Something 4 The Weekend by Paul Bullock

Welcome ladies, gentlemen and film fans everywhere to entertainment manchester's weekly feature 'Something for the Weekend'. If, as Forrest Gump once might have said were he a film fan, cinema really is like a box of chocolates, then think of us as your mini-menu, steering you away from the coffee creams and towards the Turkish delights of the movie world.

With the summer blockbuster period now well under-way, the first disaster film of the season (not including The Da Vinci Code, of course) chugs its way onto the big screen in the shape of Poseidon, a remake of Ronald Neame's 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure.

Presumably ditching the 'Adventure' part of the title as a trite act of post-9/11 political correctness, Wolfgang Petersen's film finds Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and Emmy Rossum replacing Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters as passengers of the titular stricken ship.

A perfect cast to tackle the screams and imperilled looks the script will demand, then. But the major boon here will probably be the experience of the director. Peterson, despite his crimes against Homer in 2004's Troy, is also the helmer of claustrophobic submarine drama Das Boot and the naval tricks he picked up on that film should make Poseidon more than just a hollow parade of special effects.

In a very nasty coincidence indeed, we move from a fictional disaster to an all-too-real one with United 93, the tale of the doomed United Airlines Flight 93 which fell to ground in the fields of Pennsylvania on 9/11.

Inevitably, much has already been said about the sensitivity of releasing such a film just five years after those shocking events, so I'll hold full judgement until I've actually seen the finished product. But, with director Paul Greengrass shooting in real-time with non-star actors and a cinema verite realism, it will hopefully provide us with a truthful account of the chaos on-board that plane, rather than two hours of jingoistic nonsense.

Looking for something a little more lighthearted? Well, Rob Schneider's been thinking of you in his latest stroke of comedy genius, The Benchwarmers, in which he leads David Spade and Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder into a baseball match against a bunch of kids. Why? We don't know... Meanwhile, the British end is kept up by Things To Do Before You're 30, a comedy-drama featuring Emilia Fox, Dougray Scott and Billie Piper as a group of twentysomethings dreading hitting the big 3-0.

The delightfully posh Richard E. Grant moves behind the camera for the first time with Wah-Wah, a memoir of his formative years in 1960s Swaziland, while another legend, Chinatown scribe Robert Towne, makes his fourth foray into directing with Ask the Dust, another period film about a waitress (Salma Hayek) who falls in love with an Irish immigrant (Colin Farrell).

Finally, as part of some devilishly cunning advertising campaign, the remake of The Omen is released on Tuesday. You see, it's the 6.06.06. An entire movie made to fit a gimmicky release date? Satan truly has taken over the Hollywood hills…