"The Sweet Hereafter" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The gifted Cairo-born, Toronto-based film-maker Atom Egoyan follows his brilliant, provocative film Exotica, which unjustly went unrewarded at Cannes, with the complex and poignant The Sweet Hereafter, which was runner-up at Cannes this year, although many expected it to win. His first film from a source other than his own original screenplays, The Sweet Hereafter was adapted by Egoyan from the novel by Russell Banks.

Egoyan's cinematic reworking of the novel effectively employs an elliptical structure, moving backwards and forwards in time as it captures the deeply traumatic impact of a school bus crash on the residents of a small town in British Columbia, killing 14 of their children. With their lives appearing to have lost all meaning, the bereaved respond in different ways, through anger, blame, religion and drawing closer together.

Whereas Banks divided his novel into four sections, each of them narrated by a different principal character, Egoyan shapes the film around an outsider in the community - a diffident lawyer (played by Ian Holm) who comes to the town and offers to represent the grief-stricken parents, while he has to deal with the pain caused by his own daughter's drug addiction. His presence divides the community and festering recriminations heighten the rancour.

Shot in striking widescreen compositions by Paul Sarossy, Egoyan's film quietly accumulates in power as it reflects thoughtfully on pain and loss, grieving and healing. The story takes its title from a line in an old Negro spiritual: "In the sweet hereafter we'll all live together."

Egoyan eschews the obvious tear-jerking potential of the story, and the film is all the more potent for his cool, compassionate handling of the material. His use of Browning's poem, The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, while initially risky and unlikely, adds to its emotional resonance. The film is accompanied by a superb score from Egoyan's regular composer, Mychael Danna, and prominently features the song Courage, performed first by the Tragically Hip, and then hauntingly by Sarah Polley over the closing credits.

As a survivor of the bus crash, Sarah Polley gives one of the most striking performances in a remarkably well-acted film, while Ian Holm gives a subtle, understated performance. The exemplary cast also includes Egoyan regulars Bruce Greenwood, Gabrielle Rose, David Hemblem and Arsinee Khanhian, along with Alberta Watson (the mother in Spanking The Monkey) and Tom McCamus (recently seen as Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night).

"Contact" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin

Directed by Robert Zemeckis in his first film since Forrest Gump and based on the best-seller by the late scientist Carl Sagan, Contact is an over-earnest and longwinded exploration of different responses to the prospect of extraterrestrial life, although it benefits from a number of imaginative ideas and the intense central performance of Jodie Foster.

She plays Ellie Arroway, a fiercely committed astronomer patiently, obsessively searching for evidence of other intelligent life. When she receives a cryptic radio message from the distant star of Vega, the world anxiously awaits the outcome and prepares to send a single representative into deep space. Arroway's hopes of being that passenger are jeopardised by several men, including her former mentor (Tom Skeritt), the US national security adviser (James Woods), a fundamentalist religious leader (Rob Lowe, of all people), and her one-time lover (bland Matthew McConaughey), a religious scholar and government adviser.

After an arresting opening of a long zoom into deep space with soundbites of Earth's history crackling on the soundtrack, the movie settles into a promising prologue with Arroway a young girl whose interest in astronomy is triggered by her father (David Morse). Cut to her grown-up years and director Zemeckis lays on the movie's earnestness with a heavy hand, reducing most of the characters to caricatures. The intermittent flashes of imagination at work in Contact are undermined by its mostly rambling nature over the course of a bloated 2 1/2 hours. As in Forrest Gump, Zemeckis plays digital gimmicks with images of real people, this time dropping Bill Clinton into the picture, not once but twice, and without consultation - to the president's express "annoyance".

"Face" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI, Dublin

Hailed by some British commentators as a hard-boiled London thriller in the tradition of Get Carter and The Long Good Fri- day, Antonia Bird's Face falls some way short of those gritty antecedents. This story of dishonour among thieves in London's East End is prefaced by the words sung by Paul Weller in Everyone Has A Price To Pay over the opening credits.

Taking its title from a slang term for criminal, Face centres on a sad-eyed crook, Ray (Robert Carlyle), who was "working honest" until he was 24. Grating flashbacks remind us regularly of Ray's past as a left-wing activist. Now 35, he's an ex-convict and carrying out the meticulously planned robbery of a security firm with his partners in crime played by Ray Winstone, Steven Waddington, Phil Davis and Damon Albarn.

"I don't like crime films," says Ray. "They never show criminals in a good light." Face, which was written by Ronan Bennett, is populated almost entirely by criminals, apart from a few token good women, and it makes one of the criminals, Ray, its questioning moral centre. Director Bird, who made Priest, never shirks from the violent, bloody milieu in which the men live and operate, although much of the worst violence is toned down by the movie's grimy, nocturnal look. The impact of the dialogue is reduced, too, because some of it is quite indistinct.

Gerry Conlon, the subject of In The Name Of The Father, makes his acting debut in a cameo as a drug dealer roughed up by crooks pretending to be police, and Bennett gives Conlon the ironic line: "I've had experience of the old Bill and they don't usually come on this strong, not even on a bad day."

Face is rooted in the gritty, firmly etched performances of its leading actors, with the versatile Robert Carlyle, fresh from The Full Monty, impressively expressive. In his first movie, Blur singer Damon Albarn acquits himself reasonably well in a limited role.

"The Leading Man" (15) Virgin, UCI Dublin

Another rock star, Jon Bon Jovi, takes the central role in The Leading Man, made by the generally reliable Australian director John Duigan, whose credits include The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, and written by his sister, Virginia.

This risible and implausible yarn of infidelity among London theatrical types features a chestwaxed Jon Bon Jovi as a smoothtalking Hollywood actor working on the London stage, and Lambert Wilson as a playwright who cheats on his wife (Anna Galiena) with a young actor (Thandie Newton). The cast members, who also include Barry Humphries, Patricia Hodge, Diana Quick and David Warner, are set adrift by the arch, stilted dialogue. "We can't go on like this," observes one character in the story. Too right!