He knows that virtuosity, amazing as it is, would be nothing without the affectionate warmth that blooms in the mere contemplation of one man and his dog.That relationship is the bedrock of this movie. Wallace, voiced as ever by Peter Sallis, remains the daffy, cheese-loving suburban inventor whose disaster-prone ways are held in check by his silent dog Gromit, who mixes the resourcefulness of Lassie with the impeccable sangfroid of Buster Keaton.He is certainly the only dog in movies who counts knitting as his hobby. As well as being chief cook and bottle-washer, Gromit is partner to Wallace in their latest business venture, Anti-Pesto, a control service that prevents rabbits from munching through the town's gardens, and is now in particular demand as the annual Giant Vegetable Competition approaches. The Curse of The Were-Rabbit seamlessly combines the familiarity of the Wallace and Gromit dynamic with a plot of headlong excitement, mined with multitudinous quirks of detail and some wondrously silly surprises. With the studio DreamWorks on board, for the money, there might have been anxieties over American influence, yet Park's sensibility stamps it as a very English comedy of character as much as a spectacle of leapfrogging invention.

When you hear that four people have worked on a script you can usually expect a dog's dinner Not here. The time-consuming nature of stop-motion animation, where one minute of film can take weeks of concentrated effort, made it doubly daunting. As Park's co-director Steve Box put it, "making an 85-minute [stop-motion] feature is like making the Great Wall of China with matchsticks".The directors, along with their previous collaborators Mark Burton and Bob Baker, have got their feature-length story, and (relief all round) it's a belter. This might be Plasticine's finest hour. Nick Park, the creative maestro behind Aardman Animations, had already bagged a trio of Oscars for his animated short films Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, the latter two featuring his most beloved characters, the madcap inventor Wallace and his faithful hound Gromit. Yet Park had not made the change from shorts, as it were, to longs, essentially because he needed to find a story that would justify 85 minutes rather than 30.

Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a chancer who leaves Little Odessa behind to become a hugely successful international arms dealer ("I supplied every army but the Salvation Army"), wooing his dream woman (Bridget Moynahan) along the way and somehow managing to elude the investigations of a dogged Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke).There are parallels with the drugs drama Traffic, though Niccol casts it as black comedy rather than as a brow-furrowing "issue" picture, and Cage resists audience sympathy by playing his title character as a Graham Greene-like amoralist: he knows he's damned, so arms-trafficking with Third World kleptocrats won't prick his conscience.It's an uncommonly intelligent study in the economics of modern warfare, and in the face of the more usual Hollywood heroics, its cynicism is almost refreshing.Le Grand Voyage (PG)Ismael Ferroukhi's feature debut is ostensibly a road movie, yet it also manages something deeply unfashionable at the moment: it gives Islam a good press.Initially exasperated by the necessity of driving his morose, tyrannical father (Mohamed Majd) on a pilgrimage to Mecca, young Reda (Nicolas Cazal?gradually emerges from his generational hostility to appreciate his old man's steadfast faith.The film is timely as a comment on the East-West divide, and as a portrait of filial duty and reconciliation, it's very touching.. Jeremy Northam and Natascha McElhone are decorative but underused.Lord of War (15)From its opening shot - a vast carpet of spent bullet-cartridges - Niccol's drama is determined to blow the gaff on the shadowy world of arms trading. He's come a long way down from Donnie Darko.Guy X (15)Jason Biggs plays a young soldier dumped in the wastes of Greenland, where a US military base is run along the lines of a madhouse. His conscience is awoken on discovering a secret hospital wing and a forgotten casualty of the Vietnam war. Metzstein directs from a novel by John Griesemer, who was perhaps aiming for the hallucinatory anti-authoritarianism of Catch-22.The film partially succeeds in duplicating that spirit but is rather tough going, and its finale is maddeningly inconsequential.