DIRECTED BY Tom McCarthy STARRING Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale Opens March 30, Cert 15, 90 mins Finbar McBride (Dinklage) wants to be alone. Inheriting an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, Fin?a dwarf?assumes he can now live a quiet, stoical life of solitude, which would suit him fine. He's a tad irritated to find local hot-dog salesman Joe (Cannavale) trying too hard to make friends, grieving artist Olivia (Clarkson) nearly running him over in her car every few seconds, and a cute librarian (Michelle Williams) coming on to him. Soon Fin's the strong centre of a screwed-up community, whether he likes it or not. Gradually, he learns to love it. Maybe the plot of McCarthy's debut sounds a little sentimental or cutely Capra-esque, but this Sundance Audience Award winner defies expectations with spontaneous, tangential humour and the wit to be grumpy when it could be cloying. If it's a fraction fairy-tale-like that everyone takes to Fin so swiftly, the film never plumps for easy options, with each character complex and believable. Clarkson, this year's indie queen, gives Olivia a multi-layered personality?weak, strong, and all points in between. As she and Fin get closer, she turns, shouting, "I'm not your girlfriend. I'm not your mother. You're not a child." Fin goes drinking, and for the first time makes an issue of his size, standing atop a bar and slurring that everyone should take a good long look. You may remember Dinklage from Living In Oblivion or Human Nature. The fact of his size is brilliantly handled (or, more accurately, left alone) here. Of course, Fin's physically small, and taunted by cries like, "Hey buddy, where's Snow White?", but his taciturn dignity becomes a source of energy and resilience for all the town's "vulnerable people". The film's a benchmark for how not to be patronising, and if Fin's success with the ladies is a mite implausible, he's a convincing new kind of hero. These people aren't idealised Spielberg saints or glamourised Tarantino sinners: they're just real, rough-edged outsiders with a suppressed desire to connect. Deadpan, visually subtle and mutedly hungry, this is a beautiful film.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 137 MINS The year is 1885, and Cate Blanchett is hard-as-nails frontier widow Maggie, raising two young daughters in the American southwest. The arrival of Maggie's estranged father, Samuel (Tommy Lee Jones), who'd abandoned his family 20 years earlier to live as a Native American, coincides with rogue Apaches slaughtering her farm hands and kidnapping her eldest daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood). Father and daughter attempt to put their differences aside and effect a rescue before her captors take her to Mexico. As you'd expect from director Ron Howard, this is efficiently assembled and well-paced, but isn't the dark, Fordian western he'd dearly love it to be, and the family therapy subtext is pure Oprah. The film's strengths lie with the two leads: Blanchett is excellent as ever, mastering her frontierswoman accent with ease, while Jones' role as a grizzled semi-shaman searching for redemption fits him like a glove. In the end, good, solid?if unsurprising?entertainment.

OPENS MARCH 19, CERT 12A, 88 MINS Anyone coming to Grand Theft Parsons under the illusion it has been the intention of its makers to celebrate the life and pioneering music of one of rock's lost visionaries is likely to be chewing holes in the wall by its end and demanding someone's head on a pole. The film pays scant attention to anything to do with Gram, apart from his squalid death of a drugs overdose in September 1973 at the age of 26, and the much-celebrated hijacking of his body by friend and roadie Phil Kaufman, who?true to the terms of a drunken pact?cremated his corpse in the Joshua Tree desert. Jeremy Drysdale's inept screenplay?which is not much concerned with factual accuracy?treats this episode as a lark, a limp attempt at gonzo comedy, with Jackass' Johnny Knoxville hamming it up tiresomely as Kaufman. Grand Theft Parsons was apparently made for a pittance, and it shows: the film looks like it was shot through a plank, and has the visual flair of something made for radio. Truly wretched.

OPENS MARCH 5, CERT PG, 110 MINS Shot under the brilliant blue skies of southern Italy, I'm Not Scared is both a gripping thriller and an unsettling story of children struggling to make sense of an ugly adult word. It's set in the summer of 1978, when Italy was suffering an epidemic of child kidnappings. When 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is playing with friends in some abandoned farm buildings, he's horrified to discover a boy chained up in a cellar. Overcoming his fear, he gradually befriends the captive. Meanwhile, his home life is in upheaval due to the return of his macho, bullying father after a long absence. He's brought with him a menacing "friend", Sergio, from the north. As police helicopters and TV broadcasts start to disrupt the rhythm of Michele's blithe childhood days, he's forced to make agonising decisions. Salvatores has conjured superb performances from his child-actors, and his use of landscape and wildlife amplifies his theme of a natural order under threat from brutal, conniving man.

OPENS MARCH 5, CERT 15, 76 MINS Mullet-headed losers Terry and The Deaner (David Lawrence and Paul Spence) spend their days drinking, dreaming of stardom and waxing profound about their "outlaw" existence. An amateur producer (Gordon Skilling) is making a documentary on them, although we don't learn why, and the mullet-heads cruise through the film without learning or doing much, despite The Deaner being diagnosed with testicular cancer. After a brilliant opening of Spinal Tappish slapstick, Fubar settles into a laugh-free pace comparable to A Mighty Wind. Your enjoyment will depend on picking up on the acutely observed smalltown rock-isms, such as when the guys' estranged buddy Tron (Andrew Sparacino) answers the question, "What did you guys do?" with, "It wasn't so much what we did as the fact that we did it. Just living each day blind and going the distance," intercut with footage of Dean and Terry falling about drunk, smashing up bus shelters and hitting each other with sticks.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT PG, 94 MINS Despite a hefty nod to Wings Of Desire, the latest from the Polish brothers (Twin Falls Idaho) succeeds in floating beautifully between fantasy and realism. Gently idiosyncratic, it's a magical yet grounded fable played with deadpan excellence by a cool cast, especially James Woods (an exec-producer) and Nick Nolte. In the mid-'50s, the small town of Northfork is to be flooded, to make way for "progress". A team of trench-coated men led by Woods have to evacuate the last few inhabitants. Who are stoic. One's even built an ark, and organised two wives. Others are less rational:in fact, they may not even exist. They're a group of ancient roaming "angels", and a sick young orphan, nursed by Nolte's grizzled priest, who believes he's one of them, with the feathery wings to prove it. The photography's lovely, melancholy but uplifting, and in harmony with the out-there story, which skilfully avoids implosion. The Polishes pull off their unique vision of an enchanting end-of-the-world as you didn't know it. Not far from heaven.