Star Trek (★★★★☆, J.J. Abrams); Coraline (★★★★☆, Henry Selick);
Chéri (★★★☆☆, Stephen Frears); Little Ashes (★★★☆☆, Paul Morrison);
Sounds Like Teen Spirit (★★☆☆☆, Jamie J. Johnson);
Blue Eyelids (★★★★☆, Ernesto Contreras); O’Horten (★★★★☆, Bent Hamer)

New trekkies start here. Old trekkies, boldly go where you’ve gone before. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek brings a brisk new broom to the myth accumulated over four reverential decades concerning the doings of the Starship Enterprise on screens small and large. But idolaters need fear no iconoclasm and newcomers no exclusion. The start of a presumably new chapter in the franchise is marked by affectionate respect tempered with an eye for modern visual tastes.

Like X-Men, this movie takes us back to the formative youth of Captain Kirk and the unsmilingly logical Spock. We see the latter’s childhood on the planet Vulcan, where his Vulcan-human parentage makes him an object of bullying (an odd phenomenon for an allegedly emotionless race). Jim Kirk on the other hand, his father dying a heroic death the day he was born, grows up a redneck tearaway, a mindless jock whose readiness to use his fists rather than his scarcely perceptible brain bespeaks a glorious future. If there is a weakness in the casting, it is that Chris Pine’s corn-fed poster boy is an uninteresting gung-ho lout, an interpretation that may be modified in the next decade or so. Acting honours are stolen by Zachary Quinto (pictured), whose Spock is an extraordinary portrayal of the logical mind occasionally beset by barely understood emotions, half-recognised, sometimes sneakingly welcomed.

Sulu, Scotty (Simon Pegg fans can be reassured, and his detractors warned, that his perky brand of comedy is wearyingly in place) and the rest are there, in embryonic glory. The hint of camp in the design comes from respect rather than mockery. The battles, inevitably in this genre, are too many and sometimes noisily unintelligible. Fun so far, without hitting greatness.

Parallel world: Coraline

The much-heralded Star Trek may be eclipsed by another fantasy release, Coraline. Stop-go 3D animation, plus the voices, among others of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are an enticing prospect, and the vision of Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) adds a darkness to this sometimes sinister fairy tale. That description seems too anodyne for the story, by the English-born US-based writer Neil Gaiman, of a young girl who discovers a parallel world where versions of her parents are more welcoming than the often distracted reality. The Other World becomes intrusive, Other Mother murderously possessive. The disguised wicked witch and her child victims are in the great tradition of domestic malaise, of normality menaced by the dark outsider, from Grimm and Struwwelpeter to Edward Gorey and Lemony Snicket, perfectly mirrored in the film’s use of blackness and colour. For the grown-ups as much as the children – perhaps more.

Secretless sphinx: Michelle Pfeiffer

Stephen Frears’ desire to please all the people all the time leads to a moral hedging of bets, with varying degrees of success. And if this tends to leave a film peopled by waxworks, go the whole hog and make them the most decorative waxworks a budget can afford. Hence Chéri, which reduces Colette’s bittersweet tale of the love between an experienced older woman and a spoilt young man to a dazzling belle époque fashion parade and soft furnishings catalogue.

Christopher Hampton’s lazily unmemorable script gives little help to Michelle Pfeiffer, her style and intelligence gratefully remembered from Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. As the ageing courtesan she indulges in the arch walk and delivery that actors imagine denotes a vaguely classy product, but fails to inject much life into this eminently secret-less sphinx. As the boy’s mother, a retired cocotte and maliciously false friend with a secret agenda, Kathy Bates is another victim of Frears’ almost Gilbertian mockery of the stout elderly lady – after Sylvia Syms’ coarsely directed Queen Mother, here we have a trial run for Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, less grande horizontale than large protubérante, and patently uncertain of style. Dazzlingly designed, the film salvages recognisable humanity in Rupert Friend’s Chéri, aka the unromantic (to Anglo-Saxon ears) Fred. Elsewhere the movie is as insubstantial as a soufflé, and less intellectually challenging.

Little Ashes also uses a past era overshadowed by imminent change to frame complex emotions. Paul Morrison’s evocation of the meeting in 1920s Madrid and subsequent tortuous relationship of the young Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico Garcia Lorca is such a labour of love that you forgive its incongruities. Chief among these is the cast’s use of Hispanic-accented English where two of the trio are British actors – thus Robert Pattinson’s Dalí and Matthew McNulty’s Buñuel sound like Englishmen trying to be stage Spaniards, somehow patronising Javier Beltrán’s real thing as Lorca. However, Adam Suschitzky’s cinematography, contrasting fierce brightness and brooding shadow, provides an apt background for the passion between Lorca and Dalí, while a tormented Buñuel fights his own sexual demons. Add the lovelorn Marina Gatell and Arly Jover, formidable as Dalí’s final muse, and you get an Iberian version of the Bloomsberries, only more talented.

Pattinson’s cult status from Twilight is evidently no squealing flash in the teenage pan. His Dalí develops from vulnerable but obstinate outsider to celebrity-seeking narcissist, epitomised by the scene where, hearing of Lorca’s death, the grief-stricken artist smears a canvas with black, only to notice how fetching the paint splashes look on him, his sorrow soon forgotten as he preens and poses before the mirror.

Never be afraid of your inner Scrooge. Sounds Like Teen Spirit has its share of emotional manipulation but this documentary on the Junior Eurovision leaves one saddened by so much hope, enthusiasm, ambition and energy expended on such a tacky concept – not that the songs are the tawdry concoctions of the adult contest; remarkably, the entries are the products of their 10-to-15-year-old performers. But some performances prompt the sort of embarrassment one feels at US beauty competitions for toddlers. Indeed, despite its vaunted European-ness, Junior Eurovision seems conducted mainly in a transatlantic variant of that offshore Euro-language English, a triumphant affirmation of the Americanisation of global youth culture.

Hauntingly luminous: Cecilia Suárez

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes last year, the Mexican film Blue Eyelids takes us back to Marty territory and gently self-effacing loners looking for affection in the big city. When Marina wins a holiday for two she realises she has nobody to go with. One evening she is accosted by Victor who claims to be an old school friend, though she remembers neither him nor the classmates he constantly mentions. From vaguely disturbing to touching, their relationship tentatively advances through small hopes and disappointments, resignation and cautious optimism. Beautifully acted by Enrique Arreola and Cecilia Suárez, an actress both withdrawn and hauntingly luminous.

Gently surreal: O’Horten

Equally quiet and cumulative is O’Horten, a winner of Norway’s Silver Lump (honestly). Think Jacques Tati in the land of Munch: a train driver retires and after a life of routine experiences bizarre adventures and strange meetings, some inconsequential, some with lasting results. Gently surreal to quizzically observant, fully deserving that lump.