DIRECTED BY Peter Weir STARRING Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd Opened November 28, Cert 12A, 138 mins

It’s taken Peter Weir three years to bring novelist Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring heroes, Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, to the screen. It’s a shame O’Brian died before he could see it, because Weir has made a scintillating action film with real intellectual ballast and a powerful emotional undertow. It skilfully evokes the Napoleonic-era comradeship between Russell Crowe’s Aubrey and naturalist and ship’s surgeon Maturin (Paul Bettany), but pulls off the even trickier feat of depicting the network of alliances and hierarchies vital to the functioning of the “wooden world” of Aubrey’s frigate, HMS Surprise.

O’Brian fanatics have grumbled about Weir’s decision to conflate two books into one story, but he reasoned that while Master And Commander introduced the main characters, The Far Side Of The World offered more cinematic scope. Shrewd thinking, since the tale of Aubrey’s pursuit of the French privateer, the Acheron, from the coast of Brazil to the Galapagos Islands is a journey on several levels. For Aubrey it’s his duty and an adventure, for his young officers it’s a daunting rite of passage, and for the lower ranks it’s a journey into the unknown where only God and the Cap’n can save them.

It can also be seen as a metaphorical voyage from superstition to enlightenment. Even as the analytical and forward-thinking Maturin is fascinated by the unknown species of the Galapagos in a foretaste of Darwin’s expedition 30 years later, the Surprise’s crew are gripped by a superstitious conviction that they’re doomed by a Jonah in their midst. Weir conveys the sense of a war spanning several oceans, while also suggesting a world poised on the fulcrum of scientific and philosophical change.

The depiction of life on ship is total and overwhelming, from wince-evoking battle scenes and a pulverising storm off Cape Horn to all-too-detailed nautical surgery. Weir found the perfect Aubrey in Russell Crowe, who handles the changes of pitch from rough bonhomie to the decisiveness of command with aplomb. Crowe genuinely looks as if he loves nothing better than shortening sail in a hurricane and shouting at the French. Bloody brilliant.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 15, 73 MINS

Think you know Dracula? Think again. It’s taken Winnipeg’s resident weirdo-genius Guy Maddin to bring Bram Stoker’s tale to the screen as you’ve never seen it before. His deadpan, surreal oddities have been striking a chord with adventurous audiences since Tales From The Gimli Hospital hit the cult circuit back in 1986, but it might just be this rather perverse project which sees him reach a wider audience. Essentially, it’s a highly-stylised adaptation of Mark Godden’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet production (lead dancer Johnny Chang makes for a charismatic Count). But it’s more than just a filmed performance; Maddin has combined Godden’s choreography and Mahler’s score with his unique cinematic vision to whip the whole thing up into a delirious fever-dream. Aesthetic pleasure aside, the film also grapples with some of the varied interpretations of the story, with sex, immigration and capitalism all getting a twirl. Beautiful, erotic and provocative.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT TBC, 106 MINS

Themed multi-director anthologies are, by their nature, going to be a mixed bag. There’s not much that’s mixed about this collection of eight 10-minute meditations on time that-with one blazing exception-mainly manages to be a complete waste of it. It clearly wasn’t wise to allow such a vague brief to fall into the hands of Bernardo Bertolucci, Istv

OPENS DECEMBER 5, CERT 18, 100 MINS

The story behind this shoestring production is almost as interesting as the film itself. Former production designer Catherine Hardwicke stepped in to help when a friend’s 13-year-old daughter spiralled out of control into drugs, alcohol abuse and self-harm. She suggested that the girl write about her experiences in a screenplay. The result is a jaw-dropping horror-show of teenage girls at their cruellest and most manipulative. Not since Larry Clark’s Kids has anyone dared to show the youth of America in such candid detail. What makes it all the more remarkable is that Nikki Reed, the 13-year-old co-writer of the film, also co-stars alongside Evan Rachel Wood. A sultry, self-contained beauty, she plays the treacherous queen of the in-crowd rather than the autobiographical role, while Wood plays the innocent who plunges into a world of promiscuity and substance abuse. Holly Hunter is the still heart at the centre of the madness as the mother who can no longer reach her child. As good an argument as you’ll see for locking up your daughters.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 15, 106 MINS

In 1985, British mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates made a bold assault on the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. They became the first (and so far only) climbers to conquer it, but their triumph turned to purgatory as they tried to get down again. After Simpson broke his leg, Yates tried to lower him down the mountain by rope. They’d almost made it when Simpson slithered over a precipice, forcing Yates to cut the rope to save himself. Fantastically, Simpson survived and crawled back to base. The film, based on Simpson’s book and directed by One Day in September’s Kevin Macdonald, imparts some sense of the soaring menace of the mountains, and does a decent job of depicting the action, given that it lacked the budget of a Hollywood thrill-frenzy like Vertical Limit. The real-life Simpson and Yates narrate in straight-to-camera close-up, lending an edge of docu-realism, though they never quite penetrate to the emotional core of the story. In particular, Yates’ decision to cut the rope isn’t fully explored. Simpson didn’t blame him, but parts of the climbing fraternity did.