The Perfect Man is another of Duff's shiny, happy high-school romances, as synthetic and teeth-rotting as the cakes that Locklear is always icing. And Duff, the blandest of blondes, plays the same role she always does: a shy, smiling, studious girl who's a bit of an outsider at school, even though she seems to fit in a visit to her fashion consultant, hair stylist, make-up artist and nutritionist every morning before registration Her pre-teen fans will probably love it.. You've heard of garage bands: Primer is a garage movie. It's a delicate, oddball film that requires a fairly high tolerance for whimsy, but its saving grace is how funny it is. Whenever July threatens to get too precious there's a deft comic set piece or some cynical dialogue to remind us how rare it is to hear from a conceptual artist with a sense of humour.The Perfect Man (PG)Every time Heather Locklear is dumped by one of her boyfriends, she packs up and moves to a different town. Her 16-year-old daughter, Hilary "Utterly" Duff, finally gets sick of all the removal vans, so when they get an apartment in Brooklyn, she hatches a plot to keep them there: in order to stop her mom falling for some unsuitable suitor who's a break-up waiting to happen, she'll send her letters, flowers and emails from a non-existent secret admirer.In short, it's the story of a monstrously selfish mother and her daughter's cruelly humiliating revenge - not that it presents itself quite like that.

The characters, meanwhile, all look like Action Men and Barbie dolls, and they don't have much more personality.Me and You and Everyone We Know (15)Like a cuddly version of last week's Crash, Me and You... interweaves the lives of several Los Angeleans, all of whom are yearning to make a connection with another human being. It's written and directed by its star, Miranda July (pictured), a conceptual artist both in real life and in the film. But, like Sky Blue again, Appleseed is lumbered with a backstory so involved that it has to keep stopping for five-minute political lectures.

It's set in a utopian megapolis where tension is rising between humans and "bioroid" clones, and where, for no apparent reason, half the characters take their names from Greek gods The animation is staggering. Like last month's Sky Blue, it puts traditional cartoon figures in a photorealistic, computer-generated landscape, but with even more dazzling results: each piece of death-dealing hardware is painstakingly designed to the last rivet. Jet Li is kept as a dog-like slave by Bob Hoskins' cockney racketeer, and he's only let out of his cage to administer acrobatic violence to those who don't get their payments in on time. There's a long and stunningly incongruous interlude in which he teaches the human pitbull about ice cream, boating ponds and shopping for fruit, but fear not: there's a lot more bone-snapping to come before the end.Appleseed (12A)Appleseed is a Japanese sci-fi anime, and so it's contractually obliged to have a post-apocalyptic setting, robotic body armour, a million rounds of automatic-rifle fire, and butt-kicking warrior women who look as if they've just tottered out of a Robert Palmer video. But one day Li wanders away from his master, and is taken in by Morgan Freeman's blind piano-tuner, a man whose patience, kindness and homespun wisdom are matched only bythose of every other character Freeman has ever played. But when characters from the original sitcom start materialising in the "real" universe of the film, it tangles itself into a postmodern, meta-narrative ball that Charlie Kaufman couldn't unravel. Is it about witchcraft, love, remakes, or showbiz egos, or what? By the end, I doubt if Ephron herself could remember.Unleashed (18)A bone-snapping martial arts movie that's also about the redemptive power of trust, family and classical music? It really shouldn't work.