast as a disciplined, unspontaneous newscaster in Life Or Something Like It (12A). Alas, that's the least of the defects of this embarrassing jumble of a "comedy". The message is that women shouldn't have career ambitions, as these only get in the way of their being wives and mothers. Another movie as rank as this one, and Jolie won't have a career to worry about.

n.barber@independent.co.uk