I Love You Phillip Morris also lingers, but in an odd way, partly because one is left trying to work out its uncertain tone, partly because it is based on a remarkable true story. Steven Jay Russell, an American con-man of quite extraordinary brio (played here by Jim Carrey), is languishing in jail. But as this biopic attests, he spent much of his life coming up with weird and wonderful ways of getting out. Russell was determined to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself and his boyfriend (Ewan McGregor), and so hoodwinked and embezzled his way to occasional riches. Nobody was actually hurt or died as a result of his scams and impersonations, so, the film assumes, it should be possible to root for him.

This proves difficult as there is little of the charm of Catch Me if You Can. Although it was originally marketed as a comedy, it's really not one for all the family. The jokes are sparse, there is little of Carrey's physical humour on show and as his past movies have shown when he plays seriousness it more often than not comes off as creepiness. Despite the unsympathetic central character and the uneasiness one feels at watching somebody fake their own death from Aids, it is nevertheless sometimes genuinely touching, and it certainly makes one look at one's own life and how tentatively and unimaginatively most of us approach the world and its possibilities.

Finally, although computers might well have given us the joys of Toy Story, in the human world of epic story-telling they are all but killing the magic stone dead. Clash of the Titans is a straight remake of the 1981 story of everyday mythological folk, a film that proved the last triumph of the wire, putty and stop-motion techniques of that great special-effects master Ray Harryhausen. His puppet Medusa looked like the result of a labour of love and endless patience and was all the more astonishing to the children who saw it. Now, with everything so slick and convincing, it all looks too damned easy. It must be difficult for kids to be awed when they have their own computers at home and intricate games to play on them.

So we're left with the story of Perseus, Zeus and the Kraken. The producers of this remake are not quite sure how we would handle it these days; best then, to brush it aside with the endless whirling and swirling of the keyboard. But you can't keep a good god, or even a demi-god, down for long. Inferior it may be, but with state education the way it is today, films like this remain the only way most kids will learn of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus.