The Mr Men are celebrating their 40th birthday today.

There is a scene about halfway through this sequel to The Da Vinci Code when the scholar-hero, played by Tom Hanks, is locked inside a glass-walled library vault whose oxygen supply has just been treacherously cut off. We are meant to be horrified as he staggers along the precious book-lined corridors, surrounded on all sides by arcane knowledge, yet unable to draw breath into his lungs. There could be no more perfect metaphor for this movie, a see-through construct packed to the rafters with complex information but peopled by characters denied the simple oxygen of credibility. How can we possibly care about a man being starved of air when he has nothing of real life about him in the first place?

The movie sequel to "The Da Vinci Code" is being greeted as a faster-paced, more gripping film than the original and is respectful to Catholics, director Ron Howard said at its Rome premiere.

The word for The Da Vinci Code is a rare invertible palindrome. Rotated 180 degrees on a horizontal axis so that it is upside down, it denotes the maternal essence that is sometimes linked to the sport of soccer. Read right side up, it concisely conveys the kind of extreme enthusiasm with which this riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller can be recommended.

A violent and silly Korean Grand Guignol about an opera singer and his young protegée heading down a country road and into the embrace of a gang of Deliverance-style mouth-breathing psychos.

What happens next is predictable enough in outline, but springs a surprise or two along the way; the build-up of aggression is nicely paced, and the film displays a primitive but intermittently effective sense of humour. On the down side, the action proper, once it does get under way, seems to go on an unconscionably long time; and as well as some distasteful sexual violence, we get an unusually revolting screen kiss. I suspect it falls between two stools: not nearly grisly enough for the aficionado of extreme Asian cinema, rather too grisly for everyone else.

The Mist is one of the most downbeat, serious-minded dramas ever to feature gigantic tentacled aliens from another dimension. Adapted from a novella by Stephen King, it's set almost entirely in a rural New England supermarket. An unfeasibly buff artist, Thomas Jane, is stocking up with his son there one morning, when the supermarket is enveloped in a white fog, and we soon see that cheaply computer-generated beasties are lurking within it. Jane and the other shoppers lock the doors.