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?

Werner Herzog is your go-to guy if you want a film about extraordinary madness. The German director's legendary partnership with Klaus Kinski yielded such wild and wonderful monuments to insanity as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Theirs would be the natural team for this tale of a cop run amok, but, Kinski having departed to that great padded cell in the sky, Herzog hooks up instead with Nicolas Cage. The result is a slickly amusing, facetious study in dementia that declares its weirdness loud and proud without straying anywhere close to the edge of its comfort zone.

The most exciting part of the screening of this absurd new blockbuster was an appearance by producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a pre-show pep talk. You may be familiar with his CV - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, all the CSIs, Pirates of the Caribbean. Only a little guy, but so was Attila the Hun. He raved dutifully to a theatre-full of British hacks about the flick’s marvellous mostly-English cast (a lot of it having been shot at Pinewood) and schmoozed with its beaming director, Mike “Four Weddings” Newell.

I daresay Jerry (and indeed Pinewood Studios) hope that Prince of Persia will kick off another gigabucks franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean, to which end the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal as the hero Dastan, former cheeky street brat adopted by Persia’s benign King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), could go a long way. Bearded, muscled-up and equipped with adorably floppy hair (he has plans to bleach it in order to play deceased grunge-rocker Kurt Cobain), Jake has cut loose from his usual quizzical moodiness to make a surprisingly effective action hero. They’ve made him put on a British accent, which he carries off to immeasurably greater effect than that old grouch Russell Crowe in Robin Hood.

The film is fundamentally daft, which is what you’d expect from a story built on the virtual foundations of a computer game about ancient Persia. I hesitate to judge whether that’s better or worse than being derived from a Disney World resort attraction, as Pirates of the Caribbean was. Surprisingly, however, the screenwriters have smuggled in a sliver of political metaphor. The plot kicks off when the Persians besiege the city of Alamut on the pretext that the Alamutians have been selling weapons to Persia’s enemies, but having captured the city, they can find no weapons of mass destruction or even minor annoyance. But somebody - no plot spoilers here - has an ulterior motive, referred to in the Sands of Time of the title. Within Alamut rests a mystical dagger, which, when filled with the appropriate magic sand, can send time hurtling into reverse. Clearly such a device could have empire-building potential, and someone badly wants to lay their hands on it. Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, are you getting this loud and clear?

Dastan, having spearheaded the Persian attack on Alamut, is rewarded for his boldness by being framed for the murder of his father, and is forced to go on the run while he tries to flush out the real killer. Happily, he is joined on his travels by Alamut's Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), who has inherited the job of the keeper of the Sands of Time. She persuades him they must find the Secret Guardian Temple, and inevitably they must overcome many alarming supernatural hurdles en route. Ghastly assassins try to impale them with lethal metal prongs, and they need all their ingenuity to fend off hideous giant snakes which creep up on them by burrowing through the sand. Gyllenhaal gets to show off his free-running technique, only slightly computer-assisted, as he runs up walls and over buildings during lavish combat set pieces.

The allure of Arterton remains obscure, as she plays the princess like a bossy big sister and barely gets any of her kit off. I suppose you could say she's almost as good an actress as Elizabeth Hurley. There's much better value from Alfred Molina, tasked with the loveable-rogue role of Sheik Amar who runs a lucrative ostrich-racing racket, while Ben Kingsley is all silky smirkingness as Nizam, King Sharaman's allegedly loyal brother (pictured above).

Maybe it's OK if you switch off your brain, take the kids and get stuck into a big bucket of popcorn. The desert shots in Morocco look nice. Marks out of 10? Don't tempt me.

OVERLEAF: GEMMA ARTERTON ON STAGE AND SCREEN