Spellbound<br></br>Cabin Fever<br></br>Concert For George

How do you spell 'work of genius'?

Another film about America's fixation with competitive pageants, Spellbound (U) is like Best in Show and Drop Dead Gorgeous, except that it's more gripping, more disturbing and funnier than either of them. It's also a documentary. Nominated for an Oscar, its subject is the National Spelling Bee, an annual event which sees nine million schoolchildren entering local heats, and just 249 reaching the finals in Washington DC, where they have the pleasure of sitting on a stage in a hotel conference room, and being asked to stand up in turn and deconstruct such Stephen Fry-stumping vocables as cephalalgia and haruspex. Two days of sudden-death spelling later, 248 children go home disappointed.

Jeff Blitz, the director of Spellbound, meets eight of the finalists and their families in the weeks before they go to DC. It's to his credit - and to his relief, no doubt - that one of those eight children ends up as the overall winner. It's to his credit, too, that he shows us great swathes of America that are almost never represented in the cinema. Angela's Mexican father is a ranch hand who can't speak English; Neil's Indian parents test him on 7,000 words daily and employ French, Spanish and German tutors to teach him foreign derivations. Ashley is a black girl who lives with her single mother in the Washington projects; Emily from Connecticut goes to pony club and choir practice, but sees more of the au pair than of her parents. Some of the children you feel desperately sorry for. For others, the Spelling Bee might actually be beneficial.

Blitz leaves these judgements to us. There's darkness and subversiveness there if you're looking for them, but the film doesn't take the Louis Theroux/ Ruby Wax route of appalled mockery, instead raising questions about how childhood aspiration should be fostered. What's clear is that such contests are part of the process that separates America's underclass from its elite. Blitz includes shots of two of the signs erected in the spellers' home towns to encourage them in the Bee. One reads "Congradulations", the other misspells "champ". For every child in the US who can spell cephalalgia, there are thousands who can't spell at all.

Eli Roth, the director and co-writer of Cabin Fever (15), is on a mission to liberate the horror genre from sanitised post-Scream postmodernism and restore it to the gory glory days of The Evil Dead and A Nightmare On Elm Street. He gets off to a flying start by depositing his teenaged heroes in a log cabin, but he trips straightaway by making those heroes so one-dimensional they might as well have been named Sweet Girl, Sweet Boy, Babe, Hunk and Moron. Still, the menace they're up against has a little more identity. On their first evening in the woods, a man with less than the standard amount of skin knocks on their door, begging for medical attention.

A bacterium has opened bleeding sores all over his body, but the kids, afraid of being infected themselves, send him packing. Nonetheless, the next day one of them needs a bumper dose of Savlon. With necrotising fasciitis nibbling the flesh of thousands of people every year, Cabin Fever is well-timed, but it doesn't capitalise on our unease.

The microbe in the film takes a long, long while to do any serious damage, and as its victims don't seem to suffer too much in the meantime, we could be watching Attack of the Chickenpox. To compensate, Roth keeps shifting the danger to other sources - a savage dog, some gun-toting rednecks - but the proliferation of threats divides the terror instead of multiplying it.

Many of George Harrison's best friends gathered in the Albert Hall last November to celebrate his life and music. Concert For George (PG) records the highlights, with some rehearsal footage and backstage chat mixed in. The line-up includes the two extant Beatles, and the show's musical director Eric Clapton, and for comic relief, there are two songs from the Monty Python team, featuring Tom Hanks on backing vocals. But even in that company, the person you can't take your eyes off is Harrison's son Dhani. Strumming along on acoustic guitar, he's the spitting image of his dad.

n.barber@independent.co.uk