The higher the aspiration, the louder the clunk of failure. The week’s biggest disappointments arise from the films with the best intentions and most serious themes.

Creation 2/5
Jon Amiel

The Soloist 3/5
Joe Wright

White Lightnin’ 4/5
Dominic Murphy

The Crimson Wing 4/5
Matthew Aeberhard,
Leander Ward

Born in 68 3/5
Olivier Ducastel,
Jacques Martineau

Management 2/5
Stephen Belber

Fame 2/5
Kevin Tancharoen

Jack Said 1/5
Lee Basannavar,
Michael Tchoubouroff

There’s little higher than the mind that unlocked the mysteries of evolution, so Creation’s director Jon Amiel tempts providence (or perhaps science) in showing us Charles Darwin at work. Or rather, a Darwin undergoing doubts, illness, marriage problems and hallucinations (he chats to the ghost of a beloved dead daughter).

The least one expects is a decent exercise in period drama, but this modest hope is clobbered by dialogue purporting to be from the 1850s in which the fittest clichés are already showing their capacity for survival: “We need to talk”; “Why must everything be about you?”

Paul Bettany, as Darwin, gives no indication of being a revolutionary thinker, presumably in case this frightens the popular audience, and intellectual issues are simplified to the level of educational broadcasting for schoolchildren. Period feeling is non-existent among well-known actors in fancy dress taking name checks (Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker).

Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin

A sub-plot features an orang-utan; it is no exaggeration to say that she is the most moving performer on screen. The last image of Darwin, champion of the rational, happily accompanied by the ghost of a little girl, is the final touch of the preposterous.

The Soloist is less elevated. The real-life Los Angeles journalist Steve Lopez’s encounter with a homeless schizophrenic busker – a cellist drop-out from Juilliard – is set to be a heart-warming tale of recovery and triumph. In fact it’s potentially more interesting. A comeback recital for the prodigy is a shambles. Lopez has career worries and domestic problems. The revelation of poverty, squalor and mental illness in LA’s underclass is horrific.

Lost in music: Jamie Foxx

But the film suffers from uncertainty of tone. Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) is a fluent, striking film-maker to the point of flashiness, and one keeps expecting – or fearing – a conventional feelgood conclusion. He brings gloss to the dross; a great feel for theatrical effects undermines the gritty truth. But the principal actors are nevertheless superb. Robert Downey Jr briskly resists sentimentalising the journo and Jamie Foxx’s lost musician has genuinely, unbearably moving moments, though cynics may see his as the latest handicapped role made to order for the Oscars.

In White Lightnin’, style and content meet, blend and writhe in the memory, a haunting nightmare. That, by the way, is a compliment. A British film made in North America and Croatia, Dominic Murphy’s hallucinatory journey through rural Appalachia has evoked praise from Berlin and Sundance. Its subject’s opinion is something else. If I were Murphy, I would be very afraid.

Carrie Fisher, Edward Hogg: ‘White Lightnin’

Jesco White learnt “mountain dancing” from his father, an Appalachian mountain speciality descended from English settlers’ clog dancing. Jesco’s stardom in this world of redneck deprivation was equalled by his stormy private life: a gas- and glue-sniffer since childhood, in and out of reform schools, he eloped with a woman old enough to be his mother and for a time was happy, barring the odd threat to murder her. Imagine the background of Boorman’s Deliverance with a dash of Charles Manson, told mainly in black and white with occasional dreamlike patches of colour (a blue pick-up, a check-shirt), recounted in voice-over in the first person. An atrociously grisly climax arouses as much pity as horror. Young British actor Edward Hogg is an extraordinary Jesco; Carrie Fisher, no less, ages touchingly as the older woman. Jesco is actually still alive and living quietly. How he has reacted to the grand guignol of his cinematic end is uncertain.

Exquisitely judged: ‘The Crimson Wing’

The Crimson Wing is this year’s Disneynature product. Rest assured: there is precious little anthropomorphism in this ravishingly beautiful depiction of flamingos in Tanzania. A patently devoted labour of love – are wildlife filmmakers capable of anything else? – it shows a painterly eye in frame after exquisitely judged frame, not afraid of economy and balance – one shot of a speck moving towards others, distantly clustered, on a blank blue background, evokes the spare mastery of a Chinese watercolour. British directors Matthew Aeberhard and Leander Ward are turning wildlife movies into a new art form.

At a little less than three hours, the family-cum-political saga Born in 68, depicting 40 years of angst, idealism and sex amid the French picturesque classes, covers about 14 years an hour; but who, apart from the gently dozing critic, is counting?

The problem is not length but shallowness. A number of socio-political boxes are ticked without being treated in much depth. A trio of student chums (two m, one f, but this is no Jules et Jim) react to the événements of 1968 by leaving Paris and setting up a commune in an abandoned farm. They smile. They sing. They have group sex. They sing some more. They smile incessantly. Some fall away, in need of plumbing, a conventional career, or to escape gnomic folk songs. The next generation has its own battles to fight. The film’s second half centres on a gay relationship, the advent of Aids and sexual politics. This social history-lite is pleasantly shot, memories cued by popular music or television news items, and remarkable for how beautifully Catherine, the hippy-turned-matriarch, ages. The men bear testimony to the passing years with a few make-up lines; but Catherine survives the decades as wrinkle-free as befits Laetitia Casta, a former Pirelli calendar star and the muse of three consecutive Sports Illustrated swimwear issues.

Management is a puzzle. Unable to decide between being a romantic comedy, a zany farce or a thoughtful study of two emotionally repressed losers finding fulfilment, it ends up a mess; but an intriguing mess. Best known as a playwright, debut director Stephen Belber gives tantalising glimpses of small, sad lives. Mike (Steve Zahn) works in his parents’ forlorn motel in the middle of nowhere. He falls for a guest, a travelling rep for hotel art (old-fashioned hunting paintings, complete with red coats and horses), played by Jennifer Aniston with the right brand of unsmiling self-possession just this side of sourness.

His pursuit involves some slapstick, some sly social observation, and some touching moments. The comedy is not funny enough, the characters not filled out, the plot broken-backed; but there’s something likable here. The camera pulls back from the happy ending to reveal a leaf-strewn, autumnal suburb under a grey sky, as untidy and worrying as life.

I’m not sure if a new version of Fame was really needed, and young Kevin Tancharoen is no Alan Parker. Unconnected shreds of plot suggest severe editing at some stage and neither characters nor musical routines add up to much. But how nice to see veterans such as Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Mullally and the great Kelsey Frasier Grammer (looking pained beyond the call of duty) among the teaching staff.

There are narrative holes in Jack Said as dark as the Expressionist murk in which the London underworld is shot. A fleeting reference to a “Lear project” cues a foul-mouthed gang boss with two daughters, one nice, one nasty (though the nice one, a dab hand at murder, is no Cordelia). Based on Paul Tanter’s graphic novel, it makes Guy Ritchie look like Dostoyevsky. Awful lines, bad acting – Danny Dyer’s appearances stand out as dazzlingly professional, which says it all – unredeemed by a taste of Act 2 of Mozart’s Figaro, a bizarre rococo touch.