Open Range<br></br>Grand Theft Parsons<br></br>Ash Wednesday<br></br>The Perfect Score

Cowboys, gangsters, dead rock stars... and Scarlett in a stinker

Kevin Costner's new western, Open Range (12A), has the same producer as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and like that film it scrapes some of the glamour off the genre: clothing varies from browny-green to greeny-brown, and the town saloon has to function without either the regulation honky-tonk piano or a bevy of prostitutes in cancan dresses. But these are minor, cosmetic changes. Aside from a few tinkerings, Open Range is as straightforward and conventional as any cowboy film made since John Wayne went to Boot Hill.

The heroes are Costner and Robert Duvall, a pair of Marlboro men who abide by the laws of nature, loyalty and respect. The villain is Michael Gambon, a frothing tinpot tyrant who's so evil that he has Costner's pet doggy murdered just for the hell of it. When the good guys ride into Gambon's town - a town where the doctor's sister, Annette Bening, happens to be both beautiful and single - there's never any doubt that a shoot-out's a-comin', and there's never any doubt who we and the townsfolk should root for.

Don't go in expecting to be challenged. Open Range is a scenic, dignified, slow-moving film that's lightened up where necessary by Duvall's twinkly, cheeky turn - he and Costner have a lot more chemistry than Bening and Costner do. But it's definitely one for viewers who, like its director, prefer their westerns the way they used to be.

Grand Theft Parsons (12A) begins where most rock biopics end - in a motel room, where a groupie is sobbing over a good-looking corpse. It's what happens to the corpse next that's the interesting part. Shortly after Gram Parsons died in 1973, aged 26, his body was stolen by his friend and road manager, Phil Kaufman, who drove it out into the desert and cremated it, fulfilling a promise he'd made to the country-rock singer two months earlier. It's a story that's been crying out to be made into a movie, but it hasn't been crying out to be made into this one. Pootling along on a spare-change budget, Grand Theft Parsons offers some farcical situations and sarcastic dialogue, but it doesn't live up to the wondrous craziness of the legend, and Johnny Knoxville, despite being a Jackass alumnus, is too restrained as Kaufman.

In Ash Wednesday (18), Edward Burns's fifth film as writer-director-star, he plays a reformed mob enforcer who faked the death of his brother, Elijah Wood, to save him from vengeful gangsters. Three years on, having been in hiding in Texas, Wood is back in town to reclaim his wife - now Burns's girfriend - and his old enemies won't be satisfied until they have either his head or his brother's. A nerve-racking drama of retribution and redemption, then? Well, no. Burns can't move on from the sleepy, sub-Woody Allen indie movies that are his stock-in-trade, and so, yet again, his character does nothing much except argue with his brother, wander around New York and chat to people in bars.

Scarlett Johansson may seem to have appeared in nothing but acclaimed art-house films, but her role in The Perfect Score (12A) proves that she and her agent are only human. It's a teen heist movie about six school kids who break into their local education authority building to steal the answers to their forthcoming exams. Flashbacks and fantasy sequences keep it zipping along, and for an MTV production it takes a remarkably militant stance on the politics of standardised testing.

n.barber@independent.co.uk