Other cinema releases

In space, everyone can hear you scream - with laughter

Galaxy Quest parodies Star Trek while Wes Craven tickles the rules of horror movies again. Those directors know that you know, you know

Scream 3 (116 mins, 18) Directed by Wes Craven; starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Parker Posey

Galaxy Quest (102 mins, PG) Directed by Dean Parisot; starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (116 mins, 18) Directed by Jim Jarmusch; starring Forest Whitaker, Henry Silva, Cliff Gorman

The Million Dollar Hotel (122 mins, 15) Directed by Wim Wenders; starring Mel Gibson, Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Jimmy Smits

In All Innocence (100 mins, 15) Directed by Pierre Jolivet; starring Gérard Lanvin, Virginie Ledoyen, Carole Bouquet

The great American critic Robert Warshow wrote that westerns have turned their audiences into connoisseurs who understand the genre's conventions and attend not for novelty but to observe the variations made on them. This week's three films by US directors are all made for this kind of connoisseur.

Wes Craven's Scream 3 completes his trilogy of postmodern, self-referential horror flicks with a rhetorical flourish. The first was about a serial killer loose in a town full of teenage horror buffs. Scream 2 moved on to a university campus stalked by a killer similarly dressed as the Grim Reaper and where everyone understood the rules of sequels. This concluding film takes place in a Hollywood studio headed by Roger Corman where Stab 3, a movie about the events in the original Scream is being made.

People are being killed in the order of the script, only the script is being constantly rewritten. The 'real' people meet the actors impersonating them. The threatened heroine (Neve Campbell) finds herself pursued on a mock-up of her old home rebuilt on a sound-stage. The real Carrie Fisher plays a Carrie Fisher lookalike, who didn't get the role of Princess Leia because she wouldn't sleep with George Lucas and is now a clerk in the studio's archive department.

Then the characters discover they are in the last part of a trilogy, not a sequel, and (as in Godfather III ) the rules change. Though not quite as good as the others, it's funny, clever, scary, with lots of good lines - such as the 'celebrity guard' pulling rank by claiming to have protected Julia Roberts, Salman Rushdie and Posh Spice.

The hilariously funny Galaxy Quest is about a group of superannuated actors, stars of a long defunct Star Trek-style TV series, who spend their time attending conventions organised by their obsessive fan club. Tim Allen is their leader, Alan Rickman is the English thesp who sacrificed his stage career by playing a Spock-like alien, Sigourney Weaver the female interest.

They find a new lease of life when recruited to assist a distant planet that has modelled its ethical system and technology on Galaxy Quest and we have the spectacle of actors playing characters who are mistaken for real people by extraterrestrials. This is a lighthearted variation on Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963) where three clients acting out their fantasies of being a judge, a bishop and a general in a Latin American brothel are forced to act their roles for real during a revolution. The movie is played straight, the observation precise, and the invention sustained to the final credits.

The third knowing movie is Jim Jarmusch's suave underworld thriller Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai starring Forest Whitaker in top form as a hitman who lives by a Zen code (eg, 'Every day without fail he should consider himself dead'), and communicates with clients only through carrier pigeons. He gets on the wrong side of a Mafia family headed by poker-faced Henry Silva (evoking his one real star role as the Mob assassin in cult 1963 thriller Johnny Cool) and must kill or be killed.

The body count is formidable, but it's the quirky bits that stick in the mind - a paperback of Rashomon that changes hands in circular fashion through the film; the gentle, ambling Whitaker's chess-playing friendship with the black, French-speaking owner of an ice-cream van; the hitman distracted by a woodpecker tapping the tree chosen for a stakeout. Ghost Dog has a dry wit and is given a hard, clean surface by cameraman Robby Müller.

Müller made his name for Wim Wenders, whose new movie is rather beautifully lit by Phedon Papamichael, one of the most mellifluous names to appear on a movie since Christopher Isherwood's. But after his return to form with Buena Vista Social Club Wenders has pressed the snooze button with The Million Dollar Hotel.

This aimless affair is some sort of whimsical thriller and though the story is attributed to Nicholas Klein and Bono, it seems more like an extended homage to Shock Corridor, a minor classic by Wenders's mentor Sam Fuller in which a journalist feigns madness to solve a murder committed in an asylum that is clearly an image of America.

Here a mentally disturbed semi-crippled FBI agent (Mel Gibson) investigates the death of a millionaire's son (an uncredited Tim Roth) at a seedy Los Angeles residential hotel inhabited by retards and misfits. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Do we care? The film moves at the pace of the London Eye and is a feast of over-acting. The ripest contribution is from Peter Stormare, sporting a Swedish-Scouse accent, as a musician who claims to have been the fifth Beatle and to have written Sergeant Pepper.

In Claude Autant-Lara's En Cas de Maleur (1958) Brigitte Bardot gave one of her best performances as a teenage thief who seduces middle-aged lawyer Jean Gabin and ruins his life. This Georges Simenon novel has been filmed again by Pierre Jolivet as In All Innocence starring Gérard Lanvin as the attorney, Carole Bouquet as his wife and Virginie Ledoyen as the sex kitten. It's slick, watchable and none too interesting.

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