Everlasting Moments (★★★★★, Jan Troell); Blind Loves (★★★★☆, Juraj Lehotsky); The Girl Cut in Two (★★☆☆☆, Claude Chabrol); Mark of an Angel (★★★☆☆, Safy Nebbou); Tormented (★★★☆☆, Jon Wright); Awaydays (★★☆☆☆, Pat Holden); Night at the Museum 2 (★★☆☆☆, Shawn Levy); Pierrot le Fou (★★★★☆, Jean-Luc Godard)

By his own admission, Jan Troell, now in his late 70s and one of Sweden’s most important film-makers, treats each project as if it might be his last. In Everlasting Moments he has found the perfect subject. A reflection on the nature of creativity, the film is in various ways a personal work, the true story that inspired it having been presented to Troell by his wife; she in turn heard it direct from a woman called Maja, who serves as the film’s narrator. At its heart is Maja’s mother, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), a Finnish-born woman living in southern Sweden in the early years of the 20th century with her abusive, alcoholic, unfaithful husband Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt).

Camera control: Maria Heiskanen

The couple and their ever-growing brood barely scrape a living from the proceeds of Sigge’s irregular work as a labourer. Life for Maria is hard, but in time she finds at least the possibility of some respite from the misery of her existence through the camera that she won years earlier in a lottery and hid away in a linen cupboard. When she first rediscovers this beautiful device, whose every elegant contour is lovingly, almost fetishistically filmed in the opening credit sequence (as usual, Troell serves as his own cameraman), Maria thinks only of pawning it. But she strikes up a friendship that develops into an extended, chaste romance with Mr Pedersen (Jesper Christensen), the owner of a local photographic studio who encourages Maria’s talent as a portrait photographer.

On one level this is a simple story of a life thwarted by a brutal patriarch. But aside from being a well-told grim tale, it tackles some compelling questions about creativity: about what it is to have an artistic gift and about whether the artist, here one who looks at life through a viewfinder, is performing a profound and vital function or merely avoiding engagement with the real world. Although punctuated with moments of shocking violence, this is a quiet, slow-moving film but it is also involving and at times deeply moving.

It’s hard to define what kind of film Blind Loves is, but whether you categorise it as animated docu-drama or perhaps as docu-fantasy, it is a peculiar, affecting piece. The theme that connects the four strands within this outré Slovakian production is, indeed, love as experienced by various blind and partially sighted people. So we meet a pianist and his plump lady-love, a Roma man and the young object of his lust, a blind woman who may or may not be pregnant by her husband, and a pretty teenage girl preparing to meet the boy she has romanced online. So long as you don’t find the shifts into fantasy jarring, there is a great deal to enjoy.

Benoît Magimel and Ludivine Sagnier

Claude Chabrol, a year older than Troell, is sadly not at the top of his game in The Girl Cut in Two. The girl in question is Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a naive young television weather reporter. Caught between two unsuitable suitors – rich, unhinged Paul (Benoît Magimel) and successful author and ageing lothario Charles (François Berléand) – she makes a succession of almost unaccountably dim choices. Chabrol is routinely characterised as the French Hitchcock, and this film does at times bring to mind The Birds, in which Hitchcock famously plays with the audience’s expectations, setting up the story so slowly that we are willing something, almost anything, exciting to happen. Chabrol is, to put it charitably, bolder in The Girl Cut in Two and, by the time the story springs to life and becomes the thriller, of sorts, that it seems set up to be, we have had to sit through 90-odd minutes of turgid melodrama.

Rather better is Mark of an Angel, an unsettling if never wholly convincing French thriller in which Elsa (Catherine Frot), a soon-to-be divorced mother, becomes weirdly fixated on a seven-year-old girl she spots when picking her son up from a birthday party. There are flaws in plotting and pacing but this is always interesting and, unlike Chabrol’s offering, doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Tormented is a neat, stylish British horror film which, while not quite as resonant as last year’s Eden Lake, still packs a punch. Any horror flick needs its own ethical framework, however artificial, around which to construct the carnage inflicted on its central characters, and here the justification for the ever-mounting body count among a group of schoolkids is a supremely ill-advised campaign of bullying against a plump classmate. In effect Friday the 13th meets Skins, the UK teen soap opera, this is brisk and, considering the budgetary limitations, technically impressive.

Awaydays is the drab screen adaptation of Kevin Sampson’s cult novel of casual violence among Merseyside football soccer hooligans in the late 1970s. This ought to have been a Quadrophenia or The Firm for the noughties but script, editing and some poorly staged fight sequences render this inchoate and almost unforgivably uninteresting.

More of the same: Ben Stiller

Night at the Museum 2 is an often frenetic sequel to a modestly entertaining yet wildly successful original. The makers have, understandably if not wisely, resolved simply to serve up more, very much more, of what was on offer first time around, and so most of the cast – Ben Stiller, Ricky Gervais, Robin Williams et al – return for another dizzying feast of CGI effects as once again museum pieces, here in the vast Smithsonian Institution in Washington, are magically animated. This is designed to appeal to attention-deficit youngsters but will irritate or exhaust more discerning cinephiles – though they may be intrigued to note that this represents the third time, after The Indian in the Cupboard and the original Night at the Museum, that Steve Coogan has played a miniature military figurine brought magically to celluloid life.

Intoxicating: Belmondo and Anna Karina

Those after fast-paced, chaotic entertainment would be far better off seeking out the re-released Pierrot le Fou, directed by Chabrol’s old Cahiers du Cinéma pal Jean-Luc Godard. With its free-wheeling, semi-improvised storyline, it is at times infuriatingly indulgent but is also an intoxicating, wildly inventive picaresque fantasy, and an essential companion piece to Godard’s dazzling debut Breathless, another convention-busting, lovers-on-the-run film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Nigel Andrews is away