You won’t see Life of Stuff at either your local Odeon or arthouse cinema because it is a poor piece of work. Since this potted synopsis is also a fair description of Trainspotting, I think he should wake up and smell the vomit. The dashing Phillipe de Nevers (Vincent Perez) swashes a glamorous buckle, the chevalier Lagardere (Daniel Auteuil) has to defend himself from blackguards with a rapier in one hand and a baby in the other, and the Duc d’Orleans (Phillipe Noirret) excuses his terrible swordmanship by claiming that he slipped on a macaroon. Next to Bob and Terry, Chris and Toni are two-dimensional creations.British directors usually lose their sense of humour when they make costume drama This doesn’t seem to happen to the French.

Phillipe de Broca’s Le Bossu (15) – based on a popular 19th-century roman feuilleton – is a cheerful, lavish, rip-roaring fancy-dress party. For instance, after a failed attempt at adultery, Chris makes things up to Marion by saying, “Who’d have fast food when you can eat at the Ritz?” Saville seems to be asking his audience to take this seriously. The main problem is that we’ve seen all these themes explored more efficiently elsewhere. Tony Hancock’s The Rebel is more eloquent on suburban aspirations to cosmopolitanism, and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is a more sophisticated treatment of thirtysomething discontent. There’s a rich irony in seeing Bale and Ross, got up as hopelessly middle-class schoolboys, ranting about “sticking one up the bourgeoisie’s fat bum”.

And there’s a pleasing Reggie Perrin-style sequence in which Chris has a vision of his wife, Marion (played by Emily Watson), looking up from the ironing to tell him to sleep with other women.But Saville doesn’t seem to know when to stop laughing at these characters and start empathising with them, which makes much of the film ludicrous. The X-Files has built up a baroque network of half-comprehensible mythology, but it’s a very fragile construction: Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens, probably. My only qualm was that Gillian Anderson has now lost so much weight since the first series of the TV show, you’d think she was the victim of some sinister Hollywood conspiracy to turn women into anorexics. But who’d believe a crazy theory like that?As the power of the X-Files concept derives from its atmosphere of dark confusion, you’ll be disappointed if you go to the movie expecting straight answers The value of “X” will never be disclosed. They succeed not because they’re overburdened with star quality, but because their roles rely on the wooden pronouncement of reams of elaborate pseudo- science. The movie’s narrative is a constant exchange between explication and obfuscation. Any titbit of information we are thrown is then rendered meaningless by a new mystery.The film has Martin Landau – completely goggle-eyed and with a face like a sack of coathangers – who pops up in alleyways to offer Mulder fragments of conspiracy theory But, of course, he’s not what he seems.

There is very little emoting required: Duchovny and Anderson just have to deadpan lines about “causative microbes” and maintain an expression of intrigued intensity while looking at phials of gunk and suppurating bodies And they both do it beautifully. “Digestives” would be too perverse, even for The X-Files.Rob Bowman is one of the regular directors of the TV series, and despite the pumped-up production values, he has kept the movie close to its small screen inspiration. The effortless transfer that Duchovny and Anderson make to the big screen must have made the cast of Friends sick with envy. “We are nothing but digestifs for a new alien life-form,” announces their chief human collaborator (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) I think it was digestifs. And it’s a tough assignment, as their enemies are not an obvious invasion force.

They operate through human quislings, a praesidium of shady suited men who ensure that secrecy is maintained – a process that seems mainly to involve having sotto voce conversations in smoke-filled rooms with the curtains drawn.Rob Bowman’s The X-Files adds one big twist to the curlicued complexities of the TV series: before they requisition our real- estate, these aliens want to have us for breakfast. Atom Egoyan’s thoughtful, haunting adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel is more conventional than his previous films, but no less elliptically constructed. Flashing back and forth with ease, the director explores the aftermath of a school-bus accident in a small Canadian town. The film lacks the cerebral punch of Egoyan’s best work (Exotica, Calendar), but it has emotional impact.. The normally wonderful Joan Cusack is stuck with an unflattering role as Kline’s needy fiancee (though, admittedly, she turns “Fuck Barbra Streisand!” into one of the year’s funniest lines). As anyone who has been near a television in the past five years will know, it’s the job of Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dr Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to sniff out their presence.