Blood Work (15)<br></br>Trouble Every Day (18)<br></br> Take Care Of My Cat (PG)<br></br>11'09"01 - September 11 (12a)

Clint Eastwood, 72 this year, graciously acknowledges his body's frailty in his new thriller, Blood Work. He plays Terry McCaleb, an FBI veteran who, chasing a serial-killer suspect on foot through the back streets of LA, looks mighty short of puff. He collapses from a heart attack, and his quarry escapes. Cut to two years later, and McCaleb is retired with a great scar across his chest from the surgery that narrowly saved him. Although virtually rattling with the pills he's required to take, McCaleb begins a private investigation into a murder case, to the chagrin both of his doctor (Anjelica Huston) and the LAPD, who don't like outsiders on their turf.

It's personal, you see: the woman asking for his help is the sister of the murder victim whose heart is now in McCaleb's chest. A touch contrived? Wait till you see what they've done with the plot. Brian Helgeland's script creaks as painfully as Eastwood's poor old joints and seldom misses an opportunity to cushion itself with cliché; I lost count of the times McCaleb has to softsoap old colleagues for some classified info, which, after the usual sighs and headshakes, is duly yielded up. And the running verbals he has with a hostile Mexican cop are embarrassingly laboured.

On the plus side there's neat support from Jeff Daniels as a loud-shirted slacker whose boat is moored on the pier next to McCaleb's, and Eastwood himself is rather touching as a man depleted by his recent coup de vieux – he keeps touching his chest, as if haunted by the beat of his new ticker. But he played cat-and-mouse with a killer so much more compellingly in Wolfgang Petersen's In The Line of Fire 10 years ago.

More surgery in Trouble Every Day, this time a brain being sliced as calmly as an after-dinner Stilton. The director Claire Denis says that her intention was to get a sense of "the fluids animating the body", the principal fluid being blood, for this is the story of modern-day vampires on the loose in Paris. Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo play the victims of a genetic experiment which has perverted their libido and turned them into bloodsuckers, a particular inconvenience for Gallo, who happens to be on honeymoon, causing his bride (Tricia Vessey) to wonder if she hasn't made a horrible mistake. Talking of which, this film just about takes le biscuit for its combination of psychosexual flummery and high-European angst, made worse – much worse – by its opaque narrative style and the two leads' humourless self-regard. (Gallo looks more bug-eyed than the gargoyles perched around Notre Dame.) The spectacle of passion turning to feral, teeth-baring violence is perhaps supposed to represent the futility of human desire, or something, though you might find you couldn't care less. What's required here is not metaphor but a transfusion – of sense, rigour, purpose.

The lives and labours of a group of five 20-year-old Koreans constitute the burden of Take Care of My Cat. The two most sharply drawn characters are the least alike: Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) is a beautiful and rather spoilt young woman who wants to be a player at her brokerage firm but is still doing entry-level chores around the office. Tae-hee (Bae Doo-Na) is the good girl, forever helping out friends and tending to the needy, most notably her secretarial work for a poet with cerebral palsy. What links the stories is the custody of a stray cat, passed from one friend to another as it becomes an inadvertent symbol of loyalty in a changing world. The director Jeong Jae-eun sometimes lets the narrative go fuzzy when a clearer focus would be helpful, but his sympathy for the lives of these women, poised on life's diving-board, is kindly and unpatronising.

The portmanteau movie 11'09"01 – September 11 is a well-intentioned but wildly uneven memorial. Producer Alain Brigand asked 11 directors of various nationalities to contribute an individual film, each lasting 11 minutes, nine seconds, about the events of September 11 and their subsequent impact. Best of the bunch is Ken Loach's alternative take on the events of Tuesday 11 September 1973, when a coup d'état in Chile ousted Allende and launched the Pinochet regime of torture and terror – it's estimated that 30,000 people were murdered under him. The irony that these "acts of war" were sponsored by the US will be lost on nobody. Also noteworthy is the contribution of the young Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (who made Amores Perros), who draws mythological parallels between Icarus and the terrible images of falling from the burning towers, soundtracked by an eerie Babel of international tongues. But the format generally proves too confining; those that choose geopolitical reflection look superficial, while the ones that aim for a more personal tone (eg Sean Penn's) feel tritely sentimental. As for the Japanese veteran Shohei Imamura's closing segment, I fail to see what relevance it has to September 11, terrorism, the pity of war or anything else.