Divine Intervention (15) <br></br>Metropolis (PG) <br></br>The Master of Disguise (PG) <br></br>The Transporter (15)

A strange, ambiguous and rather maddening rumination on Arab-Israeli tensions

Elia Suleiman's new film Divine Intervention is a strange, ambiguous and ultimately rather maddening rumination on Arab-Israeli tensions. Subtitled "A Chronicle of Love and Pain", the first part is set in Nazareth and plays virtually as a silent movie while it pieces together a collage of urban strife: beatings, bombings and shootings are a fact of life, even in the quietest suburbs, yet interspersed with the violence is an irrepressible streak of absurdity. A boy playing keepy-uppy on the street finds his football stabbed by a curmudgeonly neighbour. A woman walks through a roadblock despite being menaced by armed soldiers, and as she crosses over the border the watchtower behind her suddenly collapses.

The director himself stars as a silent Keatonesque observer, his attachments divided between his ailing father and a beautiful Palestinian woman (Manal Khader) with whom he enjoys wordless, hand-holding trysts in a car parked at a Jerusalem checkpoint. Is he being romantic, or whimsical, or subversive when he releases a large red balloon emblazoned with Arafat's face and watches it bob gently over the bemused border guards? Nothing in Suleiman's impassive gaze tips us the wink. The film is full of such arresting images, though it's difficult to tell just how seriously it wants us to take them.

The coolness of tone is baffling, particularly in the late fantasy sequence where an Israeli firing squad is flamboyantly dispatched by a female Palestinian ninja, and a bizarre allusion to the crucifixion tests the boundaries of the film's studied neutrality. Divine Intervention offers interpretative challenges that some may feel, by the end, are an unsatisfactory substitute for the staider pleasures of character and narrative development.

First seen in 1926, the restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis comes at us with the dire force of a premonition. As a fable of tyranny and idealism it isn't very sophisticated, but its crowd scenes and monumental city-scapes eerily foreshadow both the Nazi rallies and what Albert Speer's Berlin might have looked like under the Thousand Year Reich. The images of slave workers filing along in meek subjection are hideously suggestive of the camps. (Hitler, it's no surprise to learn, was an admirer of Lang.) Yet its tale of revolution is stirringly optimistic. The tyrant boss who rules Metropolis is scheming with a mad inventor to crush the workers, while the boss's son and his spitfire girlfriend want to mobilise the downtrodden proletariat: as the intertitles reiterate, the "head" of the ruling classes and the "hands" of the workforce can only be reconciled by the heart's goodwill. Modern audiences may baulk at the clunkiness of the message, but no one will be unmoved by the stupendous Expressionist design or Lang's visionary grandeur.

It's been a while since we heard from Dana Carvey, Mike Myers's geeky Wayne's World cohort, and after The Master of Disguise it won't be long enough till we hear from him again. He plays a doltish Italian waiter who inherits the family talent for mimickry – and also, it seems, their unbelievably lame sense of humour. The plot involves Carvey donning one disguise after another in his attempt to bring down a superthief, played by Star Trek android Brent Spiner. The latter may now wish to retreat to the stolid embrace of the Enterprise, where he isn't required to do exactly the same fart gag five times over. As for Carvey, there really isn't a disguise to cover this sort of inadequacy.

In the preposterous action thriller The Transporter, Jason Statham throws his black Mercedes around the streets in a would-be imitation of Ryan O'Neal's getaway expert in The Driver. Well, he can dream. He plays a hardnut courier who operates according to three rules. One: never change the deal. Two: don't ask names. Three: never look in the package. Needless to say, he breaks all three in short order and suddenly finds his Riviera bolt-hole under attack from thugs with machine guns and heat-seeking missiles – but our hero can kick like Van Damme, so everything's just fine. Statham might have profited from a fourth rule: don't switch accents mid-movie. He starts out with a vaguely American burr, then drifts towards the mid-Atlantic before settling on tried- and-tested London geezer. Personally, I'd sooner use FedEx.