The Son (12A) <br></br>Elling (15) <br></br>Virgil Bliss (12A) <br></br>Equilibrium (15) <br></br>Barbershop (12A) <br></br>Stealing Harvard (12A)

Despite its modest, humdrum surfaces, The Son has the confidence and moral seriousness of great drama. In common with their previous film, Rosetta, the Belgian writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne examine the psychological benefits of work, both as key to self-respect and as a vital bonding agent of companionship. Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a reticent carpentry teacher at a youth rehabilitation centre, is suddenly panicked by the arrival of a new trainee, Francis (Morgan Marinne), whom he begins to shadow around the drab streets of Liège. Gradually, we come to learn that the boy was responsible for the death of Olivier's young son, and for the subsequent rupture of his marriage. Yet, in spite of his ex-wife's horrified objections, he takes Francis under his wing, tormented by a dreadful curiosity in his unknowing nemesis.

The Dardenne brothers keep the handheld camera tight on the back of Olivier's head, as though it were as expressive as the face, and in the long silences, the mood between man and boy becomes extraordinarily tense: spooked and wrongfooted by the kid's blank friendliness, Olivier seems always on the edge of violence, yet somehow keeps his head. When, during a work trip, Francis asks Olivier to stand as his guardian, the moment is electrifying, the more so for being so matter-of-factly done. The film constitutes a sort of counter-argument to last year's In The Bedroom, probing the limits of parental bereavement to find solace not in retribution but in the mysterious promptings of forgiveness. It's a terrific film, and a worthy successor to Rosetta.

Petter Naess's gentle folk comedy, Elling,was an Academy Award nominee last year, and while its feelgood factor probably endeared it to voters, it may have been just a bit too oddball to run out winner. A self-confessed mummy's boy, Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen) is a fortyish care-in-the-community case who has been installed in an Oslo apartment with his equally maladroit room-mate Kjell Bjarne (Sven Nordin); neither of them has a clue about the real world, but somehow they muddle through. Naess focuses upon Elling's gradual emergence from his shell as he learns to overcome jealousy of Kjell's relationship with their upstairs neighbour – he lends him clean underpants for his first night with her – and discovers, through an academic acquaintance, a talent for poetry. In the title role, Ellefsen is more amiable than he has any right to be, given his prudishness, egomania and a gratingly querulous tone of voice, while Nordin lends sturdy support as the credible hulk Kjell. Ibsen it ain't, nor does it need to be.

Set in an unrecognisably bleak New York, Virgil Bliss concerns an ingenuous Southern jailbird who, out on parole, wants to go straight. He sets up home with a troubled prostitute, Ruby (Kirsten Russell), and finds his criminal past has branded him as plainly as any prison tattoo. The underworld – his old room-mate, her pimp – proves cunning in its determination to drag him back down. Clint Jordan is very good in the title role, a decent man trying to rein in the volatile temper that got him banged up 12 years before, and his scenes with Russell, stewed in drink and depression, are very touching. The director, Joe Maggio, shoots in dismal, washed-out colours, and conjures an authentic sourness of mood from these luckless lives. Perhaps too authentic: this rock-bottom realism will test the stamina of an already shrinking constituency.

A dystopian thriller, Equilibrium imagines a 21st century in which a despotic state has subjugated the people via enforced intake of the drug Prozium, an emotion anaesthetic. Children invigilate this drug-taking, and are known to snitch on defaulting parents. The upside is an absence of war, the downside, well, you spend every day gazing at a giant plasma screen of Sean Pertwee's mug – this is "Father", a rather obvious kin of Big Brother. As chief crime-buster, Christian Bale hunts down renegades, and others guilty of "sense-offending", ie, any aesthetic or emotional indulgence; his partner, Sean Bean, gets a bullet through the head just for sneaking off with a volume of Yeats. Then Bale himself stops taking the tablets, and suddenly wakes up to, as they sang in Aladdin, a whole new world. If Orwell is the literary point of reference, you can take your pick of the cinematic ones, including Metropolis, Minority Report and, in the fetishistic leather-wear and whirly martial-art face-offs, The Matrix. Kurt Wimmer directs competently, but his screenplay wades through a treacle of pomposity and plain nonsense.

Barbershop stars the rap artist Ice Cube as a Chicago barber who is torn between selling the shop that he inherited from his old man, and maintaining it as a cherished neighbourhood hangout. The screenplay veers between bull sessions on the shop floor, Ice Cube's battle with a loan shark who has put the muscle on him, and a rather feeble slapstick subplot concerning a stolen ATM. It's not unpleasant, but the cornball sentimentality and general absence of wit should wipe the smile off your face.

The week's other comedy, Stealing Harvard, is its rival in tedium, and has the further disadvantage of Tom Green, whose charm remains absolutely invisible to me. He plays buddy to Jason Lee, a nice guy caught between honouring a promise to fund his niece through Harvard, and putting a down-payment on the house that he and his fiancée want to buy – both cost $30,000. Does hilarity ensue? No, it does not.