Divine Intervention<br></br>The Transporter<br></br>The Master of Disguise<br></br>Metropolis

Violent fantasy ? will this really help Arab/Israeli tension?

A man waves to his neighbours as he drives down the hill from his home, but as he does so he swears at them under his breath. Another man lobs his rubbish sacks over a wall into the garden next door, and then is offended when the recipient has the gall to throw them back. A group of men reacts to the sight of a snake by bludgeoning it, shooting it and setting it on fire. A boy's soccer practice is cut short when someone plunges a knife into his football.

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention (15) is subtitled A Chronicle of Love and Pain, but it's more a chronicle of pettiness and disgruntlement. The winner of the International Critics' Prize at last year's Cannes festival, Divine Intervention opens in Nazareth, where Suleiman was born, and where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, with limited civil rights.

The film is how Suleiman sees their maddeningly circumscribed existence. There's no plot, just a series of grimly funny, almost wordless sketches, executed with such precision that they could be by Jacques Tati, or by Chris Morris in collaboration with Buster Keaton.

After half an hour it seems as if these vignettes might coalesce into a story, as the setting moves to a checkpoint on the edge of Jerusalem, and Suleiman himself appears as a stone-faced observer. But instead of trying to alter or escape his situation, the Suleiman character retreats into fantasy sequences. In one of these, his girlfriend is so gorgeous as she strides through the checkpoint that the guards hold their fire and their look-out post crumples at the sight of her. In other, more problematic fantasies, she becomes an arab ninja, vaporising a phalanx of Israeli gunmen with her super powers; and Suleiman tosses a peach stone out of his car window and blows up a tank in one of the all-time great movie explosions.

Exhilarating as these segments are, they don't stop Divine Intervention being a deeply depressing film. If Suleiman's best riposte to Arab/Israeli tension is the false catharsis of violent daydreams, then what hope is the viewer meant to come away with? Even the film's fragmentary structure can be read as an admission of hopelessness: life in an occupied territory is so restricted that there's no room for a 90-minute narrative. Maybe Suleiman identifies with the car driver who mutters insults at the start of the film, knowing that no one can hear him.

Jason Statham's main thespian achievement in The Transporter (15) is resisting the temptation to grin like a fool. He's one of Guy Ritchie's regulars, but up until now, he's been better known as Kelly Brook's boyfriend than as an actor, so he must have been over the moon to get the lead role in an action movie produced and co-written by Luc Besson. You have to be pleased for him, if only because you can imagine how jealous his old mate Vinnie Jones must be.

Statham plays Frank, a retired US soldier, although his accent is so indistinct that one leading American critic didn't even notice it, and commented blithely that Frank used to serve in "British Special Forces". Wherever he came from, he now lives in the south of France, where he keeps himself in seafood by working as a glorified delivery boy for the underworld. For the right price, he'll transport anything or anyone anywhere, no questions asked. Even when he's burning rubber away from the scene of the crime with a trio of bank robbers in the passenger seats, he's as unconcerned about risk and morality as he would be on a milk round.

You've got to pay the bills somehow.

That seems to have been Luc Besson's perspective, anyway. When Frank discovers that the hold-all in the boot of his BMW contains a young Chinese woman, a film that began as an amusing caper in the spirit of The Italian Job turns into a Jean-Claude Van Damme martial arts rumble. Can a man run faster than a heat-seeking missile? Do crop-dusting planes carry stunt parachutes as standard? Why can't the lead actress speak intelligible English? And what is going on in this silly film, anyway? Viewers, like Frank, would be advised not to ask any questions.

The Master of Disguise (PG) stars and was written by Dana Carvey, Mike Myers' sidekick in the Wayne's World movies. It follows the Austin Powers formula of pastiches, fart gags, prosthetic make-up and celebrity cameos, but while Austin Powers lifted Myers to phenomenal heights of success, The Master Of Disguise will have the opposite effect on his ex-partner. Starting with his wacky Italian accent and his wacky name – Pistachio Disguisey, believe it or not – everything in the film has been fine-tuned to produce the least possible mirth. I suppose we should be grateful that it doesn't last much longer than an hour.

Metropolis (PG), Fritz Lang's expressionist masterpiece, premiered in Berlin in 1927, only to be withdrawn a few weeks later and cut for the American market. Now, thanks to a painstaking restoration job, we can see a new print that is closer to Lang's original vision than any that's been screened in 75 years. For the first time, we can appreciate just how bonkers that vision was.

Metropolis is a disaster movie, a horror film, an allegory and a sci-fi epic. Utilising special effects that are boggling to this day, it shows us a future city of Himalayan skyscrapers, hellish subterranean factories and streets seriously in need of a congestion charge. It also features the Seven Deadly Sins made manifest, and a flashback to the Old Testament. All that, plus belly-dancing and a mad scientist named Rotwang.

n.barber@independent.co.uk