Goldmember (PG) <br></br> Amadeus:The Director's Cut (PG) <br></br>The Girl from Paris (15) <br></br>The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (PG)

Mike Myers carries on

Strange, is it not, that a comic performer can achieve worldwide popularity on the strength of a tight velvet suit, a mouthful of snaggle teeth and a mating cry of "Yeah baby!" This is Mike Myers' third outing as the swinging British spy Austin Powers, following International Man of Mystery and The Spy Who Shagged Me, and there seems every chance it will be the most successful installment of the franchise yet. Such is his drawing power nowadays that the film can afford a pre-credit sequence featuring celebrity cameos by – well, let's just say they're all as famous as Austin himself, only with better dental work.

So what is it that audiences find so attractive about him? Partly it's to do with his swaggering self-assurance, the idea that nothing could be more irresistible to the opposite sex than a lecherous oaf with chest hair foaming over his frilled white dress shirt. (Yeah, baby!). He's a throwback to the free-spirited randiness of the Sixties, located somewhere between Bond's take-charge suavity and sex comedies such as The Knack and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. There's an innocence, too, in the way that he looks straight to camera and expects us to applaud him simply for the magnificent favour of being Austin Powers. Myers does his usual multi-tasking on Goldmember, co-writing (with Michael McCullers), co-producing and playing not only super-agent Powers but his megalomaniac enemy Dr Evil, the obese (and deeply unamusing) Scotsman Fat Bastard and, in a new role, one Johann van der Smut, aka Goldmember, a sybaritic Dutch metallurgist whose private parts were turned to gold in a bizarre "smelting accident". Goldmember, as well as plotting world destruction, has an alarming predilection for eating bits of his own peeling, sun-damaged skin.

In terms of form the new movie has made few advances on the last, rehearsing the now familiar routine of double entendres, musical interludes, toilet jokes, lunatic spoofery and infectious phrase-making, a wildly uneven mixture of the inspired and the unutterably banal. Early on there's a fantastic moment when Dr Evil sniggeringly describes his enormous submarine HQ as "long and hard and full of seamen", and finds his audience staring back stony-faced. "No laugh – not even a titter? Tough sub". Trouble is, those moments of sublimity are very few and far between, and neither the presence of Michael Caine (as Austin's reprobate dad, Nigel) nor the increasing involvement of Dr Evil's midget sidekick Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) can provide the required comic ballast to keep it aloft. God knows, we'd welcome a little summer entertainment, however lowbrow and tasteless, but Goldmember turns out even baser metal than that.

It's a moot point whether Amadeus, garlanded in 1985 with eight Academy Awards, needs the extra prestige of a "Director's Cut". The additional 20-odd minutes of footage extends rather than deepens what was already a long film: the heart of the story – the tormented jealousy of a mediocrity for a genius – is unchanged. Not having seen it since its original release, I found I remembered all the towering, black-eyed rage of F Murray Abraham's incarnation of Salieri, but had quite forgotten the broken notes of his humanity, and their final, terrible crescendo. Tom Hulce's performance as Mozart, a giggling buffoon in a fright wig, still does little for me, though he too grows in dignity as he fades towards death. The scene in which he feverishly dictates his Requiem to an astounded Salieri is superbly played, even if it fudges their relationship (Salieri intends to steal the music, but becomes its helpless amanuensis). The real star, on second viewing, is Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II, conveying in his mild, fluting tone a wonderfully lofty ignorance. "Too many notes," he chides Mozart on his latest opera. "Just cut a few and it'll be perfection." One is tempted to say something similar of Amadeus.

A sleeper hit in France last year, The Girl From Paris is a gentle, heartfelt story of pride and prejudice. Mathilde Seigner plays a thirtysomething singleton who abandons city life for a goat farm high in the Alps. Here she begins marketing the place as a holiday gîte, while the grouchy old widower (Michel Serrault) who sold her the tenancy curls his lip and waits for her to screw up. First-time director Christian Carion, celebrating the landscape's changing seasons simply and unaffectedly, nonetheless doesn't shrink from depicting the harsh and lonely aspects of farm life, or its recent troubled history (they had mad cow disease too). But his masterstroke is in the casting, for we come to care very much about the twinned fates of the strappingly lovely Seigner and Serrault's old timer, whose set-in-his-ways tetchiness is a rustic counterpart to the character he played in Nelly & Mr Arnaud. Conventional in its way, but deeply charming.

I can see the appeal of Aussie conservationist Steve Irwin and his tireless grappling with snakes, spiders and assorted jungle beasts – his cheerful patter and wide-eyed enthusiasm never falter, even when he looks likely to get a bite on the nose from some fanged horror. (He's Ozzy Osbourne to David Attenborough's Cliff Richard). But wiser simply to have documented him and his wife Terri ("mate") at work in The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course than decorate it with a pathetic sliver of plot about the CIA and the hunt for a missing satellite. And surely "Animal Crackers!" is a better title.