"The Maker" (18)
In the new film from Tim Hunter, the ubiquitous young Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a free-spirited young Californian coming under the influence of his criminal older brother (Matthew Modine), who reappears after 10 years. Director Hunter, best known for the gritty 1987 River's Edge, skilfully avoids the most obvious pitfalls and plot turns in this well-acted and mostly engrossing urban drama.
"Nightwatch" (18)
Crucial elements have been lost in the transposition of the gripping 1994 Danish thriller to a US setting, chiefly the tension director Ole Bornedal built and sustained so effectively in the original. Bornedal is also at the helm of the new version, which features Ewan McGregor as the student working nights at a morgue at a time when a serial killer is on the loose. However, despite having a good cast that also includes Patricia Arquette, Nick Nolte and Josh Brolin, Bornedal appears to merely going through the motions as he recycles his original material for an American audience.
Cinema to Video
"Wag The Dog" (15)
Barry Levinson's still topical and often hilarious political satire stars Robert De Niro as a White House spin doctor who enlists the help of a cunning Hollywood producer when the US president gets caught up in a sex scandal. In a wonderfully droll change of pace, Dustin Hoffman, improbably tanned and bewigged and wearing outsized spectacles, plays the producer with unstinting relish, reputedly modelling his performance on the flamboyant Hollywood producer, Robert Evans.
"Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil" (15)
Clint Eastwood's underestimated film of the best-seller by John Berendt is set in Savannah, Georgia, and features a strong cast with John Cusack as a New York journalist writing a book on a murder case in which a wealthy antiques dealer (Kevin Spacey) is charged with killing his gay lover (Jude Law). The local eccentrics, especially the transvestite Lady Chablis, steal the show in this handsome and entertaining but rather overlong movie.
"Happy Together" (18)
The imaginative Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-Wai received the best director prize at Cannes last year for this sensual gay road movie featuring 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. Wong's free-style film-making steers the narrative in any number of directions and his visual style is as flamboyant as ever.
"Ulee's Gold" (15)
Peter Fonda deservedly received an Oscar nomination this year for his dignified, understated portrayal of a reclusive Florida beekeeper unwillingly drawn into the consequences of a robbery in which his son was involved. Victor Nunez directs this slow-burning but absorbing human drama.
"Oscar And Lucinda" (15)
Adapted by Laura Jones from Peter Carey's 1988 Booker Prize-winning novel, Gillian Armstrong's handsome but languorous film of star-crossed Australian lovers in the Victorian era features Ralph Fiennes as a gauche Anglican priest with a talent for gambling and Cate Blanchett (from Elizabeth) as an heiress who attempts to live by her own rules.
"TwentyFourSeven" (15)
This succinctly scripted and sharply observed film, the first feature directed by 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 middle-aged man (Bob Hoskins, rarely better) renovates a disused boxing club and encourages them to get into the ring.
"US Marshals" (15)
In this follow-up to The Fugitive, Tommy Lee Jones again plays the dogged Marshal Sam Gerard, this time on the trail of a former CIA operative (Wesley Snipes) who's suspected of murdering two Secret Service agents. The slender narrative is over-stretched and involves relentless set-hopping across the US, but director Stuart Baird keeps it moving by piling one energetic action set-piece atop another.
"A Thousand Acres" (18)
Jocelyn Moorhouse's over-melodramatic film echoes King Lear in its story of a farming patriarch (Jason Robards) turning the family farm over to his three daughters, played by Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jennifer Jason Leigh. But the high-powered cast can't save it.
"John Grisham's The Rainmaker" (15)
Francis Ford Coppola fails to enhance an utterly formulaic John Grisham yarn featuring Matt Damon as yet another idealistic young lawyer catapulted into a maelstrom of danger and corruption - a David faced with the Goliaths of corporate and legal power - when he takes a case against a powerful insurance firm. The underused cast includes Jon Voight, Claire Danes, Teresa Wright, Mickey Rourke and Virginia Madsen.
