Muscle men and mystery men

"L'Appartement" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Tantalising, surprising and satisfying in equal measure, Gilles Mimouni's very clever genre-crossing coalescence of comedy, thriller and romance in L'Appartement is as intricately plotted and structured as the most devious jigsaw. In his teasingly revealed scheme of things obsessive and lustful, Mimouni's movie is a pleasure from start to finish and marks an immensely assured feature film debut for him.

Set in Paris, L'Appartement features Vincent Cassell as Max, a computer executive engaged to be married and about to travel to Tokyo on a four-day business trip - until he is detoured by a series of chance encounters. First he meets his old friend, Lucien (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) whose shoe store plays a pivotal role in the time-shifting scenario.

While he is having a farewell drink with his fiancee, Max overhears a woman in a phone booth and recognises the voice of Lisa (Monica Bellucci), a woman from his past. His insatiable curiosity to confront that unresolved relationship brings him into contact with another woman, the actress Alice (Romane Bohringer) and with an adulterous art dealer (Olivier Granier) who may have been responsible for his wife's death.

Past and present collide before Max's future is finally decided as director Mimouni seamlessly cuts back and forwards in time, teasingly revealing his complex, splintered scenario in a succession of clues which variously puzzle, intrigue or inform the audience. It would be entirely unfair to reveal further about a movie in which the gradual unravelling of that scenario commands the attention right down to the very last twist in the tale.

In the film's observations on obsession, voyeurism and acting, it invokes copious references to other dramatic sources, most explicitly to Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Mimouni's adept amalgamation of these allusions heighten the fascination exerted by his own movie, a true original in its own right. Crucially, his casting of the central roles has been most astute, and he elicits fine performances from, in particular, the expressive Romane Bohringer and Vincent Cassell, the latter virtually unrecognisable from the pinched-faced skinhead he played in La Haine.

"Hercules" (general; nationwide)

Marking a return to form after the relative disappointment of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and the unmitigated disaster of Pocohontas, the new animated feature film from Disney successfully appropriates the Hercules myth for its own entertaining purposes. The directors, John Musker and Ron Clements, were also responsible for Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, two of the sassiest offerings from New Disney since the studio was revived in the mid-1980s, and the film bears their unmistakable stamp - rapid-fire jokes, lots of contemporary pop culture references and a brash, highly kinetic animation style. There's not much that Musker and Clements can do with the character of Hercules himself - he's drawn and voiced (by Tate Donovan) as a big, dim sports jock trying to come to terms with his own strength - so the real fun is to be had from the Danny De Vito-voiced satyr Phil, Hercules's personal trainer, and most especially from Hades, Lord of the Underworld (voiced by James Woods as a schmoozing Hollywood agent), the character who most obviously shows the influence of production designer Gerald Scarfe.

Some of the gags work better than others (there's a whole sequence spoofing the promotional activities of sports personalities like Michael Jordan, which will surely date very quickly), but the device of the Muses, conceived here as brassy, gospel-singing soul sisters, is inspired. It's a pity, though, that the conceit isn't carried through into the rest of the score, as we have to endure yet more of those anaemic MOR ballads which composer Alan Menken has made a Disney speciality.

"Madame Butterfly"

The movie I really want to see is Madame Butterfly's Revenge, a sequel to Puccini's opera in which the dreadful Pinkerton, having returned to the US with his cute little half-caste son and his spanking new All-American bride, degenerates into gibbering alcholic dementia while Madame Pinkerton carries on a passionate affair with a young Japanese naval officer and Pinkerton Junior grows into a teenage werewolf. In the meantime there's always Frederic Mitterrand's persuasive new film of the original, which tells the oh-so-familiar story in an engagingly straightforward manner. The opera has always seemed endless to me: the film, by contrast, fairly zips along, so that you're fumbling for your tissues before you know it.

But then almost any production of this opera could make you weep. Some productions, alas, make you chuckle as well - at least at the point where the stately, plump soprano soloist invites the American consul, Sharpless, to guess her age and he answers, just a shade too promptly, "ten". No danger of that here, as the stunning young Chinese singer Ying Huang brings to the role of Cio-Cio San - as well as a fresh and beguiling singing voice - exactly the mixture of naivete and dignity it demands. She is surrounded by a cast of equally impressive actor-singers; the American baritone Richard Cowan gives an unusual depth of focus to the role of the shady diplomat Sharpless, while the Chinese tenor Jing Ma Fan, as the mercenary marriage-broker Goro, sports a marvellous line in swishing silk and supercilious stares. And while it's notoriously difficult to evaluate vocal performances on the basis of a big-screen performance, the Chinese mezzo Ning Liang sounds particularly lustrous, though there are few chances to shine dramatically in the role of the taciturn maid Suzuki.

Frederic Mitterrand was wise to place most of his emphasis on characterisation - sets are reduced to a couple of pretty views, a flower-filled garden and the house of sliding partitions which so entrances the perfidious anti-hero - for, once hooked on the simple story of innocence betrayed, the audience will be swept to the final snuffle by Puccini's effortlessly powerful score.

"subUrbia" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

The fourth feature from the insightful Texan director, Richard Linklater, subUrbia registers as a singular disappointment after his mature, thoughtful and achingly romantic Before Sunrise. Characteristically for a Linklater movie, subUrbia follows its central characters over the course of a single day and night.

Linklater's first movie not drawn from an original screenplay of his own, subUrbia is adapted by Eric Bogosian from his 1994 play which was recently staged in Dublin. It's set in the fictional Texan surburb of Burnfield - although it was shot in Linklater's regular location of Austin, Texas - and as the camera traverses the terrain under the opening credits, Gene Pitney's 1962 movie theme, Town Without Pity plays on the soundtrack to signal what's to come.

Burnfield isn't strictly a town without pity in that its dazed and confused young slacker protagonists are as steeped in self-pity as they are lacking in self-awareness. Fresh out of their teens, they are disaffected, mostly unemployed and sinking alcohol to hide their fears for the future. To emphasise the emptiness of their lives, Bogosian heavy-handedly has them gathering nightly to drink at their teenage haunt, the corner of a convenience store by a deserted parking lot.

This predominantly stage-bound filmed play takes place on the night when a high school colleague returns home a rising MTV rock star in a stretch limo. Tensions simmer and rise as those he left behind are faced with his success and their own failure, and are heightened by heavy drinking and the racist attitude of one of them to the store's new owners, an ambitious young Pakistani couple.

While there are some sharp exchanges and observations, most of the characters speak awkwardly in statements, like human placards, and their material already seems dated, three years after the play was first staged in New York during the short-lived grunge era. As the rambling, downbeat narrative trundles into its last act, it becomes as tiresome as the people who populate it and it is further undermined by a grating con-trick of a script contrivance. As the college dropout who is the movie's conscience, Giovanni Ribisi is the most credible in a cast of which the only familiar actor, the US indies stalwart, Parker Posey, is saddled with the most cliche-riddled role, as the rock star's Bel-Air publicist.

"Photographing Fairies" (15, Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin)

Set in England in the immediate aftermath of the first World War, Photographing Fairies is a surreal and captivating melodrama which uses that period's fascination with mysticism as the backdrop for a strangely contemporary gothic melodrama about love and loss. Toby Stephens plays Charles Castle, a professional photographer paralysed by grief after the death of his young wife in an accident during the couple's honeymoon in the Swiss Alps. At a meeting of the Theosophical Society, he uses his technical knowledge of photography to pour scorn on the photographs of "fairies" presented to the society, clashing with novelist Arthur Conan Doyle in the process (Conan Doyle's support for the photographs of the "Cottingley Fairies" is the true foundation for this fictional story). But when Stephens is visited at his studio by a woman (Frances Barber) with a photograph purporting to be of her daughters playing with fairies, he can find no evidence of fakery and decides to travel to the small village where she lives to investigate further, coming into conflict with Barber's husband (Ben Kingsley), the local vicar. Death and danger follow as Stephens is forced to confront the possibility that there is another world beyond the one we know.

Nick Willing's impressive directorial debut convincingly evokes a period when death and grief were commonplace in British society, but his real achievement is in his unique, almost quirky interweaving of fantasy, black comedy and tragedy. Stephens gives a remarkable performance as the emotionally damaged Castle, hiding for most of the film behind a rictus sneer of self-contempt. Ben Kingsley gives his best performance in some time as the tortured vicar, and cinematographer John de Borman's compositions avoid the cliches of British Heritage cinema to deliver some original and unsettling compositions. Photographing Fairies is a genuinely unusual and original film, not easy to categorise but well worth seeing.

"Shooting Fish" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Stefan Schwartz's entertaining British comedy of two endlessly resourceful young confidence tricksters takes its title from an American slang term, "shooting fish in a barrel", which denotes the ease by which people can be swindled. A prologue introduces the two con-men as boys, orphans raised on opposite sides of the Atlantic, before the movie moves into the present when they're in their twenties and working as a team in London.

One is the shy, technical wizard, Jez, played by the Irish actor Stuart Townsend in a ghastly pudding-bowl haircut, and the other is the brash, fast-talking American Dylan (Dan Futterman). Their intention is to make a million pounds each and buy a mansion in the country, and no ruse is too large or too daunting for them, from a loft insulation scam involving a whole street of houses to peddling what they claim is a voice-operated, keyboard-free computer.

Into their lives comes Georgie (Kate Beckinsale), an almost saintly medical student who has her own money-raising ambitions. The capable Beckinsale does what she can with an underwritten character which proves more problematical as the picture proceeds, especially in its misconceived and over-extended later stages. All of the fun in the film derives from the sundry schemes of Jez and Dylan, and from the sharp, well-matched performances of Townsend and Futterman.

The movie comes with the obligatory Britpop soundtrack (Space, Wannadies, Bluetones, Divine Comedy et al), interspersed with the seemingly even more obligatory collection of songs from Burt Bacharach, to whom Jez and Dylan have built a jukebox shrine in their gasometer home.

"A Simple Wish" (PG), Savoy, Virgin.

Why can't a fairy godmother be a man? That's today's question, boys and girls. There's an earnest pedagogical shadow hovering over Michael Ritchie's contemporary New York fairytale about a little girl (Mara Wilson) who enlists the help of a fairy godmother to ensure that her father (Robert Pastorelli) gets the leading role in a Broadway musical. When he is transformed into a statue through the incompetence of her (male) fairy-godmother (Martin Short) she discovers that magic is unreliable and adults are fallible. Short's fussy performance - a series of camp one-liners that fall flat, together with Kathleen Turner's overacting as an ex-fairy godmother, fail to lift this into the magical realm so carefully evoked by the sets.