Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.

Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had grouped in provocative sections: "Brave, Bold and Wilful"; "Good Girls and Where it Gets Them". She talked about the difference between the work undertaken by "chaps" – the novel and the epic – and the kind of stories often referred to as "old wives’ tales".

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Overture ‘Béatrice et Bénédict' Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)

It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living large in films as variable in quality and tone as Thirteen, Youth in Revolt and Project X. In The Giants, from Belgian director Bouli Lanners (Eldorado), three teens go wild but in a very different way: they’re forced to return to nature as a consequence of parental neglect.

As Mrs Thatcher used to say, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Solutions have been flung with a will at the problem ballet of Kenneth MacMillan’s last years, his orientalist fairytale The Prince of the Pagodas - the Royal Ballet’s retiring director Monica Mason revived it last night as one of her last presentations, determined that a new generation should have the chance to love it.

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

Yesterday I fell in love with a black boy less than half my age and half my size – or, rather, a sculpture of a black boy. At just over two feet tall, Ron Mueck’s Youth is utterly beguiling. His silken skin, slender fingers, low-slung jeans and paisley patterned underpants are seductive enough; what made me lose my head, though, was the suggestion of dirt under his neatly clipped toenails. This beautifully observed detail made me want to kiss his exquisitely modelled feet.

It must have been a toss-up for the BBC whether to scrap Waking the Dead or Silent Witness, but evidently the latter won the race against extinction by a putrefying nose, probably attached to a hideously-charred corpse which may or may not have been raped but had been stabbed 47 times and bludgeoned with a... Funnily enough there was one a bit like that in this first episode of Series 15, along with an asphyxiated child and a man killed by knife and stun-gun.

This year's seasonal production from the Lyceum is one of those shows that feels more like an uninspired stocking filler than a big, beautiful, beribboned gift. Neither magically Christmassy (it begins on Halloween, and the only substance falling from the heavens is gold dust), nor a gung-ho pantomime (though some slightly stilted call-and-response mischief creeps through the cracks in the fourth wall), in the end it seems content simply to entertain rather than enthral.

Nightmarish images abound. There’s a giant plastic fish. There are several scary beards and the world’s most unconvincing bear costume. Often cited as one of the most unsettling of children’s entertainments, The Singing Ringing Tree is reissued by Network DVD along with The Tinderbox. Both were made in East Germany in 1957 and 1959 and became known when shown in serial form on BBC television in the 1960s.