Dreamcatcher (15), *<br></br>25th Hour (15), **<br></br>Welcome To Collinwood (15), ***<br></br>Le Fate Ignoranti (15), **

I had to keep pinching myself during Dreamcatcher to check that I hadn't died and gone to some Cinematic Inferno of the Damned as punishment for all my critical offences. This movie would be screened on the very lowest circle, over and over again. Based on a novel by Stephen King and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, it's a horror fantasy about four friends who go off on their annual retreat to a remote snowbound cabin and find something nasty in the woods. An alien that resembles a huge black pudding with razor teeth has been stalking the locals, and a military force led by a nutso colonel (Morgan Freeman) has quarantined the area and now intends to liquidate all of the infected humans.

There's a kind of Stand By Me back story: the friends have known one another since boyhood, when they saved a retarded kid named Duddits from a gang of bullies and were endowed with telepathic powers as reward. This gift may now be a help to them as adults in battling the alien, and then again, may not; the screenwriters, Kasdan and William Goldman, seem to forget all about those extrasensory abilities, and the characters suddenly have no better idea of what's happening than the rest of us. On one of them, Jonesy (Damian Lewis), suffers a particular misfortune: possessed by the alien, he goes rampantly schizoid and alternates, Gollum-style, between all-American guy and fruity, English-accented evildoer. Lewis, who was terrific in The Forsyte Saga and Band of Brothers, shouldn't have to belittle himself on such arrant silliness, and we shouldn't have to watch it. Twenty years ago, Kasdan made The Big Chill. Now, he has made The Big Blob. It's not what you'd call progress.

Spike Lee's 25th Hour is one of the first American movies to take stock of New York after 9/11, and finds that more than an urban skyline has changed. Adapted by David Benioff from his own novel, it focuses upon the last day of freedom left to Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), a drug dealer who is about to start a seven-year jail sentence. A few melancholy farewells need to be said, to his Puerto Rican girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), to his two best pals, a Wall Street trader (Barry Pepper) and a private-school teacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman), to his bartender dad (Brian Cox), and all the while the condemned man wonders just who ratted him out to the DEA. Monty is scared of what awaits him in prison, but he's also stricken with guilt and rage at what he has done with his life. The centrepiece of the film is a profane aria of bitterness against New York "and everyone in it" – Arabs, Jews, Italians, blacks in Harlem – which ends on a note of exhausted self-loathing: the fault lies with him, not with the melting-pot.

Stylishly shot by Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) and buzzing with jangled city talk, the film is never dull, though it must be said that, for all the trauma of 9/11, the atmosphere isn't markedly different from that of any other Spike Lee joint. Like Scorsese, Lee has always characterised New York as a cauldron of turbulence and aggression, its inhabitants acting out their own passion play. (See Do The Right Thing, or Jungle Fever, or Summer of Sam). Perhaps the tone is slightly chastened, and the conciliatory spirit of its ending is untypically earnest, but for the rest, it's another square yard of New York attitude.

The crime caper Welcome to Collinwood mixes familiar ingredients (a bunch of bungling crooks, a "perfect" bank job) in an unfamiliar setting (rust-belt Cleveland), and pans a little bit of gold from the scuzz. A third-rate boxer (Sam Rockwell) gets wind of a "Bellini" – criminal parlance for a dream heist – and recruits a team of fairly talentless lowlifes (Isaiah Washington, Michael Jeter, William H Macy) to help pull it off. George Clooney, on production duty, has a minor role as a wheelchair-bound safecracker whose idea of a great disguise is the beard-and-hat combo of a Hassidic Jew. Written and directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, the film gets off to a surprisingly slow start, like Palookaville minus the laughs. Once the heist is set in motion, however, the film hits a fabulously giddy rhythm as the gang fluffs one obstacle after another. William H Macy is outstanding, and the slapstick incompetence eventually irresistible.

If you're in the mood for melodrama, you might wish to check Le Fate Ignoranti ("Ignorant Fairies", apparently), Ferzan Ozpetek's study of marital deceit. Antonia (Margherita Buy), a doctor in Rome, is thrown for a loop when she discovers that her late husband was having an affair – with a man. You think you know someone... Her feelings become more deeply confused when the secret lover, Michele (Stefano Accorsi), and his coterie of pals befriend her. Soon, Antonia is helping chop the onions for supper and dancing the night away with the gay caballeros. Ozpetek likes his characters enough not to force convenient resolutions on them, and the two leads do nicely understated work. Nonetheless, it does seem short of a scene or two that might land a telling emotional punch.