When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating  “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.

For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.

High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making.

Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than he. Breakfast on Pluto found Cillian Murphy’s girly boy swishing around working-class Dublin in frocks and furs. And now comes Ondine, Jordan’s reimagining of the watery fable transplanted to the rugged shores of Cork.

Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets for Alice at the London IMAX. Is it worth the wait?

The action is set within a framing story. Alice, now aged 19, is about to be pushed by her widowed mother into an engagement to a smug upper-class twit. So down the rabbit hole she plunges to escape to a parallel life that she dimly remembers from her childhood dreams. Her adventures invoke Lewis Carroll's familiar line-up of fabulous creatures, even if these don't always appear quite in the order they do in the books.

The indispensable star cast - some seen caked in extraordinary make-up, others heard voicing CGI characters - includes Michael Sheen (the Rabbit), Alan Rickman (the Caterpillar), Barbara Windsor (the Dormouse), Stephen Fry (the Cheshire Cat), Timothy Spall (Bayard the Hunting Dog) and, not least, Johnny Depp, kitted out with an orange fright wig and green cat's-eye contact lenses as the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter as a grotesquely distorted Red Queen.

Burton and Carroll, those twin dark fantasists, should have been a marriage made in heaven. But there's a third party in this union - Walt Disney Studios - and so things get a bit crowded. The director makes the point that the books are episodic, with Alice wandering through a suite of loosely linked encounters. To make the narrative more film-friendly, he sends her on a trite inspirational trip towards personal empowerment in the company of humorous, loveable sidekicks, courtesy of the screenplay by Linda Woolverton, a seasoned Disney alumna (Beauty and the Beast; The Lion King).

Mia Wasikowska looks gorgeous as Alice and gives a very spirited performance, but you sense Burton is secretly more interested in the Mad Hatter (when, after all, did he last create a great female character?); the role is vastly beefed up for the benefit of Depp, the director's long-time collaborator and male muse, who has, it must be said, tremendous fun with it. The climax is a by-numbers joust between Alice and the Jabberwock, a monster controlled by the Red Queen (the contradictory script endorses her rebellion against her mother, while requiring her reluctantly to embrace this pre-ordained destiny as dragon-slayer). It's all surprisingly ordinary.

Visually the film is eye-popping, though the luxuriant blue-tinged tropical Wonderlandscapes, with their strange creatures whizzing through the air would have been a good deal more impressive if I hadn't already seen Avatar to which this bears a marked family resemblance. The 3D isn't always all it might be either, especially in the "real-world" scenes, and, sitting near the front of the IMAX auditorium, I experienced ghosting at the fringes of my field of vision.

For a truly strange Alice you could do worse than to watch the first ever screen version, recently restored by the National Film Archive and available to view here. In 1903, this bizarre little nine-minute fragment, made decades after Carroll first published his original stories, represented the state of the cinematic art. Today it comes closer than all the extravagances of Hollywood to capturing their fragrant spirit. Curiouser and curiouser.

ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening

Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style

Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin

Alice Through the Looking Glass. Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp back in inventive if unfaithful Carroll sequel

Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film

wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Alice in Wonderland

“I guess I’ve always been pretty good with words,” says the eponymous character in the opening, voiceover line of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe - and with that clunker we know the Canadian director's move into the mainstream isn't going to be as gripping or original as any of his previous indie efforts. With a join-the-dots script by Erin Cressida Wilson and overwrought music, it is, unusually for Egoyan, a linear movie and one that ultimately goes nowhere.

When I last met Nitin Sawhney, I’d heard that he was a whizz at mental arithmetic. I asked him, perhaps impertinently, what was 91 times 94? “8,827,” he relied, quick as a flash. Several hours later, I worked out he was probably right. “Vedic mathematics,” he said. What I can say about last night’s performance was there was some interesting mathematics going on. Some time signatures rubbed friskily against others in certain scenes in ways a mathematician would love. The score had an enormous facility.

It's a tough time these days for mothers in Hollywood, who are either dead, as a result of which they figure in the story only as an absence, or so scarily alive that their children would be better off without them: cue Precious and Mo'Nique's inevitable walk to the Oscar podium. The by-product of that first phenomenon has been various films about dads belatedly connecting with their kids. Clive Owen bonded with his two young sons in The Boys Are Back, and now it's Robert De Niro's turn to go in search of filial sustenance in Everybody's Fine. Does he succeed? Well, let's just put it this way: The film's title is for the most part not ironic.

It's a tough time these days for mothers in Hollywood, who are either dead, as a result of which they figure in the story only as an absence, or so scarily alive that their children would be better off without them: cue Precious and Mo'Nique's inevitable walk to the Oscar podium. The by-product of that first phenomenon has been various films about dads belatedly connecting with their kids. Clive Owen bonded with his two young sons in The Boys Are Back, and now it's Robert De Niro's turn to go in search of filial sustenance in Everybody's Fine. Does he succeed? Well, let's just put it this way: The film's title is for the most part not ironic.

If Michael Moore's new film were a person, it would be diagnosed with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. His Cook's Tour through the ills of capitalism spans, inter alia: forced repossessions; worker lock-ins; the breadline salaries of airline pilots, some of whom sell blood or use food stamps to pay the bills; a scam, perpetrated by a judge in collusion with a private company, to make money by sending harmless youngsters to a correctional facility; Hurricane Katrina; the election of President Obama; cats flushing toilets - in short, everything but the kitchen sink.