Dracula's youth, ironic zombies and the nightmare of Auschwitz

Vlad III Tepes, who's better known historically as Vlad the Impaler, is here presented as a noble 16th century central European ruler who saved his country by reaching an uneasy truce with the Ottoman Turks. But when their sneering ruler Mehmed II (a hammy Dominic Cooper) comes to demand the eldest son from every family as a hostage, Vlad seeks the help of an ancient vampire who offers him a terrible deal that might just save his people.

This will involve turning into a vampire himself, and Vlad suffers nobly as the lust for blood takes hold. But hectic battles scenes and a few nice bat effects are not enough to save Dracula Untold from chaos and incoherence.

And speaking of the undead, in Life After Beth, a young man named Zach (Dane DeHaan) is mourning the recent death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza), when she turns up alive and apparently well. As Beth was killed by a poisonous snake, and her family took the liberty of burying her, Zach is initially confused. But he's also overjoyed, particularly by his revived girlfriend's new-found enthusiasm for sex.

After a while, however, he begins to notice a funny smell, and realises that Beth is actually a zombie, with a growing desire to feast on human flesh. And as other zombies begin to surface, a well-manicured suburban neighbourhood is overwhelmed by panic. Written and directed by Jeff Benna, Life After Beth has nothing particularly new to add to a rather tired and hackneyed genre, and for example is nothing like as funny as Ruben Fleischer's 2009 film Zombieland. It's watchable, but instantly forgettable.

Once seen, on the other hand, Night Will Fall is impossible to forget. André Singer's film provides a remarkable account of how a British Army Film Unit working under Sidney Bernstein set out to compile a visual record of the Nazi death camps. Following the forces that flooded into Germany in 1945, the unit stumbled into Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and were confronted with horrors beyond the human imagination.

The footage was so awful that the British government stifled it, and the film never saw the light of day - till now. It's shocking, upsetting, distressing in the extreme, and captures the true obscenity of the Holocaust. And God love those cameramen: one of them, George Leonard, apologises for breaking down during his interview and says, simply, "too painful".

French actress Emmanuelle Devos delivers a memorably intense performance in Martin Provost's enthralling period drama Violette, which is based on the turbulent life of Violette Leduc. A tough but unstable young woman who survives the German occupation by trading food on the black market, Violette dreams of becoming a writer but is going nowhere until she meets Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir sees a raw talent, and gives Violette every encouragement, but things become complicated when Leduc falls in love with her. Mr Provost's film is moving and lyrical, and Sandrine Kiberlain is terrific as the starchy but redoubtable de Beauvoir.

Dracula Untold

(15A, 92mins)

2 Stars

Life After Beth

(15A, 89mins)

3 Stars

Night Will Fall

(No Cert, IFI, 75mins)

4 Stars

Violette

(No Cert, IFI, 139mins)

4 Stars

Coming soon...

71 (Jack O'Connell, Sean Harris); Gold (David Wilmot, Kerry Condon); The Maze Runner (Dylan O'Brien, Will Poulter); The Rewrite (Hugh Grant, Marisa Tomei).