"The Van" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

The backdrop to The Van is the euphoric summer of Italia 90, when World Cup fever swept Ireland like never before. That wonderfully heady and good humoured atmosphere is recreated vividly in Stephen Frears's entertaining film of Roddy Doyle's novel, which captures the impact of Italia 90 on the homes and pubs of Doyle's fictitious Barrytown.

It deals specifically with two unemployed friends, Larry (Colm Meaney) and Bimbo (Donal O'Kelly), who have the foresight to see the event as an opportunity for private enterprise. They buy a grease caked and engine less chip van and position it outside the local pub for after match profits.

The third and last of Doyle's. Barrytown novels to be filmed. The Van is characteristically littered with sharp and often hilarious humour and throwaway and inoffensive expletives, while the most cringe inducing comedy is, created by Larry and Bimbo's deplorable lack of hygiene standards' in the van.

At its roots, though, this is the most melancholy and philosophical film in the trilogy, and as the tone of the movie darkens in the later stages, Doyle firmly eschews a Hollywood ending in which all of the characters' problems are cosily resolved. Some of the movie's film's own cinematic problems have been remedied since it had its world premiere at Cannes in May.

Shorn of about four minutes of footage since then, The Van has been considerably tightened, although it still fails to match its predecessors, The Commitments and The Snapper, in terms of pacing and energy. An overbearing and inappropriate guitar driven score by Eric Clapton and Richard Hartley regularly detracts from the mood of the movie. A few scenes misfire entirely, most gratingly one in which Larry and Bimbo tow the decrepit chip van to their estate and the whole neighbourhood exuberantly - and unconvincingly - forms a parade behind them, and the camera cuts not once, but three times, to a young girl performing cartwheels in front of the van.

When that initial awkwardness subsides, the film settles into its stride - boosted by extensive and resonant footage of George Hamilton's coverage of Italia 90 for RTE - and at its heart it is a warm and touching picture of two close male friends who are essentially innocents in a hard world, and the accumulating tensions which develop when they work together.

Colm Meaney, who has starred in all three movies based on the Barrytown trilogy, perfectly catches the inner vulnerability and broken pride of the brash Larry, who thinks any woman who rejects his chat up lines is a lesbian and who believes that a night of non stop pints in the pub is the solution to every problem.

In his first feature film, Donal O'Kelly is wonderfully natural all the way from the opening scene when he cries into his pint after being made redundant as a baker, although the quality of his performance will not surprise Irish audiences familiar with his remarkably versatile work in theatre.

Ger Ryan and Caroline Rothwell are solid in their supporting roles as the spouses of Bimbo and Larry, respectively, and a Irish fine supporting cast most notably includes real life siblings Neili and Ruadhri Conroy as Larry's older children, and in a spot on performance as a wily fixer, Brendan O'Carroll.

"Fear" (18) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

The distinctly variable career of director James Foley has ranged from the meaty of At Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross to such forgettable froth as Who's That Gig. The latest Foley film to reach us is Fear, which he made between the Al Pacino drama, Two Bits, which looks most unlikely to get a cinema release here, and the legal drama, The Chamber, the most recent and least successful of the John Grisham screen adaptations to date.

Fear is a psychodrama which follows a familiar pattern from cuckoo in the nest yarns such as Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Set in Seattle, Fear features Reese Witherspoon as a 16 year old schoolgirl attracted to a softspoken and charming young man (Mark Wahlberg), despite the warnings of her suspicious father (William Petersen). Sure enough, the young man soon lets slip his mask of boyish tenderness to reveal a cunning, unhinged brute and the movie builds to a siege finale which echoes Cape Fear and Straw Dogs.

For all its obviousness, Fear is quite a slick and efficient exercise and it benefits in particular from the well judged ambiguity in the central performance of the muscular Mark Wahlberg, a former underwear model and rap singers who shows real promise and strong screen presence in his first leading role.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"The Long Kiss Goodnight" (15s) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

Director Renny Harlin is at his best with brash, hi tech action movies like Die Hard 2, and the catastrophic failure of his last movie, the big budget, swashbuckling fiasco Cutthroat Island, sees him quickly returning to what he does best. The result is a brainless and implausible, but mildly entertaining, thriller that will probably do better on video than in the cinema.

As with Cutthroat Island, Harlin casts his wife, Geena Davis, in the central role as a mild mannered suburban schoolteacher who suffers from amnesia. Unable to remember anything about her life before she was discovered with a head injury several years before, she employs an unreliable private detective (Samuel L. Jackson) to try to discover something about her identity. It soon becomes apparent that in her previous life Davis was a highly trained US government assassin, and that her reappearance threatens a conspiracy by rogue intelligence agents.

Davis slowly regains her former, ruthless personality, shedding her homely, handknitted appearance in favour of black leather and bleached blonde hair. Jackson doesn't have to expend much effort to earn his fee as the comic foil, trailing along in his co star's wake. With plenty of explosions and shootouts to while away the time, the absurd plot doesn't become too irritating, although the application of even the tiniest amount of logic would see the whole thing crumble to dust.

. Today's other new release is Dracula: Dead and Loving It - one relentless spoofer meets another as Mel Brooks lampoons the horror movie and Leslie Nielsen plays the terror of Transylvania.

. Opening at the IFC on Monday next, Fallen Angels is the most recent movie from Wong Kar wai, the Hong Kong style master of Chunking Express.