<preform>Good Company (PG)</br>Shall We Dance? (12A)</br>Criminal (15)</br>Solaris (PG)</br>Are We There Yet? (PG)</br>Head-On (18)</br>The Yes Men (15)</br>Moog (nc)</preform>

Cheer up, Dennis, it might never happen. Oh dear, it has...

I'm not convinced that hawking advertising space for a sports magazine was ever a noble vocation built on honesty and friendship. But that's how it is in In Good Company (PG), at least until the magazine is ingested by a global corporation, and the 51-year-old head of ad sales, Dennis Quaid (right), is demoted.

I'm not convinced that hawking advertising space for a sports magazine was ever a noble vocation built on honesty and friendship. But that's how it is in In Good Company (PG), at least until the magazine is ingested by a global corporation, and the 51-year-old head of ad sales, Dennis Quaid (right), is demoted.

His new boss (Topher Grace) can't breathe a sentence that doesn't contain the word synergy, downsizing or awesome. What's worse is that he's young enough to be Quaid's son - and young enough to date his daughter (Scarlett Johansson, below).

In a parallel universe, In Good Company would be a family farce featuring a gurning Steve Martin. In this universe, Paul Weitz's film is more thoughtful, with a cloud of angst and insecurity looming over its bright one-liners. It's a welcome change to see a mainstream Hollywood comedy with such grown-up concerns, although in the film's second half the bleak grey cloud is thick enough to blot out most of the fun. The romance between Grace and Johansson, in particular, is as cheerless as a picnic in the rain.

There's another mid-life crisis in Shall We Dance? (12A). Richard Gere stars as a successful Chicago lawyer who, despite his fabulous marriage to Susan Sarandon, gazes ruefully out of the window of the commuter train every evening. On one journey home he spots Jennifer Lopez gazing ruefully out of the window of a rundown dance studio, so he hops off the train and signs up for ballroom dancing lessons. Why Lopez signed up for the film is harder to explain, considering that rueful gazing is just about all she has to do.

For a while the film hoofs along as a slick, slushy comedy, but then it tries to waltz in two directions at once and falls flat on its face. It wants to exalt the dancers as a brave, oppressed minority at the same time as it jeers, Strictly Ballroom-style, at their fake tans and sequins.

Criminal (15) is a pointless American remake of the Argentinian conman film Nine Queens. In the original a low-rent fraudster and his protégé plotted to flog a forged set of rare stamps to a tycoon. The US version moves the scam from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, and swaps the stamps for a historic bank note, but the main change is that in the leaden remake - co-written and produced by Steven Soderbergh - the anti-hero (John C Reilly) is far less sympathetic. Don't be conned.

Speaking of Steven Soderbergh's remakes, the NFT is showing Solaris (PG), the sci-fi haunted house mystery which was Soderberghised two years ago. Tarkovsky's film is poignant and enigmatic, and slower-moving than most plant life. Still, if it lasts much longer than the remake, it lingers in the memory much longer, too.

Ice Cube stars in Are We There Yet? (PG) as a kid-hating bachelor who nonetheless attempts to charm his girlfriend by taking her two demonic young children on a road trip. For 300 miles they're as dangerously destructive as John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles multiplied by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone - and yet Cube still learns to love the lil' tykes. Hideous.

Head-On (18) is a squalid, nasty, yet funny and romantic drama about a cocaine-snorting Turkish-German wreck who agrees to marry a young stranger so she can escape from her repressive Turkish family. It's a marriage of convenience, but the faux-spouses have a great deal in common, namely hedonism, substance abuse and suicidal tendencies.

The Yes Men (15) are two agitprop pranksters who, posing as World Trade Organisation spokesmen, give Swiftian lectures on WTO policy at business conferences. They tell one audience, for instance, that pre-Civil War slavery - "an involuntarily imported workforce model" - just wasn't as cost-effective as plonking factories in the Third World as we do today.

They're trenchant satirists, but this sloppy video diary does them a disservice, consisting largely, as it does, of the Men cutting their hair and walking through airports.

Another documentary, Moog (nc) is an affectionate portrait of the cuddly old hippy who invented the Moog synthesiser. I learned more from the press notes than I did from the film itself, so if you're not a Moog-maniac already I'd stay away. Besides, when an instrument's leading proponents are Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, it's not about to come back into fashion any time soon.

n.barber@independent.co.uk