Morvern Callar (15)<br></br> 28 Days Later (15)<br></br> Two Men Went To War (Pg)<br></br> They (15)<br></br> Mr Deeds (12a)

The long-awaited second feature by Lynne Ramsay, Morvern Callar, is an awful dud. It pains me to report this, because I loved Ramsay's debut feature Ratcatcher, and I loved the Alan Warner novel on which Morvern Callar is based. But there is almost nothing about this film to recommend. Samantha Morton stars as Morvern, a 21-year-old lass who one Christmas finds her boyfriend dead by his own hand on the kitchen floor. Reluctant to tell anyone in her small Scottish port town, she buries his corpse on the moors and sets about getting his posthumous novel published – under her own name. Then she abandons her supermarket job and takes off with her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott)
for a package holiday in Spain.

The late boyfriend also bequeathed Morvern a compilation tape, which plays on her Walkman as she becomes increasingly dissociated from the life around her: her own private Iberia. Ramsay is faced with the task of translating to the screen what is essentially a "voice" book, short on plot and incident; the music backs this up to a degree, but it can't sustain the novel's drifting line, or find a visual equivalent to its trippy, dreamlike rhythm. The film becomes an aimless travelogue, which neither Alvin Kuchler's photography nor an arid screenplay by Ramsay and Liana Dognini even remotely enliven. (Most absurd moment: Morvern, promised £100,000 for the novel by an independent publisher, receives the whole amount in a single cheque)
. At its centre Samantha Morton is an unreachable blank; it's the opposite of the soulful laundress she played in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and in that film she didn't say a word. The odd thing is that this looks a much callower, less confident work than Ramsay's debut – perhaps it's a film she had to get out of her system before moving on to something more congenial to her talent. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Another director with a cult reputation to uphold is Danny Boyle, who has laboured to recapture the brutal energy of Trainspotting. His new one, 28 Days Later, is a rough-and-ready apocalyptic horror movie, shot on digital video and determinedly avoiding the pyrotechnics of the ill-starred The Beach. The most impressive scenes come in the first 10 minutes, as a coma patient (Cillian Murphy)
emerges from hospital to find central London deserted: the desolate environs of Whitehall and Westminster make a thrillingly eerie sight, reminiscent of 1960s episodes of Dr Who and 1970s what-if dramas like Survivors. An animal-rights raid on a primate research facility has unleashed a lethal virus that has caused legions of murderous "infected" to roam the city mobhanded. Murphy and some fellow survivors band together and make for an army base north of Manchester, only to find that this outpost of civilization is anything but.

Comparisons with George Romero's Living Dead movies are unavoidable, though this film has the good sense to make its ravening zombies scarily fleet of foot – none of those lumbering creatures that any arthritic granny could outrun. For a while its band-on-the-run plotline exerts a crude but effective hold, even if some of the acting feels a bit amateur-hour. Once the scene switches to the military compound, however, Alex Garland's screenplay slumps into comic-book excess, echoing the social Darwinist warnings of The Beach and the blood-curdling hysteria of recent werewolf movie Dog Soldiers. Horror aficionados will want to catch it; everyone else should hang on for Boyle's Trainspotting sequel.

A gentle comedy about British pluck, Two Men Went To War contains the plot in its title. Fed up with sitting out the Second World War in the dental corps, an ageing sergeant (Kenneth Cranham)
and a callow private (Leo Bill)
go AWOL to Cornwall, steal a boat and make for occupied France in order to fight the Nazis personally. Lest they be mistaken for deserters, they explain their quixotic mission in a letter to Winston Churchill. Apparently based on a true story, the film is a cross between Boy's Own adventure and Dad's Army, with Cranham a gruff Mainwaring to Bill's ingenuous Pike. (He stops just short of calling him a "stupid boy")
. It's a harmless slice of nostalgia, fondly indulgent of its two have-a-go heroes and reverential towards Churchill's backroom staff (Derek Jacobi, Phyllida Law)
, engaged in a round-the-clock effort to keep the PM going.

The supernatural chiller They depends on a morbid fear of the dark. The "they" of the title announce their approach with power blackouts and light bulbs going pop, scaring the bejesus out of grad student Julia (Laura Regan)
who's already lost a childhood friend to their malign influence. Director Robert Harmon has made a horror movie that screws the tension to a terrifying pitch – unfortunately it was back in 1986, and called The Hitcher. This latest lurks around the shadows and springs the occasional fright, but it's not going to give anyone sleepless nights.

It's bad enough having to watch Adam Sandler in his own rotten movies. Now in Mr Deeds he's had the nerve to remake Frank Capra and step into the role once played by Gary Cooper. For those of you who don't want to know the result, look away now. There is hardly anything more dismaying about American movie-goers than their affection for Sandler: can they not see him for the smug, charmless, oafish berk that he is? Apparently not. Mr Deeds made more than $100m at the US box office, so it looks like we're stuck with him for a while yet.