Third time scary

The original Scary Movie promised 'No mercy, no shame, no sequel'. We can be glad they lied. Veteran director David Zucker has been handed the Wayans brothers' franchise and provides a dash of comedy panache and a breath of fresh air for Scary Movie 3.

Viewers should have no difficulty following the plundered plot. While Lord Of The Rings, The Others and The Matrix get a nod of recognition, 8 Mile, Signs and The Ring get taken out to dinner and promised a weekend away. Plying tried-and-tested pratfalls, slapstick and pastiche, the Airplane! director piles one-liners upon set-pieces upon spoofs until you think you're going to die laughing. (Stop groaning.)

Add to this deadpan performances from Charlie Sheen (as Tom, the farmer with a crop circle problem), Anna Faris (as Cindy Campbell, the reporter hunting a killer videotape and investigating said crop circles) and - praise be - Leslie Nielsen as an uncanny US President, and you have a riotous, un-PC (especially to black hip-hop culture) touch of comic genius. I haven't laughed this much in years.

Salesman Ed Bloom (Albert Finney) always considered himself a Big Fish, telling tall stories to escape the reality of the pond-sized Deep South town in which he found himself. Now he's dying, and his resentful son Will (Billy Crudup) has one last chance to sort the facts from the fiction. The result is a series of fantasy-smeared flashbacks in which young Ed (Ewan McGregor) talks his way into every conceivable shade of limelight. There's not enough plot in the present to tether Ed's flights of fancy or make his failings as father or husband more palatable: he's a monstrously selfish creature adored by his wife (Jessica Lange) and unable to face harsh facts without a filter. Truth, maintains director Tim Burton (clearly in sympathy with Bloom), is whatever you make it. Despite some enchanting moments and a moving payoff, this film celebrates delusion to the point of insanity and beyond.

Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain is a candid examination of American post-war society - specifically, the political correctness that he sees as a plague. His hero, Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is also sexually indiscreet, and his relationship with troubled cleaning lady Faunia (Nicole Kidman) adds more fuel to the enmity of his university's faculty, who have already removed him for a supposedly racist remark. Silk's racism is a complicated affair, though: what no one knows is that he is in fact black, but has 'passed' as white all his adult life to further his career. This is much more interesting than his May-December affair with the least convincing cleaning lady in the history of cinema, but director Robert Benton passes it up in favour of a lot of coy yet melodramatic sex. That, plus the casting (I didn't believe Hopkins as a Jew, much less an African-American with an identity crisis) makes this film a rather sour joke.

The joke was on chess world champion Garry Kasparov when he decided to take on IBM's Deep Blue machine; in 1997 he became, for all time, the grandmaster beaten by a computer. Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine, an intelligent if long-winded doc, sees the Russian as the victim of corporate conspiracy, and certainly makes a case. But the hints that IBM cheated seem rather peevish when what we see is a clear case of hubris. Kasparov never believed Deep Blue could even challenge him and, when it did, he freaked out and never recovered his edge.