Spider<br></br>Star Trek: Nemesis<br></br>Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 1600

This is one creepy-crawly that moves very, very slowly

David Cronenberg's latest release, Spider (15), is a Freudian psychodrama about a mentally ill man who slides between fantasy and reality as he remembers a horrific murder. No change there, you might say – and it's true that the film revolves around Cronenberg's usual preoccupations. But it also counts as a radical departure. For one thing, it's set in London. For another, what you're left with afterwards is the impression of how quiet and gentle it is. Spider is a long way from The Fly.

"Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) has just been released after more than 20 years in an asylum. He dosses in a Dickensian halfway house in the very part of the East End where he spent his childhood, and as he shuffles, hunched and mumbling, through the backstreets and along the canals, he finds himself peering into his own past, much like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone staring into his future. He sees his father, a plumber played by Gabriel Byrne (inspired casting – Byrne and Fiennes both have beaky enough noses for you to believe they're related). Cleg Sr is rubbing along with his wife (Miranda Richardson) until a witchy, yellow-toothed prostitute threatens to break up their happy home. But the prostitute is played by Richardson, too, and she seems to be having more fun than she's had since Blackadder II. So to what extent have Spider's memories been warped by his years of incarceration? As he writes the story of his traumatic youth in a greasy notebook, we can't be sure how much of it happened and how much is a yarn spun by the Spider.

Patrick McGrath adapted the script from his own novel, but you'd think its source was a short story. Slender as a web, it moves along at Fiennes's creeping pace and it still has barely enough incident to stretch it to feature length. Once you adjust to it, though, it's the soothing slowness of the film that makes it so rewarding. The long, terraced streets are empty of cars and people; the time-slips between past and present are achieved with elegant simplicity and no special effects. For a film about insanity and murder, the biggest shock is that the violence and bloodshed you're steeling yourself for never appear.

It's pleasing to look at – maybe too pleasing. The stylised London it portrays is supposed to resemble a city as filtered through the perceptions of a madman, whereas it actually resembles a city as filtered through the perceptions of an art director, just as Fiennes's measured twitchings are no more a convincing portrait of a schizophrenic than his tattooed serial killer was in Red Dragon. But the film's artistic fakeness never outweighs Cronenberg's customary sympathy for his outsider heroes, and it's this compassion that makes Spider a mini-classic.

Star Trek: Nemesis (12A) is the tenth Star Trek film. Six of them feature Kirk, Spock and co from the 1960s series, and four of them follow the Next Generation crew, who were on TV in the 1980s and 1990s. If that weren't enough, there have been three more Star Trek TV shows – Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise – since the first movie was made, so how can another film possibly go where no Trek adventure has gone before? Unless you're satisfied by a scattering of in-jokes and the warm glow of seeing the gang together once again, it would take quite some epic to justify the enterprise.

Nemesis isn't quite some epic. Although it was written by John Logan, who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Gladiator, the back-of-an-envelope plot is just a matter of the Enterprise flying to the planet Romulus, then flying away again. It's more of a stroll than a Trek, and it still requires so many iffy plot devices that Trekkies will be shouting, "That is illogical, Captain," every five minutes.

The arch-villain is Shinzon, a man with a mysterious resemblance to Captain Picard. (Or so we're told. Actually, he's a dead ringer for Dr Evil from the Austin Powers films). His dastardly schemes involve no less than the annihilation of the human race, and yet Nemesis still seems smallscale – just another page in the Star Fleet annals. Despite some action sequences more redolent of James Bond and Star Wars than Star Trek, it looks smallscale, too. Spaceships that are meant to be the size of a city have just five rooms and two corridors. And if Shinzon is the ruler of a whole planet, how come he has fewer men under his command than Captain Mainwaring did?

When Claude Lanzmann was researching Shoah, his Holocaust documentary, he heard the story of a Jewish uprising in the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, and decided it was important enough to merit a film of its own. That film has arrived: Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 1600. It consists of Lerner's 1979 interview with one of the insurgents, Yehuda Lerner. The camera is trained on Lerner as he gives matter-of-fact answers to the director's questions, and these responses are then translated into French by an interpreter, and into English by the subtitles. With all due regard for its importance as a historical document, it's not much of a film.

n.barber@independent.co.uk