After years in the wilderness, Bill Forsyth is back where he belongs with a major film on our screens, the long-awaited, and much dreaded, successor to Gregory's Girl, his 1980 comedy which made a star of John Gordon Sinclair, although much good it did anybody else. A sequel has long been wanted, but as the years passed it seemed less and less likely, given Forsyth's bad luck in Hollywood with Housekeeping and Breaking In and the truly awful, although dear to his heart, story of mankind, Being Human, which was seen by a man, a dog, a few hardy souls at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and hardly anyone else. It came out in 1993 and it seemed as if Forsyth planned to lick his wounds for ever. But now we have - and get the flags out and start cheering - this extremely funny, ever so slightly black, comedy about what happened to Gregory, once again played by John Gordon Sinclair, after he lost his football-playing sweetheart and grew up to be a great big gangling lummox, a man child if ever there was, still living in Cumbernauld and teaching at his old school.

The centre of the film is Sinclair's engaging performance as Gregory. A stick insect made flesh, Gregory ambles his way through life causing havoc wherever he goes. It is a stylish piece of work, and must rank among the best things Sinclair has done. Forsyth has given him the chance to escape from TV hell - he has some passable, but not exactly mould-breaking, earth- shattering sitcoms to his credit - and maybe finally become a film star. As the object of his lust, Carly Mackinnon is delightful, as is Maria Doyle Kennedy, the fellow teacher who wants him. Nobody could replace Chic Murray, but John Murtagh, as the understanding Heid, gets as near as dammit. The jokes come fast and furious, and Forsyth has conjured up some splendid set-piece comic scenes, but I have reservations about the politically-correct plot - maybe another eye was needed to get it into order - which gets terribly confused. Dougray Scott, as the villain of the piece - a former pupil turned rich entrepreneur who is up to no good in the Third World with defective computers - is oddly ineffectual. This is not a film to win prizes, as the Edinburgh jury rightly decided, but it should win hearts.

Forget Rattigan. Deep Blue Sea has nothing to do with his play. It is yet another cast-in-peril adventure, the marauding monsters this time being sharks. Forget Jaws and its sequels, too. This lot are worse. Saffron Burrows, who could win any contest for the world's worst actress, is the mad professor, Susan McAlester, who causes the trouble. She is conducting research into a cure for Alzheimer's Disease, which involves extracting a serum from the brain of sharks, but ordinary sharks do not produce enough so she has started to modify them genetically by enlarging their brains. The result is that the world's most efficient killing machine becomes a super intelligent killing machine with the usual results for the rest of the cast.

The action takes place on her research station, an underwater affair miles out at sea with the fish tanks at surface level as well as the control tower. Samuel L Jackson is the big boss who comes to check out what she is up to, and it is while he is being shown round that a storm hits the station and the sharks start playing up. As a result the usual suspects are trapped in the underwater rooms which are being flooded as the sharks break down the doors and start gobbling. Usually in such films you know who is going to get eaten because it goes in order of star billing. This time it is anybody's guess, and some of them depart this life in spectacular fashion. Director Renny Harlin does break other rules of the genre, in which the dog never dies, but I am not telling you what they are. Thomas Jane, last seen in The Thin Red Line as the obligatory hunk with a past, who swims with the sharks and refuses to have anything to do with Dr McAlester, makes a serviceable action hero, while the hip-hop artist, L L Cool, provides the comic relief as the engaging fat cook who gets drunk when the water starts to come in, reflecting, as a shark corners him in his oven, that "Brothers never survive situations like this."

Harlin handles the material brilliantly, and has come up with the best imaginable excuse for getting Saffron to strip off to her smalls - this is a lads' movie - resulting in a dish with fried fish. This is a film of frequent sensations rather than a linear plot. You move from incident to incident at speed and, while some are predictable - the helicopter will crash, the second lead woman will die - others are not. There is a great opening in which four young things snogging on a yacht are threatened Jaws-style, and a splendidly jokey ending. It is a case of thrills, fish and quips.

Peter Sellers has a lot to answer for. Ever since that record with Sophia Loren, it has been virtually impossible to take Indians speaking English in that dreadful Welsh sing-song accent at face value. They are inherently comic. Some Indian actors have managed superlative performances as individuals. Two of them, Roshgan Seth and Om Puri, are in this film, Such a Long Journey, but put them all together and the result is disastrous. Had the Icelandic-born Canadian film-maker Sturla Gunnarson's film been shot in Gujarati, Hindi - or whatever tongue it is Bombay Parsees speak - with sub-titles, the film would have been infinitely more impressive.

A colourful account of life in a Bombay tenement set in 1971, and based on the novel by Rohinton Mistry, it focuses on a hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble (Seth), who becomes involved in something shady involving a large sum of money at the behest of a friend, Ghulam (Puri). All sorts of grotesques surround Gustad, Miss Kutipia, the witch upstairs (Pearl Padamsee), his randy but naive colleague Dishawji (Sam Dastor), the local idiot Tehmul (Kurush Deboo), and his long-suffering wife, Dilnavaz (Soni Razdan).

The film's heart is in the right place, but the language problem sabotages its intentions fatally and the result is a very long journey indeed.

The best advice I could give about Head On is to do just that, keep heading on and on past the cinema. Set in Melbourne, it is about Ari (the undeniably talented and personable Alex Dimitriades, who is hardly ever off the screen), the 19-year-old son of a Greek immigrant family. He is gay in the Greek way, takes drugs, is unemployed, hates Wogs, Spics, Orientals and everyone who isn't Greek, and is an uncouth, self- centred pain in the neck. We follow him through a long night of promiscuous sex, drugs, Greek music - would that it were rock and roll - violence, and self-pity. It is literally unendurable. The trouble with Ari is one has no sympathy for him, which means the film becomes pointless. That an immigrant in Australia has problems fitting into a melting pot society, which is what, once the immigration rules changed, it has become is a good subject for drama, without the gay complications. Paul Capsis, looking like that lady next door in Birds of a Feather, as his transvestite friend Johnny is rather good and gets the film's best line when in the back of a taxi he starts to chat up the driver, discovers he is a Turk and announces: "Your grandfather raped my grandmother." It encapsulates the melting pot perfectly. It is well played, well photographed, but totally off-putting because, like Gable, you just don't give a damn. At the end Ari, having alienated everyone, dances alone on the dockside at dawn. It has been one helluva night. Don't bother to share it.

James Moll's documentary, The Last Days, made for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation consists of interviews with five Hungarian Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. Hungary was the last country to be invaded by the Nazis and the killing of the Jews started in the closing days of the war. It is a film to make anyone think long and hard, a moving, painful affair, but also one which celebrates the human ability to rise above such horrors. These five are survivors. They are scarred emotionally, but they do not hate. They are in stark contrast with the dreadful Dr Hans Munch, who performed experiments at Auschwitz, and thinks he did no wrong.

The layout of Ken Ingles' swish new Filmhouse brochure, although I am not sure it is a change for the better, deceived me last week - Romance, Catherine Breillat's controversial film, opened in London on Friday, but it does not open here until next week. There is a difference between pornography and erotic art. This ridiculous, pretentious film is neither, being brain dead as erotic art and dreary as pornography.