Fireworks (Hana-Bi)
The prolific Japanese director, actor and writer, Takeshi Kitano, delivers his most thoughtful, tender and emotionally involving movie and casts himself as a morose former detective whose wife is diagnosed with a terminal illness and whose former police partner is paralysed in a shooting. The film employs minimal dialogue and an unsettling stillness punctuated by quite unexpected outbursts of stylised violence.
Tuesday, March 10th, Ambassador, 8 p.m.
Gattaca
This clever, futuristic drama of identityswitching marks an auspicious debut for New Zealand film-maker Andrew Niccol. Set in a time when human success and failure are dictated entirely by genetics, it features Ethan Hawke as an unhealthy human specimen so determined to overcome his status as an "in-valid" - and to fulfil his ambitions of space travel - that he assumes the identity of a once-perfect accident victim (Jude Law). Niccol's sleekly designed drama makes for intriguing cinema and the fine cast also includes Uma Thurman, Loren Dean and Gore Vidal.
Saturday, March 7th, Savoy 1, 11.15 p.m.
The Hanging Garden
WRITER-director Thom Fitzgerald's first feature is a visually and structurally imaginative picture of a dysfunctional Nova Scotia family. It employs surrealism and magic realism to follow a 25year-old gay man on his return home after a 10-year absence for his sister's wedding. He is known as Sweet William - all the principal characters are named after flowers or plants - in this ambitious picture which cuts back and forwards in time and eventually makes several surprising revelations.
Tuesday, March 10th, Screen, 8.15 p.m.
Happy Together
The freestyle Hong Kong stylist, Wong Kar-Wai, was named best director at Cannes last year for this gay road movie starring two handsome Hong Kong movie icons, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, as gay lovers who are happy together when they arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong but their relationship suffers when they take to the road. Lighting cameraman Christopher Doyle uses hand-held work, speededup film, gritty black-and-white and striking colour to achieve a sensual movie of a tempestuous relationship.
Saturday, March 7th, Ambassador, 3.50 p.m.
Very loosely based on a Ruth Rendell novel, Pedro Almodovar's precisely plotted picture of interlocked destinies involves five protagonists whose lives are changed irrevocably when a bullet is fired one evening - a bitter, alcoholic policeman (Pepe Sancho); his despairing, abused wife (Angela Molina); his young partner (Javier Bardem) who is having an affair with her; an Italian diplomat's daughter (Franchesca Negri); and the young man (Liberto Rabal) who loses his virginity with her. This entrancing melodrama reveals a serpentine narrative of infidelity, jealousy, guilt, revenge, obsession and destiny.
Saturday, March 7th, Ambassador, 8 p.m.
Love And Death On Long Island
WRITER-director Richard Kwietniowski's impeccable screen treatment of Gilbert Adair's postmodern novel features John Hurt in a sublime performance as a reclusive English writer, a middle-aged widower far removed from the modern world, who becomes utterly besotted by an American teen heartthrob (Jason Priestley). His obsession eventually takes him to Long Island, in the hope of ingratiating himself with the young man. This is smart, sophisticated and seductive cinema.
Saturday, March 7th, Ambassador, 6 p.m.
The Maker
The remarkably prolific young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, impressively plays a free-spirited young Californian high-school student coming under the influence of his criminal older brother (Matthew Modine) who reappears after 10 years. Director Tim Hunter, best known for the gritty 1987 River's Edge, skillfully avoids the most obvious pitfalls and plot turns in this mostly engrossing urban drama.
Tuesday, March 10th, Ambassador, 6 p.m.)
Shall We Dance?
Although it has its longueurs, there remains much to enjoy in this gentle and charming Japanese comedy elegantly directed by Masayuki Suo. Its focus is a conservative businessman ostensibly happy in his marriage and work but he is tired, stressed out and feels there's something lacking in his life - which he finds when he nervously enrols in a ballroom dancing studio.
Thursday, March 5th, Ambassador, 6 p.m.
Twentyfourseven
This notable first feature from the 25year-old Nottingham writer-director, Shane Meadows, takes its title from one character's line describing the tedium of daily life - 24 hours a day, seven days a week - for him and his unemployed mates. Their lives are transformed when a paunchy, middle-aged man (Bob Hoskins, rarely better) renovates a disused boxing club and encourages them to get into the ring. This succinctly scripted and sharply observed film is shot in striking black-and-white and introduces several fine young actors.
Sunday, March 8th, Ambassador, 8.15 p.m.
White Room
Screening as one of my Dublin Film Festival Revisited choices, Patricia Rozema's 1990 Canadian film is an adventurous urban fairytale dealing with the destructive effects of media attention on private lives. Specifically, it deals with an aspirant writer (Maurice Godin) and the three women in whose lives he gets caught up - a popular singer (Margot Kidder) whose murder he observes; an enigmatic friend (Kate Nelligan) of the dead woman; and a precocious extrovert (Sheila McCarthy) who's hungry for fame. In this heady, hypnotic experience, the music is, appropriately, magical and haunting.
Friday, March 6th, Screen, 3.45 p.m.
10 Films I Most Want To See
Afterglow
Julie Christie is an Oscar nominee this year for her performance in this new movie from Alan Rudolph, the unpredictable maverick whose best work includes Remember My Name, Choose Me, The Moderns and Equinox. A romantic comedy, Afterglow follows two strained relationships which become interlinked in multiple adultery. Julie Christie and Nick Nolte play the older pair, with Lara Flynn Boyle and Jonny Lee Miller (from Trainspotting and Regen- eration) as the younger couple.
Saturday, March 7th, Savoy, 11 a.m.
At Swim-Two-Birds
A true curiosity piece. Flann O'Brien's classic 1939 novel, his first, finally gets a screen treatment - in an Austrian production which recently had its world premiere in Vienna. It's directed by Kurt Palm, a 42-year-old theatre director who says in the press notes: "I know quite positively that the film will receive the most diverse and controversial reviews. Some people will find it fantastic, others will find it terrible." See for yourself.
Saturday, March 7th, Screen, 1.45 p.m
Devil's Island
Icelandic director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson follows the thoroughly engaging Cold Fever with a characteristically offbeat and bittersweet story of everyday life in 1950s Reykjavik. Set against a backdrop of American rock 'n' roll influences, his ensemble drama deals with a poverty-stricken family, their neighbours and friends in an abandoned American military barracks which is now a slum.
Wednesday, March 4th, Ambassador, 4 p.m.
Dobermann
One of the wildest and trendiest French movies of the past year, Jan Kounen's in-your-face first feature has its roots in a cultish series of French crime novels and its visual inspiration in comic books and spaghetti westerns. Described as an urban western set in present-day Paris, it centres on the eponymous Dobermann as its anti-hero for a hi-tech, black-humoured, techno-boosted audio-visual experience which the Variety reviewer noted "has as much redeeming social value as a land mine".
Sunday, March 8th, Ambassador, 3.50 p.m.
Eve's Bayou
Actress Kasi Lemmons makes her debut as a writer-director with this warmly received picture which has been compared to the novels of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Set in a small Louisiana town in 1962, the drama is seen through the eyes of the 10-year-old daughter of the wealthy but philandering local doctor, played by Samuel L. Jackson. The cast also features Lynn Whitfield, Debbit Morgan, Diahann Carroll and Kasi Lemmons's husband, Gridlock'd director Vondie Curtis Hall.
Friday, March 6th, Ambassador, 8.15 p.m.
Insomnia
This Norwegian psychological thriller sounds like it could match another recent Norwegian thriller, Nightwatch, for tension and thrills. The remarkable Stellan Skarsgard, from Breaking The Waves and Good Will Hunting, plays a detective who, with his ageing partner, travels to a northern town to help the local police investigate the brutal murder of a teenage girl. A second murder raises the stakes in this very promising first feature directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg.
Friday, March 6th, Ambassador, 1.30 p.m.
Marius Et Jeanette
Nominated in several major categories in this year's Cesar awards, Robert Guediguian's film is set in a small port in his native Marseille and follows an initially unlikely relationship between two people in their forties - a single parent (Ariane Ascardie), struggling on her wages as a supermarket cashier, and a man (Gerard Meylan) employed as the lone security guard at a disused factory.
Wednesday, March 4th, Screen, 8 p.m.
The River
Winner of the International Critics' Award and a special jury prize at the Berlin festival in 1996, Tsai Ming-liang's film concludes the trilogy he began with the disappointing Rebels Of The Neon God and the more accomplished Vive l'Amour. The narrative revolves around a young Taipei man whose mother is involved in an adulterous affair and whose father frequents the city's gay saunas. When, working as an extra on a movie, he suffers a serious neck injury after floating in a polluted river, his estranged parents seek a remedy.
Wednesday, March 4th, Ambassador, 8 p.m.
Sliding Doors
Selected to open this year's Sundance Film Festival, British actor Peter Howitt's first feature as a director is a contemporary love story with a twist. Set in London, it features Gwyneth Paltrow as a seemingly successful PR executive who lives with her boyfriend (Irish actor John Lynch), a struggling novelist. On one eventful day, she loses her job, meets a stranger (John Hannah), and finds her lover in bed with another woman (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
Saturday, March 7th, Screen, 8 p.m.
Ulee's Gold
In an acclaimed comeback performance which won him a Golden Globe in January and an Oscar nomination this month, Peter Fonda plays Ulysses Jackson, a reclusive Florida widower, war veteran and beekeeper, caring for the daughters of his imprisoned son (Tom Wood). When the son's drug-addicted wife gets into trouble, Ulee sets out on an eventful rescue mission to Orlando in this very well-regarded drama directed by Victor Nunez, who made Ruby in Paradise.
Thursday, March 12th, Savoy, 2 p.m.
