The Kid Stays In The Picture (15)<br></br> Narc (18)<br></br> Final Destination 2 (15)<br></br> Hejar (PG)<br></br> The Wild Thornberrys Movie (U)

Adapted from his raucously entertaining memoir, The Kid Stays in The Picture recounts the life and times of producer Robert Evans, a man for whom the word "brash" might have been invented. Even by Hollywood standards it's remarkable rise-and-fall stuff: a millionaire before he was 25 thanks to the family's clothing business, he was discovered poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Norma Shearer, who picked him to play her late husband Irving Thalberg in the 1957 biopic. Despite his sleek good looks he decided producing was his metier ("I was a half-assed actor and I knew it") and quickly became head honcho at Paramount, where he oversaw the likes of Love Story, The Godfather and Chinatown.

A patchwork of newsreel footage and superimposed stills, the narrative is animated by Evans's rasping voice, a marvellous instrument that blends the hardboiled style of a Forties private eye and the grandiloquence of a guy who basically thinks he's the bee's knees. The stories pour out of him – the deals, the feuds, the crises, the several marriages – and one can't help being transfixed as self-mortification slides into self-mythologising and back again. How much truth resides in the tale is doubtful, but as entertainment it's unimpeachable, whether describing early spats with his wife-to-be Ali MacGraw ("Miss Snot-Nose"), chivvying along the perfectionist Polanski on the set of Rosemary's Baby ("Pick up the pace, will ya, or we both end up in Warsaw") or grabbing Kissinger from tense Vietnam talks to be special guest at The Godfather premiere.

The fall is as precipitous as the rise, if rather more cagily recalled. His great weakness, apart from women, was drugs, and having walked through a blizzard of cocaine during the Seventies, he crashed and burned in the Eighties. A drugs bust, the debacle of The Cotton Club and the taint of a murder case became his very own Evans's Gate, and might have destroyed a less self-confident man. He survived it all, though his talent did not, as a glance at his recent CV (Sliver, Jade, The Saint) will attest. No matter: Robert Evans is his own greatest creation, and The Kid Stays in The Picture is a frequently hilarious testament to the showman, the braggart, the mover, the shaker – the yarn-spinner. I hope there's a sequel.

While the basic situations of the cop thriller Narc feel done to death, the movie itself feels incandescently alive from the get-go: a cop bursts out of a house in pursuit of a suspect, and a handheld camera follows right behind him, so close that we can hear his panting breath. The sequence has the electrifying you-are-there immediacy of that great car chase in The French Connection, a movie which proves to be a forefather to this one in its gall and grit. Not that the writer-director Joe Carnahan is out simply to pay homage; his film is both an artfully constructed murder mystery and a disconcerting portrait of driven men.

Nick Tellis (Jason Patric), a Detroit narcotics cop with a troubled history, is brought out of suspension to investigate the murder of another undercover officer. He is teamed with Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), the dead man's partner and the kind of cop who tends to crack cases by cracking heads. As they wade deep into the squalor of Detroit's junkie underworld, Tellis begins to wonder if Oak's involvement in the case is all that it seems, and director Carnahan keeps spinning Rashomon-style variations to keep us in the dark as to who was responsible for the cop's death. Patric, who played a similar undercover role in Rush (1991), looks better with a few years on him, and handles even the stock scenes (heated domestics with a wife who hates his job) with plausible conviction. He does well not to be blown off the screen by Ray Liotta, whose rage crackles like high-tension cables in the eye of a force-nine – even his new beard looks like it could kill you. This actor has done his share of psychos and strong-armers, but here he goes beyond ballistic into something more like Greek tragedy: Liotta Unbound. Don't miss it.

The Grim Reaper is back at work in Final Destination 2. Having narrowly escaped a calamitous pile-up on the highway, a young woman (AJ Cook) gifted with second sight envisages herself and a random bunch of strangers being stalked by death. Ali Larter returns from the original movie to confirm that she's not making it up. The screenwriters are tasked with inventing ever more gruesome ways for the characters to die, a process which splits evenly between the camp and the macabre. "Death is sealing a rift in its grand design", someone says – right, just as the producers will be sealing a contract in their grand design for Final Destination 3.

Banned by the Turkish government five months after its release because the security forces felt undermined, Hejar is rather more innocent than its reputation suggests. A retired nationalist judge (Sukran Gungor) in Istanbul finds a five-year-old Kurdish girl (Dilan Ercetin) on his doorstep, the only survivor of a police raid on the apartment next door. Reluctantly taking her in (he hasn't a word of Kurdish) the old grouch finds his prejudices whittled away by the cute, dark-browed moppet. As a humanist parable it's fine, but it suffers in comparison with the 1997 Czech film Kolya, which covered almost identical ground with more skill and less sentimentality.

A TV cartoon spin-off, jungle adventure The Wild Thornberrys Movie actually isn't bad once you get past the twittish Brit accents of Thornberry pere (Tim Curry) and the family monkey. Do American kids think we all talk like Bertie Wooster? The animation isn't subtle, and the plot is a save-the-elephants handwringer, but I was highly entertained by Danielle Harris as the spoilt older sister Debbie, maintaining impeccably urban values in the face of so much cuddly wildlife.