Jurassic Park III moves so fast that the film's cutting room must have resembled an abattoir. How much digital blood, skin and bone were left on the floor as director Joe Johnston and editor Robert Dalva electronically rendered this dinosaur trequel's raw material into a bite-sized 90 minutes?

As processed picture-making goes, it goes like the clappers. You can take the family, the cat, Aunt Edna, the children. All will thrill to the sight of Jurassic Park survivor Dr Sam Neill returning to his Costa Rican atoll - or rather, its predator-colonised neighbour introduced in JP2 - to battle the galumphing monsters.

"No force on earth or heaven could get me on that island," he says initially. But by the rules of action cinema he is there in five minutes, lured by the megadollars of a supposed research benefactor (William H. Macy) who wants Neill to escort him and his estranged wife (Tea Leoni) in a sightseeing plane trip over the isle where - we soon learn - he aims to look for their young son, gone missing after a parasailing accident.

Any screenwriting excuse will do to land half a dozen humans in earthly hell. This time the wildlife includes two new recruits: the spinosaurus, distinguished by the Andean spur of scales on its back, and the winged long-beaked pterosaur. Dozens of these steal the last reel, swooping and shrieking around their prey as it nervously crosses a ravine-spanning bridge.

There are some absent friends: the T-Rex, the triceratops; and sadly the Attenboroughsaurus, finally put out to pasture with its white whiskers and cherubic cheeks. But changes must be rung to ensure shock and novelty. Today even BBC TV can parade lifelike carnivores from 65m years BC, and here a first aerial shot of long-necked beasts cantering across grasslands seems as anodyne as a safari holiday movie. We need every new craggy face, every demonic twist on ugliness, every "bird" that can chitter from Dantean skies or turn its giant beak to camera in an audience-appraising close-up that chills the blood. For extra richness, there is a sub-plot about Sam Neill's research into the theory that prehistoric creatures communicate with intelligent sounds. In a screen saga where humans seldom aspire to more than "eek", "argh", "don't move" or "run!", this should give the animals an advantage in future instalments.

High Heels and Low Lifes is a British gangster film with a difference: it is even worse than most British gangster films. Minnie Driver and Mary McCormack play the London-dwelling pals - one a nurse, the other a struggling American actor - who blackmail a gang of bank robbers masterminded by Sir Michael Gambon. Playing a gay gang lord referred to throughout the film as "the poof", our foremost actor-knight contributes yet another take-the-money-and-run cameo.

Driver and McCormack as the Thameside Thelma and Louise archly add comedy to thrills, tripping over stiletto heels and misfiring their machine guns, in a movie that has no idea where it is going although limitlessly indebted to the rubbish it has come from: the UK mob movie with mid-Atlantic aspirations.

There is an Andrews Theory that in the digital age, with the looming possibility of the Virtual Actor and the simplified range of thespian types that may bring, all screen performers will come to resemble other performers. Animal Attraction suggests the trend has already begun. Hugh Jackman as a handsome researcher on a TV chatshow could turn heads with his resemblance to the young Clint Eastwood. Ellen Barkin as the show's host could stop traffic with her likeness to Angie Dickinson. And as the heroine - an unlucky-in-love co-worker who finds sex and happiness are pseudonymously publishing a media-feted essay on the sex war - Ashley Judd seems to have had all her pretty, once idiosyncratic puppy-fat lipo'd away. She now resembles Lara Croft or a younger version - same fetching moue, same lynx-like eyes - or Marisa Tomei, playing her best friend. The film itself stutters amiably through a romantic-comical plot thin but sweet, that might itself have been more at home on small screen than large.

Ed Gein should have gone straight to video in a handcart. Playing the notorious Wisconsin serial murderer and mutilator, Steve Railsback acts with staring eyes and a mesmerised mumble, as if trying to synthesise the two Anthonys who have played famous fictionalised Geins: Perkins in Psycho, Hopkins in the Silence of the Lambs. The duty-macabre tableaux - lampshades of human skin, shrunken heads, skull soup-bowls - are mixed with nickel-and-dime psychologising, mostly provided by flashbacks to Gein's bIble-thumping mother (Carrie Snodgress).

Foreign, in the depths of the silly season, isn't necessarily better. Benito Zambrano's Solas from Spain is an unpretentious feelgood movie. One wishes it was more pretentious and didn't feel so good, or so self-huggingly virtuous; that the tale of a promiscuous girl, pregnant by a passing male, who discovers love through a mellowing relationship with mum (up from the country to tend hospitalised dad) and the friendship of an old man in a neighbouring flat fidgeted a little to show some fierier facets.

Despite lovely performances from Maria Galiana as the girl and Ana Fernandez as her seraphic, age-beautified mum, the spiritual therapy is laid on thick. The ending with its promise of an eternal platonic intimacy between the baby-cradling heroine and her devoted oldie shuffling among gravestones is a little repellent: like a commercial for the afterlife before we have finished with this one.

Robert Guediguian's A L'Attaque is no better: a French love-and-politics tale in which the ups and downs of a Marseilles garage-owner family form a movie within a movie, Pirandellianly framed by scenes in which two screenwriters try to get the muddled, sentimental plot right. (Whimsically dramatising your creative failures doesn't make them go away. The festival-hailed The Iron Ladies, a truth-based Thai comedy about a gay/transvestite volleyball team, contains the Hundred Oldest Jokes about limp-wristed chaps trying to be macho, then goes for the tearducts as they triumph. I left before inundation. Many others have stayed to applaud and adore.

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