Stuart Little 2 (PG) <br></br>Jason X (15) <br></br>Lighthouse (15) <br></br>The Abduction Club (12) <Br></Br>Hijack Stories <br></br>Vivre Sa Vie (15)

A small talking mouse beats hockey-masked psycho

The titular mouse in Stuart Little 2 is now so thoroughly ensconced in the Little household that Mr and Mrs (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis) refer to him, rather creepily, as "our son". But if you can tolerate that, and the occasional lapse into sickly sweet cosiness, this Manhattan adventure comedy entertains quite pleasantly. This time the miniature rodent hero (voiced by Michael J Fox) finds romance with an orphan bird named Margalo (voiced by Melanie Griffith), little suspecting that she's a reluctant jewellery thief put to work by a Faginesque falcon (voiced, with magisterial scorn, by James Woods). As in the original, the best comedy is provided by the voice of Nathan Lane as the Little's cowardly moggy, Snowbell, supported by the inimitable goofy drawl of Steve Zahn as feline lowlife Monty.

Still a long way from the racing ingenuity of the Pixar crew, but lifted by one or two deft touches, like Stuart and Margalo sitting in a mini-convertible in front of a TV screening of Vertigo, as if at their very own drive-in movie.

I managed to miss the first nine instalments of the Friday the 13th series, so Jason, the indestructible masked avenger of teenage promiscuity, was previously unknown to me. Not any more. Jason X whisks us 400 years into the future where student scientists on a field trip discover the cryogenically frozen psychokiller and haul him back to their spaceship. Their mistake, of course, is to unthaw him, and once let loose he begins a stalk-and-slash campaign on the terrified crew, many of them young women in skimpy crop tops – plus ça change.

Maybe I'm amazed, but for a genre flick this isn't at all bad, Todd Farmer's screenplay slyly sending up the conventions and having a little fun with cyber-technology. While the slicing and dicing is predictably gory, there's a handful of archly amusing lines to suggest a sense of humour was at large on the set.

"Gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to finish this old dog," says the crew commander as cold steel pierces his midriff. Then another blade skewers him to the wall. "That ought to do it," he gasps, expiring.

There's another psycho on the rampage in Lighthouse, a murky British thriller which, unlike Jason X, takes itself very seriously indeed. An accident on a prison ship maroons a motley bunch of convicts and jailers on a storm-battered island with only an ancient lighthouse for refuge. James Purefoy, doing his second group-in-peril thriller in a week after Resident Evil, is the designated hero, keeping his head while all around him are (literally) losing theirs. Two things about the film baffled me: first, the anachronism of prison hulks, which surely had their day around the time of Great Expectations, and second, how the killer manages to keep his white boots spotlessly clean, even though he trudges through mud, sand and rain. Such were the mental diversions from the plot's violent, overcooked absurdity.

Costume romp The Abduction Club is based on a trend in 1780s Ireland for the disinherited younger sons of noble families to secure a fortune by kidnapping wealthy heiresses and coaxing them into marriage. Even if this practice could be made to seem charming, Stefan Schwartz's film squanders any remaining goodwill by its ridiculously mechanical plotting and the absence of any discernible effort to approximate the speech or demeanour of late-18th century nobility. (Just read some Boswell if you're wondering.) The cast are good-looking enough – swanlike Alice Evans pairs up with Daniel Lapaine, Sophia Myles with Matthew Rhys – and constitute the film's only chance at box-office success, but given how very unpersuasive they are in manner and address one wonders why anyone went to the bother of putting them in costume at all.

The convention of the actor who shadows the cop for "research" purposes is given a twist in Hijack Stories. Middle-class Sox (Tony Kgoroge) keeps failing the audition for a street hood role, so heads for the mean streets of Soweto to get some expert tuition from one who knows – a hardened gangsta named Zama (Rapulana Seiphemo). Unfortunately, once writer-director Oliver Schmitz sets up this potentially interesting antagonism, the film merely exploits what one hoped it might explore. Sox's hero-worship of the actor Wesley Snipes, for instance, looks ripe for some serious disabuse once he learns how criminality really works in the townships, but no, the standard fare of guns and gut wounds is blithely served up, and the script's early pot-shots at the "rainbow nation" and the class divide come to nothing.

There is one profoundly unsettling moment in Godard's re-released Vivre Sa Vie (1962) when Anna Karina (Bambi eyes and Louise Brooks bob) gazes directly into the lens. The look is quizzical, searching and somehow accusatory all at once, and hints at the troubled relationship between the director and the actress, who also happened to be his wife. She plays a shopgirl who drifts into prostitution, a lonely figure whom the camera tracks like a helpless voyeur through the streets, bars and hotel rooms of Paris. As with most of Godard, it has its dull patches, but you could never tire of looking at Karina, who is here at her most bewitchingly beautiful.