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.... or on the football pitch, if this depiction of four young hopefuls trying to forge football careers at Borussia Dortmund is any guide. This film is about how making a successful career in football is incredibly fickle. Often depressing viewing, particularly the way all four contenders - even the one who was very very good and got into the first team - became visibily disillusioned. The happy, floppy-haired Chilean, bounching about pretending to be Marcelo Salas (to his coach's voiceover of "Claudio thinks he's going to be Salas .. he isn't far from being Salas, he's light years away") - by the end of the film getting gradually more obese, moping miserably around the Jugendhaus. The driven Mohamed, Ghanaian and determined to make it, whose decline started when he came back from Mecca one week into training camp, provoking another stern coachly outburst ("he must learn football is more important than religion") - again gradually phased out. Francis Bugri, the really really really good one (as you could tell by the way he tracked back in training early one) - shy, unassuming, hardworking and on the Borussia first team - and then cometh Sammer (as coach) and, in short order, injury and "The 25 Million Mark Man" Rosicky. And Heiko, half German half Thai, who ends up resigning and gets a soccer scholarship to the US (the film spends a bit too much time following him after he drops out)

Francis Bugri couldn't have completely dropped out of football - he must be playing somewhere in Germany?

If it ended after an hour, it might have been a feelgood flick, but Die Champions is a very well made portrayal of broken dreams.

The rise of the producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Flashdance and sundry other subtle works exploring the deepest secrets of the human heart) in the 1980s introduced the High Concept movie - one whose premise and entire raison d'être could be summed up in a single sentence, preferably referring to other hit movies – for example Days of Thunder was `Top Gun with cars.' 1999's Analyse This may have been a High Concept movie – Mafia Don Sees Shrink With Hilarious Results – but it had a lightness of touch that made it seem less like a focus-group product and more like an offbeat little comedy.

Unfortunately for Analyse That, the success of The Sopranos has made Mafioso-psychiatrist relations almost as much a cliché as two cops, one steady and by the book and the other an impulsive maverick, who initially hate each other but bond over the course of several gun battles. More fundamentally, the concept of Analyse This hasn't been taken any further. There could be some entertainment to be had when Robert de Niro's character takes a job as an advisor on `Little Caesar', a Mafia-themed TV drama, but the main joke is that the actor playing the Don is an Australian. It struck me that both actors who played Don Corleone in The Godfather series have now taken the mickey out of the mafia – Brando in The Freshman and now de Niro in the Analyse This and That series (if there's a sequel, what will it be called? Analyse The Other?)

Lisa Kudrow is grossly underused – one gets the feeling that much of her part ended up on the cutting room floor. Both Crystal and de Niro are pretty good (this is called `damning with faint praise' in the trade, if you're wondering) There are some pleasing shots of New York, and David Holmes' soundtrack has its moments (although is nothing to his work for Ocean's Eleven or Out of Sight) Analyse That is not a bad film, just a rather forgettable one. Puts the `sleep' into `sleeps with the fishes.'

Since Schindler's List, Stephen Spielberg has felt compelled to make Important Movies. Thus the portentous likes of AI and Minority Report have bored moviegoers worldwide. Spielberg' s latest is thankfully more playful than his recent work. And unlike some of his previous films, its less manipulative of the emotions than usual. Ironically Catch Me If You Can's lightness and lack of manipulativeness make its more emotional moments much more effective. Partly this is due to John Williams' soundtrack; usually Spielberg's in-house composer writes rather formulaic orchestra-driven music, but marimbas and glockenspiels and other percussion instruments lead the breezy theme here.

Both AI and Minority Report went on far too long; both could have ended at a point where it was logical and satisfying but chose to carry on and on and on. Catch Me If You Can only possesses this fault of Spielberg's recent work to some extent; the film might have ended ten minutes earlier to no particular disadvantage. It tells the story of Frank Abagnale Junior (di Caprio), son of his namesake upright pillar of the community father (played by Christopher Walken, in one of his less psychotic roles), who runs away from home rather than confront his parents divorce. He learns that forging cheques and impersonating airline pilots and other professionals is much easier than it seems. All it takes is audacity. Inevitably, Abagnale draws the attention of plodding, methodical FBI man Hanratty (Hanks), the FBI's one passionate believer in the importance of cheque fraud.

The opening credits resemble nothing so much as the cover of a 1960s paperback. In a way Catch Me If You Can is a film about the Sixties, but a Sixties slightly different from the image we have of it. Both Abagnale and Hanratty are touched by broken marriages, his parents in the case of Abagnale, his own for the older man. Aside from a few brief references, Vietnam and student radicalism and LSD might as well not exist.

Some might see this as Spielberg closing his eyes to reality, but for me it more accurately reflects what the Sixties must have been like for the great mass of people who actually lived through them. It reminds us that for most people (at least most people who didn't go on to lucrative media careers in which they could endlessly revisit their preoccupations) the Sixties weren't about fashionable radicalism and rioting but a decade where they got on with their lives as most people generally do; working, living, getting married etc. Or in Frank Abagnale Junior's case, impersonating doctors and lawyers and airline pilots and passing fraudulent cheques.