Bandits (12) <br></br> Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (18) <br></br> Zoolander (12) <br></br> The Devil's Backbone (15) <br></br> Ghosts of Mars (15) <br></br> Meet Me in St Louis (pg)

In bandits, Barry Levinson and his writer, Harley Peyton, try to fuse the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde with the kvetching domestic humour of Lemmon and Matthau in The Odd Couple. Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton, both in unflattering hairpieces, play a couple of escaped cons who traverse the country on a bank-robbing spree, their gimmick being to take the bank manager hostage in his home the night before, and use him to access the vault first thing the following morning (they become known as "the sleepover bandits"). Willis is the cool thinker of the duo, Thornton the peevish hypochondriac, and between them they get into the sort of goofy scrapes Elmore Leonard's fallible felons are prone to.

For a while, Bandits is fun, and the opening prison break, soundtracked to the Led Zep version of "Gallows Pole", sprints along on a rush of adrenalin. Once unhappy housewife Cate Blanchett makes it a trio, however, things go right off the boil. It's not Blanchett's fault, really; she's a game comedienne, and wears the silly wigs with rather more panache than the blokes. But the romantic triangle that ensues is super-irritating (Willis and Blanchett discover a mutual love of Bonnie Tyler's power ballads – please) and throws off the plot altogether. Who's chasing them? Is there a policeman in charge? Bandits becomes the lamest sort of "caper", empty of even a glimmer of suspense or danger, and the frequent excerpts from a TV interview with the two robbers only labour the pace even further. By the end, it's less Bonnie and Clyde than Bob'n'Bing, with Blanchett in the Dorothy Lamour role – sadly, this particular road movie leads nowhere, or nowhere you'd want to go.

Unfortunately, there's worse than Bandits this week. Anyone who hasn't been a regular moviegoer for the past three years will wonder why Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is meant to be funny – even those who "get" the references to Planet of the Apes, Scream, Good Will Hunting etc, will have to listen very hard for anything resembling a laugh. Writer-director Kevin Smith and his co-star (the utterly charmless Jason Mewes) play the New Jersey stoners who've progressed from minor characters to title heroes, which elevation is, like everything else, a cause for mockery: "They don't deserve their own movie", writes one Internet critic, and within 10 minutes I was in passionate agreement.

It's one long in-joke, with Smith's celebrity friends – Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock – all eagerly sending themselves up as Jay and Silent Bob slouch into Miramax Studios, Hollywood, to claim back the copyright on their life story.

Quite purgatorial at times, and a conclusive indictment of the school of comedy that believes media conventions and insider parodies are funnier than human stories.

The same goes for Zoolander, Ben Stiller's satire on the shallow glitz of the fashion industry – an even softer target than Miramax. Stiller himself plays Derek Zoolander (pictured below), a male model who has just been ousted as top dog by an equally empty-headed narcissist named Hansel (Owen Wilson). Intending to do some soul-searching, Zoolander instead becomes the pawn in an international conspiracy of fashion designers to preserve sweatshop labour.

Like Kevin Smith, Stiller decides that it's more fun to pack his film with nudge-in-the-ribs cameos – David Bowie, Winona Ryder, David Duchovny et al, ad nauseam – rather than write some decent jokes. It rivals Altman's Prêt à Porter for inanity, not to say self-congratulation. What's most regrettable is that Stiller, affecting a silly voice, gives probably the worst performance of his career.

Following a mediocre outing to Hollywood with Mimic, director Guillermo Del Toro returns to his native Spain for The Devil's Backbone, a mightily impressive Gothic horror set during the Civil War. New boy Carlos (Fernando Tielve) no sooner arrives at a remote orphanage than he encounters a ghost whose presence seems to plead for retribution on a killer. The story gathers in force, enhanced by a cast that mixes young and old (Marisa Paredes and Federico Luppi are marvellous as the children's protectors) and resonant with echoes of larger events outside the orphanage walls (an unexploded bomb remains propped in the courtyard). Del Toro builds dread with masterly restraint, and brings to his compositions some eerie and original astonishments.

That the special effects are woefully cheap and nasty is but one of the problems besetting John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. Others include a well-worn plot clunkily told in flashback; a cast that mismatches the rapper Ice Cube, Jason Statham and Natasha Henstridge; and the unmistakable feel of a director going through the motions. Slap a monotonous heavy rock drone over the top and you have one of the most unappetising dollops of dreck to clout the consciousness this year.

The reissued Meet Me in St Louis (1944) remains a peerless sentimental classic, as comforting and redolent of Yuletide as a goblet of mulled wine. Set in St Louis at the turn of the last century, its picture-book portrait of family togetherness – songs around the piano, children in their pyjamas peeping through the bannisters – is counterpointed by its melancholy undertow: a farewell to a more innocent, less complicated time. Judy Garland was perhaps never lovelier, and certainly never more touching, than when she comforts her sister (Margaret O'Brien) with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", a scene I've never been able to watch without misting up. I'll be all right... just give me a minute.