When Clint Eastwood finally shuffles out of the director's chair – after a long, flinty stare, threatening growls, and a quick couple of slugs – Ben Affleck should be waiting politely to take his place. Measure for measure, Eastwood has been the current cinema's best proponent of the classical Hollywood style: not too much of this, just a pinch of that – the kind of filmmaking that doesn't call attention to itself and gets on with telling a good story. And Affleck, in the space of two films, has been making the cut.

The Town is a crime thriller full of unusual sensitivity and hard-knuckle grit. It's set in Charlestown, an area we are told has given birth to more bank robbers than a convention of 1930s films. This is working-class, Irish Boston, up the road from Eastwood's Mystic River, and Affleck's own debut, that nervy noir Gone Baby Gone. The film picks up mid-heist where we get an idea, pretty quickly, of our two main men: there's Ben Affleck's Doug MacRay, the gangleader who instructs his team beforehand that no one should get hurt; and there's his number two, Jem Coughlin, played by The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner as another live-wire loon, the kind of guy that keeps tipping everything off balance.

And yet it is MacRay that causes all the trouble. During the heist, they kidnap the bank's willowy manager Claire Keesey, played by Rebecca Hall. They let her go safely, and, though she has no idea what they look like, they discover she lives around the corner. What does she know? Doug 'bumps' into her at the launderette and the scene leads to the only heavy-handed gesture in the film: she folds her laundry, sees blood stains from a beaten bank worker on her white shirt and floats teary-eyed into black and white reverie. Doug looks at her and then the shirt. "I'm sorry," he says. "It's not your fault," she says. We giggle. He's hooked.

For just a second, the criminal tastes the victim's trauma and it serves as one of the film's enticing mysteries: does Doug fall for Claire out of guilt? Or is it genuine love? You can see, though, what he's attracted to. Hall has a grace and an easy earthiness, the kind of actress who makes her characters so at home in a film, you would think they were always there. And watching Doug decide to woo and pursue her is uneasily exciting. It also makes for a moment of tension better than any action sequence: during an afternoon date, Jem turns up out of the blue sporting the neck tattoo we know Claire has told the Feds she's seen. She sits there smiling, Jem entertains, while Doug and the audience hand-chew in anxiety.

There are times you wonder what these two are doing together: she's a white-collar bank manager who tends an allotment; he's a blue-collar sand-and-gravel man who part-times hi-tech robberies. I suppose they both like banks, though they don't talk much about that. But after a while, you see she understands his hardness is just an act and Affleck, the actor, is very good at portraying that jutting jaw which guards a sensitive soul.

Affleck, the director, explores all this while shaping a smooth heist thriller. There is a rat-trap alley car chase that ends with a moment of surreal comedy. And the Fed on their tail, Jon Hamm's Agent Frawley, is the kind of velvet-glove operator who can walk into a roughneck bar and charm MacRay's drug-addled ex-girlfriend before he needs to pull a badge.

Affleck, however, only part-plays the cat-and-mouse game of nemesis. He's more interested in exploring the nature of the sensitive male in a hard-bitten world. You can tell he knows these people and the terrain. And he rings around his hero tradition and loyalty like coils of barbed wire. Jem serves the way things are always done; their paymaster, a pinched and prickly ex-IRA florist played with nasty relish by Pete Postlethwaite, expects loyalty. As Doug is forced into one last job, it becomes clear The Town is not just about not getting caught. It is also about escape.

You think of escape, too, watching Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love. At two-and-a-half hours, it's like being jammed beside an obnoxious, self-obsessed giraffe for a long flight. This is based on Elizabeth Gilbert's self-help memoir and is the story of a perennially unhappy woman in search of enlightenment. In New York, she looks disparagingly at her new husband when he can't hold a friend's child properly and decides he's toast. She hooks up with an actor (James Franco) who is sweet but cans him too. "You never asked me to stay," she tells him as she leaves him, when, in fact, she was using him as a rebound relationship. She decides to go travelling to become free of men, and when she finds herself alone in Rome, having got what she wants, she moans, "I am alone". With her spindly arms and skinny waist, she tucks into a plate of pizza like she was tucking into a bucket of foie gras and proclaims the joys of guilt-free eating. She goes to India – a pageant of predictability – and moans that she can't meditate. She goes to Bali and moans when Javier Bardem knocks her off her bike. Honestly, some women are just never happy. My favourite bit comes when she returns to the Bali medicine doctor she met a year before, and, for a moment, he doesn't remember who she is. I suppose he's had his fill of self-indulgent, rich American women.

Like Sex and the City 2, Eat, Pray, Love is holiday porn masquerading as a film. It is dramatically inert and bizarrely lit: in almost every scene, Roberts is back-lit so her hair glows with an aura as if she were the Buddha himself. But the film's quest is not really about enlightenment (go watch an Ozu film instead). It is about finding a man. And while there is a rootlessness to modern life, if it can be addressed in any way, this is not it.

The Hole (3D) is a serviceable family horror with spirited humour from Gremlins director Joe Dante. The basement's supernatural lure, in classic fashion, reflects the psychological fears of our teen protagonists.

His own hole (2D), meanwhile, is the place Gaspar Noé climbs inside in Enter the Void, the latest film from the Argentine-French provocateur who made us watch, in Irreversible, the raping of Monica Bellucci for nine minutes. Here, he tells the story of a dead junkie with a first-person camera that follows the grim exploits of his stripper sister (Paz de la Huerta) in neon-lit Tokyo.

Our protagonist is killed early on in a scene that is technically brilliant. And the camera evokes his spirit, roving through a world that is hellish and unnatural like a bad acid trip. Most of the film is shot from overhead, with a cinematic fluidity that is not unlike watching Google Earth. It also means we rarely get to watch faces. If film is a study of the human face because the face is a mirror to all of life – both in its beauty and its ugliness – then Noé has no interest in life and the film does its best to deny beauty in every form, like the nihilistic tantrums of a teenager. Noé hammers home his point with ear-deafening, strobe-lit monotony that life is nothing but the biological urge for sex and violent despair. It is shaped with the same woozy mysticism of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey amidst the grim mania of Brughel's The Triumph of Death. It's trash dressed up as art.