Crush (15) <BR></BR>Dragonfly (12) <BR></BR>Roberto Succo (15) <br></br>Beginner's Luck (15)

Also released

I suspect that Crush might be one of those films that distributors put out in the belief that some women can't stand 90 minutes in a house where the World Cup is showing. Well, it's out of the frying pan, I'm afraid, because this is a menopausal comedy to drive anyone back into the arms of Des Lynam. In a small Cotswolds town three fortysomething women friends get together over gin and chocolate to moan about their lot: who can't get a boyfriend, who's got the saddest life, and so on. Kate (Andie MacDowell) is a prim headmistress at the local school, Molly (Anna Chancellor) is a bitch-on-wheels doctor with three failed marriages behind her, and Janine (Imelda Staunton) is a police detective inspector with a stroppy teenage son.

That this trio live in fabulously appointed homes in picturesque settings immediately tips us off as to the film's target audience. This is Middle England packaged for the American market, and writer-director John McKay's script follows the template first struck by Richard Curtis in Four Weddings: an Anglo-American romance, irreverent sexual farce (tea-room meets the locker-room) and a couple of original cast members to boot.

The "fun" starts when Kate meets Jed, a 25-year-old church organist (Kenny Doughty) and begins a supposedly outrageous affair with him. Molly and Janine are appalled and decide they must sabotage the romance in order to save Kate from herself – "he'll just spot someone younger and bendier down the youth club," Molly waspishly predicts. (Jed, who slurps his soup and acts the pest at dinner parties, seems more adolescent than mid-twenties – I had some sympathy with the interfering friends).

The starkly tragic turn the plot takes is also a Curtis-approved ploy, though I can't see Crush doing anything close to Four Weddings business. It has a few good lines, most of them delivered by Anna Chancellor, but there's nothing sufficiently droll or distinctive to warrant a night out.

Kevin Costner's career continues its remorseless journey down the pan with Dragonfly, a hokey melodrama about the afterlife. He plays an ER doctor who has recently lost his wife, Emily, in a road accident in Venezuela; six months later her body has not yet been recovered, and Kev's driving himself to distraction with overwork and a fanciful notion that he's being sent messages from the beyond. Former patients on his late wife's paediatric ward tell him that they've seen Emily during near-death experiences, and squiggly crosses keep turning up in their drawings. As he investigates these phenomena his friends and colleagues begin to suspect that Kev is not quite well, whereas we know that he's just being his usual boorish self. When a grief counsellor tries to reach out to him over dinner, he snarls at her: "I don't need you crawling up my ass with a flashlight to let me know how I feel." Charmed, I'm sure!

Dragonfly is part of a small wave of movies, spearheaded by The Sixth Sense, which tries to make Americans feel better about death. But will it make them feel better about Kevin Costner (who's merely box-office death)? Having bounced back last year in a support role in the Cuban missile drama Thirteen Days, he's tried to reclaim leading-man status, but whatever he does here – leaping down waterfalls like Milk Tray Man, for instance – it's to no avail. Part of the problem is surely his deep and abiding humourlessness: audiences like a bit of cheek from their heroes nowadays. Mind you, it would be difficult raising a smile with material like this, directed by Tom (Pet Detective) Shadyac with galumphing heavy-handedness. It's about as close to a near-death experience as you'd want to get.

Based on a true story, Roberto Succo recounts the life and crimes of a killer who eventually became France's public enemy number one. Beginning in the Venetian suburb of Mestre, where Succo (Stefano Cassetti) murdered his parents on the same night in 1981, Cédric Kahn's film follows his trail to the south of France and the mountains of Savoy, where he indulges a spree of killing and kidnapping. The violence is notably underplayed: we hear a gun's report in the distance, or see the police break into a room and discover a bloodied corpse.

Nobody seems able to catch Succo, who operates under a variety of aliases; even his on-off girlfriend Lea (Isild Le Besco) doesn't know what to make of his frequent disappearances and his sexual frigidity. "I can't have a normal life like you," he tells her, though why this might be we never learn. Cassetti, who resembles a crazier-looking Vincent Gallo (if such a thing can be imagined), gives a ballistic performance in the title role, but writer-director Kahn maintains such a neutral, dispassionate tone that one feels no more involved in his psychopathy than with the baffled police detective (Patrick dell'Isola) who's tracking him.

In probably the poorest week of films this year I'm afraid Beginner's Luck still stands out as a dog. A no-budget British film about a talentless theatre troupe on tour in Edinburgh and Paris, it tries to pull a comedy out of the players' ineptitude – but when all we can see is the filmmakers' ineptitude the joke rather backfires. Julie Delpy is the one cast member with a claim to fame, and I only wish I could say that she brings a little class to the proceedings. Unfortunately, there's nothing to redeem this time-wasting folly from the oblivion it's bound for.