Nightlife in Manhattan in the 1980s

"The Last Days Of Disco" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

"The Last Days Of Disco" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

Following Metropolitan and Barcelona and fitting between them, Whit Stillman's third feature The Last Days Of Disco completes his triptych of nightlife movies observing, to borrow a term from Metropolitan, the UHBs - the urban haute bourgeoisie - and the romantic travails in their lives. This time the setting is Manhattan in the early 1980s as a disparate assortment of graduates find themselves uncomfortably cut adrift after the comparative cosiness of their college years. The naive, impressionable Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and the sly, spiteful Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) find low-paid work in the same publishing firm - where they study formulas for finding best-sellers - and they move into a rundown apartment together. Their nights are spent at a club where they encounter Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), an advertising executive who sneaks clients into the disco; Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), a two-timing lawyer; Josh (Matt Keeslar), an assistant district attorney; and Des (Stillman regular Chris Eigeman) who works at the club and fakes being gay whenever he feels like breaking up with a woman.

All of these young people are introspective and insecure in different ways, and they express themselves through Whit Stillman's signature articulate and idiosyncratic dialogue which, as ever, is shot through with sharp, wry humour, not least in their extended debate on the morality of Lady And The Tramp. Gradually, they reveal themselves as knowing a lot less about life than they would have each other believe, and they are dogged by fear of failure, personal and professional.

Unlike the imminent cinema releases, 54 and Velvet Goldmine, which are set in or around the same period, Stillman's film is less concerned with the period in which it is set than with the people who inhabit that period. That said, Stillman also succeeds in pinning down the period detail with exactitude, and - crucially for a film with a night-club setting - he gets the music precisely right in a joyous soundtrack featuring over two dozen well-selected disco hits of the time.

READ MORE

The cast is no less impeccably chosen in this literate, insightful film in which the young English actress, Kate Beckinsale (from Shooting Fish) is outstanding as the disloyal Charlotte, who believes that most authors are "conceited dopes" and whose true ambition (and probable future) is in television.

"Mulan" (General) On general release

Loosely based on an ancient Chinese legend, Disney's 36th full-length animated feature Mulan proves to be the studio's liveliest, most entertaining and most visually arresting animated offering sinceAladdin. In sharp contrast to the hapless, dependant heroines of past Disney productions, the eponymous Mulan is a high-spirited, courageous and resourceful young Chinese woman who more than holds her own in a rigidly patriarchal society.

Following a prelude involving Mulan's hilariously disastrous visit to a matchmaker comes news of an invading barbarian army and an order from the emperor that one man in each family must serve in the imperial army. Unwilling to allow her elderly, ailing father be conscripted, Mulan disguises herself as a man and enlists in his place. To watch over her, the family ancestors send Mushu, a feisty, motor-mouth dragon whose reputation is in need of restoration.

Much of the early humour derives from Mulan's attempts to act masculine - and from the macho posturing of her fellow soldiers - especially when the young commanding officer performs the song, I'm Going To Make A Man Out Of You. His singing voice is provided by Donny Osmond, and Mulan is voiced by Ming-Na Wen (from One Night Stand). Serving the comic function of Robin Williams's Genie in Aladdin, Eddie Murphy, on more amusing form than in any of the recent movies in which he has appeared, voices Mushu with gusto.

Compared to most Disney animated features, there is less emphasis on songs in Mulan - just four - and it's all the better for that, especially when the film is powered by such a sweeping dramatic original score from Jerry Goldsmith. It provides a rousing accompaniment to the movie's often breathtaking visual imagery, in which the Disney animation team excel themselves, drawing on Chinese art and calligraphy for inspiration and producing one show-stopping tour de force in a spectacular battle sequence as hundreds of Huns charge down a snow-covered mountain.

When I saw Mulan with an audience mostly made up of children last Saturday afternoon, they were rapt with attention throughout and maybe even enjoyed the movie as much as I did.

"The Dream Life Of Angels (La Vie Revee Des Anges)" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

This smouldering, low-key and uncompromising French drama from the writer-director Erich Zonca features Elodie Bouchez as Isa, a resourceful, optimistic 20-year-old who roams from city to city with all her belongings in a single rucksack. Stopping off in Lille, she gets a job sewing in a garment factory and befriends Marie (Natacha Regnier), an edgy, anti-social loner who works there.

The film follows their experiences when they share an apartment whose owner and her teenage daughter have been hospitalised after a car crash. Finding the daughter's diaries, Isa gets so caught up in them that she begins to make regular hospital visits to see the girl, who lies in a coma. Meanwhile, Isa and Marie become casually involved with a couple of night-club bouncers, while the volatile Marie also succumbs to the club's seductive but duplicitous young owner (Gregoire Colin).

Erick Zonca, who directed his first short film six years ago when he was 36, makes an assured feature film debut with this keenly observed naturalistic drama which echoes Agnes Varda's Vagabonde in its early stages and the cinema of Ken Loach in the compassion and care Zonca shows towards central characters who feel alienated from society. As Isa, Elodie Bouchez affirms the considerable promise she exhibited in Les Roseaux Sauvages, Clubbed To Death and A Toute Vitesse, and Natacha Regnier, a relative newcomer from Belgium, she succeeds in generating audience sympathy for the sullen Marie. Bouchez and Regnier well deserved the best actress award they shared at Cannes this year for their performances in this emotionally involving character study.

"Divorcing Jack" (18) General release

The humour is consistently black in David Caffrey's vigorous film of Colin Bateman's novel, Divorcing Jack, which has been adapted by Bateman himself. It's set in 1999, in the run-up to the election of Northern Ireland's new prime minister, with Robert Lindsay as the suave front-runner, a former IRA bombing victim who campaigns on a peace platform.

The scenario's central character, Dan Starkey (David Thewlis) is an abrasive Belfast journalist who writes a weekly satirical newspaper column. His drunken adulterous fling with a young art student (Laura Fraser) he meets in Botanic Park ends abruptly when he finds her dead in bed. Soon he has the RUC, IRA, UVF and the British army on his trail in this cynical and acerbic comedy which regularly - and gleefully - turns jaw-droppingly irreverent.

Briskly paced and marked by some keen comic timing, it marks a notable feature debut for its young Irish director, David Caffrey, although it could benefit from some fine-tuning of its over-plotted final stages and the deletion of a superfluous montage of flashbacks.

Thewlis is on fine form ahead of a spirited cast which exhibits keen comic timing and also notably includes Bronagh Gallagher as a foul-mouthed Belfast taxi driver, Rachel Griffiths as a nurse who moonlights as a nun-o-gram, and Jason Isaacs as an ex-IRA man named "Cow" Pat Keegan.

"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

After the glory days of their literary adaptations from E.M. Forster (A Room With A View, Maurice and Howards End) and Kasuo Ishiguro (The Remains Of The Day), the Merchant-Ivory team foundered with the ponderous Jefferson In Paris and Surviving Picasso. Their latest movie, again from a literary source, marks a return to form. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is based on the autobiographical 1990 novel by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of the author and war veteran James Jones, who wrote From Here To Eternity. In the film, set during her formative years living in Paris with liberal, expatriate American parents, James Jones is thinly disguised as Bill Willis and sympathetically portrayed by Kris Kristofferson, while Kaylie, played by promising newcomer Leelee Sobieski, becomes Channe.

James Ivory's film of these dislocated characters, who never try too hard to assimilate and never feel they belong, is divided into three chapters, each named after the key male in Channe's life at the time. The first deals with the arrival of her adopted brother, Benoit, who changes his name to Billy; the second with the precocious Francis, who becomes her closest friend in her early teens; and the third with her father as his health gives way.

The principal problems with this episodic structure are the sketchiness of its nature and the abrupt disappearance of some of the most interesting characters - Francis, in particular - when time and the narrative move on to the next chapter. That said, the film survives as solid, straightforward narrative cinema, leisurely paced, attentive to detail and sprinkled with some unexpectedly off-the-wall diversions, among them a wildly over-the-top avant-garde performance of Salome. As the gruff but amiable paterfamilias, Kris Kristofferson heads a solid cast that also includes Barbara Hershey (as his wife), Jane Birkin, Virginie Ledoyen, Dominique Blanc, Jesse Bradford, and it introduces a distinctive young talent in Anthony Roth Costanzo, who plays Francis with panache and demonstrates a gorgeous countertenor voice when called upon to sing.

"A Perfect Murder" (15) General release

This glossy remake of Alfred Hitchock's 1954 thriller Dial M For Murder (which was shot in 3D) deals with a triangular relationship in which all three participants are up to their necks in deception. One of those necks is the most admired in contemporary cinema; it belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow, who follows in the tradition of Hitchcock's glacial blonde women (in the part originally played by Grace Kelly) as Emily Taylor, a multilingual translator working for the US ambassador to the United Nations.

As yet another of the wealthy, impeccably dressed but morally flawed protagonists as whom he has become typecast, Michael Douglas is on auto-pilot as her husband, Steve, a hard-nosed, work-obsessed Wall Street bond trader (played by Ray Milland played the role first time round). The third side of the triangle is David Shaw (played by Viggo Moertensen), a bohemian artist with a shady past. He and Emily are secret lovers. The predictable consequences of their actions involve double-crossing, an excess of coincidence, a paucity of sustained logic - and such risible dialogue as Steve Taylor's line to his wife's lover, "You steal the crown jewels of a man's soul."

Andrew Davis, who made The Fugitive, efficiently directs this ultimately pointless remake of a none-too-remarkable original. At least it's not as stage-bound as Hitchcock's version. Gus Van Sant has an infinitely tougher act to follow in his imminent remake of the Hitchcock classic, Psycho.