Everything Put Together<br></br>Betty Fisher And Other Stories<br></br>Imposter

The success of Monster's Ball has prompted the release in this country of Marc Forster's debut from 2000, Everything Put Together, an edgy and sobering portrait of bereavement. Angie (Radha Mitchell) is an expectant mother safely cocooned within her pleasant California suburb where baby-showers and barbecues are the order of the day. Then disaster strikes: Angie's newborn baby dies, and she and her husband Russ (Justin Louis) are plunged into a black hole of misery, unable to comprehend (like any other parents) why they should be the chosen victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But the real theme of the film is the sudden alienating effect that the death has on her friends, who withdraw from Angie as if she were a contagion in herself.

Forster, shooting on digital video, lends the film an almost documentary rawness, and has an instinctive feel for making apparently ordinary spaces feel oppressive. The script, however, hugely overdoes the pariah-effect the loss of a child might have: Angie's girlfriends aren't just unsisterly, they're a lame caricature of social squeamishness, while phonecalls from her distant, high-achieving mother are too obvious in their can't-talk-now brusqueness. One feels the film on the verge of drawing us a diagram. Much the best thing here is Radha Mitchell's performance, her soft features an eloquent negotiation between distress and stoicism. That she accepts her friends' exclusion so quietly is far more affecting than if she'd turned to ranting or sobbing.

Bereavement is also central to Claude Miller's Betty Fisher and Other Stories, a strange and compelling mosaic of Parisian life in which class and criminality overlap to tragicomic effect. Based on Ruth Rendell's novel Tree of Hands, it considers motherhood and its power to harm or heal. Betty (Sandrine Kiberlain) is a successful novelist whose unstable mother Margot (Nicole Garcia) re-enters her life and, in a single act of madness, saves her from suicidal despair. Meanwhile, in a nearby council estate, working-class mother Carole (Mathilde Seigner) turns tricks and shoplifts, then suddenly finds herself in the media spotlight when her four-year-old son Jose is abducted.

Gradually the story fans out to encompass the various boyfriends and exes of Betty and Carole, and the unremarked connections that flicker between them. The most entertaining of these vignettes concerns Alex (Edouard Baer), a weakly handsome gigolo who sniffs a scam when he finds himself house-sitting for a wealthy client: what if he were to sell the house and pocket the commission, cash up front?

Tonally the stories are quite different, yet Miller confidently interweaves and clinches them in a finale of mostly calamitous ironies (Kubrick's The Killing is plainly referenced). He likes to deal with the past elliptically, inviting the audience to put the pieces together. An opening subtitle, for example, defines the blood disease porphyria and the propensity towards "acts of violence" in its sufferers: cut to a mother and daughter on a train, one minute in cosy togetherness, the next a pair of scissors flashing through the air. The film keeps wrongfooting us, testing our moral responses until we feel queasy with indecision. The kidnapping of a boy is an indefensible transgression, of course, until we realise that the child is in safer hands than he would have been with his mother. Hitchcock, you feel, would approve.

Based on a 1950s short story by Philip K Dick, Impostor is a better than average sci-fi chase movie, impressively designed if not quite so smartly scripted (four people worked on the screenplay). The year is 2079, and Earth, threatened by alien invaders, lies beneath the protective bulwark of a domed force field. Through this brave new world stride munitions scientist Spencer Olham (Gary Sinise) and his doctor wife Maya (Madeleine Stowe), whose hospital treats the afflicted rabble underclass beyond the city-state's cordon sanitaire – it's a bit like LA without the sunshine. On the day of a top-level meeting with a political bigwig, Olham is suddenly arrested by a security major (Vincent D'Onofrio) and accused of being an android assassin, the sort that infiltrate the Earth concealing megaton bombs. Only one thing for it: our hero must go on the run and find some way of proving his innocence.

One has only to look at an earlier Philip K Dick adaptation, Blade Runner, for the model, both in terms of plot (alien replicants hunted by humans) and of design, a dank, crepuscular milieu that marries dilapidated architecture with state-of-the-art technology. The director Gary Fleder hasn't the swagger of Ridley Scott, though the film delivers a fair quota of pulpy thrills, and its storyline is booby-trapped with uncertainty: we can never be absolutely sure that Olham isn't the fiendish impostor the authorities claim him to be, and Gary Sinise's somewhat shifty features are precisely the sort to keep us guessing. A vein of moral ambiguity throbs beneath the narrative's cat-and-mouse games, and proposes, not for the first time in this week's movies, the disquieting notion that good can sometimes flourish directly from evil.