A treat to be savoured and a rash of rehashes. By Mark Kermode Sideways (15) Meet the Fockers (12A) Assault on Precinct 13 (15) Creep (18)

Having already popped its cork with several awards including a Golden Globe for Best Film (Musical or Comedy), the seductively sozzled Sideways is shaping up as the fruity joker in the Oscar pack. Based on a novel by Rex Pickett, this wry comedy of manners plays like a cross between Mondovino and Harold and Maude, as hapless anti-heroes Miles and Jack take off on a Californian wine-tasting tour, ill-advisedly mixing the grain and the gripe with heartbreaking, side-splitting consequences.

Blond-locked Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is a fading TV star hell-bent on spending his prenuptial stag week in an orgy of sexual recklessness, an endeavour in which he is hindered by his miserably divorced best man Miles (Paul Giamatti), who wants only to drown his sorrows in the grapes of wrath. Like the Pinot that is his true love, Miles is "thin-skinned, temperamental, in need of constant care and attention" - attention that has so far evaded his unpublished novel, suicidally entitled The Day After Yesterday. "Did you drink and dial?" demands Jack, after plans for a hot foursome with wine-smart waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen) and her quaffable companion Stephanie (Sandra Oh) are scotched as Miles crawls ever further into a swill bucket of self-loathing. "I told you - don't go to your dark side."

Despite softening the stylistic edges of his previous social satires Election and About Schmidt, writer/director Alexander Payne sacrifices none of the bitter-sweet aftertaste that has long defined his tart cinematic palate. However jaunty and loose the filming may be, the symbiosis that binds the ebullient Jack to the pathologically introverted Miles is drawn with clinical accuracy. To this end, Payne is assisted by some knockout casting. The splendidly hangdog Giamatti looks even more world-wearily befuddled than he did in American Splendour, and Church provides a toe-curlingly charismatic portrait of an ageing reptile. Terrific, too, to see Madsen back in the big-screen spotlight. Her wonderfully engaging face holds centre stage in many of the film's key moments (she pours herself into a speech about how "a bottle of wine is actually alive"), reminding us of the fiery spark with which she once enlivened such genre movies as Candyman and The Hot Spot. Only the ludicrous boys' own conceit of women this glamorous being interested in such desperate old soaks strikes a bum note. Otherwise, Sideways is a treat to be savoured: easy on the eye; sharp on the palate; and deliriously heady despite the whiff of a painful hangover.

While Sideways is notable for its offbeat originality, the week's other releases are dominated by sequels, remakes and rip-offs. Meet the Fockers is the money-spinning follow-up to Meet the Parents in which Robert De Niro's tight-assed CIA retiree spends a hellish weekend getting "Fockerised" by his hippy-dippy future in-laws, overplayed with gusto by Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. The visual humour is broad (foreskins in the fondue, dogs shagging shiny shoes), the verbal slapstick coarse ("I'm going to be Pamela Martha Focker - I know how that sounds") and the subtlety non-existent, as the Austin Powers helmsman Jay Roach goes for gross in every sense of the word. But the basic gag about the excruciating horrors of extended families remains cringingly intact, even in its third outing - the "original" Meet the Parents itself being a remake of a little-seen indie movie of the same name.

More unexpectedly inventive is Jean-Francois Richet's remake of Assault on Precinct 13, John Carpenter's classic urban actioner, which in turn updated the legendary Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo. Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne star as the cop and killer holed up in a besieged police station whose ragtag inmates are brutally picked off with scant regard for the conventions of movie survival. Blending head-banging action with an unfashionable nihilism, Richet's dark, noisy film stands alongside Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead as one of the better examples of the recent rash of Seventies rehashes.

Not so Creep, an Anglo-German horror flick that follows in the footsteps of Gary Sherman's 1972 chiller Death Line about cannibals living in the London Underground. Here, first-time writer/director Christopher Smith dishes up a leerily sadistic mutant who chases the archetypal final-girl Franka Potente around the labyrinthine tunnels of the Northern Line. Ho-hum. Despite stylish production design by John Frankish, some creepy set pieces and a humming score by The Insects, Creep never makes good on its promise to mutate into something genuinely weird or original. There are moments of grisly fun, but it's not a patch on last year's Switchblade Romance, which remains the ne plus ultra of throwback slashers.

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