Frills no thrills

Here's English costume drama from the other end of the scale - Plunkett & Macleane, the most unpalatable highwayman romance since Adam and the Ants' Stand And Deliver. The poster advertises it as "a mediaeval Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels," which is a bit steep considering it takes place in the 18th century.

Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller are the dandy highwaymen, robbing, looting and swapping not-quite Swiftian badinage ("Surrender is for wankers!") in a murk-enshrouded England that looks more cut-price than a Hammer horror set. Anachronism is one thing, but it might as well be consistent - you can't just lay on the period squalor one minute and expect us to accept thumping techno and Philip Treacey hats the next. Jake Scott, son of Ridley, directs in slap-happy fashion.

Beyond Silence, a tender Bavarian vignette about a young woman coming to terms with her parents' deafness. It was nominated last year for an Academy Award as best Foreign Film - which just shows what a well-meaning trudge it is. The best you can say is that everyone in it - especially Tatjana Trieb as the heroine aged eight - seems to be brilliant at sign language.

Re-release of the week is Charles Laughton's ineffably strange 1955 nightmare The Night Of The Hunter, with Robert Mitchum as the psychotic preacher, roaming the fairy-tale countryside with knife clutched in his tattooed fists. Even more unnerving, though, is Lillian Gish as the cloying embodiment of good.

August In The Water is the latest and weirdest from Japanese eccentric Sogo Ishii. In a similarly mystical-psychedelic vein, it's about a schoolgirl high-diving champion and a mysterious disease from space. It's slow, eerie, strangely detached, and - unlike Ishii's taut, X-Files-y Angel Dust - doesn't know when to stop.