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

The second full length cinema feature from Poison director Todd Haynes, the ironically named Safe is a provocative, demanding and uncomfortable picture of personal and physical decay in a hi tech modern world where many of the apparent advances in civilisation are revealed as ultimately destructive forces

Written and directed by Haynes, Safe is set in an affluent area of the San Fernando Valley in California and its focus falls upon Carol White (played by Julianne Moore), a timid and deeply dissatisfied woman devoid of self esteem and living a bored, sterile existence. Her empty lifestyle is a bland daily round of time filling exercises - aerobics, shopping, coffee mornings - and fake smiles; her nights involve fake orgasms in a loveless marriage in which sex is utterly mechanical.

In the early stages of the movie as she goes round and round on this mind numbing assembly line of domestic oblivion, Carol's life feels like an extended episode from The Stepford Wives, a reference most pointedly made when she meets her women friends who lead similar lives. Exchanging presents, one admires the wrapping and asks another if she herself wrapped it. "I wish I were so creative," is the reply.

When Carol orders a new couch and it is delivered in the wrong colour, she reacts as if this were a crisis in her life - but infinitely worse traumas lie ahead. Driving on the highway, she gets a choking fit brought on by the exhaust fumes of passing vehicles; under the dryer in the hairdresser's, she gets a nose bleed; collecting the dry cleaning, she faints.

When her doctor fails to help, Carol sets out to diagnose the problem for herself and she realises that she is suffering from a debilitating environmental illness - an extreme allergy to toxic substances - and she seeks refuge in, and surrenders her freedom for, the promise of self completion at a patently phoney New Age institute.

Shot in a precise, dispassionate style that heightens its distancing effect, Safe operates on ambiguous levels of interpretation. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry, and sometimes when you laugh, you may feel tempted to bite your lip. Whatever way you look at it, Safe remains a caustic cautionary tale for our times and a distinctly eerie, intriguing and unsettling experience.

At its core is a quite remarkable portrayal of Carol by Julianne Moore, building on the wealth of promise she exhibited in Short Cuts and Vanya On 42nd Street. Her appearance - seriously slimmed down and with a deathly pallor - prompts parallels with the anorexic Karen Carpenter in Haynes's first film the 40 minute pseudo documentary, Superstar, which was populated by Barbie dolls.

"The Juror" (18s) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

Demi Moore is earning herself a reputation as the hardest working woman in show business these days, with several movies due out before the end of this year, but maybe she should be more selective in her choice of roles. Here, Moore plays an independent minded single mother with artistic aspirations who finds herself selected for jury duty on.a big Mafia murder trial, and is picked out by the mob as a suitable target for intimidation. When psychopathic hitman Alec Baldwin proceeds to threaten her life and that of her young son, Moore has no choice but to play along. She delivers the necessary verdict, but finally has to fight back as she finds herself increasingly embroiled in Baldwin's plans.

This is dull stuff - it's one of those films where you can predict every plot twist after 10 minutes - and British director Brian Gibson does little more than paint by numbers. Screenwriter Ted Tally won an Oscar for his script for The Silence Of The Lambs, and the Moore Baldwin relationship here has faint echoes at times of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins's double act in that film, but these only serve to underline the inferior characterisation here. Baldwin has a few moments where he is genuinely, creepily frightening, but most of his performance is straight off the peg marked "generic villain", while Moore tries to avoid the usual cliche's of female helplessness, but can't get around the problem that for three quarters of the film she is essentially a passive victim. For some strange reason the climactic scene takes place in a remote Guatemalan village perhaps a last, desperate effort to inject some colour into a pallid exercise. If so, it doesn't work.

"How To Make An American Quilt" (15s) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

If good casting automatically meant a good film, then How To Make An American Quilt would be a sure fire winner. With Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Nelligan, Alfre Woodard and Maya Angelou on board, Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse has assembled one of the most impressive rosters of female acting talent seen on screen in a long time for her first American film. It's a pity, therefore, that the result is not more coherent or impressive.

Ryder plays a young graduate student who returns to the house of her grandmother (Burstyn) in California for the summer to complete her thesis and mull over her boyfriend's marriage proposal. At the house, a quilting bee is in progress, involving Burstyn's relatives and friends. The communal work on the quilt, and the telling of the different womens stories, serve as backdrop and catalyst for Ryder's own decision making process.

Interweaving her characters' reminiscences with the present day narrative, Moorhouse attempts, sometimes successfully, to paint a portrait of American womens lives since the second World War, with the quilt serving both as metaphor for their relationships and as expression of a shared folk memory. Mixing flashback sequences, home movie footage and elements of quasi magic realism, the film self consciously adopts a sort of quilting technique in the way it tells its story. Some parts of the patchwork work better than others - the main storyline, set in the present, is the most satisfactory, while the flashback sequences seem over contrived, with a heavy handed humour that doesn't work most of the time.

In its structure and subject matter, How To Make An American Quilt is more ambitious than most of the generic "women's movies" of recent years. Unfortunately, that ambition is not matched by the craft of the film making. In addition, the film's feminist credentials are hardly enhanced by the irredeemably slushy ending, which seems to indicate that the solution to all a woman's problems lies in the arms of a good, strong, old fashioned man.

"Last Of The Dogmen" (12s) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

There's a longhand dishonourable tradition of enjoyably trashy exploitation movies about lost tribes of savages coming into contact with modern civilisation. Unfortunately, this directorial debut by screenwriter Tab Murphy eschews the tackiness of non classics like Irwin Allen's The Lost World in favour of a post Dances With Wolves po faced seriousness. Tom Berenger plays a rugged bounty hunter in present day Montana who comes across evidence of a tribe of Cheyenne warriors hidden in the wilderness for the last 130 years. Together with anthropologist Barbara Hershey he sets off in search of the tribe, pursued by the forces of law and order.

This is silliness dressed up as New Age profundity, with a confused, contradictory plot and bad pacing. It also boasts the most ridiculous, Grizzly Adams style voice over from Wilford Brimley, which sounds as if it was patched in desperately in post production. The only thing to be said in favour of Last of the Dogmen is that it features some stunning location photography of the Montana landscape.