Windtalkers (15) <br></br>The Sweetest Thing (15) <br></br>Kin (15) <Br></Br>Pluto Nash (PG) <br></br>Scratch (15) <br></br>All About Lily Chou Chou (15)

In its graphic depiction of battlefield carnage Windtalkers does for the war in the Pacific what Saving Private Ryan did for the D-Day landings. Directed by Hong Kong action maestro, John Woo, the violence is relentless even by his standard, pinning you back in your seat for what feels like hours at a time. It stars Nicolas Cage as Joe Enders, a decorated Marine with damaged hearing and a bad case of the flashbacks – he's fighting to exorcise the guilt of being the sole survivor from his previous tour of duty, and he won't let anyone get close to him.

Joe's new assignment is to act as the bodyguard of one of the Navajo marines, Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), whose native language is the basis of a vital code that's indecipherable to the Japanese. The twist is that Joe might have to kill his charge to prevent the code from falling into enemy hands. (The Navajo codetalkers were acknowledged as a key element of America's eventual victory in the Pacific, though their role was kept secret until the late Sixties.) The bulk of the action concerns the war of attrition waged on the island of Saipan, and focuses specifically on the platoon to which Joe and Ben are attached. There's some flagrant sentimentalising of the marines, which is standard for the genre, and some revisionist fudging of the Native American presence in the army – one senses that the redneck racist (Noah Emmerich) who's on Ben's case was not the exception, as here, but the norm. Windtalkers is a well-made and indeed well-meaning epic, though as an investigation of the psychological trauma wrought by war it's not nearly as thoughtful or penetrating as Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

The Sweetest Thing is a sex comedy determined to prove that, when it comes to dirty talk and disinhibition, women reign supreme (as if we didn't know). Cameron Diaz, who's already won her spurs in this field with There's Something About Mary, plays a romantic opportunist who, with her two pals (Selma Blair and Christina Applegate), believes there's no such thing as Mr Right – just Mr Right Now. Cue jokes about blow jobs, embarrassing stains and the veneration of the penis, the last of which is (ahem) extended into a public song and dance number. Such upfront ribaldry is probably a day at the office for screenwriter Nancy M Pimental, who honed her craft on South Park, though judging from the quietness of the press screening I'd venture that none of it is as funny as she thinks it is. The Farrelly Brothers can rest easy.

Who is poaching the elephants in the remote Namibian desert? That's what Anna (Miranda Otto), wildlife conservationist and heroine of Kin, wants to know. What we want to know, however, is the precise nature of her relationship with Marius (Chris Chameleon), the possessive brother who's plainly miffed about Anna's burgeoning romance with visiting American lawyer Stone (Isaiah Washington). Is there a whiff of incest here, or does he just like brushing his sister's hair? Unfortunately it's the poaching question that occupies the bulk of Elaine Proctor's earnest and slightly dull movie about "personal growth", while the tension between the siblings, all the creepier for Marius being a Lutheran pastor, fizzles away.

Cheap-looking and shoddily constructed, Pluto Nash is an Eddie Murphy vehicle that simply isn't roadworthy. Murphy plays the eponymous Pluto, a nightclub owner on the Moon, dateline 2087, which looks suspiciously like a couple of soundstages rented by the hour. The strong cast (Randy Quaid, Jay Mohr, Joe Pantoliano) pretends not to notice the absence of a single decent gag in Neil Cuthbert's script, while director Ron Underwood tries to crank up the miserable caper plotting to an acceptable speed. A deeply unfunny cameo by John Cleese as a cyber-chauffeur (don't ask) reflects the big-name slumming that the film-makers evidently hope will excuse the shortcomings elsewhere. It doesn't.

I was hoping that Scratch might do for the history of scratching/hip hop what the recent Dogtown and Z-Boys did for skateboarding. Yet whereas the latter made its subject fascinating even to those who'd never done a wheelie in their life, Doug Pray's homage to the DJs who pioneered their own sound from the "accident" of scratching records left me unimpressed. Yes, it's quite interesting to hear how many DJs took their initial inspiration from Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", and I accept its "importance" as a subculture, but scratch as an art form still sounds like what it is – a manufactured synthesis of other records' beats – and no amount of enthusiastic reminiscence convinced me I'd been missing something.

Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou Chou is a tale of adolescent anguish and popstar worship that's heavy on atmosphere and light on coherence. Lonely teenager Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) finds refuge from the everyday cruelties of school bullying in a website dedicated to his music idol, Lily Chou Chou. Via his online moniker "Philia" he forms a close friendship with another Lily admirer, "Blue Cat", whose real identity becomes the main burden of interest. While Noboru Shinoda's photography achieves a mysterious kind of shimmer, the movie is far too languorous (146 mins) in tracing its various antagonisms and insufficiently engaging to make us care either way.