Lolita (18)

In the wake of Stanley Kubrick's death, one can't help making unfavourable comparisons between Adrian Lyne's slick, carefully crafted, hollow version of Vladimir Nabokov's novel and Kubrick's mordantly comic 1962 interpretation. Lyne is superficially far more faithful to the original book, and changing mores have allowed him more freedom to depict the illicit relationship, but the resulting film is vacuously pretty, like a Flake ad with literary pretensions.

A Bright Shining Lie (15)

Set in Vietnam over the entire course of American involvement in the war there, Terry George's film tells the true story of John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton), a former US army officer who played a key role in American policy throughout the conflict. While it provides a sometimes interesting perspective on the American failure in Vietnam, George's second film after the hunger strike drama Some Mother's Son is hampered by prosaic film-making, a surfeit of information and an absence of subtlety.

The Land Girls (15)

David Leland's low-key film has good performances from Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel as young women sent to rural England to till the land during the second World War, but there's a blandness about Leland's treatment of their stories, and an almost fetishistic attention to period detail, that marks this as yet another humdrum exercise in British nostalgia.