Hostage (15)<br/>Life Is a Miracle (15)<br/>The Chorus (12A)<br/>Duck Season (15)<br/>Monster Man (18)

Come on Bruce, just call it 'Die Hard 4' and be done!

In the prologue of Hostage (15), a bearded, long-haired Bruce Willis is hailed as Los Angeles's top hostage negotiator, so it's not exactly flabbergasting when Everything Goes Wrong. Three dead bodies and a few months later, he's shaved his hair off and transferred to a small-town sheriff's office, either because he wants a quiet life or because he wants to redeem himself when the inevitable opportunity for bloodshed arrives. He doesn't have long to wait. One afternoon three delinquents break into a mansion and hold its occupants at gunpoint. To raise the concept a few feet higher, a mysterious associate of the mansion's owner wants Willis to manage the siege in a particular way, so he kidnaps Willis's wife and daughter.

In the prologue of Hostage (15), a bearded, long-haired Bruce Willis is hailed as Los Angeles's top hostage negotiator, so it's not exactly flabbergasting when Everything Goes Wrong. Three dead bodies and a few months later, he's shaved his hair off and transferred to a small-town sheriff's office, either because he wants a quiet life or because he wants to redeem himself when the inevitable opportunity for bloodshed arrives. He doesn't have long to wait. One afternoon three delinquents break into a mansion and hold its occupants at gunpoint. To raise the concept a few feet higher, a mysterious associate of the mansion's owner wants Willis to manage the siege in a particular way, so he kidnaps Willis's wife and daughter.

Just in case he doesn't get round to Die Hard 4, Hostage is a Die Hard movie with the gore turned up and the wisecracking turned down. The wind whistles through all the plot holes, but it's definitely tense, and Florent Emilio Siri, the film's French director, makes it strangely dark and gothic, pouring in some distressing violence and demented religious symbolism. You can tell it's more hardcore than Die Hard because in the scene that requires Willis to take his shirt off, he discards his trademark vest and goes topless.

Funnily enough, Hostage has some thematic overlap with Life Is a Miracle (15), the new comedy-drama from Emir Kusturica. It's the story of Luka (Slavko Stimac), a Serbian railway engineer who lives in a friendly mountain village on the Bosnian border in 1992. Then war breaks out, his manic-depressive opera-singing wife leaves him, and his grown-up son Milos is captured by the enemy. The villagers intend to buy back Milos in exchange for a Muslim hostage, a young blond nurse who is billeted with Luka. But Luka is so attracted to her that he has doubts about going through with the swap.

It's the kind of dilemma that could make for a searing tragedy, but Kusturica is in a much more whimsical mood. The lusty and endearing love story doesn't get going for an hour or two, and before it does you have to endure a whirl of Balkan yokel wackiness that would seem racist if the director weren't a local.

It feels like being slapped heartily on the back for two and a half hours. In the first few minutes Kusturica gives us a lovesick donkey, a skipping postman and a car that runs on a railway line, and he follows them with endless, chaotic scenes of people getting drunk and pushing tables over, all to the merciless parping of an oompa band. If I never hear another tuba, it'll be too soon.

The Chorus (12A) is a film you've seen before - several times, probably. On its previous outings it's gone by the name of Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile and even Coach Carter, but it's always the same old story of a teacher who puts inspiration on the syllabus, much to the disapproval of the hidebound powers-that-be. On this occasion, the story is set in 1949, when a soft-hearted, turtle-faced musician (Gérard Jugnot) gets a job at a boarding school for "difficult children". There's an ongoing contest between the boys and the teachers to see who can be more vicious, but Jugnot quickly divines that he can spread sweetness and light by forming a choir.

It's difficult to believe that the little savages would take so readily to the idea of close-harmony singing, and it's even more difficult to believe that they'd ever sound like the Aled Jones clones we hear on the soundtrack. Still, that's the sort of nostalgic, reassuring film The Chorus is, which is why it was such a hit in its native France - and why it was a Best Foreign Film nominee at the Oscars. For a far more complex and touching example of the genre, see Jamie's School Dinners on Channel 4.

In Duck Season (15) two 14-year-old boys are left home alone in a Mexico City apartment one Sunday. Alas, their plan to spend a productive day with their Xbox is stymied by a power cut, a pizza-delivery man and a pretty neighbour. With black-and-white photography that could grace a coffee-table book, Duck Season should open doors for its first-time director. But at bottom it's a study of boredom, and it gets a little too close to its subject for my liking.

Monster Man (18) is a cheapo, gross-out horror comedy in which two of America's most punchable young men are menaced by a customised Jeep that looks like a scaled-up version of something from Robot Wars. The film revels in its own atrociously schlocky dumbness, but only because it doesn't realise how atrociously schlocky and dumb it truly is.

n.barber@independent.co.uk