Apt Pupil (18) Virgin Cinemas, Dublin

Bryan Singer, the bright young director of the complex and invigorating The Usual Suspects, has achieved a vivid meditation on the individual's capacity for evil in his third feature, Apt Pupil, skilfully adapted by Brandon Boyce from a Stephen King novella in the same collection that spawned The Shawshank Redemption.

Set in suburban America in 1984, Singer's psychological horror movie features Brad Renfro as a bright, inquisitive high school student who takes his interest in the Holocaust to extremes when he recognises a notorious Nazi war criminal (Ian McKellen) on a bus and confronts him, offering not to reveal his identity to the authorities in exchange for details of the man's horrific past activities.

Steeped in sinister atmosphere, the film follows the boy's obsession as it overtakes his life to the point where both his grades and his sexual progress suffer. When he buys the man a Nazi uniform as a Christmas present and orders him to wear it, the man reluctantly agrees but soon reverts to character, reawakening the past he has suppressed so fastidiously.

The sting in the tale is how this taps into the boy's own potential for evil, and in addressing this, how absolute evil corrupts absolutely. There is an eerie topicality about Apt Pupil as it unavoidably evokes the recent case of the two high school students whose capacity for malevolence was shockingly revealed when they went on a homicidal rampage in their Littleton, Colorado school. Singer's cautionary tale is achieved in a succession of imaginative and stylishly devised visual compositions lit by Newton Thomas Sigel and tightly edited by John Ottman, who as on The Usual Suspects, doubles as the composer of the movie's fine, dramatic score. The power of the film is charged by its terrific central performances, with Ian McKellen on masterful form yet again and the gifted young Brad Renfro, who made an auspicious debut in The Client when he was 10, matching the veteran actor all the way.

Swing (15) General release

Nick Mead's formulaic Britfilm attempts to combine the comic pathos of The Full Monty with the musical energy of The Commitments, but fails dismally on both counts thanks to a leaden, banal script, a bland directing style, and a vision of Liverpool which makes Brookside look like a Ken Loach film.

Hugo Speer plays the ex-con determined to break out of his rut a la The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle by forming a swing band, but finds family, friends and the legal system standing in his path. It's hardly giving much away to tell that hope triumphs over adversity in the end - what's important is what happens along the way, and, despite sterling efforts by a strong cast which includes veterans Tom Bell and Rita Tushingham as Speer's parents, the story never rises above platitudes and cliches.

One of the annoying things about The Commitments was the way it collapsed a longstanding, urban, working-class fascination with black American music into a few watery diatribes by the band's manager, as if he'd thought it all up by himself. Similarly, Swing picks up on the burgeoning contemporary nostalgia for 1940s big band music, but puts the whole thing down to Speer's conversion to the joys of the groove by sax-playing cell-mate Clarence Clemmons while behind bars. On his release from prison, Speer sets about forming his ensemble, enlisting a motley crew that includes a National Front skinhead on drums and a brass section drawn from the local Orange marching band, led by Alexei Sayle. As singer, he enlists his former girlfriend (Lisa Stansfield), who is less than happily married to a repellent police officer.

The only slightly interesting elements in this unconvincing affair are in some surprising characterisations: the Liverpool police, for example, are depicted as corrupt, violent and stupid, a harsh view which sits oddly with the surrounding schmaltziness; and Sayles's performance is probably the most sympathetic depiction of an Orangeman seen so far on the big screen - perhaps the Loyal Orders should take note and put a little more jive in their stride.

Bedrooms and Hallways (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Questions of sexual identity, personal honesty and commitment are raised and explored with perspicacity and humour by the young American director Rose Troche in the London-set romantic comedy, Bedrooms and Hallways, her second feature after the low-budget, lesbian-themed US feature, Go Fish. Working from a keenly observed original screenplay by Robert Farrar, Troche deals with an array of characters, most of whom are sexually confused, in Bedrooms and Hallways.

Kevin McKidd plays the pivotal character, Leo, a sensitive lovelorn sort persuaded by his heterosexual colleague (Christopher Fulford) to join a New Age men's group lorded over by a pretentious older man (a delightfully deadpan Simon Callow) who's married to a Hampstead feminist (Harriet Walter).

Leo falls for one of the men, an ostensibly straight Irish man (James Purefoy with a very dodgy Irish accent) who's soon inviting him for "real Guinness" and offering him poteen. Meanwhile, Leo's flatmate (Tom Hollander, looking like a camper version of Robbie Williams) is having a torrid affair with a sexually voracious estate agent (Hugo Weaving).

Troche's briskly-paced movie deftly juggles the ensuing complications, coincidences and misassumptions in a film that gleefully plays with and upturns gender preconceptions. Some of the humour is pitched too broadly, as if Troche were delivering some kind of homage to a once-popular, now dated style of British sex comedy. But as in Go Fish, there is enough freshness about her approach to the material to sustain such lapses. And her casting is spot-on, in particular with Kevin McKidd's appealing turn as Leo, which marks a welcome change after the intensity of his work on Trainspotting and Small Faces.

Virus (18) General release

Special effects whizz John Bruno is best known for his work with James Cameron on The Terminator, The Abyss and Titanic, so it's perhaps not surprising that his directorial debut seems to amalgamate elements from all those films, dealing as it does with extraterrestrial robots slaughtering unwary humans aboard a storm-wrecked ship. But the more obvious reference point for Virus is the Alien cycle, with its tougher-than-the-rest heroine battling the nasty intruders, while her macho male crewmates are dispatched in various nasty ways.

Taking the Sigourney Weaver role, Jamie Lee Curtis plays the navigator of a small tug boat captained by Donald Sutherland (shamelessly hamming it up as a salty old seadog), which comes across a Russian satellite-tracking research ship with nobody on board. With visions of a multimillion dollar salvage bonanza, the tug's crew boards the vessel, but it soon becomes clear something is seriously amiss, and it's not long before the mayhem begins.

There's nothing here that we haven't seen before, and the plot is peppered with illogicalities and absurd non sequiturs, while the mechanical monsters are sometimes rather silly-looking, but Vi- rus isn't a bad slice of sci-fi horror, with the action sequences vigorously handled by Bruno, who brings it all in at an admirably economical 99 minutes.

Citizen Kane (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Is Orson Welles's 1941 classic the greatest movie ever made? As the end of the century nears, that debate gets stoked up again by the re-release of the movie today in a new 35mm print. Whether or not it is the greatest achievement in cinema history is ultimately immaterial when what really matters is that there is so much to savour and gain from every viewing of this magisterial movie.

It launches a major, two-part Welles retrospective at the IFC which over the weeks ahead will include The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey Into Fear, The Stranger, The Lady From Shanghai, Macbeth, Othello and Confidential Report - along with screenings tomorrow and on Monday of the fascinating recent documentary, The Battle Over `Citizen Kane'.