open all hours; Twenty-somethings moaning about love in a cafe how

reviewed Late night shopping (15) saul metzsteinhhhh room to rent (15) khaled el hagarhh another life (15) Philip Goodhewh evolution (PG) ivan reitmanhh A group of underachieving 20-something night workers hang out in a cafe and grapple ineptly with relationship problems: it sounds like a contender for The Most Tedious Movie Ever Made. However, in the hands of Scots director Saul Metzstein and writer Jack Lothian, the inauspicious subject matter is neatly woven into a slow-burning comic gem.

Late Night Shopping has more than a little in common with Jamie Thraves's impressive feature debut, The Low Down - both films are snapshots of a generation, both are works that are impeccably of their moment but also in some ways timeless. And both films feature rising star Kate Ashfield. In Thraves's film, the characters are their late-20s and early-30s and struggling to come to terms with mortgages and maturity. Metzstein, meanwhile, focuses on a group of friends in their mid-20s who are still trying to get a grip on the basics.

The main differences between the pictures are those of style and camera direction - Thraves favours naturalism, whereas everything in Metzstein's picture is heightened; Thraves shoots tightly around his characters while Metzstein prefers wide shots. Neither film is perfect but they are two of the more interesting movies to have come out of Britain in the last 12 months.

Late Night Shopping is the loose tale of four acquaintances who can't even decide whether they are friends or not but who hang out anyway, whiling away their breaks on interminable night shifts at a local cafe. Metzstein has cast young and mainly unfamiliar actors in his key roles, which works in his favour, although the standard of the performances is dramatically variable. Ashfield, for example, is a delight and is irresistibly bolshie as Jody - a kind of latter-day punkette without any direction for her anger. Luke de Woolfson is endearingly clueless as Sean, a hospital porter in a relationship crisis, but James Lance, as supermarket shelf-stacker Vincent, has a tendency to bellow his lines as if he was trying to order a kebab in a shop next to an eight-lane motorway where nobody speaks English.

At first appearing somewhat slight, the picture gently builds and it's not until you are nearly halfway through that you realise how funny and well-observed it is. There are some enjoyable running jokes: the final member of the group, call-centre operator Lenny (Enzo Cilenti) is plagued by what he describes as porno reactions - the compulsion to imagine every woman he meets as the star of his perpetually running mental porn movie (the hard-core version of an inner monologue).

But the best jokes of the movie are not those that are obvious. Metzstein and Lothian have a nice line in stealth humour, with spot- on observations that are almost as tragic as they are funny. Deep down, the spiky, confrontational Jody longs to be cool and accepted. Her response to the group's journey to a coastal resort is to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the book cover of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. The irony is that she is by far the coolest out of her useless bunch of slacker mates.

The biggest criticism of the film is that Jody remains a peripheral character despite the fact that the film is clearly at its best when she's around. Still, it's an enjoyable debut from a talented Scottish team that promises a great deal for the future.

While Late Night Shopping tracks its characters in a globalised, geographically non-specific world of convenience and consumerism, Khaled El Hagar's Room To Rent takes the opposite tack. In this film, the location (specifically, London) is as much a character as any of the unlikely assortments of misfits that Hagar assembles. Unfortunately for the film, it's probably the only convincing character in the whole sorry mess.

Sad Taghmaoui (best known for his role as Sad in La Haine) plays Ali, a young Egyptian screenwriter living in London on a rapidly- running-out student visa. Desperate to stay in the country, he contemplates paying for a white marriage until he meets Linda (Juliette Lewis), a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who models for Ali's gay photographer flatmate. She agrees to marry him, until she recalls that she is in fact already married to a very large, violent man who takes bigamy personally. Luckily, an ancient woman who claims to have met Ali in a previous life steps in and, in a truly bizarre twist, offers to marry him.

What opens as a vibrant portrait of the Arab community in west London rapidly descends into an ill-conceived mess populated by cardboard-cutout characters.

Still, Room To Rent is better by a long way than Another Life, a relentlessly pedestrian dramatisation of the true story of Edith Thompson, an Edwardian woman whose affair with a much younger man led to the murder of her husband and her own subsequent execution.

Natasha Little is barely watchable in the central role and Nick Moran is hopelessly miscast as Edith's stuffy husband. Ioan Gruffudd manages to salvage dignity as Edith's lover Freddie Bywaters, but not much.

The whole thing is like Dancer In The Dark without the music - no originality, little comprehension of the difference between cinema and mediocre telly and stuffed-sock puppets instead of actors.

Finally this week, Ivan Reitman - the man behind the massively successful Ghostbusters franchise - seems to have lost his comic touch with Evolution, a puerile sci-fi spoof. After proving that he categorically doesn't do romance in Return To Me last year, David Duchovny now demonstrates that his acting "skills" don't run to comedy either.

He plays a disgraced government scientist who has been relegated to teaching at a community college in Arizona. When a meteor crashes into the local desert, he and his colleague - played by Orlando Jones - discover that the boulder brought with it a cargo of organisms that are capable of two billion years' worth of evolution in just a couple of days. Soon preposterous computer-generated multi-legged creatures are threatening to overrun the quiet town of Glen Canyon and the government has stepped in, banishing the two local scientists and stealing all their research.

Realising that rapidly evolving aliens are about to take over the world, Duchovny and Jones team up with, for some strange reason, the local gormless swimming-pool attendant (Seann William Scott) and a renegade government scientist (Julianne Moore) to form a crack team of alien busters.

Yes, it is all a bit familiar - but, sadly, nowhere near as delightfully absurd and unrepentantly silly as the Ghostbusters movies.

There is a preponderance of toilet humour (anal probes, shampoo enemas) but laughs are scant for audience members whose comedy tastes are anywhere above the absolute bottom of the barrel.

All the films are released on Friday except Another Life, which is out now

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