Love, lies and robots with Ex Machina, and Mark Wahlberg takes on Dostoevsky in The Gambler

Young programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is thrilled when he wins a workplace lottery and gets to spend a week with his company's owner. That might sound like a terrible prize, but not in this case, because Caleb works for the world's most successful search engine, and its creator is a seldom-seen recluse who lives in splendid isolation in the wilds of the Arctic tundra.

Caleb is nervous and excited when he's dropped by helicopter in the middle of a lonely forest: eventually he finds the doorway to a hi-tech, minimalist, subterranean labyrinth that serves his host as both laboratory and home. When he first meets Nathan (Oscar Issac - again), Caleb is taken aback by his relative youth, and unaffected manner: he's hungover, talks like a slacker, and seems to want his guest to treat him as a friend. But it doesn't take long for Caleb to figure out that the workplace lottery was a ruse.

The great inventor has been exploring the limits of artificial intelligence, and created a robot he thinks may just be capable of independent thought. He has chosen Caleb to do a Turing test on it, and find out if it really has achieved consciousness. Caleb is intrigued, especially when he meets Ava (Alicia Vikander), whom Nathan has given an exquisite, doe-eyed face and a tastefully sexualised female identity, including, we are reliably informed, a fully functioning synthetic vagina.

Ava seems melancholy, and wistful, and in one of their monitored conversations she forces a power outage and warns Caleb not to trust her creator for one minute. And as Caleb starts to fall head over heels in love, his hard-drinking host is becoming ever more unstable.

Ex Machina is beautifully photographed and designed, and has a real originality that's rare in this genre. Alex Garland takes on a tricky story but never gets lost in his own high concepts, and makes sure it's the drama that stays with you, not the science. Alicia Vikander is tremendous as the damsel in distress, and Ex Machina is a superb, effortlessly efficient sci-fi thriller that hardly puts a foot wrong and keeps you guessing till the end.

Rupert Wyatt's The Gambler is a loose remake of a 1974 James Caan picture, which in turn was inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1860s novella. Mark Wahlberg, we are asked to believe, is Californian literature professor Jim Bennett, who is also a published novelist, but doesn't seem too happy about that or anything else. When we first meet him, he's burying his grandfather, Ed (George Kennedy), the only person he ever cared about.

Jim already has a serious problem with gambling, and his grandfather's death sends him over the edge entirely. After the funeral, he drives at high speed to a fancy casino, bets big, loses bigger and ends up in serious debt to the joint's ruthless Korean owner, and a swaggering hoodlum called Neville (Michael K Williams). Given seven days to come up with $260,000, Jim half-heartedly seeks the help of yet another low-life loan shark (John Goodman), but doesn't seem to mind very much whether he lives or dies - until he falls in love with one of his students, a beautiful young writer played by Brie Larson.

She turns out to be a genius, and Jim might be too: in fact, everyone in this film seems alarmingly literature savvy, and even thugs are prone to quoting Shakespeare.

A script by William Monaghan, whose previous credits include Martin Scorsese's Departed, creaks under the weight of its big ideas, and only John Goodman seems comfortable spouting The Gambler's interminable soliloquies.

Flashy and hopelessly overwritten, The Gambler wears its ideas on its sleeve and contains scarcely a single believable moment. It's pompous, dreary, overblown stuff; all talk and no substance. Mark Wahlberg is pretty good at action films, but doesn't really have the chops for this kind of pseudo-intellectual caper.