Watchmen (Zack Snyder)
The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée)
Surveillance (Jennifer Lynch)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
American Teen (Nanette Burstein)
Flame and Citron (Ole Christian Madsen)

Watchmen comes so close to catching lightning in a bottle – the lightning being Alan Moore’s venerated 1988 comic book, the bottle the screen version directed by Zack 300 Snyder – that a critic feels mean to say the bottle is still empty at the close. It has been subjected to 160 minutes of colourful trauma, streaked with cracks and singe marks, warped and bent and shiny with multiple impact. Yet the lightning somehow passes on, or returns to the book.

Author Moore conjured a planet wild with eventful panic. In his 1980s America still ruled by Richard M. Nixon, masked adventurers – some self-appointed, some creaking out from retirement – hurtled about righting wrongs or, in malevolent cases, wronging rights. Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse pack a teeming plot into a tedium-tight structure. Every character struts his vivid stuff, from Billy Crudup’s Dr Manhattan (a blue super-nude with body-upsizing powers) to Malin Akerman’s shimmying Silk Spectre, from Patrick Wilson’s Clark Kentish Night Owl – his boffin basement accessorised with self-assembly airship – to Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach, riffing embittered voice-overs through his white hood patterned with moving inkblots.

The script is clever, with side-servings of camp. (“It’s all quantum mechanics and parallel realities with John,” sighs Silk Spectre of boyfriend Dr Manhattan.) The music choices are perfect, not least Bob Dylan crooning “The times they are a-changing” over the montage’d march of time in the opening credits. This sequence’s ludic rewrites of history include an identification of the grassy knoll killer: in the comic book world, anything is up for re-hypothesis.

So what is missing? A little of the original’s madness and a lot of its aesthetic high-wire walking. Moore never stopped laying on ideas. His stories within stories were not just the characters’ flashbacked histories; they included enrichments like the long, gruesomely inventive pirate adventure read by a street boy devouring, yes, a comic book. Moore’s Watchmen is a labyrinth of storytelling about storytelling – Borges meets Batman. Shouldn’t the film have found a screen equivalent to this entropic maziness? Instead we get a rollicking super-yarn, full of fun for all but three hours but lost to mind and memory, when over, in a similar timespan.

Emily Blunt as Victoria and Rupert Friend as Albert

“There is much dispute over Queen Victoria,” went the old rhyme. “Was she liberal or was she Tory-er?” Scripted by Julian Gosford Park Fellowes and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, The Young Victoria twirls and glitters like a disco light shining above the floor of history. Whether anyone real or believable is dancing beneath is a question more moot.

Biopics with “young” in the title nearly always assign themselves to tease out the spirit of romantic rebellion in someone later known for crustiness or solemnity. It pushes it, though, to present Victoria as a combination of beddable moppet and Becky Sharp minx, with a sideline in precocious super-diplomacy. Emily Blunt puts the sex into Saxe-Coburg, a dimple-chinned girl with bedroom eyes, while Rupert Friend strives bravely to make Albert seem more than a moustachioed German mannequin. The history is by Mills & Boon, the visuals are wall-to-wall frou-frou. Add the banality-packed dialogue (“Even a palace can be a prison”) and some substandard mise-en-scène, and we feel like crying, “Call back Merchant Ivory!” They at least would never fob us off with fake rainstorms – more than one – in the foregrounds of expansive sunlit uplands.

Sharp as a knife: Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond

Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance is a blistering little thriller from the daughter of director David. Growing up in the household that hatched Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, what do you do for an encore? Lynch fille starts by dispatching two dark-suited FBI agents (Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond) to tidy up the mess after a spasm of serial killings in a desert township. Is there more here than meets the eye – even though by half-time the eyes have been met by murder, drugs-taking, drive-by sniping, near-rape and a triple-fatality car pile-up?

The scenes are shot in a clever range of styles, the dialogue is as sharp as a Stanley knife. The atmosphere in the cop shop, where the film closes in for the teased-out development before the recapitulation and surprise coda, is irresistibly seedy. Everyone spies on everyone else as the interrogations-with-surveillance begin and we start asking: “Who is lying and who is acting?” I did guess the twist ending; more joy to you if you do not. Either way, this is time well spent in the dark abyss of a multiplex.

Critics cannot be trusted within 50 miles of a dog. Some reviewers go off-message, even off-planet, at the sight of a gooey-eyed mutt laying down its paw, droit de seigneur-style, on a film script. The script and dog in Wendy and Lucy both belong to writer-director Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy), whose film won six stars out of six this week from London’s Time Out magazine, putting her up there with Eisenstein, Welles and Tarkovsky.

This for the skimpy, small-town tale of a girl (Michelle Williams) losing a dog, looking for the dog and possibly or possibly not (mustn’t give away cliffhanging ending) finding the dog. Sensible people will see the film for what it is: Waiting for Dogot without Beckett, or Dog Day Afternoon with the addition of evening, night and a long morning. But you cannot argue with dog lovers: they see in a vacuum of nothingness an existential nirvana.

The week’s third woman filmmaker from the US – one more and we’ll have a revolution – is Nanette Burstein. Her documentary American Teen goes in close on the lives, hopes, heartbreaks and tears of a dozen schoolchildren in Warsaw, Indiana. The sweet-mannered geek with the acne-spotted Adonis looks; the basketball jock whose competitive dad moonlights as an Elvis impersonator; the upwardly mobile lonely heart downwardly spiralled by a boy’s jilting text message. All human life? All high school life anyway. It is medium-mesmerising, even if we are gnawed by secret shame at watching a glorified reality TV show.

Have you noticed that the Dutch and the Danes are stuck on second world war resistance films long after the rest of the world has moved on? It must be all that bicycling across flat country, the brain gets too low to the saddle of the space-time continuum. Flame and Citron is the story as several times before. Boy meets girl; girl meets ghoul (Nazi variety); girl informs on ghoul; boy meets ghoul and spills gore; gore gets more... Ole Christian Madsen directs with crisp conviction, however, and strong crescendi. And a truth-based story always helps.