Sex and Lucia (18) <br></br>Dog Soldiers (15) <br></br>Dark Blue World (12) <br></br> Slackers (15)

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Julio Medem's new film Sex and Lucia is one of those jigsaw-puzzle movies that has to be assembled in the viewer's head piece by piece. Whether it rewards such patience is a moot point. The story opens in medias res as waitress Lucia (Paz Vega) returns to her Madrid apartment to find that her writer boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa) has done a runner. Mystified, Lucia repairs to a remote Mediterranean island he once told her about and happens upon a woman, Elena (Najwa Nimri), who, unbeknownst to her, also has a connection with the errant Lorenzo – she bore his child after a brief encounter on the island several years previously.

It's not too long before one realises that Medem is playing games with narrative, shuffling what appears to be part dream, part flashback and part Lorenzo's novel-in-progress. I fancy that its riddling mood wouldn't be quite so tolerable without the frequent parade of young women shedding their clothes: it's the sort of art-house film where nudity seems almost a consequence of soulfulness. So what if Lucia and Lorenzo conduct one of the least plausible courtships in cinema – Spanish is the loving tongue, and it's really no hardship at all to watch Paz Vega zipping around on a moped, or performing a striptease, or even enjoying a mudbath with some Latin smoothie. Vega is already being touted as the new Penelope Cruz, and if her English can pass muster there's no reason why she won't go on to conquer the world: she's certainly as beautiful as Cruz, and on this showing a much better actress. All the same, Sex and Lucia isn't as much fun as it might be. Like David Lynch's recent Mulholland Drive, it's wonderful-looking but maddeningly elusive, and at least 20-minutes too long. Its recurring imagery of lighthouses and full moons, while pretty enough, lends it an erotic undertow the bouts of explicit sex have surely made superfluous.

The survivalist drama Dog Soldiers is so ridiculous it could become a cult classic. A squad of six soldiers in the Scottish Highlands run into some local difficulties while on a routine exercise. Their radio is dead, the full moon is up and bloodcurdling howls can be heard through the woods. Writer-director Neil Marshall somehow manouevres the soldiers into a remote cottage where they are besieged by a ravening pack of werewolves. Yes, that's right – werewolves. Hasn't Scotland got some interesting wildlife all of a sudden? Sean Pertwee and Kevin McKidd lead their men through a night-long rearguard action that would like very much to be compared to Rorke's Drift and the gallant lads of Zulu, though it's not the defence of Empire that's on this lot's mind but the England-Germany World Cup qualifier, so cue some dodgy football metaphors to go with the gory black comedy. Were Pertwee's intestines meant to look like sausages dipped in red paint or was the props department just being careless? Visceral stuff – literally – saved by virtue of not taking itself too seriously.

More servicemen in Dark Blue World, this time Czech fighter pilots who fled Nazi Germany to fly with the RAF during the Battle of Britain. In spite of their heroism, a dreadful fate awaited those Czechs who survived and returned home at the end of the war – they were interned as common criminals by the Soviets in case they spread the contagion of democracy. One such is Franta Slama (Ondrej Vetchy), shivering with pneumonia in a labour camp as he recalls his own particular drama of war: he fell in love with the same woman (Tara Fitzgerald) as his fresh-faced protègé (Krystof Hadek). Director Jan Sverak handles the battle for the skies with some panache, but on the ground he's less sure-footed, hobbled by a stodgy script (written by his father Zdenek, who starred in his superior 1997 movie Kolya) and the basic implausibility of the love triangle – Vetchy and Fitzgerald look more like Hadek's mum and dad than the other sides of a love triangle. Medal of honour goes to Charles Dance as a laconic Wing Commander, addressing his squadron in tones as dry as a gin martini.

Slackers is an American campus comedy that tries to ride two horses at once: the teen-romance and the gross-out gags of the New Moronism. The result is a half-baked American Pie, ie. a pretty stale pastry. Devon Sawa stars as one of a slacker trio who have cheated their way through college exams but now look about to fall at the graduation hurdle, thanks to the devious scheming of campus weirdo Ethan (Jason Schwartzman). He's blackmailing them into procuring the divine Angela (James "Why does she have a bloke's name?" King), whom he has madly pursued for months. In truth, the dark-browed Schwartzman – part satyr, part stalker – is the film's only point of interest, seizing hold of a role that eerily suggests the disturbed and sociopathic creature his Max from Rushmore might have become. If things go his way he could turn out to be, like his cousin Nicolas Cage, one of cinema's great romantic nutters.