Bowling For Columbine<br></br>Sans Soleil<br></br>Big Shot's Funeral<br></br> Super Troopers

It's been a good month for George Bush. But the fact that Bowling For Columbine is currently doing exceptional business at the US box office suggests he's not everyone's favourite chimp. Michael Moore's latest documentary (a prize winner at Cannes) is ostensibly an essay on the 1999 Columbine school massacre and gun control, but is really an assault on the flag-waving, big-business- boosting rhetoric that Bush personifies.

Not that Moore (pictured below) makes this a party-political issue. Bill Clinton, along with all the Presidents of the last 50 years, comes in for a kicking as far as American foreign policy is concerned. A claim repeatedly made by Moore's interviewees is that bearing arms is about the right to defend yourself. A neat montage (including footage from Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador) suggests it's got more to do with having the might to attack.

As for the shambolic-looking Moore – his weapons of choice are a great soundtrack, tight editing, devastating footage from various killing sprees and, most effective of all, humour. He talks to one character after another, and simply lets their one-liners tumble into his lap – an organic farmer turns out to be the maniac brother of Oklahoma bomber Terry Nichols; a sweet-faced local teen is soon bemoaning the fact that bomb-making skills only put him second on the town's most wanted list.

Moore makes much of the fact that he, like Nichols and one of the Columbine killers and Charlton Heston, the National Rifle Association president, hails from Michigan; and his home-boy manner obviously puts people at ease. Moore may be interested in exploring American history from an alternative perspective, (a wonderfully manic cartoon from the creators of South Park draws a link between the "death" of the Ku Klux Klan and the "birth" of the NRA; a trip to Canada shows that an ethnically mixed, gun-totin' population can be peaceful) but he looks like any other white-bread dude. Ever since 1989s Roger & Me, he's been accused of pushing himself into the limelight. In fact, he's the perfect undercover reporter.

And then he goes and screws up. Having established that the majority of people running around with guns aren't crazed, inner-city blacks, but rather paranoid, suburban whites, Moore then immerses himself in the case of Kayla Rowland, a little girl killed by a six-year-old black boy, and starts making impassioned pleas for women like the boy's mother not to be forced to work long hours in welfare programmes. In other words, having carefully broken the link between the underprivileged and violence, he re-enforces it. Doh!

Moore's final "coup" is a trip to Heston's house, where he demands to know why Americans seem so keen on killing each other. Heston doesn't come out of the interaction well (surprise, surprise, he's a good ol' fashioned racist, and plumb ignorant about world history to boot), but a part of you longs for him to say well, smarty pants, have you got an answer? Moore boxes himself into a corner in the drive to find out what makes America "special". Wanting your country to be uniquely bad is as egocentric as wanting it to be uniquely good. In trying to fight too many battles (excuse the violent metaphor), this liberal's in danger of losing the war. And George Bush would love that.

Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is another film-essay, but this time it is a blast from the past (it was made in 1983), reissued to chime in with a Marker season at the ICA. The template for films such as Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space, it consists of a female narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reading us excerpts from letters sent by a wander-lusting friend, accompanied by images, that don't so much make sense of the words, as float alongside.

French-born Marker is a god in many circles. For a good part of Sans Soleil, it's not entirely clear why. The musings (mainly on Africa and Japan) are often pretentious, and even when they're interesting, you hardly feel glued to your seat. References to "African women" also grate (who would dare to generalise about "European women"?), as do lofty declarations such as, "...this is why I will never let it be said that youth is wasted on the young...."

But what starts as a trickle of surreal gems (a John Kennedy robot, apparently accompanied by The Chipmunks, singing his famous 1961 inaugural address) gradually becomes a flood. All the best stuff is prompted by Tokyo, a city whose amusement arcades alone are a storehouse of trippy tales. Computer "games" are inspired by Sixties street battles with the police, or punishing hierarchies in the work place. And when Marker's camera wanders over the faces of a carriage of tube dwellers (many of them asleep) you find yourself straining forwards to get closer. You've seen what tickles their waking selves – now you want in on their dreams.

The travellers persona, too, becomes more affecting, as he reveals a fondness for owls and cats, and astonishment that some people can "remember" without using film, or photographs.

Sans Soleil is about falling in love – with wide-eyed, non-musing animals; and a notion of the "East", as a place that honours "non-being". It may start out as anthropology, it winds up as a story. Trust me, if you can just stay awake till the dreamy tube journey, you'll skip out of the cinema feeling your eyes have been unpeeled.

In Big Shot's Funeral, Donald Sutherland plays a burnt-out Hollywood director who, while on location in China, discovers another side of life. Via his funeral. What follows takes in romance, the perils of product placement and the need for irreverence when dealing with death. It's not as weird as it should be, but has wonderful moments.

Super Troopers introduces us to a bunch of Vermont state troopers, led by Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar). His gang play pranks on each other all day, pranks they find very amusing. Chandrasekhar looks a little bit like David Schwimmer; another cop owes something to David Arquette.... Alas, the lines have more in common with Police Academy than Friends.

Brian Cox is the boys' long-suffering boss and when his lovely, pitted, Marlon Brando-ish face appeared on screen for the first time someone in the audience I was with actually yelped "No!" You wonder what induced the actor to join in these "shenanigans". It can't have been money, since director /star /writer Chandrasekhar is unheard of, ditto the rest of the cast, who are mostly part of his comedy group, Broken Lizard.

Whatever, when it looks like the troops may lose their jobs to the hated, apparently straight-laced "local police", they hit on a plan to make themselves look good in front of the governor (Lynda Carter aka Wonder Woman). The plan involves a lot of checking of watches. You know exactly how they feel.