Film: Hollywood fluff doesn't come much nicer than this

The Muse (PG) Albert Brooks; 96 mins End of Days (18) Peter Hyams; 110 mins

Albert Brooks is probably best known in this country as the untelegenic, smart one who didn't get the girl in Broadcast News. He should have, though. Even when he called Holly Hunter his "china doll", he should have.

Brooks is a well loved comedian in America, and a prolific writer and director. He is a thick-set man with that brand of tight curly hair that could pass for pebble dash. As writer-director-star of The Muse he plays Stephen Phillips, a Hollywood scriptwriter who has "lost his edge". His friend Jack (Jeff Bridges, still the only film star who can get away with long hair) recommends that he spend strictly platonic time with Sarah (Sharon Stone) who claims to be a bona fide muse. Jack swears by her. Sarah agrees to take Stephen on, bullying him with her midnight demands for Waldorf salad while inspiring him to write a Jim Carrey vehicle set in a failing aquarium.

The Muse has a dig at Hollywood's absurdities - the huge, featureless studio lots, the $50 steamed radish ordered but never eaten - but is basically relaxed. Perhaps even too light a souffle? But let's recall Hollywood's recent self-lacerations. The more hysterical films such as Swimming with Sharks and The Player became, the more apparent the makers' sly smugness at being the centre of a moronic inferno. How insincerely Tinseltown wrings its hands - its own most loveable stage villain. Like Richard III, Hollywood has managed to educate everyone to hate it.

The Muse's toothlessness is its best quality. Its cheery refusal to become involved in redundant self-recrimination is winning, and there are some great moments. It seems that Sarah is responsible for every hit of the last 20 years. She warns James Cameron to "keep away from the water" when he comes to her door asking for help with Titanic II. Martin Scorsese shows up. His idea for a remake of Raging Bull starring a "thin, angry guy" has gone belly-up. The least august-looking genius in the history of the world, Scorsese resembles an errant Hobbit parent of Noel and Liam Gallagher. He's a hoot.

End of Days is one of those disastrous blockbusters which will have forced American showbiz correspondents out of their beds to write leaders about soaring budgets and squabbles over on-set vegan catering. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as an ex-cop (they're always ex-cops in these films, because no other job description so facilitates those lonely breakfasts that Philip Marlowe did so well). Arnie does battle with the devil (Gabriel Byrne) in the last hours before the new millennium. Beelzebub must impregnate a young woman marked for the job since her birth by a crazed and heaving Miriam Margolyes.

The film shuttles through increasingly ludicrous scenarios. My favourite: a Catholic priest turns the numbers 666 upside down and gasps "1999!" Try it yourself at home sometime.

Arnie is supposed to be an alcoholic but, even after consuming a vat of vodka, cannot bring himself to pass for drunk. And he walks funny anyway. We have seen him, sober as a judge, lurching around like WC Fields, simply on account of his hypertrophied thighs. Clive James used to say that Arnie looked like a "condom stuffed with walnuts". Now, he's more like a Planet Hollywood take-out bag full of biodegradable burger meat.

End of Days is a hilarious mess; particularly at the moment when Gabriel Byrne is possessed by the Devil and immediately starts fondling a woman's breasts (as we all know, the Devil is fantastic at sex - thanks a lot, Milton). Suffice to say that it's an opportunistic con, no more concerned with chiliastic neurosis than The Omen was.

October Sky tells the true story of Homer Hickam, now a Nasa engineer but once a teenager in a woeful Appalachian mining town. Back in the 1950s, encouraged by his teacher, Homer worked at maths and made rockets, much to his miner father's disgust. His father wanted him down the mine, but Homer wanted to be a thousand miles above it - literally.

This is an entirely straightforward, kind film.The final few frames are footage of the real Homer and his schoolmates hanging out, circa 1957. It may be a horribly manipulative trope, but I fell for it, though the images are frustratingly brief. We see the camera following one of Homer's home-made rockets high into the blue air. Finally, we see Dad making his slow way through the snow (is he smiling? I can't tell) a few years before dying of blackened lung disease. It's just like the line in an e.e. cummings poem: "Sam was a man/ grinned his grin/ done his chores/ laid him down. Sleep well."

The Five Senses is a far from negligible addition to Canadian cinema. A series of chamber pieces involving a handful of loosely connected Toronto residents is delicately linked to the disappearance of a small child. Producer-writer-director Jeremy Podeswa has similar instincts and preoccupations to Robert Lepage and Atom Egoyan. He works within an extremely narrow palette of melancholy colour with a subdued, almost glazed rhythm, patient and non-judgemental, under-dramatising everything.

Though not as pedantically insistent as Lepage, who requires that every piece of his chilly puzzles should fit, Podeswa's film, like The Confessional, is overdetermined and schematic. So while it makes few mistakes, it does make a pretty vital one - in that it fails to live. The sixth sense lacking in these involving yet inert Canadian films is a sense of humour.

The Last Yellow opens in Leicester, where the gentle but gun-obsessed Frank (Mark Addy) holes up at a desperately grim B&B inhabited by simpleton Kenny (Charlie Creed-Miles) and his disabled brother Keith (James Hooton.) Soon, Frank and Kenny are on their way to London to kill the evil Cockney responsible for Keith's injuries, but they stop off at the zoo and have a lolly before the hit. Some hit. No hit, of course. A likeable, TV-oriented film that benefits from the masterfully vivid but casual Addy. Watching him show Kenny how to make fried bread (vegetable oil, lots of it, plus salt - I think, but that could have been fag ash) is one of the best sights the big screen has had to offer all year.