Wenders lightens up

The Million Dollar Hotel (15) Selected cinemas

A truly international production, the 20th feature from the German director, Wim Wenders, originated in a story devised by an Irish rock singer (Bono), is set in Los Angeles and features the US actor Jeremy Davies, the Russian-born Milla Jovovich, the Australian-raised Mel Gibson, and the Swedish actor Peter Stormare in the leading roles.

It is strikingly photographed by the Greek lighting cameraman Phedeon Papamichael, many of whose visual compositions clearly were inspired by the imagery of Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell.

The setting is March 2001 in a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles, an edifice which has seen better days, rather like the motley crew of outcasts and misfits who occupy it. It begins at the end, when the most childlike and innocent of those residents, Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), leaps from the roof of the building and the movie cuts to extended flashback and explores the events of the previous fortnight.

Those events hinge on the interruption of the residents' lives by the arrival of a hardline FBI agent, Skinner (Mel Gibson), to investigate the death of a junkie occupant who, it transpires, was the son of a multi-millionaire media magnate. Skinner's gruff, methodical personality is firmly at odds with the laid-back eccentricity of day-to-day life in the hotel.

Ostensibly a murder mystery, The Million Dollar Hotel gradually reveals itself, rather ponderously in its expository sequences, as a series of inter-connected and stylised character studies which eventually mesh together in an absorbing picture of thwarted aspirations and self-destructive behaviour.

It pivots on the inarticulately expressed and unrequited yearnings of its most guileless creation, Tom Tom, who's played with an all-consuming intensity by the mannered and hyperactive Davies, in marked contrast to Gibson's amusingly deadpan playing as the detective whose uptight demeanour is emphasised by the elaborate back brace he wears.

The movie's mood is enhanced by a vibrant score that includes five new Bono songs, and by its quirky sense of humour which offers director Wenders a welcome opportunity to lighten up after several more portentous exercises.

Bleeder (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin, from today; Triskel Cinematek, Cork, from Wednesday

The young Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn follows his quite promising first feature, the 1996 Pusher, with a simmering drama of marginalised Copenhagen lives in Bleeder. The pivotal character is Leo (played by Kim Bodnia from Pusher), whose aimless existence revolves around drinking and watching movies in video clubs, and life with loving, patient partner, Louise (Rikke Louise Anderson).

Leo's self-loathing nature mirrors his pessimistic view of the world, a view which draws alarmingly into focus for him when Louise tells him she is pregnant. After several abortions she wants to have the baby, but he cannot contemplate bringing a child into the world in which they live.

He begins to express his moroseness through increasingly brutal acts of violence, triggering off a cycle of appalling acts of vengeance.

The shallow psychology of the nihilistic characters which populate this grim picture is further outweighed by the realism of the violence it depicts and by the horrific sadism it employs. Light relief is provided by Mads Mikkelsen as a video store clerk who's so obsessed with movies that he cannot handle real-life relationships.

Galaxy Quest PG General release

The words "sci-fi spoof" are generally guaranteed to chill the hearts of most moviegoers, conjuring up images of deeply unfunny, elongated TV skits made cheaply to cash in on hits like Star Wars. The fact is that most science fiction teeters on the edge of absurdity anyway, so making fun of its trappings - the silly names, ridiculous costumes, nonsensical plots - is a pointless and rather drab exercise.

Based squarely on the Trekkie phenomenon, whereby thousands of rather sad individuals attend conventions to discuss their favourite Star Trek episodes, dress up as Klingons and swap memorabilia, Galaxy Quest adopts the self-referential tone of recent horror movies such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub and Daryl Mitchell are washed-up actors, still trading on the memories of the sci-fi TV series Galaxy Quest, which they all starred in before its cancellation in the early 1980s.

Now they traipse from geek conventions to mall openings, scraping a living and bickering endlessly among themselves. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when they are approached by emissaries of an alien race, the Thermians, who have been picking up transmissions of the show on the other side of the galaxy, mistaking it for an historical document, and basing their entire culture on it. Now confronted by their evil nemesis, they have come looking for help from their idols.

On the surface, Galaxy Quest is a fairly basic one-gag movie, and should start floundering after 20 minutes or so. But the often hilarious script (By David Howard and Robert Gordon) manages to squeeze a lot more mileage out of the concept - delivering a rollicking space adventure undercut with excellent gags. What really makes the film work, though, is the surprisingly high quality of the cast: Allen, as the preening, William Shatner-ish captain; Rickman as the disappointed thespian who feels he should be doing Shakespeare but finds himself labouring under a latex reptile mask instead (shades of Leonard Nimoy and his pointy ears); Weaver, subverting her own Ripley character from Alien, as the pneumatic blonde whose mind-numbing job is to repeat whatever the computer says. Great fun.

Scream 3 18 General release

In the final part of a trilogy, all bets are off, and anyone can bite the dust, comments one character in Scream 3. Well, perhaps, but more importantly, as we all know, the third film in a horror franchise is almost invariably dreadful. Scream 3 isn't quite as bad as that, but the cycle has clearly run out of steam, and no amount of attempted movie-within-a-movie cleverness can disguise the fact.

Setting this second sequel in Los Angeles, on the set of slasher movie Stab 3, seems to offer some opportunities for developing the cycle's trademark self-referentiality, but compared to Galaxy Quest, the gags here are few and far between. The result is a movie which is both less funny and less scary than its predecessors.