"The Devil's Own" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Arriving here trailing horror stories of going over schedule and over budget, of re-shoots and rows between its two stars, Alan J. Pakula's controversial The Devil's Own was dismissed earlier this year by one of those stars, Brad Pitt, as "the most irresponsible bit of film-making I've ever seen."

Under studio pressure Pitt promptly retracted that remark, explaining that he referred to the protracted process in bringing Kevin Jarre's long-ingestation screenplay before the cameras. That screenplay was reworked along the way by five different writers, among them Terry George, who wrote In The Name Of The Father and Some Mother's Son.

The film opens with a prologue set in Northern Ireland in 1972 as the eight-year-old Frankie McGuire, sitting down to dinner with his family, witnesses the murder of his father by sectarian gunmen. Following the opening credits, the movie moves forward 20 years in time, when Frankie - played by a bearded Brad Pitt with a convincing Belfast accent - is a Provo assassin responsible for killing two dozen members of the security forces.

Cue the movie's action high-point, an elaborate, well-staged shoot-out in Belfast (and shot in Dublin, in Inchicore). "The Cabinet was talking peace the whole time the SAS was trying to take us out," a fellow traveller tells Frankie, who heads for the US to acquire stinger missiles for the Provos. Clean-shaven and assuming the identity of Rory Devaney, a construction worker, Frankie gets a room in the basement of an Irish-American police officer, Tom O'Meara (Harrison Ford).

The two men bond instantly over pool and pints, Frankie finding a surrogate for the father he lost when he was so young and Tom, who lives with his wife and three daughters, noting that "sometimes it's good to have someone around who can pee standing up". There is a rare moment of well-judged humour when Tom's wife serves up corned beef and cabbage for Frankie's first dinner with the family. "I thought that's all you ever eat over there," she explains.

Despite his terrorist background, Frankie is a Provo who is almost too good to be true - an essentially charming, good-natured and handsome young man and, as Tom later remarks, a victim of his childhood circumstances. "Don't look for happy endings, Tom," Frankie tells him. "It's not an American story. It's an Irish one."

The Devil's Own is more efficient and sophisticated than some of the worst American movies of IRA stories, such as Patriot Games, which also featured Harrison Ford, and the ludicrous Blown Away. However, it rarely ever rises above the politically naive and simplistic. Predictably, the ubiquitous British detective in pursuit of Frankie is at least as cold-blooded as Frankie himself; furthermore, the film struggles between the demands of an action movie and those of a more thoughtful, character-driven picture. As it proceeds, it becomes all too dependent upon the most far-fetched of coincidences, petering out in a melodramatic finale, one of several shot for the film.

In the wake of the murders in Lurgan on Monday, there could hardly be a worse week than this for opening a movie about a sympathetically drawn IRA terrorist. Then again, when would that timing ever be right?

"Intimate Relations" (18) Virgin, Dublin

The austerity and hypocrisy of post-war England is the backdrop to former actor Philip Goodhew's confident directing debut, Intimate Relations, which is set in 1954 in a dreary provincial town and based on a true story of sexual obession that ended in murder. Julie Walters plays the prim, middle-aged Marjorie Beasley who lives with her husband Stanley (Matthew Walker), who lost a leg during the first World War, and their 14-year-old daughter Joyce (Laura Sadler). And their (male) dog, Princess Margaret.

When Marjorie decides to take in a lodger, she selects Harold Guppy (Rupert Graves), a young sailor who takes boiled sweets to control his propensity for violence, and sets about seducing him. A game of "spin the bottle" releases the trigger of sexual tension, but their relationship is complicated when the precocious Joyce insists on sharing Harold with her mother. Something's got to give.

Intimate Relations takes its title from the coy euphemism employed by newspapers of the time to describe sexual relations. Goodhew's caustic screenplay regularly pokes wicked fun at the repressive and hypocritical attitudes of a time when people took pride in the notion that "the less we know the better we are".

The movie regularly evokes the spirit of Joe Orton in its offbeat dialogue, as when Marjorie tries to chat up Harold with the line, "I like your pyjamas - they're very distinguished", and in outline The Intimate Relations specifically recalls Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane. It only begins to lose its way in the later stages, when narrative takes precedence over cutting social critique. In roles not entirely dissimilar to characters they have played in the past, Rupert Graves and Julie Walters deliver deft and admirably dead-pan performances.

"Marvin's Room" (12) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

Three generations in an American family are drawn together at a time of personal crisis in Marvin's Room, the film of Scott McPherson's off-Broadway play. McPherson died of AIDS shortly after completing the screen adaptation of his play in 1992, and the central character in his story is a middle-aged woman who learns that she has leukemia.

She is Bessie (played by Diane Keaton) whose younger sister, Lee (Meryl Streep) moved out of their Florida home to make a life of her own in Ohio, leaving Bessie to care for their bedridden father (Hume Cronyn) and eccentric aunt (Gwen Verdon). The estranged sisters speak for the first time in 20 years when Bessie calls Lee, seeking a blood relative to donate bone marrow for a transplant.

Lee, a hairdresser who broke up with her husband years earlier reluctantly goes back to Florida, accompanied by her sons, the rebellious and volatile Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the innocent young Charlie (Hal Scardino). While the long-running tensions between the sisters begins to subside, the temperamental Hank surprises himself by responding to the attention paid him by his aunt, Bessie.

With the exception of a few grating aberrations - such as "My feelings for you are like a big bowl of fish-hooks" - Scott McPherson's screenplay is grounded in sharp, credible dialogue and treated with an aptly low-key style by Jerry Zaks, a veteran New York stage director one his film debut. And the screenplay's abiding sense of humour saves it from its potential pitfalls of mawkish sentimentality.

This touching story of forgiveness, responsibility and commitment benefits crucially from its exceptional cast. In the performance of her career, which earned her an Oscar nomination earlier this year, Diane Keaton immerses herself in the role of Bessie, her forced smiles and bonhomie failing to disguise her deep-rooted fears. The formidable Streep foresakes her mannerisms to complement Keaton's work, and the remarkable DiCaprio effectively holds his own in such experienced company. Robert De Niro, one of the film's producers, has an extended cameo as Bessie's doctor.

"Mon Homme" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The provocative 58-year-old French film-maker Bertrand Blier is the subject of a six-film retrospective at the IFC which spans his career from his breakthrough with the calculatedly outrageous Les Valseuses in 1973 to his latest movie, Mon Homme, the centre-piece of the season which encapsulates the preoccupations of Blier, the misogynist's misogynist.

It is rooted in Blier's view that all women are whores and that those who are not secretly desire to be whores and would benefit from the experience. "She doesn't know what she's missing," observes the central character, Marie (Anouk Grinberg), at the film's outset as she encourages a passer-by to have paid sex. "I'm Marie, a prostitute, and not afraid to broadcast it," she declares.

Blier depicts Marie as being almost saintly in her devotion to her clients and to making them happy. She kindly helps an elderly customer up the several flights of stairs to her apartment and sets up a voyeurism opportunity to stimulate another client who cannot get an erection.

Returning home one bright night after providing some corporate entertainment, Marie befriends a homeless man (Gerard Lanvin), to her apartment and offers him food, drink, money, a room for the night, and sex. To underline her saintliness, Blier plays hymnal music on the soundtrack while she is sodomised roughly by the homeless man. The next morning she invites him to become her pimp, but for all her devotion to him, he cheats on her and slaps her. "A pimp has to pimp, or he's no pimp," he explains.

This resolutely offensive film registers as nothing more than the wishful thinking of a dirty old man's fantasies, laced with some hollow socialist pretensions and wrapped up in a daft narrative. The character of Marie is played with doe-eyed sincerity by Anouk Grinberg, the young actress who is Blier's off-screen partner, and it's curious how Blier and directors such as Nicolas Roeg and John Derek feature their off-screen partners so often in states of undress and degrading positions on screen.

"Private Parts" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UC1s, Dublin

In the unlikely event that he would watch a sub-titled film, the notorious American radio presenter, Howard Stern, would probably enjoy Bertrand Blier's movies. Stern, the so-called shock jock and self-proclaimed "King of All Media", shares Blier's obsession with in-your-face irreverance and his fixation with undressing women with his eyes.

Stern plays his favourite person, himself, in the preposterously self-adulatory Private Parts, based on his 1993 autobiographical book and directed by Betty Thomas, who made The Brady Bunch Movie. The screenplay is by Len Blum, who scripted such crude efforts as Meatballs, Stripes and Heavy Metal, and the press notes inform us, is married to the vice-president of a large university"

Stern first appears in the movie, flying on to a stage in his Fartman-persona and receiving wild applause; the film ends with another outpouring of applause from worshipping fans as he addresses a rally to celebrate his eclipsing of a rival radio presenter in the ratings. In between these outbursts of glorification, the movie charts Stern's life, beginning in childhood, when his father, who worked in radio in New York, sparked his son's passion for the medium.

At college Stern is a nerd-shunned by women and troubled by how "minuscule" his penis is. His early attempts at DJ work founder in his phoniness until he is advised to be himself by the woman who becomes his wife. She's played by Mary McCormack, who was the cool, conniving Justine Appelton in Murder One.

It's onwards and upwards from there as Stern starts getting outrageous on the air - ridiculing minority groups and insulting his listeners, but soaring in the ratings - until NBC sign him and set out to tame him. But the indomitable Stern puts them in their place, just like everybody else.

Like Stern's own syndicated radio show, Private Parts is an initially amusing curiosity piece that soon wears thin as it applies more and more massage to its subject's outsized ego. In this narcissistic exercise, Stern is not just a towering radio talent and maverick, but like so many geniuses, he tells us, he is misunderstood. And like that other recent glibly self-righteous movie, The People vs Larry Flynt, it is implicit in Private Parts that viewers and listeners who object to Stern's gross tirades are bigots or bores.

"The Chamber" (12) Virgin Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Interviewed in this newspaper last month, the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman talked about the "painful" experience of spending six months working on his adaptation of John Grisham's novel The Chamber, and the anger he felt when director James Foley came on board the project and "changed everything". Goldman now shares the screenwriting credit with Chris Reese on Foley's film, such a turgid effort that one can share Goldman's sense of deep disappointment.

An all-too-weak Chris O'Donnell gives a bland performance as an idealistic young lawyer, Adam Hall, who seeks clemency for his grandfather, Sam Cayhall (Gene Hackman), an unrepentant racist on Death Row in Mississippi for a bombing which killed two young childen. As Hall probes the case, he discovers the secrets and lies of his truly dysfunctional family, among them his traumatised, alcoholic aunt (Faye Dunaway). Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and we get regular updates on the countdown to execution day.

Despite the best efforts of the reliable Hackman, The Chamber is a trite and tepid exercise starved of dramatic tension and grounded in hack psychology. In dealing with the issue of capital punishment, it positively pales by comparison with the infinitely more thoughtful and complex Dead Man Walking.