Solaris (12A) <br></br>Frida (15) <br></br>Analyze That (15) <br></br>Jackass The Movie (18) <br></br>Life and Debt (PG)

Here's a film that the studio couldn't sell to the US even on the promise of revealing George Clooney's bare bum. Maybe modern audiences are smarter than we think. Credit to director Steven Soderbergh, who at least shows himself eager to try something new after a string of hits; Solaris, a sci-fi psychodrama based on a Stanislaw Lem novel and already translated to the screen in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky, could hardly be more different from the high-class fluff of Ocean's Eleven, even with Clooney in the starring role.

He plays a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, who comes to investigate a space station bewitched by contact with the mystery planet Solaris. He finds that one crew member has committed suicide, and another displaying symptoms of mental imbalance, although given that the latter is played by Jeremy Davies (the weedy soldier in Saving Private Ryan) it might just be the twitchiness of his overacting. What really spooks Kelvin is the reappearance of his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone), smirking away and speaking in riddles despite the fact that she died some years back. Perplexed? You will be, and perhaps also exasperated by the aching rhetorical solemnity of it all. It's attractively shot (by Soderbergh himself) in shivery gunmetal tones and soundtracked by an insistent electronic hum, while the clenched, portentous moodiness, – a rival to 2001: A Space Odyssey – eventually gets inside you like a head cold. Theme-wise, I think we're being told something about love, or memory, or eternal life – "Death shall have no dominion," quoth Clooney. No, but boredom sometimes will.

Julie Taymor's Frida is another good-looking film that doesn't really come off. A labour of love for its star and producer Salma Hayek, it is a lively, sincere, occasionally inspired tribute to the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, but its episodic structure flattens its 30-year timespan into a pretty mundane sort of canvas. Hayek, who's in almost every scene, has an extraordinarily lovely face, and plays the bisexual, Communist, monobrowed artist with brio if not a great degree of reflective subtlety. The life hinges on two turning-points, a trolley-car accident that almost permanently crippled her and, later, a meeting of souls with the celebrated muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Their eventual marriage sets the tone for the movie, a tumultuous cycle of infidelities, crockery-flinging tantrums and reconciliations that's more exhausting than an afternoon with Jerry Springer: the "Latin temper" as bubbling volcano.

Shot in lustrous, torrid colours by Rodrigo Prieto (who lensed Amores Perros) Frida brims with incident but only rarely steps outside the biopic format to risk a flourish worthy of its subject, such as the nightmarish animated montage (by the Quay Brothers) in which Frida's broken body recovers in hospital, or the magical black-and-white cartoons of New York skyscrapers that end with the Empire State dissolving like a soap bubble in Frida's bath-tub. The rest is a flurry of cameos – by Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and, clankingly, Geoffrey Rush, supposedly playing Leon Trotsky but closer in resemblance to Elmore Leonard – followed by Frida's gradual disintegration. Already excruciated with back pain, she later loses half her foot to gangrene, prompting this unhappy exchange: "You've lost weight," she tells Diego. "You've lost your toes," he replies. Gallant! The script is a multiple collaboration, and sounds like it.

Analyze That, a sequel to Analyze This, revisits the relationship between a mob boss (Robert De Niro) and a put-upon shrink (Billy Crystal), a comic clash of professions exploited far more ingeniously by The Sopranos. This time De Niro has faked insanity to get himself discharged from prison under the care of the therapist, and somehow lands a job as consultant to a TV show called "Little Caesar". The only thing I honestly enjoyed was De Niro wagging his finger at Crystal's expert diagnoses and leering his approval: "You. You. You're good", a habit simply lifted from the original. The saddest thing was seeing the great Cathy Moriarty mugging along as a Mafia godmother: it occurred to me that the last time she and De Niro were together on screen was 23 years ago. The film? Raging Bull.

I defy you not to be tickled by one or two moments in Jackass the Movie, a compendium of don't-try-this-at-home stunts performed by ringmaster Johnny Knoxville and his crew of overgrown fratboys. The one that rattled my funny bone was a relatively gentle sequence in which the team midget (Jason "Wee Man" Acuna) hides himself entirely beneath a traffic cone and goes waddling around downtown Tokyo to the utter bemusement of passers-by. Well, I suppose you had to be there. While members of the public are sometimes unwittingly dragooned into the fun, most of the slapstick is orchestrated towards perilous self-humiliation. So a Jackass regular takes on some ridiculous dare – for instance, launching a firework from his butt-hole – while the rest of the team stand by, laughing like hyenas. Hard to defend as anything other than 90 minutes of abject puerility, but hard to resist giggling too.

Stephanie Black's documentary Life and Debt portrays a Jamaica that the tourist industry would prefer to ignore. Crippled by the legacy of economic policies instituted by the IMF and the World Bank, the island is now deep in debt and most of its people reduced to slave wages – if they can still get a job. Brochure shots of roasted sunsets and idyllic beaches contrast with pictures of grinding urban poverty and rioting, a shameful indictment of past governments and the fatal influences of globalisation. The white tourists provide a smiling embodiment of the phrase "fools' paradise".