A remake too far

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (91 mins, PG) Directed by Adam Shankman; starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Hilary Duff

Just Like Heaven(95 mins, PG) Directed by Mark Waters; starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue

Rize

(86 mins, PG) Directed by David LaChapelle

Boudu Saved From Drowning(85 mins, PG) Directed by Jean Renoir; starring Michel Simon, Charles Granval

Fanny and Alexander

(188 mins, 12A) Directed by Ingmar Bergman; starring Ewa Froling, Jarl Kulle, Erland Josephson, Allan Edwall

There was a time in the Eighties when Steve Martin was among the sharpest comic actors in Hollywood, frequently co-writing and producing his own films. Pennies From Heaven (an undervalued American version of Dennis Potter's TV mini-series), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (a spot-on spoof of the Forties film noir) and Roxanne (the updated Cyrano de Bergerac) have taken on classic status.

But a rot set in when the sentimental Parenthood seemed to convince him that his future lay in soppy family movies, and it has continued through a series of dire remakes - Father of the Bride and its sequel, a disastrous big-screen Sgt Bilko, the dreadful The Out-of-Towners, Cheaper by the Dozen and now, worst of the lot, Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

In the charming 1950 comedy Cheaper by the Dozen, Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy played the real-life time-and-motion pioneers Frank Gilbreth (1868-1924) and his wife, Lillian, who used their 12 children as a laboratory to test their theories. In the sequel, Belles on Their Toes, Lillian carried on their work after her husband's death. The pointless Martin remakes misleadingly describe their source as 'a novel' by two of the Gilbreth children and the philoprogenitive protagonist becomes Tom Baker, a soppy-stern high-school football coach with a disorderly family and no theory of any kind to pursue. Sadly, he lives on into the sequel, which is set at a lakeside summer cottage in Wisconsin where Tom renews a fiercely competitive relationship with a childhood rival (Eugene Levy), who has done better in life and raised a family of eight depressed overachievers.

The movie jerks along from one crudely handled farcical scene of destruction to another, and the sentimentality increases exponentially. As the plot works towards the competing families gathered around the hospital bed to ogle Tom's first grandchild, the treacle spreads like molten lava and everyone ends up flat on their molasses.

Not quite as bad as Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is Just Like Heaven. It's the latest movie in a tradition of romantic ghost stories that stretches from The Ghost Goes West and the Topper comedies of the Thirties through The Ghost and Mrs Muir in the Forties to the big 1990 hit, Ghost, of which this is a distaff version. The appealingly dishevelled Mark Ruffalo plays a traumatised widower of great sensitivity who rents a marvellous apartment in San Francisco belonging to workaholic doctor Reese Witherspoon.

In the first 10 minutes, we've seen her involved in a horrendous crash on her way home from a 27-hour stint at the hospital. She's now in a coma three months after the accident, and her spirit turns up to haunt the flat and fall in love with Ruffalo.

The movie is cute rather than witty. The rules of haunting are established, only to be broken whenever it suits the plot to do so. And the picture ends up endorsing the most right-wing views on the pulling of plugs that artificially sustain the lives of people in a permanent vegetative state.

David LaChapelle's lively documentary Rize observes two encouraging movements that have grown up in South Central Los Angeles since the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the LAPD cops whose assault on Rodney King was recorded on film for the world to see. One group was founded by Tommy Johnson, a former delinquent and drug dealer, who calls himself Tommy the Clown and created a group of painted harlequins to entertain family audiences and, in effect, to parody the activities of street gangs. The other group practise 'krumping', a form of hip hop dancing that neutralises violence by transforming it into West Side Story-style choreography.

Clowning and krumping are now practised by numerous groups, most of them involving former criminals. They regularly compete against each other in dance contests, one major annual event being staged at LA's enormous Great Western Forum. Tragically, while one of these shows was taking place, Tommy's uninsured house in Watts was trashed by thieves and relieved of all his professional props and anything else saleable.

To begin the year on as high a note as the cinema has reached to date, and is unlikely to equal in the foreseeable future, let me hail the return to the big screen of two masterpieces by great humanist moviemakers. The first is Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, made in 1932 and remade not at all badly in 1986 by Paul Mazursky as Down and Out in Beverly Hills. It's getting released in cinemas around the country and being shown at the NFT throughout January as part of a major Renoir retrospective and is an extremely bold satire on bourgeois values.

Essentially a comic paean to anarchism, it stars the great Michel Simon, France's answer to Charles Laughton, as a Parisian tramp who's rescued from suicide by a kindly, middle-aged bookseller. But instead of showing a proper gratitude to his saviour and benefactor, the unrepentant clochard sets about seducing his host's wife and creating maximum disorder in his cosy household.

Boudu is a deceptively rough-looking black-and-white film with long takes and sound recorded on location. The other film, Ingmar Bergman's 1982 Fanny and Alexander, made for Swedish TV but shown here theatrically in a shortened version, is Bergman's most opulent production that well deserved its Oscars for cinematography and costume design. It's back on the big screen as a result of the success here of Bergman's latest and, he says, last film, Saraband, also made for TV. Saraband is a sombre chamber movie, a string quartet of a picture for four actors. Fanny and Alexander is a family epic, a symphonic piece for a large cast.

The film begins with a marvellously sustained Christmas party sequence in 1907 at the home of a wealthy ex-actress in what is clearly the university city of Uppsala and comes to focus on the almost Dickensian life of her grandchildren when their actor-father suddenly dies and their mother marries a puritanical bishop. Performed by Bergman regulars, the film has much that is autobiographical about it and involves a contest between theatre and church, between magic and dull diurnal reality. During its three hours, seasons come and go, friends and relatives gather for funerals, weddings and christenings, and all human life is here.