Auto Focus (18) The Good Thief (15) Maid In Manhattan (PG) Live Forever (15)

The title sequence of Paul Schrader's Auto Focus is one of those brightly coloured Doris Day jobs, its rinky-dink cheeriness belying the grim real-life story to follow. True, it begins in innocence as California DJ Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) is about to get his big break on a TV comedy pilot called Hogan's Heroes in the mid-1960s. A Catholic family man, Crane is a blandly amiable fellow whose only real passion seems to be playing the drums, but then stardom arrives and with it a new friend, John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), who introduces him to the new-fangled pleasures of video technology. From doing guest drum spots in strip clubs Crane progresses, under Carpenter's influence, to nightly sex parties, which they film and later watch together: an odd couple, you might say.

Schrader has built a career on portraying weirdly driven men, both fictional (Taxi Driver) and real (Mishima, The Last Temptation of Christ) but he's on to something new here. Despite wrecking two marriages, despite his frantic promiscuity, and despite the squalid pimping he and Carpenter do for each other, Crane regards himself as a regular guy. "Tell them sex is normal," he says to his long-suffering agent. Kinnear nicely conveys this ruinous self-delusion: he insists on his own "likeability", yet doesn't notice that he has scarcely any friends. Dafoe is pretty funny as the sleazeball swinger, part-friend and part-hanger-on, using the same line with every girl he hits on ("I love what you do!") and flashing those scary teeth of his. The strangest scene of the film has the pair of them lounging on a sofa and idly masturbating to one of their home-porn videos, a picture of easy familiarity that Schrader gradually darkens into a study of sublimated homosexual longing.

Auto Focus is always fascinating, but hardly ever enjoyable. While it is establishing Crane's double life – family man and celebrity satyr – the film works up a sick sort of comedy. Once the family drops out and his career hits the skids, all that's left is screwing and filming, chronicled with beady-eyed detachment by Schrader. It ranks just below Eyes Wide Shut as perhaps the least erotic film ever made about sex; an achievement of sorts but not an experience to recommend to your friends.

Nick Nolte, the star of Schrader's last great movie Affliction, is wonderfully dishevelled in The Good Thief, Neil Jordan's uneven remake of the 1955 Jean-Pierre Melville film Bob le flambeur. Nolte plays Bob, a chronic gambler and addict who's beached up on the sleazier reaches of the French Riviera. Having lost all his money and cold-turkeyed for three days, he decides to get serious and pull the heist of a lifetime: robbing a casino vault full of priceless Old Masters. In the meantime, he has to stay a step ahead of his old rival, a Nice-based cop (Tcheky Karyo), shake off the gang's "Judas" and protect an East European waif, Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze) from a vicious pimp. Working in a rougher, looser style than is his custom, Jordan piles plot upon counterplot to no clear end and gets rather lost in the Riviera setting – the last half-hour is a shambles. Still, you might enjoy cameos by Ralph Fiennes as a corrupt art dealer and Emir Kusturica as a guitarist-cum- safecracker, while Nolte, his face scored by a thousand sleepless nights, shambles around like a big melancholy bear. Long may he do so.

Ralph Fiennes pops up again opposite Jennifer Lopez in the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan. He plays a high-born politician running for the US Senate, she plays a single mother from the Bronx who works as a cleaner in a swanky Manhattan hotel. The two meet after Lopez, on a dare, briefly puts down her mop and puts on the Ritz, courtesy of a borrowed Dolce & Gabbana outfit; Fiennes mistakes her for a guest at the hotel, and in the course of a stroll around Central Park they start to fall for each other.

It's fairy-tale stuff, but what you baulk at isn't the contrivance so much as the weediness of the comedy – the screenwriter Kevin Wade seems never to have heard of the tart one-liner. Lopez does OK as the aspiring gal from the Bronx, even if her protestations of rootsy solidarity ring hollow these days, but Fiennes struggles badly: he has the shiftiness of the politico but none of the charisma, and he's not much of a light comedian either. Of the other Brits, Bob Hoskins does a nice whispering homage to Anthony Hopkins's paragon of discretion in The Remains of the Day, and Natasha Richardson steals the Bad Acting prize for her grotesque turn as a brittle society bitch.

I groaned through most of the documentary Live Forever, supposedly an overview of Britpop culture of the last decade but no more than an extended "I Love the Nineties" with celebrity contributors. The writer-director John Dower starts with a vague idea of a thesis, namely that a musical revolution arose in the wake of Thatcherism, but his brief becomes muddled and his interviewees aren't bright enough to make a persuasive argument. However good they might be at their jobs, Ozwald Boateng, Damien Hirst and Liam Gallagher have almost nothing of interest to say, while the "style commentators" who are supposed to know about this stuff offer even less. Honourable exception: Jarvis Cocker. Career suicide: Jon Savage.