Vulgar, pointless, unfunny comedy produced by Will Ferrell about a team of ruthless hustlers called in to save a Californian used car firm from extinction. They’re salesmen whose deaths even the compassionate Arthur Miller would greet with equanimity.

This colourful documentary on the current state of Jamaican popular music as practised in Kingston begins with the death and grand funeral of a leading figure in the Dancehall movement who styled himself Bogle, sang songs advocating extreme violence and was assassinated by a rival group at a petrol station after a fight in a nightclub. “The music is our life saviour,” someone says, and most of the songs concern sex, religion and slavery, though one suspects the film-makers have deliberately excluded numbers of a homophobic nature.

Some of the performers are hugely likable, especially the older ones. But a couple are extremely unpleasant, most especially Animal Man, who encourages members of the audience to simulate sex on stage and invites young women to stretch up and “feel my anaconda”. The film concludes with him singing the Jamaican national anthem.

Shot in Liberia and set during a civil war in an unnamed African state where the official language is a form of English, this is a gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids, some not yet teenagers. They have been torn from their families, pressed into the service of a self-styled guerrilla general, brainwashed with chants borrowed from Hollywood action movies and turned into ruthless killers, rapists and looters.

Most of them have fierce noms de guerre such as Small Devil, No Good Advice, Never Die and, of course, the eponymous Johnny Mad Dog, and they act without remorse, taking vengeful pleasure in their ability to menace and humiliate.

The most excruciating scenes involve two of the youngest raping an educated woman at a captured TV station as punishment for having called the insurgents terrorists in a news bulletin, and the intimidation and murder of an elderly couple, teachers at a local school, who attempt to retain their dignity. Almost as chilling is the moment the kids retrieve an automatic weapon from one of their victims, identifying it as an Uzi of the sort carried by Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

Parallel to the tragic story of the boys is the comparatively hopeful one of a 12-year-old girl trying to take care of her little brother and their father, who is presumably a doctor or other sort of professional person, who has lost his legs.

There is a brief glimpse of a residual human decency when one of the boy soldiers doesn’t reveal her hidden presence to his comrades, but sadly it’s the one moment that’s a bit Hollywood and doesn’t really convince.

(1988, 15, Nouveaux Pictures)

Brunel University has joined the Nouveaux art-house label to launch Cine-Excess, a welcome new series devoted to “Taking Trash Seriously” featuring low-budget exploitation classics from around the world. It’s off to an excellent start with this stylishly atmospheric Dutch thriller written and directed by Dick Maas, a fast, gory, immensely entertaining horror flick that cleverly crosses Dirty Harry with Jaws and throws in a dash of Don’t Look Now. A mad serial killer in a diver’s wetsuit emerges from the murky water of Amsterdam’s canals to murder people in nasty ways: the Mayor is furious and a maverick cop (Huub Stapel) is assigned to track him down before travel agencies boycott the city. There are ingeniously staged killings, terrific chases, a visit to the Rijksmuseum where the heroine works, and a sharp green socio-political message given a new topicality by the current Trafigura affair. The film can be viewed either with subtitles or dubbed into English and is accompanied by a fascinating “making of” documentary.

Most weeks nowadays, there’s a vampire film from some corner of the globe. This week, there are two, one of a certain merit from the States (Cirque du Freak), the other an execrable British film.

Said to have been made for £45, Marc Price’s Colin is a confused, unoriginal and unimaginative hand-held account of a contaminated young man staggering around a London populated by flesh-eating zombies and death squads trying to wipe them out. The opening sequence, which for some reason is tagged on to the end, evokes George A Romero’s horror movies by way of a TV newscaster referring to a plague of zombies in Pennsylvania.

The problem with prequels is that they usually add up to little more than a bunch of boring backstory and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, Fox, 12) is no exception. Despite being directed by Gavin Hood, who cut his teeth on edgy fare like Tsotsi and Rendition, this is plodding comic-book stodge all the way, with surprisingly little sense of character development or narrative invention. While Bryan Singer’s original X-Men flicks traded on their political nous, this is all empty, eye-popping punch-ups and unremarkable CGI – a real sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Much more fun (although still far from exceptional) is Monsters Vs Aliens (2009, Paramount, PG) which mashes up die-hard riffs from Attack of the 50 ft Woman, Dr Strangelove, Invaders From Mars and more and reconfigures them as a sparkly, child-friendly digimation. As always, the 3D gimmick is just that, but snappy voiceover work from Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen and Hugh Laurie keeps things upbeat and the visual design is likably retro.

In Fired Up! (2009, Sony, 12), a pair of thumpable high-school jocks enlist at cheerleader camp to score chicks with headache-inducingly dull results. Imagine Porky’s with all the X-rated rudeness removed, leaving only a crust of bland crassness and you’re in the right ballpark. Stalwart funny man John Michael Higgins does his best to alleviate the boredom but it’s a losing battle. Fired Up? More like Pissed Off.

Thank heaven, then, for Claire Denis whose 35 Shots of Rum (2008, New Wave, 12A) is that increasingly rare thing – a “proper film” with believable situations and finely drawn characters. Tracking the complex relationship between a father and daughter against the backdrop of the Parisian rail network, this warm but melancholic work owes an obvious debt to Ozu, locating its participants in a landscape that is social, emotional and geographical.

Alex Descas and Mati Diop are excellent in the central roles, but this is very much an ensemble piece which benefits from unintrusively intimate support.

Ghost In The Shell 2.0
DVD & Blu-ray, Manga

There aren’t many animated films that can be hailed as truly influential, and those that can, such as Disney’s Snow White and Pixar’s Toy Story, for the most part only really influenced other animated tales. Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 cyber-thriller Ghost In The Shell stands out not only for its bar-raising animation but also for its massive impact on live-action science-fiction movies – most notably and blatantly The Matrix. Given a full overhaul, with added, unneeded CGI sequences, GITS 2.0 is still an overflowing mine of rich ideas and concepts. It’s impossible to fully get this film in one sitting, there’s just so much detail to take in and speculative science to wrap your head around. Most sci-fi tales like this become obsolete or outdated within a decade; this still looks very much like the future. Set a few decades from now in Hong Kong-like metropolis, a technologically augmented counter-terrorist organisation are pitted against a mysterious super-hacker known only as The Puppet Master. Of course, this is the plot rendered at its most simplistic, levels of subterfuge are peeled away to reveal something far more complex and far-reaching. Even in the so-called quiet moments between the incredible action, the characters toss around synapse-popping questions on the nature of being and the consequences of technology. You can buy this on its own or packaged with its even more cryptic sequel: Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence.

Also out

Monsters Vs Aliens

Fun animation voiced by the likes of Seth Rogen and Reese Witherspoon.

DVD & Blu-ray, Dreamworks

Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee

Shane Meadows’ amiable music mockdoc, with Paddy Considine on form.

DVD, Warp

Young Soul Rebels/Playing Away

Landmark black British movies from Isaac Julien and Horace Ové, respectively.

DVD, BFI

Shirin

Abbas Kiarostami’s latest provocation: a movie watching the faces of women watching a movie.

DVD, BFI

True Blood Season One

Alan Ball’s New Orleans vampire saga.

DVD & Blu-ray, Warner

Ghost In The Shell 2.0
DVD & Blu-ray, Manga

There aren’t many animated films that can be hailed as truly influential, and those that can, such as Disney’s Snow White and Pixar’s Toy Story, for the most part only really influenced other animated tales. Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 cyber-thriller Ghost In The Shell stands out not only for its bar-raising animation but also for its massive impact on live-action science-fiction movies – most notably and blatantly The Matrix. Given a full overhaul, with added, unneeded CGI sequences, GITS 2.0 is still an overflowing mine of rich ideas and concepts. It’s impossible to fully get this film in one sitting, there’s just so much detail to take in and speculative science to wrap your head around. Most sci-fi tales like this become obsolete or outdated within a decade; this still looks very much like the future. Set a few decades from now in Hong Kong-like metropolis, a technologically augmented counter-terrorist organisation are pitted against a mysterious super-hacker known only as The Puppet Master. Of course, this is the plot rendered at its most simplistic, levels of subterfuge are peeled away to reveal something far more complex and far-reaching. Even in the so-called quiet moments between the incredible action, the characters toss around synapse-popping questions on the nature of being and the consequences of technology. You can buy this on its own or packaged with its even more cryptic sequel: Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence.

Also out

Monsters Vs Aliens

Fun animation voiced by the likes of Seth Rogen and Reese Witherspoon.

DVD & Blu-ray, Dreamworks

Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee

Shane Meadows’ amiable music mockdoc, with Paddy Considine on form.

DVD, Warp

Young Soul Rebels/Playing Away

Landmark black British movies from Isaac Julien and Horace Ové, respectively.

DVD, BFI

Shirin

Abbas Kiarostami’s latest provocation: a movie watching the faces of women watching a movie.

DVD, BFI

True Blood Season One

Alan Ball’s New Orleans vampire saga.

DVD & Blu-ray, Warner

An unselfconsciously celebratory documentary about an energetic music culture, says Peter Bradshaw

A documentary about the Jamaican music scene, made in 2006, that is unselfconsciously celebratory about a culture teeming with energy and semi-absorbed influences. It is not just a matter of reggae being the country’s “classical” phase, and dancehall being the more energetic sound. Jamaican music is ingesting rap and R&B to create something less stereotypical. A lively documentary, although it passes lightly over the ugly side of dancehall, and its boorish attitudes to gay men. Probably the most striking contributor is the outrageous Lady Saw, one of the few women music stars in Jamaica.

If there ever was a zombie calamity on Britain’s streets, Peter Bradshaw fears it would look like this micro-budget thriller

First-time British director Marc Price has become a bit of an industry legend for this film. It’s a micro-budget zombie thriller that he reportedly shot on a camcorder for £45. The resulting release has been variously cheered on, derided and hyped, and it is the kind of film which is notoriously subject to upside-down embellishment on the subject of budget. The overall cost was clearly higher than £45, but I’ve seen duller and cheaper-looking films that have cost Britain’s lottery players an awful lot more. Colin is a ultra-minimal, ultra-experimental future-shock in the tradition of The War Game, Survivors and Threads. A nuclear war in the US has caused a viral catastrophe here. Corpses have come back to life, biting the healthy and spreading the disease. One such is Colin – whose sister refuses to kill him. Price focuses as much on human drama and social breakdown, as on the zombie phenomenon. As for the undead gamely played by Price’s mates, the acting and gurning and ketchup are a little broad, sure. But if there ever was a zombie calamity on Britain’s streets, I have a sinking feeling that it would look exactly like the cheap absurdist nightmare shown here.