Cinema: They may be lost, but they've got a great interior designer

IN THE PANTHEON of cult sci-fi, Lost in Space has a relatively lowly place, somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and The Clangers. The original Sixties TV series featured the dentally perfect, Bacofoil- wrapped space family Robinson, the sneakily effeminate Dr Zachary Smith and a robot (name of "Robot") which was was a hybrid of hostess trolley and a goldfish bowl.

Though it allows the surviving members of the original cast to pop up in cameo roles, Stephen Hopkins's big-screen, big-budget Lost in Space (PG) doesn't retain any retro-kitsch valves or ticker-tape machines. The Robot still looks like it might contain a rack of nicely warmed plates, but otherwise, the film is a delicious exercise in techno-cool. Its designers have shaped a future from swooping curves and big chunky contours; ethereal glass domes, polished bronze transoms, and moulded, frictionless surfaces. The Robinsons might be lost in space, but their interior decorators really know how to use it imaginatively. They can certainly come round and do up my flat.

Visual seductiveness is both the pleasure and the problem of Hopkins's film. His work is brassy and bold, and some of his action set-pieces are breathlessly exciting. But Lost in Space is much more persuasive as an advert for this sexy aesthetic than it is as a coherent piece of film- making, and marketability is a stronger influence than logic over its events. There's a cute computer-generated space monkey who fulfils no function in the plot other than to pump up the merchandising potential. A sequence in which young Will Robinson (Jack Johnson) uses virtual-reality technology to exterminate a horde of scuttering alien arachnids will doubtless be available as a Doom-type shoot 'em up before the end of the week. And just when you think the ads are over, Apollo FourForty's tub- thumping dance remix of the original TV theme blares over the film's closing credits, hypnotising you into buying the single. I got my copy two hours later (though I passed on the monkey).

Oh, did I mention that there are some people in the movie, too? As Major West, the pilot, Matt LeBlanc plays the same part as he does in Friends, but in a rubber spacesuit. William Hurt (in a fuzzy beard that makes him look like an illustration from The Joy of Sex) is interplanetary patriarch John Robinson, on hand to lend weight to the flimsy familial platitudes of the script. ("I just want you to know I love you, son" is one of the script's uglier outbursts.) Gary Oldman has been hired as Dr Smith for similar reasons - but he's badly let down by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who hasn't supplied a single line worthy of Oldman's capacity for sneering camp. He really shouldn't be taking parts as underwritten as this - unless, of course, he wants to spend the rest of his career stuck in roles that are somewhere between Abanazar and Tony Parsons. Goldsman is also responsible for the structural disasters that afflict the final third of the movie - which veers badly off course once it decides to dabble in matters such as time bubbles, temporal anomalies and hyperspatial wormholes. Contemporary sci-fi can't get enough of this quantum jiggery-pokery, but its exponents rarely give the impression that they ever made it beyond the first five pages of A Brief History of Time. By the time the Robinsons have been marooned in an alternative future staffed by a nine-foot version of Gary Oldman in Jolson blackface and Richard III hump, Goldsman's plot has engineered its own entropic collapse.

Betty Thomas's disappointingly unamusing Dr Dolittle (PG) relocates Hugh Lofting's books to modern-day San Francisco. We first meet John Dolittle as a three-year-old, being advised by his dog (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) that bum-sniffing is the key to true friendship. However, when he begins to put these ideas into practice, his father attempts to forcibly suppress John's predilection by calling on the services of an exorcist and a dog- catcher.

Years later, John is being played by Eddie Murphy, and his tendency reappears after he receives a knock on the head. "The guys in the dorm told me this thing wouldn't affect me!" he wails, finding himself berated by a guinea pig. Too agitated to go to bed with his wife, he heads straight for the doctor. But the experience brings him closer to his young, science- obsessed daughter (Kyla Platt), who also feels herself to be a "freak". Anyone smell a subtext here?

In Lofting's stories, Dolittle is a linguist not a medic, and his animal conversations are the result of a research project through which he triumphantly rediscovers a prelapsarian form of communication (in one story, he hears the story of Adam and Eve from an ancient turtle). For Murphy's doctor, talking to the animals is a guilty secret which he has to conceal, like a socially unacceptable illness or weird sexual peccadillo. At an al fresco power lunch, he is driven to a state of hysteria when he finds that he can understand an argument between a group of pigeons. He's as traumatised as Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, who hears the London sparrows singing in Ancient Greek. The film's message is a surprisingly radical one, straight out of the writings of RD Laing - learn to celebrate your idiosyncrasies, even if society regards them as psychotic. Which is an interesting sentiment - it's just a pity that the film hasn't got the gags to match.

Monk Dawson (15) has the opposite problem - it tries to generate earnest dramatics, but manages only unintentional hilarity. An over-narrated adaptation of a Piers Paul Read novel, Tom Waller's film follows a hopelessly improbable story about a Benedictine monk who becomes a tabloid columnist. The tone is amateurishly uneven. It's Jilly Cooper meets Brideshead Revisited - and they don't get on.

Finally, we're back on the shrink's couch for a re-release of Psycho (15), which - after 38 years of familiarity - still glares with a strange, brutal magic. Watching for the first time on a proper cinema screen, I was struck by the film's sense of airless discomfort. The interiors are not the plush modernist environments of Hitchcock's Technicolor thrillers, but seedy offices, lots and motel rooms. Traffic noise mithers away under the early scenes, set in a sun-baked Phoenix. Every space is cramped and confined: even Janet Leigh's handbag is slightly too small to comfortably accommodate its contents.

But Hitchcock's smartest trick is to make his audience complicit with the two principal guilty acts in the plot - the $40,000 robbery carried out by screwed- up, pill-popping secretary Marion Crane (Leigh) and the infamous piece of butchery perpetrated by motelier Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). The director coaxes us into a voyeuristic relationship with Leigh - encouraging us to share Norman's interest in her semi-naked body - and then gives us more of her than our senses can possibly cope with. The resulting shower sequence remains the most shocking scene ever committed to celluloid: there's that horrid cabbage-hacking noise which competes for control of the soundtrack with Bernard Herrmann's savage violin-strokes; the globulous mess of blood sliding towards the plughole; the inexorable arc of Norman's carving knife. But its power comes mainly from Hitchcock's sly way of allowing you to participate both in Norman's murderous frenzy and Marion's open-mouthed terror. Gazing at this carnage, you feel you've been put in the place of both victim and violator.

And what should we make of the penultimate scene, that long explicatory speech by a fag-toking psychiatrist? Some have seen this as an outbreak of clumsiness on Hitchcock's part. Last week in this paper, David Thomson suggested that it reflected Hitchcock's nervousness about his subject- matter. I'm inclined to regard it as a red herring which attempts to rationalise the events of the plot with railway book-stand Freudianism - cod psychobabble about "the Mother Half of Norman's mind". This might offer a crude explanation of what was going on in the killer's head as he sliced away at Marion's naked body. But it doesn't explain what was going on in ours as we watched him do it. And that's enough to give any cinemagoer 38 years of creeping anxiety.

Cinema details: Going Out, page 10.