WRITER-DIRECTOR JUDD Apatow is the natural heir to the Farrelly Brothers: a man who likes to go as near to the knuckle as he possibly can, while sweetening the bad taste humour with sentimentality. Despite a title that suggested unspeakable naffness, The 40-Year-Old Virginwasthefunniestfilmof2005and, surprisingly, one of the most romantic.

Knocked Up doesn't quite reach those dizzy heights. One reason is that it lacks consistency: at the end of Virgin, you ached from laughing; at the end of this, you're feeling relieved. A better editor would have cut the film and sharpened the gags. Moreover, the story is based on an improbability that, even for comedy, simply doesn't wash.

Apatow combines two social scenarios - the unplanned pregnancy and the mismatched couple - when career-minded TV presenter Alison (Katherine Heigl) and stoner slob Ben (Seth Rogen) meet at a bar, get hammered and spend a night together.

Over breakfast with the lewd and shallow Ben, Alison understandably regrets her mistake and walks away. When she realises she is pregnant, however, she not only decides to have the child but also invites Ben to share the burden actively, as her boyfriend, a proposition he snaps up. Now the pair just have to overcome their incompatibility and, ideally, fall in love. They are not encouraged by the fact that Alison's sister's marriage, itself initiated by pregnancy, is falling apart.

The bad taste element of the film's comedy comes fromBen'sflatmates-drug-addleddrop-outs whose sole passion is a website devoted to celebrity nudity. Good gags are few, however. More effectively entertaining are the rows between the two leads, and the seemingly improvised buddy moments between Ben and his prospective brother-in-law, played by Paul Rudd. They also riffed in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and are terrific value together.

Butforlongpassages,thefilmisnotonly unfunny, it's suspect. The weakest aspect is the question of why Alison would take up with a man whose response to learning she is pregnant is to look forward to unprotected sex. A brief, no-laughs sofa exchange between Ben and his flatmates - during which abortion is mentioned only as "the A-word" - hints at one reason why Alison's decision to go ahead regardless might seem natural to US audiences. But the anti-abortion lobby is less powerful in Britain than in America, which might leave some of us finding the fundamental premise of the movie harder to believe.

Seraphim Falls is a good-looking, old-fashioned western, of the sort where men scramble through an unforgiving landscape in which to be without a horse is to be dead, and the lines between good and evil are bleached out by the desert sun.

Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) is alone, high up in a wintry forest, when shots ring out, hitting him in the arm. He immediately abandons his horse and his gun, careering down the mountain in agony. Giving chase are Carver (Liam Neeson) and a paid posse. It seems like the end of the line.

In fact, it's just the beginning. Gideon escapes - in a gripping fashion that includes a discomfiting way of warming your hands - and the chase continues on to the warm plains, and ultimately the sun-scorched salt flats. En route the quarry, a dab hand with his awesome all-purpose knife, is revealed as more than a match for his pursuers. And we find ourselves wondering who is the villain of the piece: Gideon, on the run, troubled by bad dreams;orCarver,whosuggestsarighteousmission,but is cold-eyed and remorseless.

The script doesn't dig deep enough into the bitter psyches as it should, but what it does offer are spectacularly shot landscapes, littered with some ofAmerica'soddestcharacteractors(Michael Wincott, Kevin J O'Connor, Tom Noonan - names that mean nothing, but faces that make one's skin crawl), and Brosnan and Neeson stepping ably into the western milieu. In particular, Brosnan enjoys himself as the resourceful enigma Gideon.

Lady Chatterley is adapted from an earlier, less steamy draft of DH Lawrence's novel. It is the first version to be directed by a woman and, though the location is still England, it is a French film. The result is lighter and more optimistic than we're accustomed to, and incredibly refreshing.

The scenario is the usual: the lonely wife of a crippled lord has an affair with their gamekeeper. But where earlier adaptations have focused on sex and class angst, this sumptuously shot film presents the relationship between Constance Chatterley(MarinaHands)andtheservantParkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h) as a tender, natural liaison.

The initial attraction is borne not just of the young woman's sexual frustration, but also her love for nature. At first she covets Parkin's idyll in the woods, then her ardour moves towards the man. FerranalsodrawsoutConstance'smaternal instincts, and Parkin's lonely life estranged from his wife. A powerful coda draws those two strands together most movingly.

l Film Club: page 43