O<br></br>The Trespasser<br></br>A Walk to Remember<br></br>Secret Ballot<br></br>Two Can Play That Game

Blood and guts in high school

The fate of O (15) proves that you can run a Hollywood studio without having to watch any of its films. Directed by Tim Blake Nelson, O was completed three years ago, but because it depicts violence in a high school setting, and was being made around the time of the Columbine shootings, Miramax wimped out of releasing it. Only after a long delay and a change of distributors was it allowed to see the light of a projector.

If anyone at Miramax had watched O, they might have spotted that it isn't an exploitative splatter movie; it's a serious, maturely acted update of Othello. The Moor of Venice is now Odin (Mekhi Phifer), a ghetto kid whose skill on the basketball court has won him a scholarship to an expensive school. He is the only black pupil on campus, but he is also a sports hero and the boyfriend of the principal's daughter, Desi (Julia Stiles). One of the innovations in Brad Kaaya's screenplay is to make Hugo (the Iago role, played by Josh Hartnett) the son of the basketball coach (Martin Sheen). The coach treats Odin as a son, too, so Hugo hates Odin for usurping his place not just in the team, but in his dad's affections.

O's flaw is not that it resembles the Columbine case, but that it doesn't resemble it enough – the film doesn't have much to tell us about contemporary America. As far as we know, the Trenchcoat Mafia were boneheads waving shotguns, whereas Othello is a tale of Machiavellian scheming, poisonous rhetoric and ironclad resolve. That might be appropriate for battle-scarred soldiers in 1604, but Hugo and his friends are schoolboys, and O never convinces us that they could be jealous enough to implicate themselves in premeditated multiple homicide. One playground scrap would have settled all their resentments over lunchtime.

An honourable failure, the film is at its best when it isn't trying to be Shakespearean. It pinpoints how obsessed Americans can be by school sports, and if it had relied more on such present-day issues and less on Hugo's 17th-century malice, it would have been enthralling. Of course, if it had done that, the film probably wouldn't have been released at all.

In The Trespasser (18), two partners in a Sao Paolo construction firm pay a hitman, Anisio, to do away with the third partner. They think that this is the beginning and end of their association with the hitman. He thinks differently. Soon, Anisio is prowling around their offices, appointing himself as their head of security and seducing the daughter of the man he assassinated. Paulo Miklox – a raddled, rat-faced, bastard son of Harry Dean Stanton – is fabulous casting as Anisio. He looks as if he could terrify the businessmen into co-operation whether he had any dirt on them or not.

The first two thirds of The Trespasser have some biting black farce, as the partners come to realise that the barrier between propriety and crime, mansion and slum, might not be as stable as they imagined. Shot with an unsteady camera and a grainy, bleached colour scheme, the film rampages through a demi-monde of sex, drugs, clubbing, violence and anti-capitalist politics that would have Irvine Welsh licking his lips. Then, in the last half-hour, it falls apart. The story buckles under the weight of its subplots, and its ending is so arbitrary that a canister of film must have gone missing. It's a pity, because for a while it seemed as if The Trespasser might have joined Amores Perros in showing how much cooller South America's cinema is than everyone else's.

There have been so many high school movies about a popular bad boy falling for an unpopular good girl that there can't be many variations left. A Walk to Remember (PG) has come up with one, though: a good girl that only a masochist would fall for. As played by the sub-Britney pop starlet Mandy Moore, Jamie Sullivan is a pious, anti-social priss, but we're supposed to respect her because she always carries a Bible and she dresses as if she's just stepped off the Mayflower. The beau she reforms isn't much of a bad boy, either. Sinful as it might be for him to drink beer at the tender age of 18, he goes to church every Sunday.

A Walk to Remember might as well be a propaganda film sponsored by the True Love Waits movement – it sets out to refute the American Pie view of high school as one long party. Still, it's hardly going to turn its viewers away from wickedness when it is so ill-thought-out, dishonest, derivative and laughable. It is one of the worst films I've ever seen.

In Secret Ballot (U), an ox-like soldier has to escort a female election agent around an island off the coast of Iran, so she can collect votes from the desert's scattered inhabitants. As she ticks off voters, Babak Payami, the writer-director, ticks off themes – law, freedom, gender, God. It's a disarming comedy, but the pacing will put off anyone who doesn't like to gaze at the same sand dune for minutes at a time.

Two Can Play That Game (15) is an uninspired battle of the sexes in which Vivica A Fox, often talking directly to camera, institutes a 10-day plan to bring her straying boyfriend to heel. The man in question is Morris Chestnut, star of last year's The Brothers, and both films left me with the same opinion: while it's important that there should be gun-free romantic comedies about affluent African-Americans, these films would be a lot more important if they were funny.

n.barber@independent.co.uk