"The Wings Of The Dove" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Ormonde Stillorgan, Dublin, Omniplex, Galway

Two of the first three new cinema releases of 1998 are literary adaptations set 24 years apart in the first half of the 20th century. One takes place entirely in London, the other there and in Venice. Both films feature Helena Bonham Carter as a strong-willed young woman in love with an impecunious man, and central to both narratives is the rigid class system of British life. One of the films is accomplished and enthralling; the other is bland and slight.

Much the more satisfying of the two is Iain Softley's thoughtful and intelligent film of the 1902 Henry James novel, The Wings Of The Dove, which comes as a welcome antidote after the acute disappointment of Jane Campion's The Portrait Of A Lady last year. Adeptly adapted by Hossein Amini (who scripted the heartbreaking Thomas Hardy adaptation, Jude), Softley's film of The Wings Of The Dove moves its setting forward by seven years to 1910, subtly tapping into the contemporary resonances of the novel.

In her strongest, most complex performance to date, a radiantly sensual Helena Bonham Carter plays the spirited Kate Croy who is taken under the wing of her steely, socially conscious aunt (Charlotte Rampling) after the death of her mother, as her father (Michael Gambon) leads a destitute life. Kate is drawn to this new world of gracious living and fashionable parties, but her aunt refuses her permission to see the lowly-paid socialist journalist, Merton Densher (Linus Roache from Priest), with whom she remains secretly involved.

Alison Elliott is touching as the wealthy but secretly ailing American heiress, Milly Theale, who meets Merton in America and befriends Kate in London, and travels to Venice with them. Perceiving a solution to her own romantic problems and their financial implications, Kate simultaneously finds herself caught in a moral dilemma between selflessness and selfishness.

Iain Softley's mature and sensitive film makes for an engrossing and melancholy meditation on lust, passion, duplicity and exploitation. In its distillation of James's novel, it takes certain - forgivable - liberties with its source material without betraying it. Visually, it is a remarkable film - as much in its intense, revealing close-ups as in Eduardo Serra's precisely composed wide-screen images and Sandy Powell's striking costumes.

This entrancing film is only Softley's third feature, following his gritty Beatles-in-Hamburg drama, Backbeat, and the flashy, forgettable computers yarn, Hackers. His skill with actors, so evident in Backbeat, is all the more apparent in The Wings Of The Dove, in which he elicits fine performances from his leading and supporting players, and especially Helena Bonham Carter.

"Keep The Aspidistra Flying" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Helena Bonham Carter has rather less to do in Robert Bierman's film of the 1936 George Orwell novel, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but is impressive nonetheless as the ever-patient on-off girlfriend of the aspirant poet, Gordon Comstock, played by Richard E. Grant. As the film opens, both are employed in the advertising department of the New Albion publishing company, she as a graphic artist, he as a copywriter.

Driven by his desire to become an internationally recognised poet for his misery-laden writings, Comstock not only turns down the promotion offered him but quits his job, to the astonishment of his philistine employer (Jim Carter), who points out that libraries are already full of books. Comstock instead takes on a poorly-paid job as a bookshop assistant and moves into digs. "Pick any house with an aspidistra in the window," he is advised regarding accommodation. "It's a guarantee of respectability." However, as the rejection letters arrive from publishers, Comstock works off his anger and frustration on his landlady's aspidistra.

Grant's highly enthusiastic central performance, and Bonham Carter's solid support, cannot rescue this misguided adaptation - the work, surprisingly, of Alan Plater, the prolific writer whose television credits include Orwell On Jura, dealing with the writing of 1984. Gone here is the cutting edge of Plater's finest television work such as A Very British Coup - and of Orwell's cutting satire on class-ridden society and pretentious literary ambitions.

Unwisely, Plater and director Bierman have substituted with a routine romantic comedy in which all the supporting characters are almost quaint stereotypes moving through sets which look so self-consciously like sets in what appears, given the paucity of extras in most exterior scenes, to have been a seriously under-populated London of the mid-1930s.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"Starship Troopers" (18) Nationwide

In an era when nearly every sci-fi or fantasy movie wears its gentle irony on its sleeve as part of the glossy package, perhaps the best thing to do is throw subtlety out the window and come out all guns blazing. Tim Burton tried it last year with Mars Attacks!, but that was an understated chamber piece compared to Starship Troopers - Paul Verhoeven's highly violent space war movie pokes fun so relentlessly at its audience that you may come out checking yourself for broken ribs. Part Independence Day, part Beverly Hills 90210 and part Triumph Of The Will, this must be one of the strangest films to be financed by a Hollywood studio in many years, and it's hardly surprising that the young moviegoers of America didn't know what to make of it.

Loosely based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s novel, Verhoeven's film gleefully takes up the crypto-fascist tendencies of its source material and inflates them beyond comic book absurdity. Starship Troopers follows the familiar narrative curve of the classic war movie - idealistic young people join up to defend the homeland, are trained and hardened in military boot camp and then flung into the furnace of battle, where some of them die and the rest grow up. But throughout, Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier pour scorn on their dumb, shallow "heroes".

The film begins on the Earth of the distant future, where, we are informed, the generals have ruled benignly since "social scientists in the twentieth century brought our world to the brink of chaos", but which is now threatened by the invading Bugs, a ferocious insect species from a far-off planet. In Buenos Aires, where the protagonists have just graduated from high school, everyone seems to live in a bland Anglo-American mall culture, fed propaganda by the ubiquitous FedNet, with its constant question: "Want to Know More?" The main character, the absurdly Aryan-looking Casper Van Dien, signs up for the military to impress his girlfriend (Denise Richards), who plans to become a starfighter captain. His best friend, the brainy Neil Patrick Harris, joins the intelligence service, re-emerging later in what looks like a Gestapo uniform. In training, Van Dien is blamed for the death of a fellow soldier, and is on the point of leaving the military when the Bugs annihilate Buenos Aires, precipitating a pitched battle with the Earth forces that wreaks huge casualties (graphically rendered by the same special effects department that handled Jurassic Park).

Along the way there's a bit of boy-meets-girl-girl-gets-eviscerated-by-giant-spider stuff that gives the unknown cast some chance to display their talents - not extensive, on this evidence. Verhoeven has never shown much interest in the finer points of the acting craft, but here he seems to take great pleasure in making his characters as plastic and implausible as possible, setting their geewhizz enthusiasm against their horrible fate. The huge battle scenes, in broad daylight on stark desert terrain, have a horrible, nightmarish grandeur that sits strangely with the other parts of the movie, and the whole experience - as always with Verhoeven - is unsettling, garish and very, very loud, an epic blockbuster with aspirations towards cult status.