Solaris<br></br>Frida<br></br>Jackass: The Movie<br></br>Analyze That<br></br>Life and Debt

Exquisite, understated, alien

This time last year, with Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney took a well-dressed, high-rolling, insubstantial caper movie and did an even better-dressed, higher rolling and more insubstantial remake. Now, with Solaris (12A), the Oscar-winning director and his favourite actor have taken an elliptical, chin-stroking and immaculately designed sci-fi classic and made it even more elliptical, chin-stroking and immaculate.

Clooney stars as Chris Kelvin, a psychologist sent through the galaxy to look into the eerie happenings on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. After one night on board, he encounters one of those eerie happenings face-to-face. His wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) materialises – and she committed suicide years earlier.

Originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris was adapted in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky as the Russian answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyone who's watched all three hours of it will be encouraged to know that the new version is only half as long. Soderbergh's other alteration is including flashbacks of Kelvin and Rheya's married life, presumably so that her resurrection will have more of an emotional impact. But Solaris is too cool and understated for anything as populist as emotion. Death and rebirth have the same muted tone, and by the end, it's the dislocated, dreamy editing and cinematography you remember rather than the characters. Kelvin fears that the woman isn't his wife, but an exquisite, poised, hollow alien replica. Viewers who have seen Tarkovsky's Solaris might have the same ambivalence towards the remake.

Frida (15) credits four separate writers, so it's a pity that none of them could transmute Kahlo's life into something more than a typical Hollywood biopic. Rather than telling a story or exploring a philosophy, it just ticks off all the red letter days in the colourful life of the Mexican surrealist: there's the bus crash that left Kahlo in permanent pain; her marriage to the pathologically unfaithful Diego Rivera; her own flings with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker; and, every now and then, some painting.

Constrained as it is by its generic structure, Frida has a few visual flourishes: Julie Taymor, the director, inserts some animations, sepia tints and sequences that merge live action with Kahlo's paintings. Salma Hayek is fine in the title role, but her awards nominations must have been a reward for her getting the project off the ground rather than for her performance, eclipsed as it is by Alfred Molina's as her elephantine husband.

Jackass: The Movie (18) is an extended episode of MTV's zero-budget, zero-sanity stunt show. Armed with video cameras and an utter disregard for their own safety, the Jackasses tightrope over an alligator pool, get tattooed in the back of an off-roading truck, and so on. It's an affront to the motion-picture medium. It's also shamefully funny.

The best thing about Analyze That (15) is the title. In 1999's Analyze This, Robert DeNiro was a mob boss who sought treatment from Billy Crystal's petrified psychiatrist. The follow-up has no such peppy premise. It tries on one plot after another for size before throwing up its hands and admitting that it's the least necessary sequel ever made. Life and Debt (PG) is a vehement documentary about the World Bank's deleterious effects on Jamaica – a political thriller crossed with Naomi Klein's No Logo.

n.barber@independent.co.uk