Direct to Video
Having followed his auspicious debut film, Boy N The Hood, with the dim naive Poetic Justice, John Singleton shows a certain return to form with his third feature, Higher Learning (18) which like Poetic Justice, failed to get a cinema release here.
Set in the fictional, emblematically named Columbus University, Higher Learning finds' Singleton on familiar ground, tackling issues of race, exploitation and authority, and heavy handedly adding the themes of lesbianism, date rape and neoNazism.
The well chosen cast features Omar Epps, Michael Rapaport Kirsty Swanson, Jennifer Connolly and Ice Cube in the key student roles, with Laurence Fishburne playing another father figure for Singleton, as the school's worldly wise political science professor. However, despite the assurance with which Singleton introduces and inter links his characters and the strong visual style he employs throughout the film Singleton stumbles as he tries to resolve the issues in a wildly melodramatic conclusion
From Michael Tolkin, author of The Player and director of The Rapture, comes the serious comedy, The New Age (18), a mostly smart and telling satire on post Eighties lifestyles which reunites Naked Lunch co stars Judy Davis and Peter Weller. They play a prosperous Los Angeles couple whose marriage is falling apart until a sharp decline in their fortunes brings them together for a financial enterprise based on their principal talents shopping and talking.
Tolkin's caustic, cynical screenplay subjects the couple to snowballing reversals of fortune and consequent mounting insecurities the Davis character, like the woman played by Mimi Rogers in The Rapture, turns to New Age spirituality for redemption. The cast also includes Adam West (star of the Sixties Batman TV series), Patrick Bauchau and the ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson.
Unlike Amy Heckerling's astute and very witty modern spin on Jane Austen's, Emma in Clueless, Steve Martin's contemporary reworking of George Eliot's Silas Marner, in A Simple Twist Of Fate (PG) is ultimately a missed opportunity. Besides writing the screenplay, Martin plays the central role of a reclusive furniture maker who finds an abandoned baby girl at his door. As the girl grows up, she brings a new meaning, to his empty life, but their happiness is threatened by the girl's biological father, a very wealthy political as pi rant played by Gabriel Byrne.
Under the Scots director Gills MacKinnon, the film proves initially engrossing but fails to sustain its momentum and it finally falters in a predictable courtroom custody case. Martin's performance is so low key that it barely registers at times, while Byrne excels in a villainous role, as he did in Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects.
Winner of the major prize the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice festival, Hou Hsiao Hsien's A City Of Sadness examines a highly sensitive period in Taiwanese history, from the new but short lived optimism that followed the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, to 1949 when the Chinese. Nationalists set up their capital, in Taipei.
Hou Hsiao Hsein's complex, valuable and deeply involving film views these events through the lives of one family and their associates, and in particular three brothers the eldest, a nightclub owner, another, who returns from the war and gets involved with Shanghai drug smugglers and the youngest, a deaf mute whose photo studio becomes a meeting place for patriotic intellectuals.
A much less deserving festival prize winner, Bertrand Tavenir's L'Appat/The Bait (18), which took the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, is based on events in Paris in the early 1980s, adapted to a present day setting. It deals with three bored middle class young people two male, one female who drift into robbery and eventually murder, their victims being clients who hire the young woman as an escort.
Although assembled with the professionalism one would expect form Tavernier, the result is surprisingly meandering. It is impossible to work, up a hint of sympathy for its objectionable young central characters and most ludicrously the movie seems to be saying that their immersion in American culture (films, TV, rock videos, designer labels) led them down the path to crime. The movie is suffused with heavy handed, sarcastic gibes at American culture, and however one might share Tavernier's distaste, he ought to have found a more apt context in which to vent his spleen.
At the bottom of this month's pile is Blue Juice (15), a threadbare British yarn dealing with surfers in Cornwall and leaving its leading players, Sean Pertwee and Trainspotting star Ewan McGregor, to sink under its banal and obvious lines.
Cinema to Video
Strongly recommended, Ken Loach's stirring Spanish Civil War drama, Land And Freedom (15) follows the eventful experiences of an idealistic and unemployed young Liverpudlian (played by the excellent Ian Hart), a card carrying Communist Party member who decides to go to Spain in 1936 to fight the fascists.
Hardly deserving of its Oscar for best film last month, Mel Gibson's Braveheart (15) works best in its spectacular battle scenes, although these will be severely diminished on the small screen.
Surprisingly, Jonathan Pryce was passed over in the Oscar nominations for his superb performance in Carrington (18), writer Christopher Hampton's first film as a director an uneven portrait of the relationship between the painter Dora Carrington, (Emma Thompson) and biographer Lytton Strachey (Pryce).
Irish writer director Gerry Stembridge makes an auspicious, cinema debut with Guiltrip (18), a powerful, hard hitting drama of psychological violence in the marriage of an army corporal and hiss wife, vividly played by Andrew Connolly and Jasmine Russell.
Benjamin Ross's macabre and intriguing The Young Poisoner's. Handbook (15) is set in 1960s London and features Hugh O'Conor in a hypnotic performance, as a young Englishman experimenting with his chemical theories on his unfortunate family, and colleagues.
One of the funniest films of recent years, Tom DiCillo's Living In Oblivion (15) is an insightful and consistently funny comedy which follows three nightmarish days on the set of an independent production with a director (Steve Buscemi), his cast and crew played by, among others, Catherine Keener, James LeGros and Dermot Mulroney.
The friendly ghost comes to the cinema screen courtesy of the special effects department in the tongue in cheek Casper (G) star ring Christina Ricci (from The Addams Family) as the young girl who can communicate with the ghost. Only Batman Forever took money than Casper at the Irish box office last year.
Sell through.
Recommended recent productions available to buy include Priest, Clerks, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Death And The Maiden, Six Degrees Of Separation, Ladybird, Ladybird and Muriel's Wedding. Older movies now on sale include Body And Soul, Pillow Talk and Funny Face. Now available on wide screen are The Deer Hunter, Once Upon A Time In America, The Elephant Man and Withnail & I.
