A very beautiful `Anna Karenina'

"Anna Karenina" (15) Savoy, Virgin, UCIs

Those who remember MGM's sumptuous 1935 version of Tolstoy's tragic novel may feel apprehensive at the thought of an adaptation which replaces Greta Garbo with Sophie Marceau, and Fredric March with Sean Bean. But this new version by writer/director Bernard Rose is intelligent and interesting, even if it fails to fire on all cylinders.

Rose's varied directorial career to date has included the terrific horror movie Candyman, and the abysmal Chicago Joe And The Showgirl. His last outing was the Beethoven biopic immortal Beloved, a torrid costume drama of doomed romance.

Here, he directs a movie which is far more faithful to the original novel than previous adaptations, devoting considerable time to the character of Levin (Alfred Molina), the romantic and tortured intellectual through whose eyes the story is largely seen. This may appeal to devotees of Tolstoy (for whom Levin provided a thinly-disguised alter-ego), but it may puzzle or disappoint those who come to the film looking for the straightforward romantic tragedy of earlier versions.

It does lend a welcome complexity to the story, while a strong supporting cast (which includes Fiona Shaw and Niall Buggy) helps to provide texture to Rose's portrait of St Petersburg's high society.

It's a pity, therefore, that neither Marceau nor Bean has enough screen presence to make something more magical from Rose's scrupulous adaptation. Bean, in particular, tries (and this is by some distance the best performance of his career) but the ghost of Sharpe lingers over his portrayal of Anna's lover, Vronsky. Marceau herself is little more than a cipher (which is as much Tolstoy's fault as Rose's); her decline into suicidal depression is more irritating than convincing.

Handsomely photographed and designed on location in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside, this Anna Karenina benefits hugely from the use of locations such as the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. Rose has a fine eye, and mounts his action against the backdrop of some stunning scenery, using the imposing architecture to accentuate the helplessness of his characters. A commendable effort.

It does lend a welcome complexity to the story, while a strong supporting cast (which includes Fiona Shaw, Niall Buggy and Danny Huston) helps to provide texture to Rose's portrait of St Petersburg's high society.

"Box Of Moonlight" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.

Writer-director Tom DiCillo, whose previous movie, Living In Oblivion, was actually set on a film set, moves into the great wide open for a quirky comedy, in the engaging and unexpectedly mellow Box Of Moonlight. John Turturro plays Al, an uptight engineer supervising a construction job far from home. The other workers won't socialise with him and his wife calls him "Mr Clockwork" when he phones home every night.

Al begins to feel paranoid and suffers from hallucinations which reverse the order of things - coffee pours out of a cup into a pot, water leaves a glass instead of flowing into it. When the construction project is cancelled abruptly, Al impulsively decides against going home for the July 4th celebrations. He tells his wife the job is still on schedule and decides to go back to his childhood roots - a nearby lake which is now polluted.

When he is ready to go home, Al encounters an unpredictable, free-spirited young man, (Sam Rockwell) who helps him to loosen up.

This amiable and satisfying picture lacks the all-out hilarity of Living In Oblivion (which returns to the IFC tomorrow for two days) but delivers a good deal of witty, incidental humour. Filmed against striking locations in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, its appeal is anchored in the sparkling on-screen chemistry of the always reliable Turturro and the very promising young Rockwell.

"Love And Other Catastrophes"' (15) Screen on D'Olier Street, UCI Tallaght

A flawed but occasionally amusing romantic comedy set on the campus of a Melbourne university, 23-year-old Australian director Emma-Kate Croghan's debut film is most likely to appeal to those who might relate directly to its early-twentysomething angst.

Alice Garner and Frances O'Conner play film students struggling to cope with romance and with college life over the course of 24 hours. Garner is in the process of breaking up with her girlfriend, while O'Conner dreams of the perfect man, and wonders if she will ever finish her long-postponed thesis (on "Doris Day As Feminist Warrior"). Meanwhile, they're trying to find a new roommate and get ready for the party they're hosting that night.

Croghan obviously aspires to the hip knowingness of the better class of American independent moviemakers, and her screenplay is often quite funny, in a junior Woody Allen kind of way ("I think you should try everything once, except incest and folk dancing," observes one character, in truce Woody-style). But her shoe-string budget and inexperience show through in the unevenness of tone, and in some of the acting, which at times is downright bad. Too often Love And Other Catastrophes just looks like an over-extended student film, although its undergraduate humour may find favour in some quarters.

"Beavis And Butt-Head Do America" (15) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

Their fans will be relieved to know that the two pubescent couch-potatoes who introduce music videos on MTV have graduated to feature-length without any discernible increase in brain power. Their twin obsessions with sex and television propel them across the US and into new experiences which don't manage to penetrate the gaping space between their ears. It's a shambolic road-movie, of sorts, with the moronic pair desperately trying to lose their virginity, while hopelessly misunderstanding everything they see around them. While some of the scrapes they get into have a comic absurdity, it all amounts to an overstretched, flimsy series of sketches with very predictable satirical targets (the hick mediocrity of middle America the vacuity of hippies), which hits the same limited, deliberately nerdy, scatological note throughout about scoring chicks, etc. - accompanied by B.&.Bs' trademark sniggers at words like' "boob".

Who is this intended for? Not for Beavis and Butt-Head's adolescent contemporaries, presumably, but for adults who can have an ironic chuckle at their expense. Fine for two minutes, perhaps, but at almost an hour-and-a-half, in the oft-repeated words of B.&B: "it sucks".