When were you last horrified by a horror movie? Really horrified, that is, as opposed to merely creeped out, or disgusted, or amused. Black Death is a proper horror movie, for grown-ups rather than ADD-afflicted teens, and I'll wager grown-ups will be duly horrified by it.

Shirin Neshat's often compelling Women Without Men spirits us back to Tehran 1953, and the political atmosphere surrounding the British- and American-supported coup that deposed Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. But the director counterpoints unrest on the streets with the fate of four women who end up in their own private haven, an apparently mystical orchard that provides them with a temporary escape, not only from the politics of the outside world but from the roles in Persian society that they are expected to occupy.

What happens when shlock is ennobled to something resembling a state of grace? The answer is on emotionally capacious view in Letters to Juliet, a by-the-books romcom that is raised beyond the ordinary, and then some, by the presence of the great Vanessa Redgrave. The English septuagenarian's lustre will matter not one whit to those drawn to the movie by Mamma Mia! alumna Amanda Seyfried, playing a fish-eyed observer of, and eventual participant in, the wonders wrought by love.

Anyone who saw Ben Stiller in Zoolander will know that he is a very fine actor. He made his over-the-top character both believable and lovable (well, up to a point on the latter, but you know what I mean) while playing the fashion model’s absurdities for every laugh he could get. And now a fascinating counterpoint comes with his touching and beautifully reined-in portrayal of another narcissist, Roger Greenberg, a 41-year-old failed musician turned carpenter who is recovering from a breakdown.

For the past decade or so, New York City has been bragging about its crime figures. Homicides are through the floor, whole fleets of firepower-toting cops are out there hassling hustlers, and the mean streets have been swept pretty much clean. I don’t think the creators of Brooklyn’s Finest can have got the press release. In their version of reality, the body count is off the chart as blood pumps, spurts and leaks from innumerable gunshot wounds, all of them faked up with a gleeful eye for detail.

The choral roar of a crowd fills the air over terraced streets. It’s match day at Liverpool FC, a club in a city whose supporters feed intravenously on its fortunes. But Kicks is not a football film. That much is clear from the image of a solitary blonde teenage girl swimming against the human tide as it files away from the ground. She pushes towards the stadium gates where, long after the final whistle, superstars will emerge in their supercars and, with a cursory wave to a cordon of obsessive fans, drive off to the hermetically sealed wonderland where the rich and famous gather. You don’t see a ball being kicked in Kicks. You do, however, see some kicking.

We’ll never feel the real impact - an all too apposite word - of the violence in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, given that it has dominated pre-release publicity for the film. The suspense of waiting for it will surely distract viewers from any suspense that the director was trying to create naturally through the formal build-up of unease within the plot and environment he’s taken on from Jim Thompson’s noir novel.

Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much.

There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging frustration that dominated. The fashion, the friends, even the puns are all still in their place, but where (as Carrie herself might ask), where is the love?