Get Carter (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Considered inappropriate viewing for Irish adults back in 1971 when it was rejected by the film censor, and although later made available here on video and beamed into Irish homes by British television, the seminal British gangster movie, Get Carter, finally gets its first Irish cinema release today, 28 years on.

For all the period trappings it captures of the pre-decimalisation era - horrible bushy sideburns, incredibly short mini-skirts, naff dancing around handbags, and outdoor toilets - there remains a timeless quality to this landmark, highly influential thriller.

Never mind The Krays, The Long Good Friday or Lock Stock; for all their various virtues, they cannot compare with this riveting drama which is infused with an unerring sense of gritty realism by its director, Mike Hodges, making a remarkable film debut, and with the cool, cynical style of its star, Michael Caine.

Made when Caine was 37, this is arguably the most iconic of those key early performances which established Caine's apparently effortless screen presence, and which sustained him through decades of dross during which meaty roles in Mona Lisa, Hannah and Her Sisters and Little Voice were very much the exception rather than the rule.

Caine plays Jack Carter, a self-assured London criminal who makes a rare trip home to Newcastle when his brother dies in suspicious circumstances. His utterly unshakeable quest for vengeance thrusts him back into the city's sleazy, corrupt underworld as he sifts through the few clues to the truth and zeroes in on the criminals who fixed and faked his brother's death.

Turning the screws vice-tight and turning up the pressure with a relentless obsessiveness, the amoral anti-hero that is Carter finds himself drawn into a vile hardcore porn operation. In the film's most powerful sequence, a wordless scene in which he views their product, the mask slips momentarily and Carter, played by Caine at his most revealing, loses his baleful gaze and hard-nosed attitude as his expression shifts from initial curiosity to fury and tears.

There are welcome patches of dry humour in the terse, hardboiled dialogue scripted by director Hodges in this admirably tight and focused picture of characters who live outside the law, and in which the guardians of the law, on their rare appearances, are seen anonymously from a distance. In situating the film in Newcastle, Hodges makes potent use of authentic locations in this bleak industrial landscape and peoples it with credibly cold-blooded characters.

Hodges assembles a fine supporting cast that notably includes Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, Bryan Mosely, Geraldine Moffat, Alun Armstrong, Tony Beckley, Godfrey Quigley, Rosemarie Dunham, and most imaginatively, the playwright John Osborne as the creepily decadent arch-villain.

Consistently edgy and tough, Get Carter is, of necessity, a violent film, but sparingly so and without a hint of the gratuitousness which has marked its many imitators. And it never proves quite as hard to take as the concept delivered by George Melly, who in his stint as film critic of The Observer when the film opened in Britain, described it as akin to the experience of "a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast".

10 Things I Hate About You (15) General release

The vogue for adapting Shakespeare to a contemporary context continues with 10 Things I Hate About You, which transposes The Taming of the Shrew to a present-day Seattle high school. This very loosely based adaptation by first-time screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith eschews the play's misogynistic vein along with most of the dialogue, retaining a few key lines such as "I burn, I pine, I perish" in a screenplay more likely to offer statements like "You are so two weeks ago".

Julia Stiles plays Kat Stratford, an aloof, curt and ill-tempered student who pointedly alienates any young man who shows an interest in her and is more interested in reading Sylvia Plath and listening to women rock bands. When Kat's father dictates that his younger daughter, Bianca, may go to the Padua High School prom only if Kat goes, Bianca sets out to find a male student to soften Kat's anti-social demeanour, selecting the enigmatic Australian student, Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) for the daunting task.

This uneven but mostly diverting romantic comedy is neither as smart nor as sophisticated as Clueless or the current release, Cruel Intentions, in its contemporary reworking of a literary classic, and the out-takes over the closing credits suggest that some of what has been left out is funnier than some of what has been kept.

Nevertheless, the film is generally witty and well-observed, and ultimately surprisingly sweet-natured, and it features a number of amusing Shakespearean allusions. Director Gil Junger pulls off some well-judged set-pieces, especially when Patrick serenades Kat, performing Can't Take My Eyes Off You at the football field with the backing of the school's brass band. In a likeable, mostly unfamiliar young cast, Julia Stiles shows a good deal of promise and will be seen later this year in two more modern spins on Shakespeare, as Ophelia opposite Ethan Hawke in Hamlet, and in O, a college basketball movie based on Othello.

Tango (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The veteran Spanish film-make, Carlos Saura, pursues his preoccupation with music and dance again in Tango, in which a renowned director (Miguel Angela Sola) suffers a mid-life crisis when his wife leaves him and he breaks his leg in a traffic accident. Falling for a dancer (Mia Maestro) who is much younger than him and involved with his shady financier, the director is distracted from his ambitious new production in Buenos Aires.

This trite and tiresome narrative persistently intrudes upon and undermines the achievements of Tango on a performance level. This is particularly unfortunate given the quality of the choreography and dancing which is the movie's raison d'etre and weaves a hypnotic spell which is broken all too often by banal narrative digressions.

Those dance sequences are subtly lit and immaculately framed by the gifted Italian lighting cameraman, Vittorio Storaro, and the strong original score, which is interspersed with tango classics, is the work of the prolific Buenos Aires-born composer, Lalo Schifrin, best known for his highly effective scores for action movies such as Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon and Mission Impossible.

In tribute to the late Lord Killanin, the Irish Film Archive will present his 1957 production, The Rising of the Moon, at the IFC next Thursday at 6.30 p.m. Directed by John Ford, the film features Tyrone Power, Noel Purcell, Cyril Cusack, Jack McGowran, Jimmy O'Dea and Donal Donnelly. Admission is free on a first-come, first-seated basis.