Simone<br></br>Possession<br></br>K-19: The Widowmaker<br></br>High Crimes<br></br>The Great Mogul<br></br>Halloween resurrection

Synthespians, poet lesbians and doomed Russian submariners

Oliver Reed's performance in Gladiator was his greatest in years, which is quite something considering he was dead for half of it. The scenes he'd shot before his death were cut up and rearranged with digital trickery – so how long until actors can be replaced outright by lifelike computer graphics?

In Simone (PG), the answer is no time at all. Al Pacino stars as Viktor Taransky, a pretentious movie director who is sick of pandering to his leading ladies' egos. The answer to his prayers is a secret computer programme that will put a virtual actress on screen at the touch of a button. At last, Taransky has the obedient, tantrum-free puppet he's always wanted. But when Simone (short for Simulation One) becomes an Oscar-winning megastar, Taransky fears that he's dependent on her for his existence, and not the other way round.

Simone was written and directed by Andew Niccol, who scripted The Truman Show and Gattaca, two films that extrapolated their stories from current hot topics – reality TV and genetic engineering. Simone fits into the same niche, but it doesn't take its conceit as far as those other films did. After all, we're already used to computer-generated dinosaurs and superheroes, and Simone isn't much further advanced than any of those. One problem is that the world-conquering "synthespian" is played by a model, Rachel Roberts. As digital actors go, she's not much better than Jar Jar Binks.

Still, the film's concept is strong enough to support a light comedy, and it's amusing when it jabs at a movie industry as fake as Simone herself.

Unfortunately, Niccol sometimes thinks he's creating a profound allegory, so he has Taransky expounding his mystical themes in soliloquies about "the death of the real". Not even Al Pacino can breathe life into these speeches. Maybe a few digital touches would have helped.

Possession (12) sounds like the sort of imaginary film that Simone might include as a satirical joke. A Booker-winning AS Byatt novel adapted by the twisted Neil LaBute? What next? James Ivory directing Bret Easton Ellis? It's quite a shock, then, to report that Possession has none of the bile of In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours. It's a pleasant, mild piece of Sunday evening TV, set among old stone bridges and stately homes, summer meadows and crackling log fires. There's a bodice or two, but no actual bodice-ripping.

As in the book, two academics are on the trail of the letters and diaries which might prove that a famously uxorious Victorian poet had an affair with a famously lesbian Victorian poetess. In flashback we see what happened a century ago, with Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle as the poets. In the present day, Gwyneth Paltrow does her posh English voice again, while her fellow bookworm is played by Aaron Eckhart. The character is a downtrodden Brit in the novel, whereas Eckhart is an American with a washboard stomach and a Desperate Dan jaw. He doesn't look like the literary type to me, although admirers of last week's Booker winner, Yann Martel, might beg to differ.

Byatt's philosophical ruminations have all been lost in translation, leaving LaBute's thesis that lovers today are kept apart by their own neuroses in much the same way as lovers of earlier generations were separated by social boundaries. This questionable point is illustrated by having Paltrow and Eckhart recite clumsy spiels about how they can't possibly have a relationship, only for them to change their minds when it suits the plot.

K-19: The Widowmaker (12A) is "inspired by the true story" (as the almost meaningless phrase goes) of a Russian nuclear submarine's ill-fated maiden voyage in 1961. The construction of the vessel claims so many lives that it's nicknamed "the Widowmaker" before it leaves port, and when the crew's beloved captain, Liam Neeson, declares that it's not seaworthy, the authorities respond by demoting him and appointing the despotic Harrison Ford – more Darth Vader than Han Solo – in his place. Then the nuclear reactor springs a leak...

Kathryn Bigelow's film is sunk by a final half-hour of improbable heroics and sentimental eulogies, but up till then it's a steely, unsettling thriller. I can't decide whether it's commendable of Hollywood to make a film in which communist Russians are the heroes, or whether the producers just couldn't bear the thought of a defective submarine being American-made.

High Crimes (12A) is a courtroom drama starring Ashley Judd as a San Francisco lawyer whose husband is suddenly arrested by the military police.

He'd forgotten to mention to her that he used to be a marine, and that he went AWOL when he was accused of massacring civilians in El Salvador. Judd defends him with the assistance of Morgan Freeman's wily old-timer. There's an interesting question somewhere in the film about how well we can ever know anyone else, but it soon gets lost in an ocean of red herrings.

The Great Mogul (PG) is a proto-Bollywood saga from 1960 that luxuriates in poetic dialogue and opulent imagery. It was 17 years in the making and it's three hours in the watching, so make sure you're at the peak of physical and mental health before seeing it. Halloween Resurrection (15) isn't just the worst film in the series. It's the worst film of the year.

n.barber@independent.co.uk