METROPIA

Dir: Tarik Saleh. Starring: Vincent Gallo, Juliette Lewis, Stellan and Alex Skarsgard

Set in 2024 Europe, Metropia is a left-field slice of Swedish animation (though the soundtrack is in English). It's bleak, but shot through with humour and is unlike any other animated offering from this year.

It is set in a dystopian future, surveillance is everywhere and all of Europe is connected by a vast and slightly sinister subway system called the Metro. But office drone Roger (who defies convention and the law by actually cycling places) hears voices in his head when he rides the Metro – are they real or is he going crazy? Who is the mysterious girl from the all-pervading shampoo commercials? Why do people keep calling him Stefan?

Presented in near monochrome, the strange animation style is perfectly suited for the Kafkaesque story of paranoia and quiet desperation. Actually, maybe it's more Phillip K Dick than Kafka. Kind of hard to classify, but it's very cool stuff.

Colombiana is a likeable bit of wish-fulfilment fantasy action, silly and over-the-top, but carried out with enough panache to make for a fun ride. The very slinky Zoe (Avatar) Saldana witnesses – as a young girl – her parents' murder at the hands of violent Bogota gangsters. So her kindly uncle (good ol' Cliff Curtis) teaches her to be an assassin and between working jobs for him she tracks down her parents' killers. As is usual with writer/producer Luc Besson, it's best to turn off your brain and just enjoy the guns and explosions.

Drug dealer movies split onto two rough camps: the violent ‘it'll all end in a rain of bullets' type, and the ‘I only got into it for a laugh and I'm actually a really nice guy' type. Scarface or Blow. No prizes for guessing which category Mr Nice falls into. This is the unlikely story of overachieving Welsh hash smuggler Howard Marks who moved veritable truck-loads of the stuff from Pakistan and Afghanistan to American and Britain in the ‘70s via an IRA connection at Shannon airport. It's quite sweet stuff but suffers from an overlong running time and unfocused storytelling.

Norwegian film A Somewhat Gentle Man probably wouldn't have been released here had not Stellan Skarsgard become Hollywood's supporting European de jour in everything from Pirates of the Caribbean to Thor. But it means we get to see this deadpan black comedy wherein Skarsgard plays a taciturn crim just released after 12 years in jail and forced to cope with the demands of life and his former gang mates. He's naive and subtle in a performance that (like the film) has garnered several awards. It's as if Jean Reno's character from Leon was directed by Aki Kuraskmaki.

In French film The Big PicturePaul is young, rich and handsome, with a high-flying job and two lovely kids, though he always wanted to be a photographer. But he's trying to hold his marriage together and thinks his wife is having an affair (the tip-off is a bottle of Cloudy Bay!). Then, after an accidental death Paul decides to hide the crime and disappear. Can he find the life he once dreamed of? It ain't – in case you couldn't guess – easy. This is a classily made film, but after moves towards thriller territory the story wanders and fails frustratingly to find an ending.

Ad the extended version of the Millennium Trilogy – Girl With The Dragon Tattoo et al – are out on DVD and blu-ray. These are the three stories in their original TV format before they were cut down to make the cinema-released films. The central part has an extra hour added, the others about half an hour each. This certainly deepens the background of characters and creates a more immersive experience, but ironically, also serves to make them even less like films and more like TV – which, of course, they were.