Other films out this week

FIRST DAUGHTER

Cert PG, 106 mins
IT is difficult to believe that Forest Whitaker, who won Best Actor at Cannes for his portrait of Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood's Bird, could direct as wet a teen movie as First Daughter. It has Katie Holmes as the daughter of an unlikely President, Michael Keaton. She's at college and gets into trouble after doing a sexy dance at a party and falling for her security officer (Marc Blucas). Worse than the Princess Diary series and unlikely to be as popular.

THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE

Cert U, 87 mins

STEPHEN Hillenburg's US TV children's show is stretched into a full-length animated feature with much of the goofy, anarchic humour that has won it an adult following. The movie is a curate's egg in which Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson add their voices to the regulars. The animation is cheerfully basic, the characters have a certain eccentric charm and there are some good jokes as Spongebob and his starfish friend try to salvage Neptune's crown.

LAURA'S STAR

Cert U, 90 mins

THIS friendly piece of German animation, about a girl who finds a fallen star in her garden and befriends it, has some very nice background work but characters who look as if Disney did it all better 50 years ago. It's rather sweet, but don't expect the miracle of top contemporary animation.

ALIENS OF THE DEEP

Cert PG, 48 mins

This is 3-D James Cameron on the ocean floor - pretty spectacular stuff. Is he searching for the drowned Leonardo DiCaprio? No, he's telling us that the deep contains some wondrous creatures and, if we did but know it, beneath the frozen surfaces of Jupiter's moons there may be marine celebrities even more wondrous than Leonardo. Best watched on an Imax screen.

SON OF THE MASK

Cert PG, 91 mins

A manic Jim Carrey was the only reason to see The Mask. Since he's not in the sequel, you'd have to be a masochist to bother with Lawrence Guterman's second edition. This has a young couple, with a baby and a dog, finding Norse god Loki's mask and the owner chasing them for repossession. The CG experts orchestrate the dire results as if this was a latterday Tom and Jerry cartoon. But T and J didn't last 90 minutes.

THE MAYOR OF SUNSET STRIP

Cert 15, 94 mins

This intriguing George Hickenlooper documentary traces the strange career of DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, LA's John Peel equivalent. The difference is that Peel wasn't concerned about celebrity, whereas the elfin, Warhol-like Bingenheimer worshipped it, entirely without cynicism. He introduced a huge number of talents in the Seventies, and basked in their not always very generous friendship; Hickenlooper suggests that he also pulled a lot of groupies.

Now on his uppers, he has memories to keep him warm. A pathetic figure? Yes, but as Courtney Love, Cher, Bowie, Alice Cooper, Jagger and others testify, he was a significant part of their careers. He is still on radio because nobody dares sack him, even if time has cruelly passed him by.