Sell-through video
On come the dancers and after a little langorous head swivelling, they're off, and the thrill is back.
The choreography is tighter, more imaginative and more adventurous than ever before, and the dancing, by turn, faster, more graceful - and sometimes so sassy that it puts the contrived Spice Girls firmly back in their box. [See Hot Licks, opposite page, for an opposing view of the Spicers].
For anyone only familiar with Riverdance from the original video and for Irish audiences who saw the stage show before it underwent a radical transformation on tour, Riverdance - The New Show is virtually a whole new show. Filmed by five cameras on the vast stage of Radio City Music Hall in New York, the video uses the widescreen 14:9 ratio to capture the experience to maximum effect. The credits, shot against a Manhattan skyscraper skyline, introduces the stars, Jean Butler and Maria Page's from the original and replacing Michael Flatley as the male lead, Colin Dunne.
For all its glorious immersion in the great traditions of the Broadway musical, Riverdance seamlessly retains its pervasive sense of Irishness, and as the show turns multi cultural in the second half, the continuity is now much more logically developed than it was originally. All too soon, we're 19 numbers down and just one to go, and the show gets back to its roots for the wonderful Riverdance International as the entire troupe fills the stage and Bill Whelan's resonant title song soars one more time. It's a knockout.
Rental video
Winner of the best director prize at Cannes in May, Fargo (18) is the finest film from brothers Joel and Ethan Coen since Miller's Crossing. A gloriously droll thriller, Fargo brings them back to their roots, being set in their home state of Minnesota and in form and content recalling their auspicious 1984 debut feature, Blood Simple. Fargo features William H. Macy as a debt ridden car salesman who concocts an elaborate scheme to squeeze money out of his wealthy, tight fisted father in law (Harve Presnell).
He hires two low life thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and offers them a portion of the reward money. One misguided move leads to another and the body count rises in the snowballing confusion. Meanwhile, the local police chief (Frances McDormand), who is seven months pregnant, immerses herself in the case, with all the sharpness of her wits. The result is a teasing, imaginative and very witty movie with, be warned, moments of abrupt, unexpected violence.
Jon Amiel's engrossing and well crafted but more conventional thriller, Copycat (18) features Sigourney Weaver as a criminal psychologist traumatised after surviving a murder attempt, and Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney as detectives who enlist her help to investigate a series of apparently connected murders.
Unfairly overshadowed by the summer's mega budget action movies, Stuart Baird's Executive Decision (15) is a very efficiently plotted and briskly paced airborne drama following the consequences when Islamic extremists hijack an American 747 airliner en route from Athens. With Steven Seagal unexpectedly (but thankfully) dispatched early in the movie, Kurt Russell takes over as an initially less likely action hero, and Halle Berry co stars as a resilient flight attendant in this lively, and vibrant adventure which will never, ever be shown as an in flight movie.
The Australian writer director Michael Rymer's, Angel Baby (15) is an unflinching and un patronising picture of the many problems faced by two clinically psychotic young people when they fall in love. It is charged with anger, feeling and wit, and by the vivid, deeply immersed central performances of Jacqueline McKenzie and the Irish actor, John Lynch, on terrific form.
The first feature from director Gary Fleder, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (18) is heavily influenced by Tarantino and features an accomplished cast that includes Andy Garcia, Steve Buscemi and the brilliant Christopher Walken. However, it never proves remotely as interesting as its title suggests. A crude and nasty exercise that is gratuitously violent, it is pretentiously scripted and self consciously directed.
This month's forgettable fodder also includes The Juror (18), an inane yarn in which juror Demi Moore is threatened by psycho Alec Baldwin; Spike Lee's picture of a reluctant phone sex operator in Girl 6 (18), which reeks of deja vu; and the dire would be comedy, Vampire In Brooklyn (18), featuring the all too limited performance of Eddie Murphy.
