Body of Lies, Ridley Scott, 128 mins, 15Blindness, Fernando Meirelles, 122 mins, 18Conversations with My Gardener, Jean Becker, 104 mins, 12A

We've had only about three years' worth of "war on terror" movies, but they're already blurring into one another. Whether it's Syriana, Rendition or The Kingdom, there's always a desert setting, deafening bombs and torture scenes, satellite surveillance footage and hokey-cokey camerawork ("You shake it all about"), and a tireless US spy who thinks it's all America's fault.

Even Transformers and Quantum of Solace traced around this template, but apart from those two, all "war on terror" movies have something else in common: they don't get much of an audience. Body of Lies won't break the trend, despite starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

DiCaprio, still looking 20 years too young to play the seasoned action men he specialises in these days, is a straggly-bearded CIA agent stationed in the Middle East. He speaks Arabic, so he's assigned to win the trust of Jordan's secret service head, Mark Strong, but his efforts are continually screwed up by Crowe, his interfering CO back in Washington. The moral of the story is that the troops in any given area know more about it than the decision-makers thousands of miles away, but it's a moral that's articulated early on, and then repeated without any variation. Right from the off, DiCaprio is fearless, noble and knowledgeable, while Crowe's slobby lovechild of Boss Hogg and George Bush is so obstructive that you suspect he's in the pay of al-Qa'ida. Ten minutes in, there's nothing left to learn about either of them.

The film skips hyperactively around countless locations, until eventually, halfway through, it lands on a compelling concept. Out of the blue, DiCaprio dreams up a cunning plan to unearth Osama's right-hand man by setting up a counterfeit jihadi cell and waiting for the bad guys to get in touch. But this idea, which merits a film of its own, is tossed away as a subplot. Another thing that "war on terror" movies have in common is that they avoid good stories like the plague.

Fernando Meirelles follows City of God and The Constant Gardener with Blindness, an art-house version of a disaster movie. Adapted from Jose Saramago's novel, it opens with the world's population losing its sight, one by one. The epidemic has no known cause, but it's fiercely contagious, so the sufferers are rounded up and quarantined. One of the only people who's immune, Julianne Moore, pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband, Mark Ruffalo, and the two of them are locked away in an asylum, alongside 100 strangers, with no supervision, and precious little food or contact with the outside world. Before you can say Lord of the Flies, this kingdom of the blind has deteriorated into an excrement-smeared hellhole ruled by thieves and rapists.

It's more of an endurance test than a film. City of God and The Constant Gardener were hardly feelgood, it's true, but they were bursting with the colour and energy of real people in real places. Blindness, by contrast, is a slow, solemn allegory about unnamed characters in an unspecified city, and it's too far removed from reality to have much power. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I doubt society would break down as appallingly as it does here, or that Moore would stand by and watch it happen. Blindness is set in a bubble of pessimism that I was happy to leave.

Still, Conversations with My Gardener perked me up. It stars Daniel Auteuil as a painter who returns from Paris to his rural childhood home, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin as the long-lost schoolmate he hires to dig his vegetable patch. The title says it all: most of the film really does consist of two grumpy oldish men chatting, without any contrived conflicts or sentimental outpourings. It should be a snooze, but it's edited so nimbly that it never drags, and the conversations themselves are profound and affecting, however insignificant they appear on the surface. And, of course, they take place in the kind of sun-kissed Eden you see only in French films.

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Nicholas Barber