Austin Powers in Goldmember (90 mins, 12) Directed by Jay Roach; starring Mike Myers, Michael Caine

The Girl From Paris (103 mins, 15) Directed by Christian Carion; starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner

The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (92 mins, PG) Directed by John Stainton; starring Steve Irwin, Magda Szubanski

Mike Myers is the 'Bomber' Harris of humour. His comedies are the equivalent of Harris's Second World War 'area' bombing, with vast clusters of jokes about genitalia, farting, urinating, defecation and oral sex dropped from a great height in the hope that some will hit the target.

But does Austin Powers in Goldmember, a follow-up to the immensely popular Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me, have any real targets? It seems to be just an aimless, scatological pastiche of the Bond movies and their various spins-offs of the 1960s and 1970s, with Myers himself as a cross between Bond, the bespectacled Harry Palmer, the dandyish Jason King and the Edwardian-styled Adam Adamant. He also plays the villainous Goldmember (with a golden penis) and Fat Bastard, the flatulent Scottish sumo wrestler.

The problem is that the Bond pictures have taken self-parodic vulgarity to the limit with names like Plenty O'Toole and Pussy Galore. So Myers's Felicity Shagwell and Dixie Normous are little more than playground jokes. And do you send up the films of Len Deighton's first novels by bringing in Michael Caine to play Austin's father?

But there's something rather touching about the Canadian born-and-bred, Hollywood-based Myers honouring his British father's obsession with English humour, which extends to having Austin say: 'I thank you!' after every joke, in tribute to the Liverpool comic Arthur Askey. The mirthless guest appearances of Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny DeVito and Steven Spielberg suggest that Myers's homage has itself become a Californian cult.

Christian Carion's directorial debut, The Girl From Paris (aka Une Hirondelle a fait le printemps), gets nowhere much beyond looking picturesque in telling the story of Sandrine, an unhappy Parisian thirtysomething, packing in her computer-progamming job to buy a farm in the French Alps. The widowed farmer, Adrien (Michel Serrault), stays on to help, annoy and undermine her, and the picture leaves you with too many questions about how Sandrine really manages the farm. Who picks up the goats' milk and makes the cheese? Why doesn't she learn to cook? Who delivers the post? Why doesn't her loving mother visit her? How come she doesn't mix with the locals?

I did, however, learn that if you give goats too much alfalfa they get 'bloat', which can be cured with a few drops of medicine. Who said movies aren't educational?

Directed by Australian wildlife documentarist John Stainton, the inoffensive The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course cobbles together two stories. In the first, the real-life television conservationist Steve Irwin goes about his business chasing lizards, capturing deadly snakes and wrestling with crocodiles in northern Queensland, chatting confidently the while to camera in a Rolf Harris manner. The less attractive part has three CIA agents hunting for a gizmo from a burntout spy satellite that has landed in Australia and been swallowed by a crocodile. Children will like it.