The Critics: The hills are alive with the sound of in-fighting

The Inheritors (15) Stefan Ruzowitzky; 95 mins Captain Jack (PG) Robert Young; 100 mins My Favourite Martian (PG) Donald Petrie; 93 mins

Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Inheritors is set in rural Austria during the early 1930s (it's in German, with subtitles). A farmer dies and leaves his property to his workers. This is not as kind as it might seem; in fact, it is an act of violence. The country hierarchy - farmers and peasants and everybody knowing their place and living in a kind of hurt silence - is stiff and set. The farmer, unpleasant when alive, knew that this gift of freedom would cause scraps and worse in the community he left behind. He was right. The local burghers rage, and predict a bloody climax to the situation. "Peasants must not be farmers," says Danninger the rich neighbouring farmer, all sag belly and mean gob. The workers are initially amazed at their freedom. Ruzowitzky has them sitting about the kitchen wondering what to do with their Sunday. Perhaps they should smoke a pipe, chat even. Eventually two of the girls slope off to milk the cows - it's a beautifully observed manipulation of the notion of truancy.

There's much in this film that reminded me of Lord of the Flies. Like Golding, Ruzowitzky examines the desperation that attends being liberated from your known world. Life for these people before their inheritance was a routine of early mornings, occasional beatings, sweating in the fields, gobbled suppers and leaning their heads against the flanks of cows at milking time and breathing in the smell of dunged straw - effort and calm. Now they must work to keep the farm solvent, but work out of choice, and for profits shared. Everything suddenly feels untried and precarious to them - choice equals pressure.

The Inheritors was last year's Austrian nominee for Best Foreign Film Oscar. Ostensibly Ruzowitzky sets out to play with the Germanic "Heimat" genre, films that idealised rural life to an almost ludicrous extent, particularly during the inter-war years. So The Inheritors, with its blank silences and yelling and exposing of the rottenness of exploitation is very much a revisionist film (although not the first of its kind).

But really, it's a western. It deals with people's passion for earth. It has a protagonist in its most vocal peasant, Lukas (Simon Schwarz), who is blonde and clear-minded and determined to defend his property and tumble prejudice. He echoes James Dean in Giant by repeating "Nobody is ever going to beat me again", and then stands fingering the tips of his barley like an astonished pioneer.

It's an incredibly controlled film. The mood is heavy, its shots of the long, scrubbed wooden farmhouse tables very deliberate, and suddenly representative of all the scrubbing, the chores upon chores, the bowing of backs, the distress of work with no reward. And then there's the film's tremendous atmosphere of trespass. Like Golding's Ralph, Lukas wonders what conditions he ought to accept as normal now that everything has changed. He wonders if he will always feel like an interloper in this world, with new rules, rules that he can establish and then alter. How raw, this civilisation he always longed for!

Captain Jack has Bob Hoskins playing a modern-day Whitby sea-captain. He is obsessed with the 18th-century Captain Scoresby, who once sailed from Whitby to the Arctic, and killed lots of whales on the way. Jack isn't interested in whales, but flouts the maritime authorities by chugging to the Arctic with a tourist, two grim sisters, an Australian hiker, and the girl from the fish-and-chip shop.

Jack Rosenthal's scrappy script ought never to have galvanised anyone into actually making this film, which is a shame, because it tells a true story. And Hoskins turns in a weird performance. Sometimes he thinks he's Robert Shaw in Jaws, singing scary folk songs behind the wheel and squinting at the sea like he's just remembered something horrible that happened to him when he ran out of chum five miles from Scarborough. Other times he's just like a rag-and-bone man. The one thing this film has going for it is its extras (presumably Whitby residents) who appear in a number of crowd scenes, all terribly flushed and trying hard not to look at the camera. The Arctic looks pretty disappointing. Like Ullswater but with no benches.

My Favourite Martian stars Jeff Daniels as a television producer forced to share his house with a shape-changing Martian whose spaceship has alternator trouble. This is much as you'd imagine - lots of special effects, and a suit that talks, and Daniels with another golden rinse. (I'm fascinated by this man's repeated use of bleach on his hair. In every other respect he looks comfortingly dull. What can all this experimenting with Ash Whisper possibly mean?) This film is sometimes very funny, and full of miniature ironies; the only irritating thing is all the oh-you-humans- and-your- emotions stuff. Why do film-makers always assume that aliens won't have any feelings? Just because the surface of Mars looks like the kind of skin you fear you'll wind up with if you ever went on a sunbed doesn't mean it didn't once harbour a nation of sonnet-reading neurotics. This aside, the film's great.