Lynch finds his way home

"Lost Highway" (members and guests only) IFC

Despite his difficulties in the 1990s, a new film from David Lynch is still a major event for anyone interested in cinema, and the first offering in five years from the influential film-maker doesn't disappoint, although it may prove too strong for some stomachs. Lost Highway is Lynch's best film since Blue Velvet, but it's also his most non-mainstream work since Eraserhead in 1976. That's not to say that there isn't an audience for this unique and often superb movie, but many people will be shocked, not just by the typically Lynchian brew of strange sex and weird violence, but by the way in which image, sound and music are deployed as weapons to assault the senses.

If Lynch has had one over-arching difficulty since making his masterpiece, Blue Velvet, 11 years ago, it has been in reconciling his thematic concerns with the requirements of feature film narrative. In Lost Highway, he subverts and parodies the problem with two strategies, one circular - the film's ending is also its beginning - and the other a plot McGuffin of such magnificent implausibility that you either accept it or spend the rest of the movie in a state of high irritation. There are two stories - the first has Bill Pullman as a jazz musician whose relationship with his wife (Patricia Arquette) ends nightmarishly and violently when videotapes of their home start arriving on their doorstep.

The second has Balthazar Getty as a young car mechanic who becomes dangerously involved with a gangster's moll (also played by Arquette). However, both men are, in some unexplained way, the same person - logic does not hold sway here, and several of the characters' personas swerve and blur into each other along the way.

Lost Highway has moments of sheer, shuddering brilliance that remind you of Lynch's genius for the telling image, as well as sequences which reaffirm his ability to create a coherent dreamscape in a way which no other film-maker working currently is capable of. If the second part is less convincing than the first, and if the film as a whole is about a quarter of an hour too long, that's a relatively small price to pay for one of the most memorable cinematic experiences of the year so far.

"Conspiracy Theory" (15s) Nationwide

Fractured identity is also a theme in Richard Donner's Conspiracy Theory, but there the similarities end. This bloated star vehicle features Mel Gibson as a disturbed New York taxi driver who believes that the world's strings are being pulled by an invisible cabal of secret organisations which are responsible for everything from Kennedy's assassination to water fluoridation. Gibson is obsessed with Justice Department attorney Julia Roberts, whom he plagues with his theories. Of course, it soon becomes apparent that, in some respects at least, he is right, and the two find themselves on the run from a mysterious and murderous organisation headed by Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame.

Somewhere amid the self-indulgence and commercial cop-outs there's the germ of a good movie here, one that we were never going to get from this particular team. Donner, who made Gibson an A-list star with the Lethal Weapon franchise, has a slick enough eye to make the New York street-scapes interesting, but his shallow style becomes tedious over the movie's two and a quarter hours. Gibson specialises in playing loveable heroes with a manic edge, but here he takes it too far, coming across as the love child of Travis Bickle and David Helfgott. Roberts is equally annoying - there's only so much lip-trembling emotion an audience can take in one movie. As the plot ascends to ever higher levels of absurdity, any tension drains away and there's nothing left but boredom and excess.

"The Full Monty" (15s) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

After such codswallop, Peter Cattaneo's engaging and unpretentious directorial debut comes as a breath of fresh air. Like last year's Brassed Off, The Full Monty is a comedy set against the backdrop of male unemployment in Northern England. Robert Carlyle plays Gaz, an out-of-work Sheffield steelworker who needs to make some money to retain joint custody of his son. Impressed by the amount of money he sees the male stripping group the Chippendales make on a visit to the city, he assembles an unlikely group of strippers from among his friends and former co-workers. The film follows them through their preparations and rehearsals, all the way to baring it all - the "full monty" of the title.

Films like The Full Monty and Brassed Off are sometimes criticised as Loach Lite, "heart-warming" stories set against the backdrop of Britain's dispossessed classes. That would be unfair to both films, but in particular to this one. In many ways The Full Monty is closer in style and subject matter to Stephen Frears's versions of The Snapper and The Van (although it's a lot more successful than the latter film). Simon Beaufoy's script intelligently and sympathetically portrays the emasculation of unemployment without ever becoming patronising or losing its sense of humour. Carlyle gives yet another fine performance, ably supported by an excellent cast, and director Cattaneo, who was responsible for the excellent TV drama Loved Up a couple of years ago, makes an impressive transition to the bigger screen.