The Dancer Upstairs (15) <br></br>Deathwatch (15) <br></br>The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (PG) <br></br>Monday Morning (PG)<br></br>Butterfly Man (15) <br></br>8 Crazy Nights (12A)

The old lizard king, John Malkovich, goes behind the camera for the first time to direct The Dancer Upstairs, part-political thriller, part-study in the maintenance of personal integrity. Adapted from his own novel by Nicholas Shakespeare, it is set in the capital of an unnamed Latin American country where police lieutenant Agustin Rejas (Javier Bardem) is simultaneously trying to keep his head above a rising tide of corruption and to track down one "Ezequiel", leader of a terrorist movement. Ezequiel's campaign begins with hanging dogs from the lampposts, before graduating to assassinations and downtown bombings, and with Rejas and his team drawing a blank, it isn't long before the army moves in and the atmosphere of panic escalates.

In his mysteriousness, Ezequiel comes to seem the Keyser Soze of Latin America, though he's actually based on Abimael Guzman, the leader of Peru's Shining Path terrorist group who was captured in 1992. The real focus of the story, however, is Bardem's beleaguered police detective, a family man who can't help his attraction to his daughter's ballet teacher Yolanda (Laura Morante), while professionally he and his team chase shadows across the city. Bardem and Morante play a fine duet of unspoken feelings, but both sound ill at ease with the film's English dialogue – a commercial decision, no doubt, though a distracting one given that almost the entire cast is Spanish-speaking. I was also wrongfooted by the belated news that Rejas was a potential candidate for president; this might be clearer in the novel, where his rank is colonel, but here he's just a city cop being trampled on by the military. Engrossing, all the same, and, for a debut, rather annoyingly assured.

The other debut is Michael J Bassett's Deathwatch, a distinctly odd mixture of Journey's End and Hellraiser. Set in 1917 on the Western Front, it concerns a handful of British soldiers who, after being scattered by a German gas-attack, happen upon an abandoned enemy trench. At first, this looks like one of those "lost patrol" movies that have enjoyed a mini-vogue recently (Dog Soldiers, The Bunker) as the soldiers argue among themselves about what to do and, in the case of Jamie Bell's rookie recruit, what not to do (abandon your pal in no-man's-land). But then the film takes an unexpected turn into horror as the trench exudes malignant energies and the soldiers begin to hallucinate.

Biggest medal goes to Aleksandar Denic, whose production design has rendered the trench an authentic hellhole of mud, reek, rats and blackened corpses; you can almost smell the corruption. Less successful is the switch from realism to the supernatural, and most of the cast's surrender to histrionics, none more so than Andy Serkis, the psycho of the unit who regards every scene as a top to go over. Mentioned in dispatches: Hugo Speer and Matthew Rhys.

From the vaults comes The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a late and rather lovely Billy Wilder picture that reveals a hidden side to Conan Doyle's usually phlegmatic detective. The director admitted to Cameron Crowe in the book Conversations With Wilder that the film was fouled up in the editing when great swathes of footage went missing, which possibly explains its two disjointed halves. The first, in which Holmes gets entangled with a ballerina, is a sly jeu d'esprit, beautifully played by Robert Stephens (as a cocaine-using Holmes) and Colin Blakely as a blustering Dr Watson. The second and longer section is a spy story about a mysterious foreign beauty (Genevieve Page) whose charms apparently beguile Holmes during a wild-goose chase around a Scottish loch. And if that's not odd enough, there's a cameo by Christopher Lee as Holmes's sinister brother Mycroft. An air of lively inconsequence holds sway until a belated twist of romantic regret takes the story by surprise, and makes it very moving. Not the most dynamic entry in the Wilder canon, but certainly one of the most loveable.

Otar Iosseliani's Monday Morning is an affectionate collection of scenes mostly charting the slow, not to say somnolent, pace of life in la France profonde. Virtually dialogue-free, the presiding influence is Jacques Tati, though the atmosphere is peculiar to Iosseliani; only his camera could be so disarmingly inquisitive about the village priest who spies on his neighbours via a telescope, the postman who steams open the mail, or the pet crocodile that goes walkabout. At its centre is a melancholy factory worker (Jacques Bidou) who is so fed up with life's routine that he briefly abandons his family for a sojourn in Venice. What he finds there isn't clear, but the film's observant and rueful comedy leaves one hoping that it might be peace of mind.

Hard to say anything positive about Butterfly Man, a banal What-I-Did-On-My-Holidays essay masquerading as a thriller about human trafficking in Thailand. The director Kaprice Kea throws in a few pretty-postcard shots, but these are no compensation for a wanly uncharismatic performance by Stuart Laing as the backpacking hero, and a voiceover that leaves no cliché unspoken.

God spare us Adam Sandler. I defy anyone to sit through his animation feature, 8 Crazy Nights , and not at some point devoutly wish yourself dead. For even though you don't have to look at his simpering mug, you do have to hear his wide range of "funny voices", and a clutch of awful songs in the telling of a story about a thirtysomething waster who comes good. The only thing that blotted out the worst of it was the sound of my own teeth grinding.