As well as being a funny/sentimental homage to famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, whose globe-trotting, deep-sea-diving voyages aboard converted minesweeper Calypso were enjoyed at camera’s length by TV audiences for most of the second half of the 20th century, this strange sea monster of a movie also dips into Moby Dick for its plot, Yellow Submarine for some of its psychedelic looks, and Tin Tin for a little of its ambience and action.

After 30 years of celebrity, and with dozens of films, TV documentaries and books under his belt, underwater explorer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) finds the star of his fame on the wane.

His noble vessel, The Belafonte, is in need of a coat of paint, his cosmopolitan crew of red-hatted divers are growing restless, and his business associate, Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon), is struggling to find a backer to fund the next voyage — a do-or-die hunt for a giant mythical fish, which, Steve claims, chewed his oldest pal, Esteban, to death. Unfortunately, some people in oceanographic circles think he is making up the yarn to hook some sympathetic millionaire into stumping up a chest of doubloons.

Luckily, Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) turns up at Steve’s bolt-hole in the Med, claiming to be his son. Ned has a quarter-of-a-mill in the bank and offers to finance the trip. Steve jumps at the money and signs up Ned for the Belafonte’s crew.

So off they steam into uncharted waters — Ned, Steve, his wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), reporter Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), divers Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe) and Pele dos Santos (Seu Jorge) and a whole raft of other misfits in woolly hats — encountering pirates, arch-opponent and wealthy oceanocrat Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) and all manner of bizarre sea creatures.

Fans of Anderson’s past films — Rushmore, Tenenbaums — will know just what to expect, i.e., the unexpected.

The story is told in a casual, dreamlike, almost absent-minded way, and this is its main selling point. You can never quite tell what is going to happen next, in terms of the story or, indeed, the visuals.

Although there are plenty of shots of the Belafonte at sea and visiting imaginary harbours such as Port-au-Patois, the ship is frequently seen in an obviously studio-bound cross-section, which, like a massive double-page spread in a Dorling Kindersley children’s book, displays the crew moving around its many sections — a jacuzzi suite designed by Japanese space engineers, state-of-the-art kitchen, antiquated film-cutting/sound recording room, etc.

The film also features a variety of gadgets which are a bizarre amalgam of the fantastic, the retro and the plain worn-out, the most-magical of which is The Belafonte’s mini-sub. It’s dinky, it’s yellow and looks like it has had four previous owners — The Beatles.

The weirdness even extends to the soundtrack, which consists of Brazilian Seu Jorge playing a variety of David Bowie songs on his guitar, with the lyrics sung in Portuguese. Why? Who knows, but it works. Everything about this production may be eye-catching, and each member of the cast twinkles in their own special way, but Bill Murray, continuing to leap from movie peak to movie peak, anchors the whole tale in his usual, wonderful, deadpan way.

In a world where so many directors might as well be clones of one another Anderson is one of a very few originals. Without him, The Life Cinematic would be a good deal less exotic.

VERDICT: Go Wes, young man and woman, and zet zail with Zissou. This is some sort of masterpiece.

Five stars

Hiding And Not Seeking is more appropriate. For why? Because this film provides further evidence that its star, the once great Robert De Niro, is continuing his worryingly long trend of hiding from quality scripts and not seeking out memorable roles.

Yes, The Deer Hunter has become The Dud Finder.

In this, his latest dud, de Niro plays caring, placid shrink Dr David Callaway. His wife Alison (Amy Irving) kills herself for very sketchily-explained reasons in their New York apartment and their young daughter Emily witnesses the event and is left traumatised. To help repair Emily’s fractured mind, David moves his diminished family unit to a small, woodland community upstate.

But as is the way with this sort of movie, it’s midwinter, the house the Callaways take on is a rambling, isolated, spooky number, the neighbours are oddballs, the local sheriff seems to have a dark side, and even the estate agent has a slight squint and a sinister beard.

I could be wrong here, but as rehab environments go, this is like trying to cure heroin addicts by sending them out to help bring in the poppy harvest.

Given the general bad vibe about the place, Emily soon takes a further turn for the weird. She gets herself a perhaps imaginary, perhaps real, new friend called Charlie (who may or may not live in the dank, hermit’s cavern deep in the forest).

To reinforce the fact that recovery may be some way off, the girl also starts mangling her dolls, sketching murders with her crayons and displaying the sort of facial pallor most frequently seen at zombie soirees and mortuary sleep-overs.

Doc Callaway is given even more cause for concern when the family pet turns up dead and somebody or something in the house engineers elaborate reconstructions of Mrs Callaway’s suicide.

Hide And Seek is mysterious and tense and does generate atmosphere by the skipload, but it crashes and burns early on because the plot is as implausible as it is predictable.

As for De Niro — never mind acting with Dakota, he should consider going to Dakota. He should rent a remote log cabin there for a year, wrestle long and hard with his interminable urge to appear in tepid flicks, and try to get his career back in the fast lane.

VERDICT: Worth seeing if you’re a fan of Dakota Fanning. She acts her socks off compared to Bobby – these days, his acting socks are anchored in place by garters of steel.

Two stars

CODE 46 is an intelligent talky sci-fi film in the mould of Gattaca or Solaris — but beneath its shiny veneer I wonder whether it’s really saying anything at all.

Set in the near future, people need cover to work inside the huge cities. Without it they have to scratch out an existence in the desert outside.

William Geld (Tim Robbins) is sent to Shanghai to investigate a trade in counterfeit papers. There he meets and falls in love with Maria Gonzalez (Samantha Morton).

The film is full of interesting thoughts about what the future might contain — details about your whole life is kept on file and shown with a fingerprint scan and people can take viruses to learn how to speak specific languages or feel certain emotions.

The film is also looks great — though it seems every film has to show the future as being mainly white in colour these days.

But like director Michael Winterbottom’s previous film The Claim, this is too cold and emotionally remote to really make an impact.

EXTRAS: Featurette and deleted scenes.

VERDICT: A cold and emotionally dead sci-fi film to avoid.

Two stars

FOR some reason the director of My Little Eye has been allowed to make another film.

But, just like his last film, Marc Evans’ Trauma is painfully inept.

Ben (Colin Firth) wakes from a coma to discover that he has been in a car crash and that his wife Elisa was killed by it.

Trying to rebuild his life, Ben befriends Charlotte (Mena Suvari) and tries to get to the bottom of his wife’s death. But soon he is haunted by visions of his dead wife and he starts to lose his grip on what’s real and what’s not. The film is as bad as it sounds from its plot and then some.

Colin Firth looks uncomfortable trying to carry a thriller and Evans’ annoying direction leaves you feeling like you’ve been hit over the head by a hammer.

EXTRAS: A director’s commentary in which Evans says, “a lot of the images in the film are significant and some are not”.

People gave him money to make this?

VERDICT: Never has a film been so appropriately titled.

One star

Special features include a director’s commentary by Howard and a commentary by Jim Lovell, the astronaut Hanks plays in the film.

But the real meat of the 2-disc package comes on the second disc in the form of an hour-long documentary on the making of the film, with cast, crew and real life characters and key members of the Apollo 13 Mission Control team.

There is a second documentary, Conquering Space, which shows the highlights of the last 45 years of space travel and a featurette with the astronauts recounting the events of Apollo 13. The Oscar-winning film is released on April 11, priced £19.99.

One film that was not threatening the Oscars on Sunday was National Treasure, which is released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment on April 25.

But the film, starring Nicolas Cage as a treasure hunter, is good fun and should do very well on its DVD release.

Sadly the special features don’t look like anything to get too excited about. There’s a lot of them, but nothing that looks like it will have any real substance.