Monster's Ball (15)<br></br>Unfaithful (15)

There are several great things in Monster's Ball which somehow fail to cohere into a great film. It is sparely written, directed with commendable restraint and revolves around two finely shaded performances, one of them an Oscar winner. Yet there's something of a mismatch about it: its harshly realistic presentation of life in the dusty American South feels at odds with the mechanical contrivances of its plotting. It's a picture with a schizoid soul: Greek tragedy locked in a struggle with Hollywood wishful thinking.

At one level the film is an astonishingly bleak portrait of parents and children. Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton) is a Georgia corrections officer supervising a team of warders on Death Row, just as his elderly father Buck (Peter Boyle) did before him. Buck is now on an iron lung back home, but his Southern-fried racism still burns bright. Hank's own boy, Sonny (Heath Ledger) is also trying to keep up the family tradition, but he has no stomach for prison work, nor can he help being friendly with two black kids from the neighbouring farm. Perhaps the only thing Hank and Sonny do have in common is the occasional late-night transaction with the local prostitute.

The story of another unhappy family runs parallel and eventually collides with Hank's. Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry), a waitress with money problems, has just paid her last visit to her ex-husband Lawrence (Sean Combs), a killer due for execution that evening. While the condemned man waits in his barred cell, he tenderly sketches the faces of his two guards – Hank and Sonny. The fate of these prison drawings will overshadow the whole film. Leticia is a desperate, unhappy woman who abuses her young son because he has eaten his way into obesity, and because she has boozed herself into addiction. A chance meeting brings Hank and Leticia together; what supposedly binds them is a traumatic loss which neither seems morally equipped to confront alone.

The German-born, New York-based director Marc Forster handles this in a laconic, slow-burning style, and the Hopperesque world of late-night diners, lonesome motel rooms and empty spaces is broodingly shot by Roberto Schaefer. (The early prison scenes, such as the condemned man's head being shaved, train an almost documentary eye on the institutional). You can also admire the way the screenwriters, Milo Addica and Will Rokos, catch that expressively stoical tone of Southern talk. "You must love him very much", someone says to Hank as he gazes at his old man. "No, I don't", Hank replies. "He's my father". That sense of resignation to one's patrimony – of a son realising what a monster he has for a dad – briefly recalls the Nick Nolte-James Coburn relationship from Paul Schrader's harrowing Affliction.

Where Monster's Ball differs is in its protagonist's too-easy escape from the trammels of his past. Much as a fellow might be soothed by the charms of a waitress who looks like Halle Berry, I don't think that fellow would be Hank Grotowski; or if he were, the process of eradicating his inbred racist instincts would surely be a matter of years rather than days. The script seems to be pulling in opposite directions: beginning as a model of understatement, it then loses its head as a romance-across-the-racial-divide. Unlikely coincidences and handy evictions take over as the propulsion of plot. This is a pity, because both leads invest these damaged lives with a hard-won credibility. Halle Berry does an affecting turn as a woman clawing her way out of a long cycle of abuse only to wonder whether she's just swapped hers for somebody else's; Thornton, as the man of constant sorrow, rides a character arc so steep it's a wonder he doesn't get vertigo. For a character who can stand at the graveside of his own kin and say, "All I wanna hear is the dirt hitting that box", he effects a remarkably swift passage towards the light. It's to his credit that he makes it as convincing as he does.

Adrian Lyne has made erotic melodrama his speciality, and it seems to get more tasteful by the picture. Whatever you thought of Fatal Attraction, it at least had a feral sort of energy. His latest, Unfaithful, is actually a remake of Claude Chabrol's La Femme Infidele, but Lyne's adman sensibility clutters the frame with "lifestyle" trappings and drains it of suspense.

Housewife Connie (Diane Lane) appears to enjoy a happy marriage in an affluent suburb of upstate New York until one day an ill wind blows her into SoHo and a chance meeting with a hunky antiquarian book dealer (Olivier Martinez, going heavy on the Gallic charm). After some dilly-dallying an affair begins – she knows it's wrong, but it's much too strong to let go. Richard Gere, playing the cuckolded husband for a change, senses something's up when fancy shoes and exotic lingerie start appearing in her wardrobe.

Lyne directs this with such portentous gravity you'd think he'd just invented adultery, and even when the thrillerish plot kicks in there's no change in pace. In fact, the only reason to stay with it is Diane Lane's detailed performance. She played another wandering wife in a small, overlooked movie, A Walk on the Moon, some years back, and brings that marvellous poignancy of a woman clutching at freedom before the doors of middle-age close upon her.

One wordless sequence of her sitting alone on the train home deserves note, her face a register of guilt, joy and panic as she recalls the irrevocable step she has taken in SoHo that afternoon – the way she makes laughing and crying indistinguishable is an extraordinary sight. Once back within the immaculately furnished confines of the family home, Unfaithful loses what small urgency it once had, but Lane's virtuoso acting is something to cherish.