“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.

Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.

Comedic curio Casa de mi Padre features Will Ferrell in his most surprising role yet – that of a Mexican rancher who “no habla inglés”. This Spanish-language film is a tongue-in-cheek thriller featuring Ferrell alongside Mexican stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s Acorn Antiques meets El Topo: frequently batty, wilfully inept and performed with aplomb by a sporting cast.

There was a strange sense of ghosts, or rather absent presences, in the screening room where I saw Ben Drew’s iLL Manors (that orthography reflects the chosen spelling of the film’s title, and Drew is also as well known as Plan B, from his rapper music career).

The world is awash with rock docs, most of them not very good, but it's best to think of Under African Skies as merely a superb piece of film-making. Marking the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon's Graceland, and included on DVD with the album's special reissue package, it's a gripping exploration of how Simon went to South Africa searching for fresh inspiration, made possibly the most memorable album of his career, but found himself embroiled in the poisonous politics of apartheid.

The Turin Horse begins with a prologue in which a novelistic male narrator, talking over a black screen, describes the probably apocryphal incident that caused Friedrich Nietzsche to suffer a terminal mental breakdown (the more likely reason being syphilis). In a Turin plaza on 3 January 1889, the German philosopher supposedly saw a horse being whipped by a coachman and, sobbing, threw his arms around its neck.

The main problem with making a prequel to Alien is that the 1979 original was so shockingly successful. Even now, countless generations of CGI and special effects later, Ridley Scott's unstoppable monstrosity is surely the most hideous intergalactic threat ever burned onto celluloid.

“The angels' share” refers to the two percent of whisky that evaporates each year during its maturation process - which the romantically or religiously inclined would have us believe is siphoned off by cheeky celestial beings. With two Hollywood monoliths (Prometheus and Snow White and the Huntsman) slugging it out at the box office this week it seems unlikely that Ken Loach’s Glasgow-set latest - a tiny wee film by comparison - will be left with much more than the angels' share of business.

There’s no particular reason, beyond the herd instinct of producers, why films should enter the multiplex two by two. But such is the case with twin reimaginings of Snow White within a couple of months. First Mirror Mirror went all out for post-modern irony with Julia Roberts camping it up as the Wicked Queen. Now Snow White and the Huntsman imparts a heavy dose of post-feminist top spin with Charlize Theron vamping it up as the etc etc. The reboot is on the other foot.

In both cases you have to ask who the films are aimed at, because it’s certainly not the same audience snared by the 1937 Disney masterpiece down the decades. This new Snow White seems squarely directed at twilit teens with Kristen Stewart, lately wedded to RPattz, now reincarnated as the luckless heroine with an almighty stepmother problem. Sort of Snow Twilight. But this Snow White is no passive victim of evil designs. Rather than be sweetly frogmarched to her execution in the forest, Stewart's all-action fairy princess contrives to escape after seven years banged up in a bristling CGI castle by knifing her captor, plunging down a sewage vent and leaping out into the foaming main. Later on, she rides back to reclaim her crown like Boadicea, metal-breasted and heavily sworded. Not a lot of frocks to merchandise from this movie. Trenchcoats, maybe.

Meanwhile, in other deviations, the Huntsman of the title (Chris Hemsworth) doesn’t walk out of the picture after refusing to kill Snow White. Indeed his mission is not to dispatch her at all but bring her to Ravenna, as the Wicked Queen is calling herself in this version. His reward will be the revival of the dead wife whose loss has driven him to the bottle. The queen wants Snow White alive as part of a novelty skin treatment not available over the counter at Boots: she keeps herself peachy by inhaling the youth out of beautiful women (Lily Cole here gets to find out what she’ll look like at 90).

And then there are the dwarves, who number more than seven and are less dopey and sleepy than lairy and snidey. As played with digitally shortened legs by the likes of Ian McShane and Ray Winstone, Toby Jones and Nick Frost, they represent quite a casting coup and lay on whatever humour is going. (Only Bob Hoskins gets close to embarrassing himself in the thankless role of a blind seer: “She is of the blood!” he wheezes.)

But there is a more radical repositioning that kicks the fairytale into the 21^st century. This time it’s not all about getting the guy. Original scripwriter Evan Daughterty (with further polishes from John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini) has chosen to ditch the romance altogether. There are two male leads are on thwacking duty – Hemsworth’s club-wielding lunk and Sam Claflin’s childhood chum, who has grown up to be quite the archer – but any notion of having them face off like rutting stags for Snow White’s affections has been timidly headed off at the pass. Indeed, the honour of titular co-billing for Hemsworth’s widowed Huntsman (pictured overleaf with the dwarves) is a red herring calculated to whip up the young male demographic this film has semi-catered for with overwrought setpiece battles and blokey punch-ups.

Having dispensed with a robust original plot, the whole film feels like an extended rummage in the summer blockbuster’s back catalogue. Inspiration is found in/shameless steals are made from – off the top of one’s head - Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones and Robin Hood. Hemsworth is part Thor, part Shrek (being a Scottish misanthrope). An early battle sequence looks like a topographical lift from the “Unleash hell” scene in Gladiator. There’s also a random ogre apparently on secondment from Clash of the Titans, which Snow White contrives to pacify with a gentle look. But then she is a very good girl.

You hanker for more breathing time in the epic open spaces

The trace memory of foregoing multiplex hits all suggests a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be – perhaps no surprise given that debut director Rupert Sanders is a whizz from video games and ads. The producers were attracted, it says here, by “the depth of soul to his commercials”. Hm. (NB Joe Roth is also the producer who helped Tim Burton make a frightful horlicks of Alice in Wonderland.) Sanders delivers a competent fight sequence, and the SFX – including magic mushrooms, a gold-cloaked figure emerging from the mirror on the wall, a stag with magnificent antlers - are all perfectly serviceable. But the galloping horses (real) are much more fun, and as ever with a film shot predominantly on a soundstage, you hanker for more breathing time in the epic open spaces. Plus at two hours, it's all rather exhausting.

By rights this version of the fairytale should be called Snow White and the Wicked Queen, because that’s the not-quite-erotic girl-on-girl showdown the plot is irrevocably steering us all towards. Stewart is personable as the (for some reason) English heroine with a determined set to her jaw and just an adorable pair of upper canines. The mask slips only when she has to deliver a rousing oration which falls several leagues short of Shakespearean. But really the film belongs to Theron who, despite the odd accent slippage (“liddle”, “huntsmin”) and perhaps a tad too much shoutiness, must be commended for biting only minimal lumps out of the furniture. The script even gives her some sort of back story to explain all the villainy. But in the end this is the grim tale of a MILF who’s terrified of ageing. They just couldn’t put that on the poster.

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Snow White and the Huntsman

The last time racial stereotyping (or at least, its cross-species equivalent) could be passed off as shorthand for a certain kind of slapstick humour was probably back in 1962 - coincidentally, the year that the last of Hanna-Barbera’s 30 episodes of the original Top Cat cartoon ran. And yet you don’t have to be eight years old to laugh out loud at the spectacle of a red-eyed gorilla beating its chest and screaming for bananas.