Pot Luck (15), *<br></br>Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress (12a), **<br></br>Darkness Falls (15), *<br></br>Old School (15), *

Cédric Klapisch's ensemble comedy Pot Luck centres upon a gaggle of students flat-sharing in Barcelona on a European exchange scheme. Into this multinational household (it includes Spanish, Danish, German, Italian, Belgian and British flatmates) comes young Parisian, Xavier (Romain Duris), whose cultural reference points are instantly identified as "Asterix and cheese". The main drama concerns Xavier's romantic oscillation between a diffident married woman (Judith Godrèche) and his girlfriend back home (Audrey Tautou), though sympathy for his dilemma is somewhat undermined by the suspicion that Xavier is actually a bit of a jerk – he yells like a stroppy adolescent at his perfectly nice ma, and maunders self-pityingly over a break-up that's of his own making. Klapisch doesn't help matters by clipping on arbitrary subplots, indulging some very lazy comedy and, worst of all, introducing into the house an English youth (Kevin Bishop) who's a charmless, racist oik. I know that football yobbery has earned us a sorry reputation abroad, but this amounts to a national slur.

Adapted from his own bestselling novel, Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress draws on the author's own experience as a victim of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In 1971, as part of the "re-education" programme, 17-year-olds Ma (Liu Ye) and Luo (Chen Kun), both sons of doctors, are sent to a remote mountain village in Sichuan where they are forced into hard labour. Yet their intellectual leanings will not be entirely suppressed: they enchant the illiterate villagers by recounting the plots of old movies, and by Ma's playing of a Mozart violin concerto, which the tyrannical village chief deems suitable on being told that its title is "Mozart thinks of Chairman Mao". The boys' travails are considerably lightened by their friendship with a young seamstress (Zhou Xun), to whom they read from an illicit stash of foreign fiction, starting with Balzac and moving on to Flaubert. The film surveys the steep mountain landscape with a lyrical affection, and despite the hardships visited upon the two teenagers the tone is unmistakably nostalgic. The pace drags a little at times, and the romantic rivalry between the boys is insufficiently explored, but as a homily on the consolations of art it hits the spot.

In the eponymous town of Darkness Falls a killer ghost known as the Tooth Fairy (pictured below) is at large, preying on kids who leave their broken molars under the pillow. Kyle (Chaney Kley) is oppressed by the memory of this witchy avenger, who visited him one night years ago but succeeded only in murdering his mother. Now Kyle is back in town to protect the brother of his childhood sweetheart (Emma Caulfield) against the same "night terrors" induced by the Tooth Fairy's reappearance. Sadly, the film-makers lack the resources of wit and invention to lend the shocks anything out of the ordinary; shadows loom, curtains rustle and unearthly moans rise up on the soundtrack. There's even recourse to that dopey horror trick of The Quiet Moment, wherein a character, after an especially close shave, will catch his breath and say, "Don't worry, we're safe in the car" – and a predatory black claw will suddenly plunge through the roof to yank him away, screaming. Warmly unrecommended.

The frat house comedy Old School is directed by a man also listed in the cast credits as "Gang Bang Guy", which should give fair warning of what's to follow. Todd Phillips, for it is he, picks up from the buffoonery of his previous outing Road Trip, only now his heroes – Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn – are all in their thirties. Wilson has left his cheating wife (Juliette Lewis – remember her?) and moved to a house near a college campus where he starts up a fraternity for the dumb, the lame and the frankly ancient. The standard of gags is pretty low (sex, drunkenness) though that doesn't mean your funny bone will remain untapped. Will Ferrell, the least famous of the three, gets the most mileage from the slapstick, doing a beer-monster streak through town and generally paying honour to stupidity in a manner not witnessed since Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, the ne plus ultra of the New Moronism.