The fake newsreel is there at the start of Citizen Kane (1941), that frustrated quest for definitive truths, and as in Zelig its presence only signals the futility of the search ahead. The horror story played for real was Welles' idea too, long before The Blair Witch Project or Series 7: The Contenders, in his infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds which caused evacuations of both kinds in many of its listeners. And Welles never expressed more blatantly his fascination with deception than in F for Fake (1973), an intriguing little compendium of musings on the subject of forgery, each one stamped with a lingering question mark.That movie's French title, V?t?et Mensonges (Truth and Lies) grasps at the nature of cinema. Movies are beguiling lies elevated by each accidental glimmer of truth that we discern within them. But documentaries by their very definition announce themselves as the whole truth, and each trace of alteration or dishonesty, however slight, can only render them bogus. Perhaps the faux documentary is the ideal bridge between the two, accommodating the artistic liberty of the fiction film while assuaging the suspicions of audience members who have found that in cinema there are mensonges, damn mensonges and then there are documentaries.'Series 7: The Contenders' is released 1 June. Do you still want your Mummy? The plot (if that's not too grand a word) of The Mummy Returns depends on a main character having flashbacks to a past life 3,000 years before, when she was an Egyptian princess and did fancy-schmancy combat with knives.

Now, you want to know what's strange? Fifteen minutes into the film I was having flashbacks as well, admittedly to just a couple of years ago, sitting in the same cinema and watching The Mummy, which was also written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Same torches in tombs, same ill-advised meddling with corpses in manky bandages, same effects-laden frenzy This didn't look like a sequel. This looked like a remake.Can inspiration really have sunk so low? I'm not kidding; this is the worst case of d? vu I've ever had in a cinema. The 1999 movie was a rip-off itself, of course, though it owed less to the 1932 Boris Karloff classic than to the tongue-in-cheek derring-do of Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels, with Brendan Fraser a sort of Cub Scout Harrison Ford: interwar setting, archaeologists versus tomb raiders, an ancient mythic power waiting to be unlocked.

All that's missing are the Nazis, who can presumably depend on an appearance around The Mummy 3. For the sake of form we're asked to believe that it's now eight years on and our hero-adventurer Rick O'Connell (Fraser) is now married to his ravishing Egyptologist companion Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and settled in London with their simply darling son, Alex (Freddie Boath). When I say "London", by the way, I mean the Hollywood version of our glorious capital, where a middle-income couple like Rick and Evelyn live in a place the size of Hampton Court, where the British Museum is the site of human sacrifices and resurrections, and where a number 12 bus doubles as an escape vehicle. The mummy Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) has indeed returned, with his retinue of skeletal bodyguards and slightly healthier-looking hangers-on, including a mysterious Egyptian lovely (Patricia Velasquez) who's also visiting from the past: she's the Pharaoh's mistress, for whom Imhotep originally sacrificed himself in the earlier movie. They're all hunting a gold bracelet, which looks like an especially tacky bauble left over from a Versace sale but is supposedly the key to unleashing the even greater potency of the Scorpion King, whose armies lie in wait to trigger "the apocalypse".Are you following all this? I don't think the filmmakers could care less if you do or not. All that concerns them is hauling ass back to Egypt and blitzing our eyes with a fatuous fusillade of special effects, which, since we've already seen most of them in The Mummy, are looking anything but special. "Oh no ­ not these guys again," wails Brendan Fraser as another squadron of decomposed Mummy minions leap out of nowhere Tell it to the producers, love.