It happens with some epics. Ridley Scott’s American Gangster lasts 2½ hours but gives the impression of having ended before it begins. Our imaginations have barely passed through immigration before we are whirled around early 1970s New York – or a series of heady visual simulacra – by a gifted movie artist who wants to show us his sketches of a city, its teeming corruption and its crusader for truth and justice.

Here is the bribery-prone, Nixon-era NYPD whose lone cuckoo in the nest, Detective Russell Crowe, gets hate looks from colleagues early on when he hands in, rather than embezzling, 1m drug-deal dollars found in a car. And here are the statelier, though no  less speedy, glimpses of heroin king Denzel Washington, the first Afro- American to outplay the Mafia at their own games. For, yes, Richie Roberts (Crowe) and Frank Lucas (Washington) were real-life antagonists. They both survived to tell their tales and to help screenwriter Steven Schindler’s List Zaillian tell his.

So it is all true – except that “it” gives the bizarre impression of barely being there at all. Did Scott and Zaillian decide on a script before they had a story? On a drama before they had characters? As a bout of two-man charisma-wrestling American Gangster is watchable enough. Crowe is peerless at playing men who look as if they barely got out of bed before trying to save the world. The untucked shirt, baggy face and swath of stubble are a gamey contrast to Washington’s high-gleam crime dandy, a self-made man who seems to polish his complexion along with his boots and whose authority is enthroned by Scott in scenes of chiaroscuro whose tones glow as if from a fashion magazine.

Whenever our senses roam beyond the stars, though, we find an underpopulated landscape. Supporting characters give little support, with the sole exception of Armand Assante’s Mafia capo, a witty, preening two-timer who seems to have bought up the film’s leftover stock of interesting mannerisms. And the themes of mercantile striving and muscular self-advancement implied in the title word “American” – with its added irony for the criminal manifestation – are never developed beyond the rudimentary. Attractive super-crook? Loser hero who finally wins? System exposed as morally dysfunctional? We have seen them all before. Length does not add substance to the drama, even where reality adds weight to the argument.

“I’m Beowulf and I’m here to kill your monst-ah,” declaims British actor Ray Winstone in his best Dark Ages cockney. How wonderful to see Britain’s favourite gangland geezer going international to play a sort of Viking-land geyser. Everyone spurts blood in Beowulf as if it was going out of fashion. The plot climbs from climax to climax as monster Grendel, voiced by Crispin Glover and realised as a barnstorming gothic ghoul by the effects team, first sets about King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) then provokes warrior hero Beowulf into hunting down Grendel’s cave-dwelling mum, a sexpot demon with swishing tail (who else but Angelina Jolie?)

This live-action/digimated version of the Old English poem, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Polar Express) and scripted by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman with Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, has a rumbustious time being the bloodiest 12A (UK) rating in memory.

First it strives to make sense of the ancient epic’s occasional plot enigma, then it makes nonsense of the whole thing by turning it into a white- knuckle ride for overgrown kids. Those kids included, on a Monday morning in an Imax theatre, 30 full- grown London critics wearing 3D spectacles and dodging and weaving in their seats.

The fights are terrific. The camera- rides – through skies, up castle walls, around ceilings for spider’s-eye views of pitched fights between men and monst-ahs – are thrilling. The optional 3D ensures that items keep flying into your face, from spears to rocks to flash-floods of blood from pierced arteries or eyes.

Humanity takes a back seat on this rollercoaster. The male characters
are two-meat dishes, beefy and hammy, with a penchant for taking their clothes off before battle. (How many shots of Winston’s derriere did they think we needed?) The females (Robin Penn Wright, Alison Lohman) are glazed-eyed mannequins stuck
in the shop-window of digimation. This process is still not confident enough to bring all its goods to the sales areas. When two or more characters stop and talk, the film becomes dead and decorous, though I exempt John Malkovich, bringing an Olivier-worthy snap and sarcasm to wicked Unferth.

I never read Beowulf and I have never read Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. So I step up to Sarah Gavron’s film version unbiased and ignorant. I find a sweet-hearted, attenuated tale of a young Bangladeshi immigrant mother (Tannishtha Chatterjee) trying to weave a liveable life in east London. And “weave” is right since the film is full of fabrics and shimmer and embroiderings of light and colour, giving a slender story the shy blush of art. (But experts tell me half the novel has been left out and the film’s story starts after the midpoint.)

Nothing here is new enough to dislodge the memory of I for India or East is East. Ms Chatterjee’s performance is too passive: even understatement must have something solid-state to work with. Satish Kaushik’s pudgy potentate of a dad is better, with his pedantry and Hume- quoting polymathy. There are two lovely moments. One is a glimpse of Brief Encounter on TV, seen from Kaushik’s slug-a-bed viewpoint through a vista of rumbled bedclothes and one emergent foot having the bunion on its big toe lanced by his wife. (Ah, married life.) The other, from the mouth of Kaushik, suspecting his wife’s fidelity, is a haunting little epigram worthy of a more haunting film: “The great
thing about getting older is you don’t need everything to be possible any more, you just need some things to
be certain.”

Spare an evening, if you feel adventurous, for Tsai Ming-Liang’s
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and The Wayward Cloud. The Taiwan filmmaker conjures stories from the pool of his unconscious. He specialises in sex, songs and surreal cityscapes. Blasted apartment blocks with inadvertent water features (dripping ceilings, flooded ground floors) are a favourite. Here his characters make love, make meals, make conversation – though not much – and in moments of transcendence remake the world according to their fantasies and longings.

Among the chattering classes “chick flick” has become almost a term of honour. Yes, there are good films made for, about and sometimes by women. But no, they don’t include this week’s The Jane Austen Book Club (12A, Robin Swicord), a twittering soap opera about five Californian women using Jane as an agony aunt for their love problems. Nor do they include Michel Spinosa’s Anna M (15), the over-cranked, under-scripted tale of a besotted girl (Isabelle Carré) stalking a handsome doctor (Gilbert Melki). Think Fatal Attraction gone French and gone wrong.