The week's top flicks

Even before a girl's dismembered body parts turn up in her garden, Frannie (Meg Ryan) is having a hard time. She teaches sullen inner-city New York kids; she's single and sexually wary. And her life is full of stalkers: her own (Kevin Bacon), her doctor-obsessed sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and In The Cut director Jane Campion artfully ensures that the camera makes three.

Frannie finds herself attracted to homicide detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), but although they have lots in common, Frannie believes she spotted him in a highly compromising situation on the night of the murder. Ruffalo and surprise choice Ryan are utterly convincing, and Campion's eloquent melange of sex and gore looks amazing; the screen is frequently part-blurred in graceful imitation of the characters' narrowed focus. It's a very sexy film, but erotic rather than pornographic: it's what's said, not what's shown, that counts. Campion even gets a few sly digs at conventional male expectations (dead women, barebreasted women) before committing her usual fault and sliding over the top: by the end, the sex-and-death mix and the tricksy visuals - not to mention Frannie's irritating tendency to jettison personal security because it furthers the story - have started to niggle. Never enough to spoil things, though: this is a startling, gutsy wade into those murky regions where trust between men and women founders.

Brutal, traumatising and a-slosh with gore - if that's your idea of entertainment then The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is for you. It's 1970s Texas. A vanful of toked-up young folk are tootling happily along to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert (yes, they deserve to die). They pick up a spooky hitcher who, after burbling about the 'bad man' down the highway, pulls a gun from between her legs and blows the back of her pretty lil' head off. Cue ingenious camera pan back from the screaming kids, THROUGH the dripping hole in the suicide's skull, zooming out the blood-bedewed window. Henceforth, it's a glorious orgy of violence, as Leatherface (he wears his victims' skins) chases the vintage hipsters away from Jessica Biel while eagerly waving a chainsaw - and not from a burning desire to prune her garden shrubs. Sure, it lacks the dark humour of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, but a good ladle of suspense and some genuine throw-your-popcorn-up jolts make it this Halloween's treat.

Seabiscuit was the undersized horse with the oversized jockey that beat all comers in the 1930s. It's a tale with Hollywood's imprint all over it, and the film is just what you'd expect - only longer.

Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) is the self-made millionaire who takes on oddball trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) and underdog jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire); with their horse, the quartet became symbols of success against the odds for Depression-riven America. If director Gary Ross had resisted the temptation to bulldoze home his 'power to the little guy' message, it might have been a good - and shorter - film.

In America is Jim (My Left Foot) Sheridan's fictionalised homage to his own family, in particular his baby brother who died; it's proof positive that directors with sentimental tendencies should steer clear of autobiography. Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton give their best as grieving Irish parents taking their two surviving daughters to start a new life Stateside, but everything, from the film's structure (the elder daughter believes her dead brother will grant her three wishes - yeuch) to its dialogue, is too Victorian in its wallowing mawkishness.

Nina Caplan, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Larushka Ivan-Zadeh