Return to Me (PG) General release

The delightful 1987 romantic comedy, Moonstruck, featured a Dean Martin song over the opening credits and Cher in an Oscar-winning performance as a widow who, in her late 30s - and surrounded by a colourful extended family of elderly matchmaking Italian-Americans - finds love at first sight when she meets an unassuming younger man played by Nicolas Cage.

The mostly whimsical Return to Me, the first film directed by character actor Bonnie Hunt, opens with the Dean Martin song of the title and features David Duchovny as Bob, a grieving Chicago architect who, a year after the death of his wife (Joely Richardson), meets and falls head over heels for a younger woman, Grace (Minnie Driver). She works in her family's Irish-Italian restaurant, O'Reilly's, and spends most of her time with her colourful, elderly, matchmaking Italian and Irish relatives.

Where Moonstruck and Return to Me diverge is when the new movie turns serious: Bob is unaware that Grace's life was saved when she received his late wife's heart in a transplant operation. Bonnie Hunt, who also features in the film as Grace's best friend, allows this scenario to overstay its welcome over the course of a two-hour running time, which is unfortunate given the chemistry which sparks between Duchovny and Driver.

Away from the strange, dark world of The X Files, Duchovny seizes on a welcome opportunity to reveal a relaxed and even charming personality, while Driver is refreshingly less mannered than usual. As her grandfather, Marty O'Reilly, Carroll O'Connor lays on the blarney with a trowel.

Michael Dwyer

Sunshine (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The Hungarian director Istvan Szabo returns to territory he had previously covered with great success in this epic drama, which spans four generations of a Jewish family in Budapest, from the late 19th century to the collapse of communism. The film explores the terrible history of Central European Jews through the story of the Sonnenscheins, a prosperous family which tries, over successive generations, to assimilate into a Hungarian society where anti-Semitism always lurks just beneath the surface.

Ignatz Sonnenschein is a successful lawyer who changes his name to the more Hungarian-sounding Sors, but finds all his dreams of security collapsing when his beloved Emperor is toppled from power at the end of the first World War. His son, Adam Sors, is a fencing champion who represents Hungary at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but is still not quite accepted by the anti-Semitic officer elite of his own team, and who ends up dying at the hands of the Nazis. Adam's son, Ivan, becomes a committed Party official in the post-war Communist regime, intent on hunting down the sort of fascists who killed his father, but he in turn finds that the Stalinist functionaries who give him his orders are as corrupt and bigoted as their predecessors.

All three roles are played by Ralph Fiennes, who does a more than competent job of delineating these different, related characters - but somehow the overall effect is unsatisfying, as if we're being short-changed by a simplified, truncated version of these huge, awful events. In fact, even at more than three hours, Sunshine is a curiously sketchy, insubstantial film, especially in comparison with the loose trilogy - Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Hanussen - which Szabo has already made on similar themes of identity and moral chaos in 20th century Europe.

There are signs here of the dreaded Europudding syndrome - an English-language cast performing a European epic and losing much of it in the translation - an impression exacerbated by the "Idiot's Guide to European History" voiceover, which takes us from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the 1956 Budapest Uprising. One might have thought that anyone interested enough to go to Sunshine might have some knowledge of such events, but the producers clearly don't think so. The result is a disappointingly prosaic film which lacks the elliptical complexity and moral weight of Szabo's earlier work.

Hugh Linehan

Drive Me Crazy (12) General release

If I were a teenage girl, I imagine that I would find rather more to enjoy than I did in the light and slight romantic comedy that is Drive Me Crazy. Teenage girls certainly would be more interested in checking out the first movie to feature Melissa Joan Hart, the popular star of the amiable television series, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. They probably would be further distracted by the brooding good looks of her co-star, Adrian Grenier, and so, less likely to realise or care that the ending of the movie is signalled in the first reel.

Hart and Grenier are neighbouring students Nicole and Chase, former childhood friends who have drifted apart in their teen years. The wholesome Nicole is caught up in organising events for her high school's centennial week celebrations, while the moody Chase is engaged in minor acts of rebellion. They pretend to get involved with each other as a ploy to encourage jealousy and interest in their respective objects of desire. No prizes for guessing what happens next in this inoffensive and thoroughly predictable picture which is blandly directed by John Schultz and relies heavily on the appeal of its two leads. Scripted by Dawson's Creek writer Rob Thomas, it's based on a novel titled How I Created My Perfect Prom Date.

Michael Dwyer

Gangster No 1 (18) General release

"Oh, no - not another British gangster pic," audiences may feel when confronted with Paul McGuigan's tale of betrayal and revenge among the knife-and-gun-wielding classes of London's East End. But, unlike such dismal Lock, Stock and ripoffs as Circus and Love, Honour and Obey, Gangster No 1 actually does something interesting with the iconography of British crime, thanks to a sharp script (by Dubliner Johnny Ferguson), some visually audacious directing by McGuigan, and a bravura performance from Paul Bettany in the central role.

Narrated in flashback from the 1990s, by Bettany's older self (a shamelessly over-acting Malcolm McDowell), Gangster No 1 is largely set in the London of 1968, a place of mod-sharp mobsters, beehived lovelies and Jag-driving spivs. Bettany, the rising young star of a crew of hard men led by suave David Thewlis, is soon looking to supplant his boss.

All this is recalled, some 30 years later, by McDowell, who is at his most effective providing the enjoyably baroque voiceover for the 1960s sequences. That overblown verbal style chimes well with a visual scheme which doesn't so much nod as lay down before such classic gangster pics of the period as Get Carter and Point Blank. Such self-conscious homage could easily be read as mere pastiche, but McGuigan, whose debut feature was the wildly uneven but visually arresting Irvine Welsh adaptation, The Acid House, brings a real sense of purpose and intelligence to proceedings.

Gangster No 1 has its flaws - the 1990s denouement is far too reductionist, and budgetary limitations start showing up in the alarmingly uneven ageing of the characters over the 30 years. But, as a rare example of a British film which excavates the past without revering it, and plays on style without losing substance, it's well worth seeing. And, on the evidence here, Bettany, as the cold-blooded young killer, has the makings of a major star.

Hugh Linehan