Dear Wendy (15); The Devil's Rejects (18); Stealth (12A); Herbie: Fully Loaded (U)

Dear Wendy (15) *

Thomas Vinterberg scored a deserved hit with his 1998 film Festen, then slumped with the abysmal futuristic fable It's All About Love. I'm afraid the downward spiral continues with this, a bizarre allegory on American gun culture in which Jamie Bell stars as a youth who rejects the hardscrabble mining life of his town and forms a gang of "pacifist" gunslingers. That the film is written by fellow Dogme-tist Lars von Trier should give fair warning: whatever point he wants to make about the " right to bear arms" question is bent out of shape by the heavy-handed treatment and smugly absurdist tone. That's two duffers on the trot from this director, who needs seriously to rediscover why he wanted to make movies in the first place.

The Devil's Rejects (18) **

This is the rock musician-turned-director Rob Zombie's sequel to his cult horror hit, House of 1,000 Corpses, and he reproduces its defiant scuzziness in every particular. It's a psychobilly road movie about a family of serial killers, the Fireflys, who take their name from Groucho Marx and style from Charles Manson, raising hell around the rusted dereliction of the Deep South, with a sheriff (William Forsythe) in hot pursuit. This is little more than a moronic fiesta of savagery, but I'm afraid it's pretty watchable for all that.

Stealth (12A) *

This is Top Gun on steroids. Rob Cohen is the man responsible for The Fast and the Furious and xXx, so it would be unwise to expect anything approaching "stealth", but this film flies beneath even his low standards. A trio of élite Navy pilots (Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx) are required to prevent a world war breaking out when an experimental unmanned fighter jet goes haywire. The CGI pyrotechnics will bore anyone who is not a gadget freak, while the gung-ho celebration of America as the self-appointed global police force will offend just about everyone outside of the Pentagon.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (U) *

The cute VW Beetle, aka the Love Bug, makes one of the least exciting comebacks in movie history. As the girl-racer taking on the boys, Lindsay Lohan displays none of the charm she brought to Mean Girls, while Matt Dillon as her track rival should have a word with his agent. The only noteworthy feature is all the weird innuendo over the sexual potency of a car.