Entrapment (12) General release
The radiant star quality of its Scottish and Welsh leading players, Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and a number of well-staged set-pieces go a long way towards sustaining the glossy romantic caper movie, Entrapment, through its longueurs and propensity for daft plotting. So confident is the production that the stars can carry the day, that it relies virtually entirely on them and reduces all other characters to the periphery of the narrative.
As is de rigueur for the genre, the movie opens on an elaborate and daring heist sequence, when a fearless thief employs hi-tech equipment to make his way down a glass New York skyscraper and through a 70th storey window to steal a priceless Rembrandt. Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Virginia Baker, an insurance investigator who is convinced the robbery was executed by the expert art thief, Robert MacDougal (Sean Connery), despite the view of her boss (Will Patton) that MacDougal, at 60, "isn't Spiderman any more". She volunteers to pose as a thief as part of her scheme to finally trap the elusive McDougal, and the avowed solo operator unconvincingly agrees to team up with her for a daring robbery. Not only is she cool as ice, but she also has a remarkably lithe and athletic body, we learn, as the camera admiringly follows the minutely detailed choreography of her leotard-clad rehearsal for the heist.
In another genre staple, this is a globe-hopping movie which captions its locations - and counts down to the millennium, as the duo plot an audacious robbery hinged on Y2K safeguards that allow for a precisely timed window to pull off a grand, against-the-clock theft at a Kuala Lumpur bank. Unadventurously directed by Jon Amiel, Entrapment makes for sleekly photographed and argeeably silly light entertainment which unwisely overstretches an all-too-slender screenplay that cries out for the genuine suspense and scintillating dialogue which marked its superior genre predecessors. Connery remains commendably deadpan given some of the lines foisted upon him, while Zeta-Jones, building on her spirited performance in The Mask of Zorro, clearly shows she has all the style, assurance and presence to become a major movie star in the very near future.
Michael Dwyer
The Deep End of the Ocean (12) General release
Potentially maudlin material is transcended by an unexpected complexity, a consistent sureness of touch, and a strong central performance by Michelle Pfeiffer in the misleadingly and pointlessly titled emotional drama, The Deep End of the Ocean. It is based on a best-selling novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which has been adapted by the former Vanity Fair critic, Stephen Schiff, who wrote the recent, underestimated movie of Lolita, and it's directed by Ulu Grosbard, on one of his infrequent ventures from theatre into cinema.
The first third of the film takes place in 1988, as Michelle Pfeiffer's character, Beth, a professional photographer, takes her three young children with her when she travels to Chicago for her high school reunion. In the hotel lobby, which is swarming with kissing and cuddling former classmates, her younger son, Ben, disappears. What follows is a horror story for parents - the dawning realisation that the child cannot be traced.
Months later, there are still no clues and Beth has become glazed, robotic, and withdrawn from left her husband (Treat Williams) and their other two children. It is when the movie jumps forward nine years that the moral drama takes a deeper, unsettling twist.
In a coincidence which audiences may or may not buy, a 12-year-old boy turns up on Beth's doorstep, offering to mow the lawn, and she becomes convinced he is her lost son, Ben. The film raises another unanticipated dilemma as it ponders whether the boy, if he is Ben, would want to return to a family he has virtually forgotten after all those years of his young life.
Even though the resolution is rather dubious after all it follows, and despite an ill-fitting Whoopi Goldberg performance as a lesbian detective who becomes Beth's confidante, The Deep End of the Ocean registers as thoughtful and absorbing - and refreshingly unsentimental - cinema which gains immeasurably in credibility from the strength and honesty of Pfeiffer's performance.
Michael Dwyer
Le Diner de Cons/The Dinner Game (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
First staged in 1993, Francois Veber's stage play, Le Diner de Cons, proved so popular with Paris audiences that it played for over 900 performances, and last year Veber turned it into an equally well-received film which became a huge success in France. The title refers to a weekly dinner held in Paris where the regular guests vie with each other to bring along the most idiotic companion they can find for the amusement of the other diners.
Thierry Lhermitte plays Pierre Brochant, a self-centred publisher who is about to pass on the dinner for a week because he cannot find a suitable laughing stock - until he meets Francois Pignon (Jacques Villeret), a bumbling and gullible minor treasury official who spends all his spare time meticulously constructing matchstick models of edifices such as the Golden Gate bridge and the Eiffel Tower, the latter feat involving over 300,000 matches and taking eight months to complete.
Brochant perceives Pignon as prime fodder for his fellow diners, and decides to bring him along despite his wife's threats to leave him if he persists with these cruel games. What Brochant does not reckon on is the capacity for mindless confusion within the disaster-prone Pignon, who triggers off a crazy succession of escalating complications as each apparent solution creates even greater problems.
Writer-director Veber makes little effort to open up his stage play for the screen, but such is the deceptive simplicity of this classically-structured French farce that its stagebound form never really matters. Zipping along at a cracking pace for a fleeting 80 minutes or so, this regularly hilarious romp is played with perfect comic timing by a capable cast in which the ostensibly unprepossessing Jacques Villeret is outstanding as the hapless Pignon.
Michael Dwyer
Wintersleepers/Winterschlaefer (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
One of the most exhilarating discoveries on the international film festival circuit in recent years, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run swept the boards at the annual German Film Awards a fortnight ago, taking five prizes including best film and director. I eagerly await the opportunity to savour its heady pleasures again when it opens here in the autumn. In marked contrast to the frenetic tempo of Run Lola Run is Tykwer's eerie, slow-burning picture of the aftermath of a fatal car accident in his second feature film, Wintersleepers, made two years ago and before Run Lola Run. The setting is the Bavarian Alps where a possibly fatal car accident interlinks five succinctly established characters for a drama steeped in foreboding and unease. A crucial twist is that the driver of the stolen car in the pivotal accident is a man who has lost his short-term memory and takes photographs to remind himself of the details of his life. Although Tykwer at times allows the movie to lapse into protracted navel-gazing with his gradually revealed portraits of his protagonists and their connections to each other, the film nonetheless affirms his bright talent as a stylist who's as comfortable with the many moody interior sequences as with the spectacular skiing footage he captures.
Michael Dwyer
My Favourite Martian (PG) General release
The seemingly inexhaustible supply of old TV series for Hollywood to recycle into new movies shows no signs of drying up yet - the latest example to reach our shores is this Donald Petrie-directed version of the 1960s comedy show about a rumbunctious alien causing havoc on planet Earth. In this update, Christopher Lloyd takes on the role of the alien, originally played by Ray Walston (who shows up as a scheming baddie), while Jeff Daniels is the ambitious TV reporter who hopes that Lloyd will make him famous.
Lloyd - surely one of the most irritating actors around - mugs up as you might expect, leaving little space for Daniels or the rest of the cast to do much except stand back and watch. The effects and slapstick are garish enough to keep the under-10s mildly entertained, but in the annals of TV-derived movies, this is just another one to file under "mediocre". Casting Daryl Hannah and Elizabeth Hurley as the two opposing women in Daniels's life, just goes to show how difficult it is for a girl to get a decent part in Hollywood these days.
Hugh Linehan
Virtual Sexuality (15) General release
With so many American teen-flicks filling our screens at the moment, it's not surprising that a British attempt at the genre should have appeared sooner or later, and Nick Hurran's fantasy-comedy with a cyber-twist, set amongst a bunch of hormonally-tormented 17-year-olds, tries valiantly to make North London seem as glamorous as Southern California. That it fails is due as much to budgetary limitations as anything else - that golden sheen costs money, after all - but a clunky script and some dubious casting don't help.
Laura Fraser plays 17-year-old Justine, intent on losing her virginity, but only to the right bloke; and not, therefore, to nice-but-geeky Chas (Luke de Lacey). Visiting a hi-tech exhibition, Fraser creates her own virtual ideal man, Jake (Rupert Penry-Jones), only to find herself transposed by accident into Penry-Jones's body. Much of the film's comedy (and all of its better gags) centres on the dilemma of a young woman coming to terms with changing her gender, but the film loses sight of its "high-concept" ambitions, forgetting to keep it simple and throwing in too many subplots in its final third.
Just as problematic is the fact that most of the actors are about 10 years older than their characters, which won't be lost on the film's target audience, who are likely to prefer the more glamorous (and, to be honest, more sophisticated) American product.
Hugh Linehan
