A strange mythic world in New York

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Directed by Jim Jarmusch Starring Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva

A marvellous, elegiac, often very funny genre-bending thriller, which takes its key cues from such familiar genres as the Mafia movie, the ghetto drama and the samurai epic and fashions them into something new and highly original. Whitaker is Ghost Dog, a professional hitman who lives his life according to the codes of the ancient samurai, swearing fealty to a middle-ranking gangster (Tormey). The influence of Jarmusch's heroes, Akira Kurosawa and Sam Fuller, is clear, but what's most impressive is how he succeeds in bringing their concerns into a contemporary setting, creating a strange, mythic world-within-a-world on the streets of New York, underpinned by RZA's evocative hip-hop soundtrack.

American Psycho

Directed by Mary Harron Starring Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, Chloe Sevigny, Samantha Mathis, Jared Leto

Harron's version of Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel stars the highly impressive Bale as a quintessential 1980s yuppie obsessed with designer labels and harbouring a taste for extreme sexual violence. Harron rightly downplays the carnage of the book, concentrating on the satire - there's a hilarious set piece in which Bale and his peers compare business cards like gunslingers showing off the notches on their pistols, and the deconstructions of such iconic MOR acts as Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News are a hoot - but the humour wears thin after a while. Like its central character, this is a film which doesn't have much going on beneath its gleaming surface.

Scream 3

Directed by Wes Craven Starring Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox Arquette, Liev Schreiber, Patrick Dempsey, Matt Keeslar, Jenny McCarthy

This, we are promised, is the climax to Craven's post-modern horror series. Let's hope so, as the cycle has clearly run out of steam. Set in Hollywood during the production of Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro, it has the recurring characters. played by Campbell and the Arquettes, dealing with actor versions of themselves. The self-referential gags can't disguise the fact that, like most second sequels, this is dismal fare.

Video release reviews will run on Friday's Vision page instead of Weekend until further notice