Secret Ballot (U) <br></br>The Trespasser (18) <br></br>A walk to remember (PG) <br></br> Two can play that game (15)

From the moment a plane flies across the horizon and a ballot box is parachuted from the sky the Iranian film Secret Ballot betrays a gentle but telling penchant for absurdity. A soldier (Cyrus Abidi) on the island outpost over which the plane has passed is flummoxed when a young woman (Nassim Abdi) shows up to take charge of the ballot box: she is the polling agent, today is election day, and he must escort her across the desert as she tries to coax the locals into voting. A woman election agent, the soldier is plainly thinking – whatever next? The director Babak Payami doesn't neglect realism as he tracks this unlikely pair – the harsh desert is a very concrete presence – but it is sifted through a fine gauze of satiric comedy, such as the moment when the soldier stops before a red traffic-light, even though there's no other car for miles around. "I can't break the law," he says. "The law doesn't mean anything here," the woman argues. So why has she been so conscientious in collecting votes?

This is a slyly intelligent parable about responsibility. By the end of the day democratic ideals have taken a knock, yet the soldier, too, has undergone a change in the company of this spirited young bureaucrat. The final scene, a belated expression of mutual respect as a plane waits on the runway, recalls the understated sadness of Bogart and Bergman's farewell in Casablanca: they won't have Paris, I fear, but they've certainly done their bit for democracy.

Beto Brant's The Trespasser is a tale of two cities, Sao Paulo's affluent uptown and its dirty, dangerous downtown. The one infiltrates the other when Ivan (Marco Ricca) and Gilberto (Alexandre Borges) have the senior partner in their construction business bumped off, thus allowing them to take overall control. But the killer they hired, Anisio (Paulo Miklos), sniffs an opportunity for greater gain, making himself both an unwelcome fixture around their premises and subsequently a companion to rich kid Marina (Mariana Ximenes), who little suspects him as the man who murdered her father.

In its shuttling between the penthouses of the bourgeois and the teeming barrios of the underclass, the film occasionally calls to mind Amores Perros and the uneasy feel of a large, sprawling city where death can pounce at any moment. Vital to this sense of menace is Paulo Miklos as the assassin-turned-entrepreneur, his feral cunning quick to exploit the weaknesses of his middle-class employers: in one grotesquely funny scene he brazenly blags a $5,000 "loan" to finance the debut recording of his friend, a Brazilian rapper who turns up at the office and does his routine before the horrified gaze of Ivan and Gilberto. Too late do they realise that this vicious genie, once released, will not go back into the bottle.

As the plot gathers pace The Trespasser looks a fair rival for Amores Perros or the recent Nine Queens as a gritty urban symphony, even if the pounding rap soundtrack offers a less than symphonic sophistication. But Brant, who adapted the story with Marcal Aquino from the latter's novel, sets up the denouement only to bring the picture up mystifyingly short: it feels like three or four scenes shy of the full deal. A faller at the last hurdle, you might say, but up to that point it runs a very good race indeed.

One didn't expect much of Adam Shankman after his feeble directorial debut The Wedding Planner, but his new one, A Walk to Remember, actually goes beyond it into a realm of inexpressible awfulness. Imagine Love Story reworked for 12- to 13-year-olds raised on Britney and the Bible, and you're just beginning to imagine the stink. Shane West is high-school bad boy Landon who finds himself falling for Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, Jamie (Mandy Moore), to his surprise and our disbelief: she's a religious prig, she drinks "sweet tea" for an aperitif, and (worst of all) she sings a power ballad halfway through that would send any normal teenager running in horror towards the exit. Not Landon. He's a model boyfriend who nobly suppresses all sexual urges and instead (get this) builds her a huge telescope, which would be hilarious if it were a sneaky Freudian reference to James Stewart's similarly impotent long lens in Rear Window. But I think we can safely assume that nobody involved in this picture saw the joke.

While not on the same level of direness, Two Can Play That Game hasn't anything to be proud of. A black American battle-of-the-sexes comedy, it vaunts its observations about the gamesmanship of romance as if they were freshly minted insights rather than tired old stand-up jokes that have been doing the rounds for years (and weren't worth telling in the first place).

Vivica A. Fox plays the high-flying ad exec who institutes a 10-day plan to bring her boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) into line, while a trio of her girlfriends provide shriekingly unfunny support from the sidelines. Fox is indeed a fox, but the character she's required to play is also revoltingly smug and self-absorbed, while the banter between the guys invokes every cliché about sexual imbecility that's ever been thrown at a man. Sorry-ass junk, to borrow their phrase.