Not so much Spicy as ho-hum

"SpiceWorld The Movie" (PG) Nationwide, from Friday. Take five Spice Girls. Stir in more than a dozen recycled or remixed soundalike songs. Sprinkle with cameos from a calculatedly eclectic selection of guests (Stephen Fry, Elvis Costello, Bob Hoskins, Peter Sissons, a kissy-kissy Elton John et al). In the editing room, stir the whole concoction to move it at breakneck speed and stave off audience ennui. The result, SpiceWorld The Movie, may not spice up your life, but it's as camp as Butlins and it rates about four sniggers and a giggle. Most of the sniggers are provoked not by the quivering quintet themselves but, believe it or not, by Roger Moore fleetingly hamming it up in a tuxedo, a kaftan or a safari jacket while stroking a cat, a rabbit or a piglet. When Roger Moore is the best thing about a movie, surely something is rotten in the state of SpiceWorld.

Moore plays The Chief, the supreme ruler of the cashcow that is the Spice Girls, and his underling (Richard E. Grant) is their perpetually harassed manager. Coincidentally, Simon Fuller, who departed acrimoniously as the group's real-life manager recently, gets a credit as executive producer. In Cannes this year he and his former charges were telling the world media that this movie would be their Hard Day's Night. So much for wishful thinking.

SpiceWorld opens in the Top of the Pops studio, always a good excuse for a song, and follows Posh, Sporty, Scary, Ginger and Baby Spice over five hectic days in the run-up to their concert at the Royal Albert Hall. It's a tough life for a Spice, what with The Chief never allowing them time off and forcing them to whizz from one engagement to another aboard their Union-Jack-painted doubledecker, the Spicebus. At least they're spared the singing of their driver, who's played by Meat Loaf.

The girls are pursued by screaming fans everywhere they go, and by the sleazy tabloid, the Daily Event. They unwittingly become embroiled in a Beatlesque/ Oasisesque controversy when they innocently ask: "Is the Pope a Catholic?" And now and then they get to catch up on some light reading - their horoscopes in the Sun. They have nightmares of themselves looking grotty in middle age, perish the thought. They moan a lot - about how uncomfortable their platform shoes are, the boredom of photo-shoots and how they're landed with topless male dancers in tight white shorts who are "too tacky". And despite all that hassle, they remain saintly - dropping everything when a friend is about to have a baby, even though the friend protests, "I'm nobody". Such selflessness is nothing compared with Geri Spice's gesture when she helps a comatose boy regain consciousness - by promising to take her top off. Small wonder, then, that they wonder aloud in the movie as to why people stereotype them all the time. Of course, they wouldn't have seen this movie at that stage. There's not much else to SpiceWorld beyond a succession of bland videos strung together with more banal dialogue and those blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos.

One of those features Michael Barrymore as a stern drill sergeant - dressed in full uniform and white dancing pumps as he puts the Spices through their paces. That sequence ends with the movie's best laugh, well, giggle - when the girls emerge one after another in army fatigues, expect for Posh, who comes out last, having swapped her little black dress for a little khaki number.

"Under The Skin" (members and guests only) IFC, from Saturday The Brazilian-born, Englishraised writer-director Carine Adler makes an auspicious feature film debut with Under The Skin, a candid and disturbing drama which follows the self-destructive descent of a grief-stricken 19-yearold, Iris (Samantha Morton), after the death of her mother (Rita Tushingham) from a brain tumour. Iris's already brittle relationship with her older sister (Claire Rushbrook), who is married and pregnant, becomes even more fractured. She walks on her job in a lingerie store and on her ostensibly happy life with her boyfriend, and she begins to wear the wig her mother wore after chemotherapy. In a cinema she meets a young Irishman (Stuart Townsend) and has sex with him in an alley. She describes that sequence explicitly in voice-over narration while director Adler intercuts the sexual activity with the flames of her mother's cremation.

That recurring narration echoes the monologues of the equally bruised and sexually confused adolescent, Alan Strang, in Peter Shaffer's Equus, but unlike Shaffer, Carine Adler eschews resorting to glib psychological explanations. The frankness of her movie's sexual imagery and dialogue, as the volatile Iris drifts further into casual sex with some disastrous results, is often startling, and fuels the unsettling nature of the experience. The unpredictable course of the narrative, which mirrors the personality of Iris, is heightened by the handheld camerawork of Ken Loach's regular cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd.

Those achievements are undermined by the misconceived fantasy sequences in which Iris imagines meeting and speaking to her mother again, and by the weak ending which relies too heavily on Iris performing Gilbert O'Sullivan's trite Alone Again (Naturally) in a bar. Nevertheless, this remains a vivid picture of an essentially inexperienced and vulnerable young woman desperately crying out for love to replace that shown by her mother. It is charged by the riveting central performance of the remarkable Samantha Morton, who also features in Mary McGuckian's imminent This Is The Sea and played Sophia in the recent BBC series of Tom Jones.

"The Myth Of Fingerprints" (members and guests only) IFC, from Saturday When a movie reunites an American family for Thanksgiving, chances are that they will be revealed as dysfunctional and that festering frustrations and disappointments will come to the surface before the goose is cooked. So it goes in writer-director Brad Freundlich's first feature which is set in wintry Maine over the course of a long weekend when a family gets together for Thanksgiving for the first time in three years. That long gap between visits can be attributed to something which happened the last time they were all together. It remains to be resolved at the outset of this emotional drama, and there are further problems and unrealised expectations to be faced along the way. Freundlich's screenplay earnestly sets out to establish all the many characters - mother, father, four adult children and their present or former lovers - although some of them register merely as sketchy.

However, his slow-burning film, while ponderous at times, is a good deal more mature and acutely observed than Jodie Foster's embarrassing foray into similar territory with Home For the Holidays. And it is generally engrossing as it tackles the problems it raises within this claustrophobic environment and as it explains its title, a denial of the view that genes shape people utterly. Much of the film's success can be attributed to the fine cast it assembles, with Noah Wyle (from ER) and Julianne Moore as the most vividly etched of the four children, Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider as the parents, and an under-used James Le Gros as Moore's friend from childhood.