Roman Polanski says he wanted to make an Oliver Twist for "for a young audience. My ambition is to make the film for my own children." I look forward to that version. Meanwhile we have this one: a film whose best parts are as child-friendly as a son et lumière in a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is Poor Law England and its workhouses and child crime syndicates. The son et lumière is Polanski's gothic imagination, strobing away while street mobs bay, women and children scream, and the composer Rachel Portman saws and throbs with her string section.

Put it another way. Watching the film is like finding one painting under the layer of another. Scrape away the kiddywink Dickensiana - the bits where boring old Mr Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke) whisks Oliver off to bachelor-household bliss in the 'burbs - and you find a true Polanski canvas. The colours are dark, the impasto is thick and you can almost hear the Ghost of Jack Nicholson Past warning, "Forget it, Oliver, it's Dickenstown."

Here Ben Kingsley plays the wicked Jew as if Fagin is the story's true tragic hero, a wheedling shape-changer, Dostoevskian in his volatility, gibbering over his jewel box, ingratiating himself with the boys as if innocence were the most appeasement-hungry demon of all. Kingsley is terrific. His mad scene in jail knocks most of the other actors (including Jamie Foreman's one-note Bill Sikes) off the soundstage and into another country.

But what country exactly are we in? For much of Oliver Twist, as with Polanski's Tess, cinema's most famous artist-in-exile turns an English literary classic into a non-denominational European pastoral. The film was shot in a Prague studio and its surrounding countryside. The hills and hamlets are a digitised haze backgrounding Oliver's walk to London after the lad blots his CV with the famous "Please, sir, I want some more." Odd half-timbered villages, seemingly uninhabited, shimmer away in Pixel-land. A stray wisp of smoke looks starved of megabytes.

When we reach London, the artistry proper starts. Polanski's production designer Allan Starski, helped by the shade of Gustave Doré, creates a higgledy maze where shops jostle slums, where Georgian houses as proudas shirtfronts camouflage barely hidden stews and shambles. The dark alleys and slithery roofs seempurpose-built for Sikes to chase Nancy to her death or to flee with hostage Oliver.

If Barney Clark as the boy hero never seems more than an extra promoted to a featured player, the best of the rest - including Leanne Rowe's Nancy and Michael Heath and Gillian Hanna as the Sowerberrys - do their Dickens with wit, detail, diligence and devotion.

Ingmar Bergman's Saraband is the first film he has directed in two decades. Rolling back the stone of retirement, he has been greeted by scarce-believing acolytes touching his stigmata. Yet what a risk for this Swedish movie messiah! Audiences today may find "the Bergman touch" old-fashioned. It fails to feature sex, violence or digitised effects (though Saraband was shot on high-definition video). There are no battles in space. And the man entirely refuses to adapt popular literary classics.

In fact Bergman has never made a film without sex and violence. His entire output is cosmic. And his own classic status means he can eat Jane Austen and Dickens for tea. Soon, watching this four-hander in which Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) re-meet 30 years after Scenes from a Marriage and the visiting ex-wife is instantly tipped into an incestuous snake-nest involving Johan's widowed son (Börje Ahlstedt) and granddaughter (Julia Duf-venius), we realise Bergman has never been away. Our lives, in their deepest abysses of fear, spiritual groping and starved or sinful love, have gone on being Bergmanesque even while the master had his feet up.

Saraband is a television-style studio drama. There are painted backdrops outside Johan's dacha. The HDTV faces are just a little too pink. And the action is all exits and entrances, in 10 separately titled scenes.

Yet the tunnelling mole Bergman uses to reach the core of existence is still so sharp that after 20 minutes' preamble we are already roasting in the nether infernos. There are crises, revelations and the spitting of white-hot truths. There are sarcasms that scorch like magma: "Henrik constantly fails at everything" is Johan's comment on his son's botched suicide attempt. And there are devilries in Bergman's own staging - such as the way almost every two-handed scene opens with one character creeping up unobserved on the other - that, hours later, you realise have left little burns on your mind.

The film is about the past playing Grandma's footsteps with the present, about the wages of emotional defeat, about love's waste and wantonness. There is never just enough love, Bergman tells us; there is always too much or too little. The too little dries the human soul into egotism. The too much can change course, after a bereavement, and devastate lives that never knew they were potential flood plains. Saraband is a small film with a formidable reach. It makes us realise that cinema has not outgrown Ingmar Bergman at all. It is still trying to measure up to him.

After watching Rag Tale you need a team of microsurgeons to reassemble your brain. They will need to repair short-circuited synapses and reattach the front of the cerebellum to the back of the eyes. The writer-director-producer Mary Mc-Guckian shoots a simple satirical story - a day in the lies of a tabloid newspaper - in a non-stop tumult of cuts, whip-pans and tilted angles. The actors improvise like sailors on a sliding deck, as editor Rupert Graves sets out to stick it to chairman Malcolm McDowell after sleeping with McDowell's wife. Colleagues help him contrive a scandal. Conspiratorial emails fly like gulls at feeding time. A main character goes the way of Bill Sikes. It is quite a lot of fun, but take seasick pills first.

Timur Bekhmambetov's Night Watch (15,), made more money in Russia than any other Russian film, which shows that the Curse of Keanu reaches far. Imagine a Slavic blend of The Matrix and Constantine; then admire the technical resource of a pop-video-graduate director strewing the screen with futuristic armies, girls changing into owls, magical swords drawn from spines and other gallimaufry from a country that has clearly decided: the hell with socialist realism.

Yet America, when pushed, can still do it better. Serenity (15}, is cheery tosh about 26th-century rogue traders zooming round space trying to outwit the overgrown bossiness of the Alliance. The writer-director Joss Whedon, who colonised the airwaves with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, gives his characters a Hawksian likeability and lays on the battles as if money were no object and imagination were a looter's paradise. Halfway through I thought: isn't this what Star Wars would have been like if it had been good?