The Pixar magic show continues to astound. The reputation of the computer animation pioneers rests as much on their ambitious approach to narrative as their skill with CGI. And after Ratatouille's clever satire on culinary pretension, comes WALL-E, a science'fiction tale that achieves so much more than a poster of a daft little robot could ever suggest.

The film opens with an image familiar from American movies: the aerial view of a skyscraper city. A closer look, however, reveals this to be a sham, since the tower blocks are made of garbage, cubes of compacted rubbish piled high. The city is, in fact, desolate. This is Earth, undone by consumerism and pollution, deserted save for our hero - the builder of said rubbish towers, the Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth'Class, or WALL-E for short.

Here is a metallic Robinson Crusoe, marooned alone, his human masters having abandoned the planet on a space cruise while the robots clean the place up. The problem is, WALLE's fellow compactors have packed up. His only company is a cockroach that, like him, lives in the dustbowl created by the detritus clogging the atmosphere.

The first half-hour, introducing the robot and his routines - working during the day, relaxing every night with his video of Hello, Dolly! - has the sublime simplicity of a classic silent film. The chief sound comes from the endlessly repeated musical, a touching reminder throughout the film of the human gaiety now absent, save for the signs of a cute personality in the robot itself.

Eventually WALL-E finds some real company, in the shapely form of a more advanced robot, Eve, sent to Earth in search of life forms. From here on the "last man on Earth" scenario turns into a love story and a surprise adventure into space. This is an ingenious and beguiling film, visually stunning, and with a cautionary tale well worth noting.

The French are always adept at family dramas, bourgeois ensembles in which long'hidden tensions bubble to the boil over a glass of wine on the terrace. Olivier Assayas's SUMMER HOURS feels a little different. This is as much a reflection on the passing of French culture as it is the death of a matriarch, and as such is particularly poignant.

When their mother dies, three siblings have to decide what to do with their gorgeous country home and its excellent collection of 19th'century art. The eldest, Frederic (Charles Berling), wants everything to remain as it is for their own children to enjoy; his younger siblings Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier), each of whom has left France anyway, want to sell.

The gentle tussle that ensues is not about greed, though Jeremie has a family and a new life in Asia that needs funding; it is more about globalisation, the way that people have become less rooted, and less enchanted by their traditions. And so, while the plot plays like a garage sale of the well'to'do, the pleasure of the film lies in the detailing: in the quiet moments of reflection before the art, and in Berling's beautifully nuanced performance, as a man for whom memory and tradition are all the riches he requires.

DONKEY PUNCH is a violent thriller that opens with the sort of scenario that, for many, would seem horrific even without a crime - namely, British youths on a Spanish holiday.

Three young women from Leeds arrive in Mallorca with a view to partying, meet a trio of unsavoury British lads and, despite knowing nothing about them, board their yacht. Sadly, one of their hosts has a stash of high'octane drugs and the eponymous, forbidding sexual practice in mind. It's bound to end in tears.

We've seen a mature version of this before: Dead Calm, in which Nicole Kidman found herself trapped on board a tiny boat with a psychopath, the claustrophobia and absence of options creating plenty of thrills. Donkey Punch initially plays well with the scenario, and after its first, inevitable fatality, keeps you guessing as to the true nature of its characters (murderous, or just plain stupid?) and how grisly it's going to get.

Ultimately, though, this good'time crowd is pretty vapid, not to mention hysterical. And what seems a smart exercise in plot twisting, ends up looking, like its characters, all at sea.

In The Fog Of War, documentary-maker Errol Morris focused his camera on former US defence secretary Robert McNamara, making the second most powerful man in the White House account for Vietnam.

In STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, Morris goes to the bottom of the food chain, namely the foot soldiers who became the scapegoats for the atrocities committed at the US prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. This is an absorbing, deeply disturbing investigation into events of 2003, when prisoners were tortured and humiliated daily, as their persecutors took happy snaps of the action - photographs that led to their own prosecution.

Morris's interviews reveal young men and women more naive and impressionable than malicious, yet with a moral compass clearly thrown off course by the horrors of war.

The film works on many levels: as an investigation of US military malfeasance, which reminds us that these soldiers were following orders from superiors who escaped censure; as a reflection on the nature of photography, questioning our reliance on the image itself, encouraging us to consider what takes place outside the frame; and as a drama, in which Morris's recreations - of anything from dog attacks to exploding helicopters to Saddam frying an egg - draw us into a world one wishes was fiction, but isn't.