GREAT science fiction reflects the anxieties of an age. But while the ozone layer withers like an old prune, Danny Boyle instead makes a psychological space thriller about the dying of the sun. Written by The Beach's Alex Garland, the eight astronauts on board the Icarus 2 must deliver a massive nuclear payload into the heart of the dying star, in the hope of reigniting it. They succumb slowly to madness and turn on each other. With superb iris-blistering visuals, it soars above its station. It is wellhandled too . . . at least until a fantastically silly ending that plumps for profundity but is really a load of old spaceballs.

Blades of Glory (Will Speck, Josh Gordon): Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler.Running time: 93 minutes.. . .

JUST when you thought Will Ferrell couldn't be any more ridiculous, here he comes in a flaming, open-backed, lycra onepiece on ice skates. Playing Chazz Michael Michaels, a figure skater with a rock star ego, drink problem and sex addiction, his nemesis Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) is a prissy perfectionist.

Naturally, they come to blows.

Banned for life, the only way for them to return to competition is to joins egos and skate as a team in the pairs competition. It sounds like thin ice, but it's consistently hilarious and light on its feet. Ferrell, usually irksome, is elegantly obnoxious.

The Messengers (Danny and Oxide Pang) Dylan McDermott, Kirsten Stewart, John Corbett Running time: 91 minutes.. .

THIS film blatantly quotes Hitchcock's The Birds and Kubrick's The Shining to give a veneer of class to an otherwise routine haunted house chiller. A dad uproots his family to fulfil his dream of being a sunflower farmer in the American midwest. What he doesn't realise is that the previous inhabitants of a remote house he buys died gruesome deaths and their restless spirits still lurk there.

The directors have a feel for landscape and achieve some telling shock effects. But that's about it, just empty style.