ROCKY Balboa is at the stage where he should be picking fights at weddings.

Instead, he gets into the ring with a killer world champion half his age. Writer/director Sylvester Stallone's fifth Rocky sequel at the age of 60 is really the story of a faded movie star from a bygone era who wants to deliver one last 'hurting bomb' before he grows too old. It's a nostalgic, lonely film with a fight sequence tagged on at the end. Old age does not bring fulfilment, unless you have something to fight for, it says meekly. He might have shovels for hands, and a slab of inexpressive granite for a face, but Stallone is thoughtful too.

Rocky runs a restaurant in south Philadelphia. His wife is dead. His son disdains him. Like Jake LeMotta, he walks with ghosts and regales his diners with stories of glory from the ring. Rocky spends a lot of time wandering lonely Philly streets questioning his empty life. "You're living backwards, Rocko, " his old trainer Paulie (Burt Young) tells him. "Change the channel from yesterday."

So Stallone flicks his remote control to the Motivation Channel. Empowerment becomes the order of the day. He takes off his shirt - Stallone is still very fit - but nobody takes the man seriously. "What's crazy about standing toe to toe and saying 'I am'?" he tells his incredulous son. The film gets so down on its luck, the inevitable arrival of the brassy theme tune to Rocky's silhouette in training comes as a relief. The fight is a popcorn-munching formality.

Rocky Balboa is not just a swansong to a hero who refuses to grow old. It is also a reminder of simpler times when pounding heads seemed an appropriate response to the world. It elicits sympathy, but only because those days are far behind us.

Infamous (Douglas McGrath): Toby Jones, Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, Lee Pace, Peter Bogdanovich, Sigourney Weaver. Running time: 118 minutes. . . .

THE unfortunate titular irony of Douglas McGrath's Truman Capote biopic is that it will be remembered as that second film about true-crime novel In Cold Blood.

Beaten to the screen by Bennett Miller's Capote last year, it could have been better served with the title 'Truman'. It certainly offers a softer, more personal treatment.

In Cold Blood, the retelling of the 1959 slaughter of the Clutter family in smalltown Kansas, was the book that destroyed Capote. The drawn-out finale, ending with the hanging of the two killers five years later, left the bon vivant a broken man.

Based upon George Plimpton's 1997 book Capote, Infamous follows this trajectory with Toby Jones playing Capote as a fabulous, wise-cracking glamourpuss - "I'm much more concerned for my safety around Norman Mailer, " he says when asked about time spent with killer Perry Smith (a mean looking Daniel Craig).

Jones turns a sadder shade of blue than the merciless, self-absorbed artist portrayed by Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman. His is more crumpled and brittle. Sandra Bullock, who plays Harper Lee, tells us that to create a great work of art, a little piece has to die with you.

I suspect Truman would have preferred that interpretation.

The Return (Asif Kabadia): Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sam Shepard, Adam Scott. Running time: 88 mins . .

MOVIES are all about the suspension of disbelief, but with the supernatural horror genre this can be strained. The compulsion to avail of digital effects to show the unshowable results in risible schlock, which perhaps is all that teen audiences really want. Director Asif Kabadia relies instead on imagination to take us inside the mind of an ambitious young Midwestern saleswoman (Sarah Michelle Gellar) haunted by nightmarish visions. A disturbing opening flashback shows her as a frightened little girl, arriving at a fairground with her father (Sam Shepard), a bruise on her forehead.

Has she been abused by him? A stranger terrorises her while her father is getting her a coke. Years later she's estranged from her father but drawn by blurred voices to return to the scene of a brutal murder. Whether what is happening to her is real or delusional is teased out far too long by Kabadia, although when the terrifying denouement comes, it's true to the logic of the narrative. Ciaran Carty