It’s Snow White and she knows it off by heart

(It’s Snow White, and she knows it off by heart.) So, when her father (Sam Neill) introduces Lilli to her new wicked stepmother, Lady Claudia (Sigourney Weaver), it’s odd that she doesn’t get a rush of deja vu – especially as Claudia comes equipped with a talking mirror and, later, offers her an apple of dubious provenance.The title of Andy Tennant’s Fools Rush in (12) doesn’t allude to Pope or Forster, but to Elvis: “Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can’t help falling in love with you.” It’s will-they-won’t-they romantic fluff, only She (Salma Hayek) and He (Matthew Perry from Friends) have conceived a child and married in the film’s first half-hour. Does it interfere with the Pill, I wonder?It’s more difficult to tell who might be the right audience for Michael Cohn’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror (15), a grisly rewrite of the Grimm Brothers with pretensions towards the Angela Carter end of the Gothic. It’s set in 1493, in a part of the Black Forest in which the American accent is popular, even with British actors like the late Brian Glover. In this dialect, the word “princess” becomes a shot of Brooklyn sarcasm rather than a prompt for Mittel-European forelock-tugging.

Anthony Waller’s belated rehash, An American Werewolf in Paris (15) is now on release, and like some cinematic Alcopop, it’s a flavourless mixture of sex and gore suitable only for under-age consumption. Waller resurrects a few scenes from the 1981 original: the lead’s zombified best mate appearing in a bathroom mirror; a traumatic dream-within-a-dream; bone-crunching lycanthropic transmogrifications. However, as its Interrailer hero (Tom Everett Scott) gets lucky with a sophisticated Parisian (Julie Delpy), Waller’s film reveals that it’s got just as much in common with frat-house comedies like Porky’s. Condoms get inflated, there are jokes about unshaven armpits, and the central theme is virgin sacrifice. And it’s odd that a film so eager to search out the comic possibilities of its hairy-palmed horror sub-genre should be so blind to the silliness of its central twist: that a sect of skinhead werewolves from an upmarket arrondisement are attempting to create a new world order which, as their leader explains, will be “free from ze trappings of technolurgical advurnce”.

No one old enough to see this movie legally will find it has much bite, but it will certainly please any 11-year-olds who slip past the usherette – though they may be bewildered by a hilarious diagram of werewolf biorhythms (full moons on the x axis and lycanthropic hormone levels on the y axis). The demands of an increasingly unearthly plot transform Smilla from a hoarfrosted Holmes to an Arctic Fox Mulder (as if to bolster the comparison, Wednesday’s X Files had an almost identical premiss). In his novel, Hoeg unifies these elements in the consciousness of his remarkable protagonist. August doesn’t have the option of using a first-person narrative in this way, and the unfortunate result is Tom Wilkinson speechifying about lethal prehistoric worms.When I was 11, John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London was the film every schoolboy pretended to have seen. (The rest of the cast – Gabriel Byrne, Tom Wilkinson, Bob Peck – stick to their native accents.)But as with most mysteries, the obfuscation is more satisfying than the explication, and August can’t steer his picture through the huge gear- change that occurs in its concluding half. When it’s in this detective-thriller mode, August’s film is icily compelling: Smilla’s deductive reasoning has all the occult wonder of a Sherlock Holmes masterclass, with a sensitivity to the shifting significance of snow substituted for Holmes’s talent for perceiving infinitesimal variations in types of tobacco ash.

Ormond – who, in her blizzard-proof mascara, is really too glamorous for the part – gives a performance of impressive detail, managing to suggest Smilla’s mixed Norwegian-American-Greenlandic heritage without once raising the spectre of the Muppet Swedish chef. But, for the film, such stylistic accord is as far away as Greenland.It begins as Norwegian noir, as Smilla Jasperson (Julia Ormond) investigates the suspicious death of an Inuit boy who has slipped from the snow-covered roof of her apartment block. Hoeg’s fiction attempts to settle the historic differences between psychological realism and sci-fi. The breaking of this racket becomes a quasi-feminist crusade for the aptly-named White, who rescues a punched-up wife on Christmas Eve; jumps to the defence of a young prostitute with a bandaged face; is shocked when she turns up at the morgue It’s an easy indulgence in victimology. The Forties femmes might have suffered equally gruesome fates, but they didn’t need knights-errant. Always something more than casualties, they knew how to stab a man in the back.While Kevin Spacey hobnobs with seedy starlets and Guy Pearce fights – and is seduced by – police corruption, Basinger and Crowe play out a romantic plot that develops with implausible speed, and seems devoid of the sassy irony with which Hanson has spiced the rest of his movie.

Though we see Basinger in her boudoir watching They Drive by Night (1942), she is a creature of daylight. Her smile is fragile and girlish; her skin looks like it would bruise to the touch. Veronica Lake had more spunk, and she wouldn’t have been seen dead out before Martini hour.Technically, the film is a marvel – Dante Spinotti’s photography gives every image an airless, dessicated quality, and Terry Rodman’s sound design unleashes camera flashes that crack like Lugers, and performs witty flourishes like striking up with “The Lady is a Tramp” as a two-bit actor beds the District Attorney for $100.There’s more genre trouble ahead in Bille August’s Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (15), reworked from the Peter Hoeg novel that gripped most of its readers like an obsession. Women are rouged and abused – they get beaten and raped, and suffer plastic surgery to enhance their sexual marketability.