Few things are more suspect than the interest in innocence shown by those who have lost it. Where would art be, though, without that interest? Insight goes hand with prurience or eroticism in Mann's Death in Venice and Nabokov's Lolita, in the paintings of Balthus, in the operas of Benjamin Britten. And they definitely join hands in Innocence, written and directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, previously known as editor of the creepy passion dramas of Gustave Noël (Seul Contre Tous, Irreversible).

Innocence is a film of two parts, though not by design. For an hour it is bewitching: a play of nubile bodies and fugitive symbolism in a sylvan scatter of buildings somewhere in - we assume - France. Is it a boarding school? The two teachers, both female, are heavily outnumbered by the girls, a troupe of pre-pubertal butterflies forever lake-swimming, skipping and swinging when not distilled to a five-girl elite for ballet lessons.

It must be a school because they wear uniforms: white shirts, white socks and white pleated skirts, though these are jettisoned for skimpy white knickers for bathing scenes. They also put on a school ballet performance down in the basement, which is reached through the pendulum case in the grandfather clock. (I told you it was weird.) And as in a school there is discipline. "Obedience is the only path to happiness," perorates one of the teachers. And to keep the butterflies in their place and discourage pride or precocity: "You're still just ugly little caterpillars."

The photography, though, is showing dangerous signs of auto-eroticism. With its Narcissus swoon of forest greens, limpid lake-blues and nympholeptic pink for the girls' blushing skin, it becomes a contender for the 2005 Elvira Madigan Award.

This brings us to the second hour. By then whimsy fatigue sets in and we start to question what this is all for. Is it for shedding new light on childhood innocence? Is it for shedding those shirts and skirts, rather too often and insistently? Unlike Lolita, that brave masterpiece that stirred into its nymph's tale every emotion known to bare forked humanity (lust, shame, longing, pity, remorse, with cosmic mockery trilling on the same frequency as cosmic tragedy), Innocence seems finally just a clever artist's tease. We are in Wonderland without a full tank of wonder. And when it runs dry - when the engine starts to stutter with repetition - we can only sigh and say, as of innocence itself, that it was so promising for a while.

Tiny films can cower behind self-important titles. A History of Violence sounds like a 10-part TV mega-series or an instalment-plan encyclopaedia of mayhem, available as book or compact disc. Instead it is an overpraised movie from David Cronenberg (pelted with paeans from Cronenberg cultists), whose output is fast gaining in pretension what it has lost in power and immediacy.

The Canadian gore guru once ran a unique business for horror buffs. His films converted small budgets into ghoulishly resonant fables, in which the body politic collided or surreally colluded with the body human. Rabid, Scanners and Videodrome: they were one-word titles that promised you multiple screams and something to think about as you tried to sleep that night.

Here Cronenberg camouflages a whiskery premise - an ex-gangster going straight in a small town, whose past catches up with him - with a kind of pop portentousness. Based on a graphic novel, the film's picture-book primary tones set out to persuade the gullible they are dealing with "archetypal narrative material" ("Sight and Sound"). To me they suggested a director thrown upon redemption drama clichés. We get the pluckily devoted wife (Maria Bello), the scaredy-cat son who will prove himself, and the little daughter whose innocence must be saved at all costs. (This moppet's eye-curdling flaxen ringlets belong in a Norman Rockwell painting or a Shirley Temple movie.) We also get the gangster (Ed Harris) whose facial scarring is a label that says "morally disfigured too".

In the last act the film hauls itself off to the corrupt big city for a showdown with Mr Big, who turns out to be someone very close to Mortensen. This is one of those endings that says, essentially, "Your past is yourself. Your enemy is the face you see each day in the mirror." We had a lot of that last week with Revolver, a film for which I now have new respect. At least Guy Ritchie's difficulties came from wrestling with an over-complex structure and too many ideas. Cronenberg's come from shadow-boxing with a pencil-trite story and sketched-by-numbers characters, pretending they are part of a reverberant moral pageant.

I kept rubbing my eyes in disbelief at Goal!. If there had been any advantage in rubbing my ears I would have done that too. But nothing can massage into reality, or the illusion of it, the experience of watching this daft sporting drama. The poor Mexican boy from Los Angeles (Kuno Becker), dreaming of football glory, gets a training contract with Newcastle United. Once in Blighty, it all goes wrong - nerves, asthma, bad weather, getting stiffed by the tabloids - before it goes right in a cliché-powered climax on the Premiership pitch, accompanied by a multi-orgasmic music track. In between, the screen fills up with celebrity faces (Shearer, Eriksson, Beckham) looking embarrassed as they try to pass themselves off as dramatis personae. Yellow cards all round.

Amnesia is the plot device filmmakers reach for when the resources of probability run dry. Bring on the oblivion trick! It is amazing what loss of recall can do to pep up plots or quicken melodrama. The medical student hit by a car in Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital (18, comes round with an empty memory bank. So was the girl he is soon eviscerating in an anatomy lesson really a former lover? Or did he just imagine her free-spirited dancing on a beach (flashback) and the S-and-M relationship involving mild strangulation during love play? The riddles drag on in a movie besotted with its own enigmas and finally throttled by its multiplying influences, which seem to range from the films of Oshima to the corpse art of Professor Gunther von Hagens.

Four Brothers (15, and Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo (15, Mike Bigelow, round off a week for which amnesia would be the kindest cure. The first is directed by John Singleton, whose overpraised Boyz 'n the Hood contained the germ for everything here. That includes the self-important selling of notions of "brotherhood" - in the tale of four male siblings (two blacks, two white) reunited for the funeral of a gunned-down foster mother - and the stilted dramaturgy that allows the boyz to seek justice and redemption through a hail of bullets, bad acting and bromidic dialogue.

At least Deuce Bigelow knows it is rubbish. Like a saintlyidiot, wreathed in smilingself-derogation, it chasesafter its mirth-and-murder plot. Someone is killing rent boys in Amsterdam, though with enough time between crimes to allowthe star Rob Schneider gags involving pimps, penis transplants and Soviet cosmonauts called Sukmeov.