Rush Hour 2 (12) <br></br>Gohatto (15)<br></br>Cats & Dogs (PG)

Did the daft action comedy Rush Hour really merit a sequel? More than $250m grossed worldwide argues very much in the affirmative, so get ready for another instalment of scenery-trashing mayhem with Jackie Chan as Chief Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong Police and Chris Tucker as LAPD detective Carter.

A strange pairing, this, not least because neither actor has any real command of English. Chan's garbled approximation to the language is pardonable, given that he's Chinese, whereas Tucker's screeching free-style patter tends to squash sentences into half their normal length. Yet, poor diction aside, their double-act works just fine, for the simple reason that they get on so well together – their relationship, capable of rising to the challenge of wit, rarely stoops to the mawkishness of, say, Lethal Weapon's Glover and Gibson.

Their chemistry also thrives on lively racial banter, the sort which might raise eyebrows were it not delivered with such verve and affection. "I'm tall, dark and handsome", says Tucker, then looks at Chan: "You're Third-World ugly". Chan demurs: "I'm cute. Like Snoopy". Tucker shakes his head: "Man, Snoopy is six inches taller than you".

The plot is a ludicrous caper about a sinister Triad overlord (John Lone) and his scheme to counterfeit millions of $100 bills, abetted by a cool assassin-cum-enforcer (Zhang Ziyi, last seen here flying through the air in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) who's already killed two US Customs agents in Hong Kong. As ever with Chan the investigation entails a full display of his balletic chop-socky moves, the rolls and twists and leaps as thrillingly agile as ever, with a little extra something thrown in – I particularly liked the improvisation of a wastepaper bin as an offensive weapon. (He used a stepladder to similar effect a few movies back).

His crime-fighting energies are in contrast to Tucker, who, being on vacation, has only massage parlours in mind; he's still the strutting, lecherous jerk he was in the earlier movie, if marginally less irritating. His best scene comes in a Las Vegas casino at the movie's preposterous climax – by now the whole movie has decamped Stateside – when he has to create a diversion for Chan. To his loud complaints that the casino operates a racist policy, the manager points out that Lionel Richie is doing the evening show. Tucker snorts: "Lionel Richie hasn't been black since The Commodores".

The other highlight is a two-minute cameo by Jeremy Piven as a Versace store assistant advising Tucker on his evening wear ("Buttercream and black", he coos) and soaring into the camp stratosphere in the process. Bliss. I hope he makes it back for Rush Hour 3.

Like Claire Denis's recent Beau Travail, Nagisa Oshima's delicate period drama Gohatto examines repressed homosexuality in a military academy. Set in Kyoto in the mid-1860s, it concerns the enrolment of Kano, an epicene young recruit (Ryuhei Matsuda) into the Shinsen-gumi troop and the ruinous desire he provokes amongst certain of his comrades. Oshima, whose Ai No Corrida (1976) became a benchmark of sexual frankness, is here all reticence and detachment; there is an almost feline slyness in the way his camera searches the soldiers' faces for clues to feeling.

In the case of the company's second-in-command Hijikata, one has the near-impossible task of reading the stonily impassive features of Beat Takeshi, a face more often seen squaring up to opponents in super-violent cop/yakuza thrillers. His final act, a single sword-stroke that fells a cherry sapling, is palpably symbolic, though what exactly it symbolises is unclear. Has the troublesome Kano been dispatched off-camera? Does it mark the death of the samurai tradition and with it the rule of the Shogunate? The film masks itself gauzily in false trails, double crosses and impenetrable gazes, by the end of which one feels sure of nothing but Oshima's artful mischief.

The much-hyped Cats & Dogs travels in the opposite direction to Final Fantasy insofar as it's a live action movie trying to ape the elastic freedoms of a cartoon. It's also a deeply tiresome continuation of America's love affair with the dog.

Jeff Goldblum and Elizabeth Perkins play a couple who lose their pet hound and replace it with a beagle pup called Lou. This unwitting creature finds itself a lynchpin in the canine struggle against – oh dear – a cats' conspiracy to take over the world. Tobey Maguire, Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin (his second voice-over in a week – careful, Alec) are among the voices you'll recognise as the doggy jaws are manipulated, quite unattractively, to mimic human chat.

The film's other joke is to pit the dogs' Bond-style surveillance technology against the agile menace of Ninja cat burglars and then watch the fur fly. Kids might enjoy the fights, as well as the obligatory slapstick involving dog poop and hairballs, but anyone above the age of 10 amused by this would have to be barking.