Waking Life (15); <br></br>The Pornographer (18); <br></br>The Green Ray (NC); <br></br>Offending Angels (15); <br></br>The Scorpion King (12)

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What is the animated feature Waking Life about

I've never seen anything quite like Waking Life, Richard Linklater's animated inquiry into the nature of dreams and consciousness. Using digital cameras Linklater shot a series of monologues and duologues, then he and his art director Bob Sabiston brought in a team of computer artists to "paint" over the live-action footage.

The result is strange and rather beautiful, a fugue-like sequence of vignettes through which an unnamed young man (Wiley Wiggins) drifts along, listening in on the various theories and conundrums proposed by this or that character. Apart from a bedroom chat between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the cast are an unknown parade of voices and faces. For a while it's engrossing, if only because of the weird, undulating animation and its just-off mimickry of facial expressiveness. A labour of love, and a one-off, certainly, though as a philosophical exercise it fades. The question of what constitutes waking and dreaming becomes boring as the minutes go by; there's only so much one can take of crackpot theorists and garrulous bores all putting in their two-penn'orth. I imagine Waking Life will play wonderfully after a couple of joints; stone-cold sober you may find the thing a trial.

Did I detect an anticipatory thrill coursing around the press show when it was announced that the 11 seconds of film removed from The Pornographer by the British Censors would be included at our screening? Having seen the offending cut (a twanging hard-on, wouldn't you know) one can only wonder at this bit of belated prudery: these are the same people, after all, who allowed similar sights to pass in Intimacy and Romance without noticeably corrupting the morals of the nation. The movie itself turns out to be a tale of heavy-duty soul-searching as one-time porn director Jacques (Jean-Pierre Leaud) comes out of retirement in order to stave off money troubles. But his directorial style is no longer à la mode, and his producer takes over the shoot. At first I wondered if writer-director Bertrand Bonello was sending up the porn business – Jacques's fans talk of past triumphs such as "Perverse Nicoise" and "Schoolgirl Hotel" – but the film becomes ponderous as Jacques tries to reconcile with his teenage son, who disowned him on discovering his father's profession. Leaud is still a compelling presence, but the drama he finds himself in is an unedifying mixture of vagueness and self-importance.

Master of humdrum though he is, Eric Rohmer severely tests our patience in The Green Ray, a reissue from 1987. Or, more accurately, his heroine does. Delphine (Marie Riviere) is a Parisian secretary who's vacillating over her holiday plans. After her trip to Greece is cancelled, she tries Cherbourg for a few days, but leaves at a moment's notice; then she tries walking in the mountains, only to return to Paris the same day. A friend offers her an apartment in Biarritz, where she suns herself on the beach, but soon she's fed up with this too.

Restlessness is one thing, but Delphine is also maddeningly fretful and neurotic, forever snivelling about her loneliness and storming off in tears. Her friends are more sympathetic towards her than she deserves, and seem as baffled by her sudden moods as we are. Rohmer casts a faintly mystical glow around her: rather implausibly, she overhears a bunch of oldsters chatting about a Jules Verne story, which holds that anyone who sees the elusive "green ray" at sunset will be able to "read their own heart". But Delphine is such a sap we couldn't care less how her heart's doing, and Rohmer's indulgence of her seems merely wilful. A retrospective of the director's films begins at the NFT this week, and most of them, happily, knock this effort into a cocked chapeau.

It is almost impossible to convey the woefulness of Offending Angels, a fey British comedy in which everything has been aimed low: budget, ambition, intelligence. A story of two guardian angels (Susannah Harker and Shaun Parkes) who descend to help a couple of entirely undeserving and charmless London flatmates, it tries to cross the coarse antics of Men Behaving Badly with the celestial whimsy of Wenders' Wings of Desire, and the result is a Chinese water-torture of a movie. Andrew Lincoln is tiresome enough as a lead, but even he looks good next to Andrew Rajan as his pornography-watching pal: as Kenneth Tynan once remarked, you can put up with bad acting, but slow bad acting is insupportable. Given that Rajan also wrote, produced and directed this rot, I'm tempted to suggest he pursues a different line of employment altogether. Inevitably, he's now working on his "next two" features. I find it inconceivable that anyone would want to fund them.

And thus did it come to pass that The Mummy prospered, and begat The Mummy Returns, wherein the crowds did rejoice at American wrestling champion The Rock. The producers saw that it was good, and upon this Rock did they build a spin-off, and The Scorpion King was its name. And lo! the special effects did create an almighty chaos of sorcery and sandstorms around The Rock, and righteously did he smite his enemies, for thus was it written: one sequel passeth away, and another sequel cometh.