Memento (18) Selected cinemas
The 29-year-old English director Christopher Nolan strongly affirms the promise of his low-budget, black-and-white debut film, Following, which was set in London, with his first US movie, Memento. A true mindbender of a thriller, Memento cleverly and tantalisingly plays with the themes of time, memory, reality and illusion - and with the viewer's brain - as it teasingly unravels its twisted tale.
In a thoroughly enigmatic performance, the ever-interesting Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a former insurance investigator seeking to solve the mystery of his wife's murder, and constrained by a rare condition of short-term memory loss which causes him to forget everything 15 minutes after it happened. He addresses this perplexing dilemma by shooting and captioning a succession of Polaroids, writing post-its to himself and tattooing "essential" information on his body to remind him of the most relevant data he collects.
It would be unfair to divulge any more about this taut, pacy and visually stylish thriller, which is dexterously assembled by Nolan as a particularly complex jigsaw. Memento is one of those rare movies which, like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense, encourages the viewer to play the whole film back immediately after seeing it - and to savour its pleasures from a different point of view a second time around.
The House of Mirth (15) Seected cinemas
Five years after his first American film, the disappointing The Neon Bible, Terence Davies is back at the peak of his form for his second literary adaptation set in the US, his enthralling treatment of the Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth, which he filmed on location in Scotland.
Davies's best film since his searing Distant Voices, Still Lives - and a far superior Wharton adaptation to Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence - the impeccably composed The House of Mirth proceeds at a perfectly measured pace as it reveals the emotionally bruising fate of Lily Bart, a New York socialite in the early years of the 20th century.
Reliant on her aunt for money, Lily believes that she must marry into wealth, which rules out the prospects of a loving relationship with the amiable lawyer, Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz) who has little money. A combination of mis-steps, misinterpretations and her own impulsive behaviour - and the scheming of a spiteful socialite (Laura Linney) - render Lily's social standing ominously precarious, with devastating consequences.
The characteristically sombre, unhurried approach Davies brings to the material he films allows ample time and space for the characters and the drama to breathe and develop, heightening the emotional turmoil which inexorably ensues. In marked contrast to the majority of period pictures, the emphasis here is firmly on the characters rather than the trappings which surround them, and the use of sets and costumes is refreshingly unobtrusive. The drama is permeated by the film's precisely captured milieu of suffocating social hypocrisy, in which image and status are all-important.
Unlike Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, which had Joanne Woodward reading Wharton's book on the soundtrack to advance the narrative, Davies's film often proves more revealing through looks and glances rather than what is uttered verbally. In this respect, the director is very well served by the expressive performances of his imaginatively chosen cast. Lily Bart is played in a revelatory performance by X- Files star Gillian Anderson, in an example of casting against type which pays off handsomely. In addition to Eric Stoltz and Laura Linney, the sterling supporting cast notably includes Dan Aykroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, Jodhi May, Elizabeth McGovern and Eleanor Bron.
In the Mood For Love (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The richly inventive Hong Kong film-maker, Wong Kar-wai, who was named best director at Cannes in 1997 for Happy Together, was back at the festival this summer with In the Mood For Love, which took the best actor award for Tony Leung and the prize for best technical achievement, which was accepted by Wong's regular lighting cameraman, Christopher Doyle, who shares the cinematography credit on it with Mark Li Ping-bing.
The third cinematic treat among today's nine new releases, In the Mood For Love is a dreamy, seductive picture set in Hong Kong in 1962. Tony Leung plays Chow, a newspaper editor who moves into rented accommodation with his wife, who spends a good deal of time away. The other new tenants in this boarding house are Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) a shipping firm secretary who moves in next door with her husband, whose work with a Japanese firm means that he is regularly out of town on business.
As Chow and Li-Zhen are gradually forced to face up to the reality that their respective spouses are cheating on them, they become drawn closer and closer to each other, even acting out the adulterous exchanges of their partners. The sexual tension rises as their mutual attraction is poised on the verge of physical expression.
In sharp contrast to the hyperactive visual styles of Chunking Express and Happy Together, In the Mood For Love is formed as a series of graceful and gorgeous compositions. As it reveals its acute study in regret, longing and repressed emotions, it establishes a delicate, mellow mood enhanced by its romantic period song score and by the subtle, intriguing central performances of Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the stars of Wong Kar-wai's 1991 film, Days of Being Wild.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (18) General release
Fuelled by an innovative Internet campaign, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Mynick's no-budget The Blair Witch Project effectively conflated documentary style with supernatural legend for a lean horror movie which artfully played on the audience's fear of the unknown and the dark. It became one of the most profitable productions ever made, making the prospect of a sequel irresistible.
One of the more remarkable aspects of its success was the number of viewers who actually believed they were watching a real-life documentary, and the film's locations in the Black Hills of Burkittsville, Maryland became a tourist trail. That is the starting point of the sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, as a local man (Jeffrey Donovan), recently released from a psychiatric hospital, cashes in on the phenomenon and sets up his inaugural tour for four Blair Witch aficionados - a couple of Boston academics, a practising Wiccan witch, and a cynical Goth with psychic abilities.
What follows plays with dreams, premonitons and hallucinations as reality and legend once again become intertwined, and video technology again plays a crucial role in deciphering the truth. None of the key original cast is involved, and the co-directors of the first film serve as executive producers, while Joe Berlinger, a documentarist noted for his work on child murders in Arkansas, is the director.
Berlinger sees Book of Shadows as a meditation on violence in the media, and how the media shapes an event. This is at odds with the inescapable conclusion that his film is an altogether more cynical exploitation of the original film and its themes than any media coverage which followed it. Despite the advantage of a much higher, though still relatively modest, budget, the sequel is scrappily assembled and generally devoid of the freshness and frissons which made its predecessor the subject of so much interest.
