PREDESTINATION (15, 95 mins)

Directors: Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig

3 stars

He may be a four-time Oscar nominee, but that doesn't mean Ethan Hawke isn't capable of appearing in some right old tosh. He's top-billed but underused in this screwy but enjoyable American-accented Australian production as a time-travelling cop trying to stop a crazed bomber from blowing up New York. For a would-be sci-fi thriller it's curiously talky and brown-looking, spending much of its first hour on the backstory of a character Hawke meets in a bar. But twists loop upon twists in a hokey, brain-frying final third that makes it worth sticking with.

CAKE (15, 102 mins)

Director: Daniel Barnz

3 stars

Jennifer Aniston took a stab at Oscar glory but came up just short of a nomination for her strong performance in this middling grief drama. She has scars on her face and body, pops painkillers like Tic-Tacs and attends a support group for chronic pain sufferers. One of its members (Anna Kendrick) recently killed herself and comes to Aniston's Claire in hallucinations as she ponders whether suicide might be the answer for her too. Claire is an interesting character, damaged and selfish and burning with anger and frustration, and Aniston conveys all this convincingly without having to reach for the big moments. But while Cake is commendable for avoiding both sentiment and histrionics and even finding a seam of humour, there's not much under the surface and it never really rises above solid.

PROJECT ALMANAC (12A, 106 mins)

Director: Dean Israelite

2 stars

The week's other time travel movie makes Predestination look like Back to the Future in comparison, as a bunch of tech-savvy youngsters build a homemade time machine. At first they have some fun with it, which is believable, but their jumping starts to change reality and the story starts to disappear up its own flux capacitor. Somewhere in there is a nifty temporal puzzle, but by taking an age to get to the action and making us wade through so much standard high school, interest wanes. It's made even less tolerable by its found footage set-up, which as ever requires a lot cheating to make it fly, and it's really quite an achievement to make something so unforgivably tedious out of so much potential.

THE WEDDING RINGER (15, 101 mins)

Director: Jeremy Garelick

2 stars

Doug (Josh Gad) is getting married, but since he has no friends he pays fast-talking Jimmy (Kevin Hart) to provide a service that will hopefully convince Doug's bride that he and the seven unlikely groomsmen hired by Jimmy are old friends. Scenes of improvisation and pretence make for an idiotic and noisy farce, and most of the things that happen in the course of the film bear no relation to the central plot, being largely a random collection of scenes that just start and end without passing through character, humour or believability. Hart's recent emergence as a bankable comedy star has yet to provide evidence that he's actually funny, though he gets to do a bit more here than his usual gurning. Still, as a bromance it's forced and one or two mild chuckles is nowhere near good enough.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (18, 104 mins)

Director: Peter Strickland

2 stars

The director of Berberian Sound Studio continues his fascination with European exploitation films of the 70s with this bizarre drama, as a woman hired to clean the home of an imperious and domineering older woman enters into a relationship of fetish and degradation with her. Weird and woozy in style, this certainly looks the part, and there's something of Almodovar in it, while the performances from Chiara D'Anna and especially Sidse Babett Knudsen are better than the film deserves. But it's not just the lectures on the noises made by insects that make this intensely boring, and making something that looks like 70s erotica doesn't mean we necessarily want to see it. Still, if you've long hankered after the good old days of Jess Franco or Tinto Brass this might just be for you.