AKA (18) <br></br>My Kingdom (18) <br></br>Villa des Roses (12) <br></br>Club le Monde (18) <br></br>The Rookie (U) <br></br>Clockstoppers (PG)

The tale of a modern Tom Ripley, minus the psychotic murders, AKA is set in the year 1978. Dean Page (Matthew Leitch) is a Romford schoolboy who leaves behind the miseries of an abusive father and seeks elevation amid the accommodating toffs of Belgravia. After working as minion to the gallery-owning Lady Gryffoyn (Diana Quick), Dean decamps to Paris, where he assumes the identity of Lady G's haughty son Alexander and becomes fast friends with an American hustler and a languid English aristo. Back home, meanwhile, a credit-card fraud team is hot on his trail.

The formal gimmick of Duncan Roy's film consists in running the narrative on three split screens simultaneously, a constantly shifting perspective that begins to seduce as Dean bluffs his way through the company of coke-snorting Sloanes and black-tied drones. It is at times very funny on British class: on hearing of Dean's educational background, one titled grandee murmurs, "I didn't know they had schools in Essex", while a chippy bureaucrat reflects on how a first-class degree from Oxford is no guard against upper-class condescension. As Dean, Matthew Leitch is plausibly chameleon-like, clinging to the imposture so desperately that he finally seems to believe his own lie. Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody? Roy's film is ambiguous on the matter, though it is deeply felt and consistently entertaining.

Nothing like Shakespeare to lend you some class. My Kingdom is loosely based on King Lear – and it's still nothing like Shakespeare. Don Boyd's drama charts the combustion of a Liverpool crime family after their mother (Lynn Redgrave) is murdered and the old man (Richard Harris) cedes his kingdom to his daughters. I tried to follow the plot about a consignment of drug-bearing cows from Amsterdam, but lost sight of it roughly at the stage a mechanical digger is rammed through a brothel wall and disgorges a half-dead man from its jaws. "Oh God – it's Billy!" somebody shrieks. Billy? Who's he? Boyd and his screenwriter Nick Davies apparently did serious research around the criminal purlieus of Liverpool, though it all looks as fake as the Burberry knock-offs they flog on Church Street. Even the violence is cut-price. The dialogue goes the same farcical way as the plot, its confusion exemplified when Jimi Mistry, playing a hard-nut gangster, looks down the barrel of an adversary's gun: "Er, the quality of mercy is not strained," he offers, feebly. That's The Merchant of Venice, Jimi, not Lear, and I wouldn't go mentioning the quality of anything at this point.

A dark, suety Europudding, Villa des Roses focuses upon the inhabitants of a squalid Parisian hotel just prior to the First World War. Julie Delpy plays Louise, a single mother who arrives to take the post of maid and eventually succumbs to the unreliable charms of a German artist (Shaun Dingwall). The script by Christophe Dirickx works up a vaguely Chekhovian air amid the glum locations, with Harriet Walter and Timothy West incarnating the hotel proprietors as sitcom gargoyles. As an ensemble piece, it's livelier than The Million Dollar Hotel, but this should hardly raise hopes for it.

Simon Rumley's low-budget comedy Club Le Monde aims to do for London clubland what Human Traffic did for the Cardiff rave scene some years ago. Zooming in on a cross-section of Nineties "yoof" – disco blondes, public schoolboys, student types, drag queens, et al – it proceeds in vignettes of attraction and rejection as drugs and the bpms get to work on the cerebral cortex. The basic untruth of all such movies remains intact: as anyone who has ever been in a club will know, it's well-nigh impossible to be heard without yelling down your pal's ear, yet Rumley's characters stand around chatting as if a small dansette were playing in the next room. Given the general standard of conversation, one may prefer the monster beats in any case.

A based-on-a-true-story entertainment as wholesome as mom's apple pie, The Rookie stars Dennis Quaid as a middle-aged chemistry teacher and baseball coach who lays down a challenge to the school team. If they win the district championship, he'll try out for the Major Leagues with his killer 98mph fastball. On the way, he may also have to rely on the forbearance of his wife (Rachel Griffiths) and resolve a few issues with his emotionally distant dad (Brian Cox), but with all that small-town Texas goodwill behind him, and Carter Burwell's gloopy music in front, you just know he's going to make it as the oldest relief pitcher in professional baseball. By the time this pleasant but interminable story reached the two-hour mark, I, too, was yearning for a relief pitcher, preferably of very strong martinis. There's only so much yahooing American triumphalism a Brit can take.

The sci-fi fantasy Clockstoppers is an unlovely mix of family values and special effects that hopes to cash in on the current Spy Kids craze. Jesse Bradford, a smarmier version of Jason Biggs, discovers that a wristwatch borrowed from his scientist father's workshop can pause-button time. This plot gimmick was also the basis of a pornographic novel called The Fermata some years back, in which the hero was magically enabled to indulge his sexual fantasies on freeze-framed women. The book sounds a lot racier than the rather limp adventure of Clockstoppers, but I guess it might struggle to get a 12 certificate.