Swimming Pool<br></br>Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life<br></br>The Man Who Sued God<br></br>Confidence<br></br>The Great Dictator

Looking for the deep end? Not in this pool...

This year, male film critics returned from Cannes not just tanned and hungover, but infatuated with Ludivine Sagnier, a starlet who wears a bikini, if that, for most of Swimming Pool (15). Since Cannes, Sagnier has been tagged "the new Bardot", and it's true that if you want to eyeball a healthy, blonde specimen of French womanhood, you'll get your money's worth from Francois Ozon's follow-up to Eight Women. Whether Swimming Pool will satisfy you in other ways is a different matter.

Charlotte Rampling plays an exhausted English crime novelist who goes off to her publisher's house in Provence to recharge her batteries. Enchanted by the solitude and the scenery, she's just getting a new book under way when the publisher's daughter Julie (Sagnier) arrives unannounced. To Rampling's annoyance, the interloper spends her days beside the villa's pool, and her nights indulging in sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, all at top volume. But the author's anger at this nuisance turns to fascination. Julie might not be disrupting her creativity, but fuelling it.

As the title hints, there is more going on beneath the surface, namely Ozon's musings about where writers get their ideas from. But as with any pool, the only way to reach these depths is via the surface, and the surface of Swimming Pool isn't as sparkling as it should be. The characters are a stock odd couple - one a Mediterranean wild child, the other a stuffy Brit.

The shooting is prosaic and the dialogue seems to be what it is: lines written in French, and then translated into English.

The first Tomb Raider movie was one of the plumpest turkeys of the past decade, so the makers of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (12A) can rest assured that the sequel is an improvement. It is, none the less, as dull as ditch water. In the hands of Jan De Bont, LATR:TCOL is less of an abysmal Indiana Jones rip-off than LCTR, and more of a bog-standard post-Bond espionage flick that plods from secret laboratory to exotic desert, as Lara goes in search of the Ark Of The Covenant - sorry, Pandora's Box. The film's tone is embodied by its aloof, smirking heroine, who is as invulnerable as the female robot in Terminator 3, and has marginally less humour and humanity.

Billy Connolly stars in The Man Who Sued God (15) as a lawyer-turned-fisherman whose boat is struck by lightning in Australia. His insurance company welches, citing the Act of God clause, so Connolly takes the deity's representatives - the priesthood - to court. It's a great story, rife with knotty issues, but the film nearly overloads it with subplots.

Connolly's relationship with Judy Davis, the journalist who breaks the story, may be sparky enough; his relationships with his brother, his ex-wife, his daughter and his dog just get in the way. Still, The Man Who Sued God is lively fun, and it's the first film to take full advantage of The Big Yin. His character is a complex human being - rude and contrary, hearty and charming, and possessed of Connolly's way with four-letter words.

Confidence (15) is a con trick movie in the tradition of The Sting and David Mamet's House of Games, so if you're addicted to underworld patois and laidback LA style, and you like to figure out who's double-crossing who and how, it should keep you entertained. For anyone else, Confidence is missable. The twists of the scam itself are easy to predict, and the grifters aren't sympathetic enough for us to mind whether or not they pull it off. Good-looking as they both are, Edward Burns is an average Young Dude, and Rachel Weisz lets her décolletage do most of the acting. Dustin Hoffman, meanwhile, does wonders with a small role as an unnervingly tactile gangster with a Muttley snigger. He makes his co-stars look like cardboard cut-outs.

What happens in Vendredi soir (15) is that a woman gets stuck in a traffic jam and then has sex with a stranger in a hotel. That's the whole of Claire Denis's film, and there's almost no dialogue, so don't go unless you fancy submerging yourself in the colours, the smells and the flavours of Paris by night. Re-released this week is Charlie Chaplin's 1940 anti-fascist talkie, The Great Dictator (PG). Chaplin - Charles Chaplin, as the credits would have it - can't quite make sublime slapstick, naive romance and scenes of violent anti-Semitic persecution sit comfortably in one film, but there are enough streaks of genius to make it worth catching, if only to see the wellspring of Mel Brooks' entire career.

n.barber@independent.co.uk