Phone Booth<br></br>How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days<br></br>Ararat<br></br>Ghosts of the Abyss<br></br>Bulletproof Monk<br></br>Hard Goodbyes: My Father

Got that Colin Farrell on the phone for you... By Nicholas Barber

This week, Hollywood goes high concept, releasing two movies that aren't much more than their one central idea. In Phone Booth (15), the idea is that the hero is trapped in a phone booth for almost all of the film. Colin Farrell stars as a hustling, superficial publicist who could be the grandson of Tony Curtis's character in The Sweet Smell of Success. Wheeling and dealing down Broadway, he stops to answer the phone in a callbox. He soon wishes he hadn't. The person at the other end of the line is a vengeful sniper who has him in his sights, and if Farrell hangs up, he'll be shot. It's like Speed, but with its premise flipped upside down.

Phone Booth took Larry Cohen a little more than a week to write and it took Joel Schumacher a little more than a week to film – hence the number of unplugged plot holes. But this is how a high-concept film should be: a B-movie and proud of it, it's short (81 minutes), it buzzes with funky energy, and it has super-charged performances from the taunter and the tauntee. If nothing else, you'll be engaged.

In How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (12A), the big idea is: what if a woman did all the girly things that are meant to put men off – baby-talking in front of his poker buddies, leaving cuddly toys around his apartment, making him go to a Celine Dion concert instead of a basketball game? Having got that far, the writers run into two stumbling blocks: 1) why would any woman behave like that? And 2) why would any man endure it? The answers are that 1) she's writing a What Not To Do dating guide for a women's magazine, and he's her unwitting guinea pig, and 2) he's an advertising exec who must make a woman fall in love with him to prove his mastery of the female psyche, or something.

Not only does the film have the most contrived plot ever committed to celluloid, it's also oblivious to how depraved a pair of contemptible yuppies the characters would have to be to manipulate each other so heartlessly. On their own terms, the scenes of Kate Hudson's tearful limpet tormenting Matthew McConaughey's Southern dude are quite comic. But the tone should be more In The Company of Men than When Harry Met Sally.

During the First World War, the Turks murdered over a million Armenians – a massacre that is still denied by the Turkish government. Now Atom Egoyan, an Armenian-Canadian, has made a film about the slaughter – although Egoyan being Egoyan, it's not that simple. Like The Hours, Ararat (15) shows us both the creation of an art work, and another generation's responses to it; like Adaptation, it shows us both a film and the film-making process.

The flashback structure is like a game of Chinese whispers. At one juncture I realised I was watching a man being told by his father (Christopher Plummer) about a kid who told him about a film based on a book and a painting about a massacre. Films as intelligent and meaningful as Ararat are thin on the ground, but Egoyan could have done without some of his characters and storylines. The genocide itself is buried under so many subplot layers it's nearly invisible.

Ghosts of the Abyss (PG) is the first film to be directed by James "King of the World" Cameron since he made Titanic – and it's an hour-long documentary about the very same liner. Cameron and his team spent years pushing back the frontiers of underwater lighting and camera technology in order to film the shipwreck for 3D viewing in Imax cinemas. It should be wonderful, but Cameron has made some frustrating decisions. Instead of employing an aquatic archaeologist to do the narrating, he lets the over-awed actor Bill Paxton extemporise ("That is history right there"). And, by dividing the picture into boxes so often, he defeats the point of having a screen the size of a football pitch.

Bulletproof Monk (12A) is a duff kung-fu superhero flick. Hard Goodbyes: My Father (nc) is a lovely study of bereavement, full of heartbreak and joy, in which a 10-year-old Greek boy refuses to believe that the dad he idolised won't be coming home.

n.barber@independent.co.uk