"One Night Stand" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI Dublin
Following Leaving Las Vegas and its emotionally wrenching chronicle of alcoholism and suicide, the new film from the Newcastle writer-director, Mike Figgis, is a less harrowing but characteristically moody exercise - a romantic drama that is adventurous, offbeat, and ultimately satisfying. One Night Stand opens as its pivotal character, Max, played by Wesley Snipes, speaks directly to camera, introducing himself as 35, very happily married with two children and working as a commercials director.
On a business trip from his Los Angeles base to New York, he responds to an unexpected change in his schedule which strands him in the city overnight, and as a consequence of a rare impulsive action, throws his well-ordered life into turmoil. A leaking pen staining his shirt triggers his first visit to the hotel room of Karen (Nastassja Kinski), a rocket scientist who offers him the room as a place to change; by the end of the night he's undressing in the same room and engaging in adultery with Karen, who is also married. To reveal any further would be unfair in the case of this unpredictable picture of love and deceit, image and perception. What ought to be noted is that Figgis dares to saddle his narrative with one huge coincidence which demands the willing suspension of disbelief. It is worth bearing with the movie, as it eventually gets away with that dramatic leap. Looks and glances speak volumes in this subtle, tender drama which belies its roots in a screenplay by trashmonger Joe Eszterhas; Figgis receives the sole screenwriting credit on the film, which has clearly been stripped of the lurid, sensationalist potential of an Eszterhas script. Figgis also composed the atmospheric jazz-influenced score, most effectively employed in the bedroom sequence when Max and Karen spend the night together in New York.
One Night Stand marks a refreshing break from action movie roles for Wesley Snipes, who received the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival last autumn for this understated, sensitive performance, while Nastassja Kinski seizes upon the possibilities of her strongest role in a very long time. Robert Downey Jr is haunting and touching as Snipes's best friend, a gay dancer and choreographer who is dying of AIDS. An exemplary cast also features Ming-Na Wen and Kyle MacLachlan, with cameos from Julian Sands, Amanda Donohoe, Donovan Leitch, Ione Skye, Saffron Burrows and film director Vincent Ward. The film is stylishly photographed by Declan Quinn, the Irish-American cinematographer who also collaborated with Figgis on Leaving Las Vegas. Michael Dwyer
"The Jackal" (18) Nationwide
The Scottish film-maker Michael Caton-Jones follows his return to home turf for Rob Roy with the glossy thriller, The Jackal, a very loose reworking of Frederick Forsyth's novel, The Day Of The Jackal, which goes uncredited in the film. Instead, the credits acknowledge that the new film is "based on the motion picture screenplay, The Day Of The Jackal, by Kenneth Ross". That screenplay served as the basis for an accomplished 1973 thriller directed by the late Fred Zinnemann, a film that sustained its gripping hold despite the fact that we knew the outcome from the outset: that the assassin at its centre would not succeed in assassinating Charles De Gaulle.
One of the many problems with The Jackal is that its assassin's prey is not remotely as dramatically interesting as the former French president - the new target, we are told, is the director of the FBI, a character barely featured in the film. The eponymous assassin is a ruthless, chameleonlike professional killer and master of disguise who demands a fee of $70 million to carry out the killing. He is played with some relish by Bruce Willis.
Enter the deputy director of the FBI operative, played with effortless gravitas by Sidney Poitier, who decides to free an IRA killer, Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere) from an American prison in the hope that he will help track down the Jackal. Fortunately for the FBI, Mulqueen is one of those ordinary decent Provos, like Brad Pitt's character in The Devil's Own, who is only interested in killing for "the cause".
"An entire government wants me dead, mister," he tells Agent Poitier, adding that his chest is covered in scars that are "souvenirs of British hospitality". Audiences here may derive some incidental amusement from Gere's Irish lilt, which is much closer to Tom Cruise's attempt in Far And Away than to Daniel Day Lewis's impeccable Dublin and Belfast accents for Jim Sheridan. There's more chortling in store when Poitier offers Gere a coffee, adding as an afterthought, "Of course you drink Guinness in your country".
Made with more money than sense, this convoluted picture is one of those globetrotting, hi-tech thrillers which dutifully captions its ever-shifting locales as the action moves from Moscow to Helsinki to London to Washington DC to Quebec, and to emphasise its truly international flavour, the narrative involves a tough, chain-smoking Russian intelligence officer (Diane Venora) and a reformed Basque terrorist (Mathilda May) with the Americans and the Irishman.
Michael Dwyer
"The End Of Violence" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin This week's third new release made in America by a European film-maker is The End of Violence, directed by Wim Wenders in his first US outing since the marvellous Paris, Texas, which deservedly won Wenders the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984. Unfortunately, the return to an American setting does not mark a return to form for Wenders, whose decline continues with this pretentious and inane new film.
A meandering yarn, The End Of Violence follows two turgid plotlines to the point where they intersect utterly unconvincingly. One strand features Bill Pullman as a fabulously wealthy and smugly amoral Hollywood producer who has made his fortune out of selling mindless violence on the screen; the other has Gabriel Byrne as a brilliant computer scientist developing a massive, topsecret public surveillance operation inside the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles.
The result is a good-looking but self-important film which is as preposterous as it is snail-paced, populated by blank stereotypes and cluttered with irrelevant digressions. It is most likely to be remembered as the last movie to feature the great maverick filmmaker, Sam Fuller, who plays Byrne's father in the film and who died last year.
Michael Dwyer
"The Winter Guest" (15) Screen on D'Olier Street, Dublin In many of his cinema roles, Alan Rickman seems intent on displaying a supercilious intelligence that raises his characters above the surrounding hurlyburly. Rickman's directorial debut, The Winter Guest, shows further evidence of that intelligence, and of some real film-making talent, but is marred by overpreciousness in some of its performances, particularly that of its one star name, Emma Thompson. Thompson and her real-life mother, Phyllida Law, play daughter and mother in one of the four, self-contained narratives which unfold over the course of one wintry day in a small Scottish seaside town. This is an adaptation of Sharman MacDonald's stage play, which Rickman himself had originally commissioned and directed at London's Almeida Theatre.
The "winter guest" of the title can be read as the shadow of death, as a revelatory moment, or as the frozen landscape which visually dominates the film and is strikingly photographed by the talented Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (a further Irish connection is provided by costume designer Joan Bergin). Thompson is a recently widowed photographer, immobilised by grief, whom Law is trying to jolt back to life. Meanwhile, her 15year-old son (Gary Hollywood) experiences his first sexual encounter wih a flirtatious neighbour (Arlene Cockburn), two elderly ladies (Sandra Voe and Sheila Reid) embark on their pilgrimage to a funeral, and a pair of truant schoolboys (Sean Biggerstaff and Douglas Murphy) explore the icy coastline. While some of these stories intersect briefly, it's the less heavilyfreighted relationships involving the schoolboys and the old women that are the most memorable. The scenes between Thompson and Law seem closer to the piece's theatrical origins in their overscripted dialogue and heavyhanded delivery, while there's a suspicion of directorial sycophancy about Thompson's over-lit close-ups. The Winter Guest is genuinely affecting at times, though, with moments of great delicacy and emotional resonance.
Hugh Linehan
"Picture Perfect" (15) Nationwide It's getting hard these days to find a romantic comedy without a Friends star in it somewhere. After her supporting role in last year's abysmal She's The One, Jennifer Aniston gets her very own star vehicle with this bland offering, which reprises the favoured 1990s theme of a single career girl desperate for guy.
Aniston is an ambitious copywriter at a New York advertising company, who becomes aware that not only is her single state bothering her and annoying her mother (Olympia Dukakis), but hindering her progress up the corporate ladder. She allows herself to be manouevred into pretending that she is engaged to a young man (Jay Mohr) with whom she is photographed at a wedding, but the ruse comes unstuck when he accidentally becomes famous.
There's nothing here we haven't seen a million times before, so the film has to stand or fall on the quality of its dialogue and the ability of its star. In this case, both fail the test. There just aren't enough decent jokes in writer/director Glenn Gordon Caron's screenplay to sustain the formulaic storyline, and the attempt to poke some fun at the shallowness of the ad industry pulls all its punches, while Kevin Bacon and Ileanna Douglas are thrown away in minor roles. As for the star, you either like her or hate her, but all that mouth-puckering and hair-tossing, while it may (just about) work in a half-hour ensemble sitcom, becomes very wearing over the course of a full feature. If Aniston wants to break into movies, she might be better advised to put more clear water between her small screen persona and her film roles - Picture Perfect just comes across as Friends without the gags.
Hugh Linehan
