Having skirted the issue of post-9/11 attitudes to Islam by setting This Is England in the 1980s, Shane Meadows similarly ducks the true realities of being a Polish immigrant in New Labour London in Somers Town. However, the lack of socio-political depth is more justifiable in this genial, if slight saga, as neglected 15-year-old Piotr Jagiello and runaway orphan Thomas Turgoose are so untutored in the ways of life that any agit-prop agenda would be wholly inappropriate.

The opening action follows Turgoose from Nottingham to the eponymous district between Euston and St Pancras, where Jagiello's father (Ireneusz Czop) labours at the Eurostar terminal. Mugged on his first night (and a very gentle assault it is, too, considering the current knife crime epidemic), the soft-centred toughie meets Jagiello in a cafe, where the wannabe photographer moons over French waitress Elisa Lasowski, and quickly becomes a secret guest in his bedroom.

Dividing their time between casual theft and doing odd jobs for wheeler-dealer Perry Benson, the boys agree to share Lasowski's affections. But they descend into a drunken depression after she returns home and Czop turfs Turgoose out on his ear. However, he lands on his feet and the picture ends with a cosy colour coda.

Despite its contemporary setting, there's not much originality in either Paul Fraser's scenario or Meadows's blend of long takes and deadpan naturalism. Indeed, this dose of Loach lite often feels like a cross between the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry and something that the Children's Film Foundation might have produced in the 1970s. Moreover, by shooting in monochrome and having Jagiello adopt the mannerisms of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud, Meadows also pays self-conscious homage to François Truffaut's masterly study of vulnerable delinquency, The 400 Blows (1959), with the Parisian finale equating to Léaud's climactic odyssey to the seaside.

In striving to capture the wonderment that the lads find in this decaying inner-city wasteland, Meadows frequently overdoes a visual poetry, whose sentimentality finds echo in Gavin Clarke's soundtrack ballads. But Jagiello and Turgoose are disarmingly amusing as the cross-cultural loners grateful for a friend and, for all the film's simplifications and contrivances, it's an irresistibly easy watch.

Produced in Italy and featuring contributions by such intellectual heavyweights as Dario Fo and Gore Vidal, Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11 is the latest in the long line of documentaries analysing the War on Terror. It's easily the most aggressive and some of its revelations will surprise those who have previously dismissed suggestions of US collusion in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as the ramblings of conspiracy theorists.

But surely this assured dissection of the official American version of events would have been even more persuasive had the directors not swamped their inflammable findings with computer graphics and musical motifs that would have been better suited to one of Chris Morris's Brass Eye satires than a serious piece of film journalism. The decision to have various Italian actors introduce key segments with caricatured gravitas similarly backfires. But only a committed Neo-Con could ignore the sheer weight of evidence amassed here.

Scientist Steven Jones, NIST whistleblower Kevin Ryan and metallurgist Paolo Marini discuss the idea that military explosive was used to bring down the Twin Towers, while air traffic controller Robin Hordon and former USAF officer Russ Wittenberg voice their suspicions about the size of the hole in the side of the Pentagon, the absence of tell-tale debris and the convenient relaxation of intercept protocols in the airspace around Washington D.C. in September 2001. Elsewhere, British scholar Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed questions the existence of Al-Qaeda and considers its origins within the US intelligence network, while Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa challenges the validity of Osama Bin Laden's video messages to the Islamic world.

Interspersed with these incredulous expert testimonies are first-hand recollections by New York fireman Louie Cacchioli, who risked his life to help survivors, and WTC janitor William Rodriguez, whose heroism was quickly forgotten when he revealed that he had heard explosions within the complex before the planes hit. But the most damning image of the entire film is a photograph of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helping to carry a stretcher on the lawn outside the Pentagon after American Airlines Flight 77 had supposedly breached its defences outer wall. If this was a genuine terrorist attack, why wasn't one of the most important members of the Bush administration safely ensconced in a bunker out of harm's way?