The Kid Stays in The Picture<br></br>Hejar<br></br>Final Destination 2<br></br>The Wild Thornberrys Movie

An everyday story of Hollywood excess

We so often hear film stars belie the glamour of their profession. "It's work, hard work," they say. "We're ordinary – regular guys and gals who just wanna do our jobs and go home." Yawn.

Robert Evans, perhaps the last of the great, larger-than-life producers, would never be so disingenuous. He bought wholesale into the Hollywood dream. He wanted the glamour, the fame, the power, the money; he had the starlets on his arm, the stars on his Rolodex and the politicians attending his premieres. Evans lived and breathed Hollywood and almost died within its fickle embrace. No screenwriter could have come up with a better story than his own.

And here it is. The Kid Stays in the Picture (15) is a rarity: a filmed autobiography, based on Evans's book and narrated by the man himself, in the hard-bitten growl of a private eye soaked in bourbon. It is deliciously entertaining, both a tragi-comic journey through one man's ego, and an anecdote-laden account of the movie business – on a par with Peter Biskind's scurrilous account of the Seventies, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

As Evans tells it, "I dived into the pool and came out a movie star." That was in the late Fifties, when as a playboy clothier he was spotted by the actress Norma Shearer, poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Shearer landed him a part opposite Cagney in The Man of a Thousand Faces, playing her late husband and movie mogul Irving Thalberg. It was prescient casting: knowing that he sucked as an actor, Evans decided that he'd rather be a mogul himself.

It was then that he made his mark. As boss of Paramount, Evans presided over some of the great films of the Seventies: Rosemary's Baby, The Conformist, The Parallax View, Chinatown and, most notably, The Godfather.

This was Hollywood's golden age and Evans was right in the middle of it – fighting with Coppola, courting Polanski, befriending Nicholson, loving and losing Ali McGraw, who ran off and married Steve McQueen. "Left for the biggest movie star in the world," Evans laments, the ignominy of being outdone by an actor signalling a spiral into drugs, arrests, controversy and breakdown which – thanks to his loyal friend Nicholson – he just about survived.

Directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein have done a remarkable job of putting this vain, vulnerable man on screen, without descending into full-blown hagiography. They depict his life through a masterful montage of archive material – film stills, newspaper cuttings, photographs, clever, comical cut-out tableaux – with his ever-present narration affording the film's character and momentum. The result is a scrapbook memory that captures the magic, idealism and folly of a Hollywood much more interesting – and much more creative – than it is today.

Another film Evans oversaw at Paramount was Serpico, one of director Sidney Lumet's gritty, verité-style films about police corruption, starring Pacino as the hippy, undercover cop. Watching Narc (18) very much brings Lumet to mind. After the handheld pyrotechnics of an opening chase sequence – the only part of the film that feels contemporary – it eases into an intense, involving drama, which puts character and moral quandary before style; much in the Lumet tradition.

When we first see undercover narcotics officer Nick Tellis (Jason Patric), he's even sporting a Pacino-style arrangement of unfortunate facial hair. Having wounded a pregnant woman while drugged up himself, Tellis tries to clean up and get out of the force. But he's tempted back for a cop-killing investigation that, from the moment we see fellow officer Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), reeks of in-house misdemeanour.

Though the film is well-made and serious, writer/director Joe Carnahan fails to find any real originality in the set-up, with the ending feeling premature and half-baked. But it's worth seeing for a powerhouse performance by Liotta. While the usually lean star of Goodfellas has filled out and grown a greying goatee, the intense blue stare remains, full of playful psychosis.

On one level the Turkish film Hejar (PG) is a simple story about the relationship between a cantankerous old man and a five-year-old girl in Istanbul. But that scenario is lent infinite resonance by the fact that he is Turkish, and a retired judge with some nationalist fervour; she is a Kurd, orphaned by the massacre of her family. Culture and, in particular, language divides them.

When the girl's Kurdish rebel carers are mown down by the police, she wanders dazed into the old man's flat opposite. His decision not to hand her over is instinctive, their time together at first confused and belligerent; not least because, in keeping with his country's political stance, he cannot bring himself to accept her language. It is only when, in a desperate attempt to cheer the girl up the judge learns some Kurdish words, that affection develops between them. A subtle, sweet, affecting second feature by director Handan Ipekci.

The original Final Destination was the best of the recent teen-horror genre, marked by an inventive and gleeful goriness, and a potent premise: a group of school-kids leave a plane just before it takes off and explodes mid-air: they having cheated death, the Grim Reaper decides to settle the account.

Final Destination 2 (15) is exactly, shamelessly the same film, only this time the hapless adolescents avoid a highway pile-up. This is a scene of quite shocking violence, after which everything else feels like a walk in the park. The deaths, mostly involving day-to-day accessories, really are nasty. But this is more post-modern than Scream, constantly self-referential, tongue firmly in cheek as the heads, literally, roll. Only for lovers of the genre.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie (U) is based on the American cartoon series, about an eccentric family of nature documentary-makers. Among the voices are those fine British thesps Rupert Everett, Brenda Blethyn and Tim Curry.