"The Truman Show" (PG) General release

Truman Burbank is a mild-mannered 30-year-old living with his perpetually perky wife on the idealised island of Seahaven, a squeaky-clean, homogenised environment where the bonhomie of the inhabitants reflects the sunniness of the year-round perfect weather. His unvarying daily routine involves trading banal banter with neighbours and acquaintances and working for an insurance company where there is mild pressure to achieve better results.

Seahaven is the only world Truman knows. And if it seems too good be true, well, that's because it is. In fact, Seahaven is one enormous fake, an entire town built specifically as the set for what has become the world's most popular television show, its voyeuristic appeal attracting over 1.7 billion viewers in 222 countries. Many viewers leave it on all night for comfort, we are told.

The only inhabitant of Seahaven who is not in on this colossal artifice is the show's subject, Truman Burbank himself, who has remained blithely unaware that his life is the subject of a round-the-clock television show which began with his birth. He was an unwanted baby chosen to star in this massive project by a television producer known only as Christof. Explaining the genesis of the series and its appeal, Christof says that audiences were becoming bored of actors and pyrotechnics. "There's nothing fake about Truman," he says, "It's genuine. It's a life."

It's a life stolen at birth, manufactured and manipulated down the years as the global viewing figures rocketed, and a life where everything Truman imagines as real is utterly bogus. Everyone else in Seahaven is an actor or an extra - even the people he believes to be his mother, his wife and his best friend. Even the idyllic weather is a special effect. "Easy on the fog," orders Christof. "Cue the sun."

This is the intriguing premise for Peter Weir's fascinating post-modern picture of our media age in The Truman Show. Its ingenious, highly original screenplay is the work of Andrew Niccol, a 34-year-old New Zealander who turned director last year with the underestimated Gattaca.

Demanding, and rewarding, the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, Peter Weir's superb film makes for consistently accomplished, thoughtful and stimulating cinema. It is rich, imaginative, precisely sustained and admirably detailed in the execution of its concept, eschewing heavy-handedness and ostentation.

Weir, the pre-eminent Australian director - whose admirable body of work includes Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Year Of Living Dangerously, Witness, Dead Poets' Society and Fearless - took a risk in casting Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, and it pays off handsomely in Carrey's remarkably subtle, expressive and - most amazingly - quiet performance. Weir elicits astutely judged performances from a cast which also notably features Laura Linney as Truman's wife, Natascha McElhone as a high school friend who wants to save him, Noah Emmerich as his best friend, and especially Ed Harris as the callous Christof.

In a film which deals so directly with the manufacturing of emotions, Weir and Carrey brilliantly pull off a memorable sequence which starts out setting up fake emotions and ends up tapping into the emotions of the audience which, in turn, takes Truman's emotions as authentic. While its purpose is fundamentally serious, the film is peppered with unexpected, ironic humour, and never more hilariously than when Truman's wife, offering him cocoa, turns the scene into a blatant case of product placement.

"Cube" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

A Canadian science-fiction production made on a minuscule budget, Vincenzo Natali's film deals with six disparate - and all too loquacious - characters trapped inside a three-dimensional maze of interlocking cubical chambers. Among them are a policeman, a doctor, a maths student, a technology buff, and an autistic savant.

One might think that their combined expertise would assist them in escaping from the cube, but their personalities get in the way, and anyhow, getting out is much easier said than done, all the more so when none of them knows how or why they ended up in there. The movie was shot within a single cube, echoing the claustrophobic setting of director Natali's best known short film, Elevated, which trapped three people in an elevator. His attempts to maximise a minimal budget in Cube are laudable, but he ought to have minimised the ponderous, self-conscious dialogue which suffuses this over-stretched movie and makes it seem like a dull filmed play, even though it has no theatrical origins.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"Ever After" (PG) General release

How do you film a fairytale in the digital, cynical, Disneyfied 1990s? The most successful attempt in recent years was Rob Reiner's delightful The Princess Bride, which spiced up its story with knowing and anchronistic wit. Writer-director Andrew Tennant's new version of Cinderella takes a different tack, with a revisionist spin which takes account of modern concerns, particularly those of feminism. If that makes Ever After sound dull and worthy, well, sometimes it is, but it's also a solidly crafted and well-played rendition of the tale.

Much of what is good about Tennant's film rests with Drew Barrymore, who brings the freshness and charm which is becoming her trademark to the central role. Barrymore - the best thing in this summer's hit comedy The Wedding Singer - plays this more active and self-assertive Cinderella with gusto, and the movie comes to life when she's given free rein. Also excellent is Anjelica Huston, who was surely born to play the wicked stepmother at some point in her career, and takes the opportunity with some glee.

Among Tennant's innovations is his portrayal of the Ugly Sisters, who are no longer ugly but spiteful and stupid, respectively. Other changes are less successful - there is no fairy godmother - her place is taken, surprisingly, by Leonardo Da Vinci (Patrick Godfrey), who lends a hand in the transformation of our heroine from grubby servant to belle of the ball. The glass slipper remains, but for no apparent reason. Ever After is not without its pleasures, but at times it's a little too reminiscent of those American TV specials in its blandness and lack of bite.