Hart's War (15) <br></br>Pollock (18) <br></br> Biggie & Tupac (15)

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Gregory Hoblit's Second World War prison drama Hart's War is a mixed bag; it's exciting, and later absorbing, principally because its investigation of racism in the military is not a subject Hollywood has previously been eager to explore. If it were possible to overhaul the final 15 minutes, when the plot performs an outrageous U-turn, it would be a film one could recommend quite cheerfully.

Colin Farrell stars as American Lt Tommy Hart, a senator's son whose cushy desk job in Intelligence suddenly takes a less favourable turn when he's ambushed by Germans in a wintry Belgian forest and, after savage interrogation, consigned to a POW camp. "For you, Tommy, the war is over," as the sneering Nazi might say, only for Hart it isn't.

A black US fighter pilot Lt Scott (Terrence Howard) is up on a charge for murdering a good ole Southern racist (Cole Hauser), and it amuses the camp commandant to let the Americans stage a court martial, with Col William McNamara (Bruce Willis) as presiding judge – and former law student Hart as the accused's attorney.

Hoblit's screenwriters, Billy Ray and Terry George, invest this internal conflict with unexpected thoughtfulness. As the beleaguered airman explains to Hart, American racism is so entrenched that, back home in the South, German POWs are allowed to visit cinemas and diners forbidden to the black man, even one in uniform. Terrence Howard's slow-burning scepticism carries a powerful charge, and would be the film's best performance were it not for Marcel Iures as the commandant, Harvard-educated (like Hart) and not unregenerately evil (for a Nazi). But the final stretch of plot lets the film down: it is as if, having confronted its race prejudice, Hart's War then felt obliged to bang the drum for the countervailing forces of patriotism and self-sacrifice. America has to be the hero after all.

Pollock is a dour and often painful biopic of the man reckoned to be the greatest American painter of the 20th century. He was also one of its meanest boozers, and wrestled with the addiction for most of his short life. Fortunately for him another painter, Lee Krasner (Marcia GayHarden), discovers him early in Greenwich village, sets up home and plays handmaiden to his art. As played by Ed Harris, Pollock is a brooding, volatile figure, always on the brink of some terrible rage. Even when he's blazing a comet-trail through the New York art scene of the Forties, he seems alienated from family and colleagues – pissing in the fireplace of his patron Peggy Guggenheim maybe wasn't the smartest thing he ever did.

Harris also directs, and looks more comfortable when his camera simply holds its gaze on the painter or his canvas; the art talk ("Jackson, are you experimenting with surrealism?") sounds earnest and clunky, even when it comes from Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor), Pollock's most discerning critic and champion. The film doesn't pretend to know where the inspiration ends and the psychopathology begins, and Harris is a black hole of pure misery. Jennifer Connelly as his last girlfriend briefly oxygenates the film in much the same way she did A Beautiful Mind.

I have friends who think documentary film-maker Nick Broomfield is a genius, but aside from his wonderfully puckish portrait of the Afrikaan racist Eugene Terre'Blanche, I'm not convinced. Once you become accustomed to his schtick – a bumbling mixture of false starts and dead ends – the substance of his films always looks thin, and that flat, public-school drone of his grates mightily on the nerves.

For much of his latest film, Biggie and Tupac, about the unsolved murder of one-time friends and rap stars Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, I saw nothing to change my mind, but then his investigation suddenly heats up and real evidence of a conspiracy glimmers through the murk: the villains appear to be certain renegade members of the LAPD in cahoots with rap mogul Suge Knight, whose record label owed Tupac millions of dollars.

The jailyard interview with Knight is the film's big coup – one can almost feel the camera frozen with fear – though it's in the detective work (mugshots of Tupac's possible killer are brought to light) where the film feels most persuasive. Not genius, but not bad either.