The end of innocence

When the Sky Falls (18) General release

Opening today, just 10 days before the fourth anniversary of Veronica Guerin's murder, John Mackenzie's When the Sky Falls presents a thinly fictionalised picture of the Dublin journalist and her risk-taking crusade against the city's powerful criminals which ended when she was shot dead at point-blank range on the Naas dual carriageway - and stirred the authorities to introduce far-reaching new laws to deal with the country's criminal hierarchy.

The film takes its title from a Latin inscription outside the Bridewell station, which translates as, "Let justice be done, though the sky falls." From the outset the forces of justice appear to be impotent in dealing with these ruthless criminals and with the city's rampant drug problem. The journalist at the film's core, Sinead Hamilton (played by Joan Allen), is depicted as pushy, driven and consumed with exposing the criminals and their activities - and also as naive and inexperienced, and irresponsible in the way she brings her young son out on her stories. The drama gets off to an unpromising start with a stilted conversation between Hamilton and a self-styled buccaneer known as The Commandant, an anti-drugs criminal with a history of art theft and bank robberies, and modelled on Martin Cahill who is played in his fourth screen incarnation in three years by Pete Postlethwaite. After he is killed, Hamilton's key source of underworld information is a shifty mechanic (Jimmy Smallhorne) with an agenda of his own, and it is he who points her in the direction of another crime figure known as The Runner (Liam Cunningham).

The uneven screenplay of When the Sky Falls went through three writers: Michael Sheridan, a Sunday Independent colleague of Veronica Guerin who had been developing a crime screenplay with her; Ronan Gallagher, whose first short film as a writer-director, Underworld, was released here over a year ago; and the New York-based Irish novelist, Colum McCann. The weakest of the writing lies in the representation of the law by a permanently unshaven and underwritten detective character, Mackey (Patrick Bergin), who is furious when, after spending five years putting the powerful Dave Hackett (Gerard Flynn) behind bars, he learns that Hackett has been released after less than three years. If we are to believe the movie, Mackey and his men engage in such unorthodox behaviour as blackmailing a young junkie to plant drugs in a rave club, and more plausibly, bolstering their image by feeding information to journalists such as Hamilton.

The newspaper which employs Hamilton, The Sunday Globe, is an unconvincing place where nobody else ever appears to do any work and where the managing director seems to be as actively involved in the editorial decisions as the editor himself. Hamilton is shown as a journalist without a desk who works almost exclusively from her car, home and mobile phone. And the film does touch on the paper's own responsibilities to its staff as it observes the editor's pleasure with how Hamilton has turned crime reporting on its head - and increased the paper's sales by 30 per cent. The film is altogether more credible in establishing the Hamilton character and the criminals she pursues. The character of Sinead Hamilton, and her passionate determination, are vividly etched in an alert, understated performance by the richly versatile American actress, Joan Allen, who received Oscar nominations for her performances in Nixon and The Crucible, and she builds such an empathy with her character here that a sinking feeling is unavoidable in the ominous build-up to the film's closing sequences.

Gerard (Mannix) Flynn, Jimmy Smallhorne, Liam Cunningham and Gavin Kielty all persuasively capture the capacity for evil and menace within the amoral characters they play. And after several Dublin crime films which were criticised for playing down the nefariousness of their protagonists, director John Mackenzie is unflinching when it comes to depicting their extreme viciousness in a number of brutally violent sequences. Best known for The Long Good Fri- day, Mackenzie plays out this generally gritty and compelling drama against authentic, well-used Dublin locations atmospherically captured by the accomplished lighting cameraman, Seamus Deasy.

Une Liaison Pornographique (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The Belgian film-maker Frederic Fonteyne confidently and effectively employs an unobtrusive mockumentary style to explore the possibilities for emotional involvement in an initially anonymous relationship that's founded solely on sex in the enthralling Une Liaison Pornographique. "It was a pornographic affair," reflects the male partner, who is Spanish. "A purely, expressly pornographic affair. That's pornography. It's sex, nothing but sex. We were only there for sex."

The initiative which triggers this affair is taken by the Frenchwoman who becomes his sexual partner. She places an advertisement in the personal columns of a magazine, seeking to explore a private sexual fantasy, and he responds. When they first meet, at a cafe in Paris, she has already booked a hotel room nearby. Afterwards they part, agreeing to meet again, and when they do, he expands the parameters of their relationship by suggesting they have a drink and a chat.

Director Fonteyne and his screenwriter, Philippe Blasband, effortlessly sustain and stimulate interest in the couple's interconnected fate, without ever disclosing, or even hinting at, the nature of their shared sexual fantasy. That air of mystery is heightened by the fact that their back stories remain a secret to us, as to the protagonists themselves: their names, ages, professions. In the closing credits they are known simply as elle (her) and lui (him).

The honesty of the writing, as it takes the two characters through a range of recognisable emotions and personal foibles which consistently ring true, is matched by the openness and honesty of the central performances in what is virtually a twohander movie. The redoubtable Nathalie Baye gives a subtle, graceful performance which earned her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, and there is a palpable chemistry in the intimacy between her and the distinctive Catalan actor, Sergi Lopez, who first came to attention in Western and features to richly enigmatic effect in the recent Cannes entry, Harry, He's Here to Help, which opens here towards the end of the year.

Une Liaison Pornographique is such a thoughtful and intriguing film that it's hard to credit it's only the second feature directed by Frederic Fonteyne and written by Philippe Blasband; their first, Max et Bobo, went unreleased here. Their new film appears quintessentially French in its preoccupation with characters talking in cafes all the time when they're not having sex. However, they and their actors bring such intelligence and maturity to bear on their exploration of the themes of the narrative - the formation and nature of close relationships, insecurities bred by unhappy experience, fear of commitment - that their intriguing film effortlessly takes on a telling universality.

28 Days (15) General release

As genres go, the rehab movie is not one guaranteed to set the heart soaring: the last major stab at the subject was the grim Meg Ryan vehicle, When a Man Loves a Woman, which managed to combine schmaltz and sententiousness in equal measure. Now, America's Other Sweetheart, Sandra Bullock, gets the same 12-step treatment in Betty Thomas's cautionary tale.

Where Ryan played a housewife on the rocks, Bullock, rather implausibly, is an arty-boho Manhattanite (we know this because she dresses in black and wears sunglasses at inappropriate moments), ordered by a court to spend four weeks in an addiction recovery centre after a drunk-driving incident. Bidding farewell to her equally boozy boyfriend (Dominic West), Bullock sets off to do her time, prepared to sneer at the sad losers all around her. Of course, before you can say "Why don't you share that with the group?" she's blubbering and hugging all over the place.

The best that can be said of 28 Days is that it's blessed with a cast it doesn't deserve - including Steve Buscemi, Viggo Mortensen and Elizabeth Perkins - none of whom are particularly stretched. It's also quite handsomely photographed by cinematographer Declan Quinn, who deploys some effective techniques in the drunken/flashback sequences, which hint at where a more complex movie on this subject might take us (Quinn shot Leaving Las Vegas, which also had a rather dubious perspective on alcoholism, but at least tried to do something interesting on the subject).

For Love of the Game (12) General release

What is it with Kevin Costner and baseball? For Love of the Game marks the third instalment in Costner's engagement with America's most romanticised sport. As a small-time player in Bull Durham and a quixotic rural fan in Field of Dreams, he epitomised that strain of US movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s which harked back to a notion of American lost innocence.

Actually, neither of those two movies was actually about baseball - Bull Durham was essentially a romantic comedy, Field of Dreams a Capra-esque, sentimental fantasy. Similarly, despite the title, For Love of the Game is basically an old-fashioned melodrama, not a million miles away from Costner's last effort, the turgid weepie, Message in a Bottle.

For Love of the Game is definitely better than Message in a Bottle (which wouldn't be hard), although there is still something slightly icky about the way Costner appears to present himself as some kind of sex god for the menopausal set. Here, he's a star pitcher, playing out his last couple of seasons, whose world starts crumbling when the team's owner (Brian Cox) tells him he's being sold, and his girlfriend (Kelly Preston) announces she's moving to London.

Faced with the twin pillars of his life collapsing within a few hours, Costner goes out to pitch one more time for his team and finds himself playing the game of his career, intercut with memories of his turbulent relationship with Preston.

Yes, this is all just as corny as it sounds and no, there are no shocks in store as the story unfolds. And yes, the plot is riddled with implausibilities (does moving to London signify the end of a relationship any more, especially for a multi-millionaire sports star?). But if you like your corn well buttered, For Love of the Game may just be the thing for you on a cold June evening - ironically, this is a "sports" movie whose audience will be composed in large part of refugees from Euro 2000.

That it works at all is more than likely due to the directing of Sam Raimi, finally moving into the commercial mainstream after years of mavericking and genre work. For Love of the Game isn't a patch on Raimi's last offering, the superb A Simple Plan, but it has just about enough energy to carry it through its ropier moments and deliver a passable entertainment.

Supernova (15) General release

"Alan Smithee" used to be the nom de guerre employed by directors who were so unhappy with what had been done to their films that they couldn't bear to see their name below the title. Now that the "Smithee" tag has become broadly known, "Thomas Lee" is the current moniker of choice, and that name is to be found adorning this half-baked sci-fi thriller set aboard an interstellar rescue ship. The shy director in question is action veteran Walter Hill, and you can see why he felt impelled to take drastic action; Supernova shows no signs of ever having been a masterpiece, but it has clearly been butchered in post-production.

There are signs of something potentially interesting here, particularly in the casting of two excellent actors, James Spader and Angela Bassett, in the lead roles of leaders of a rescue mission gone wrong, who find that the castaway they pick up from a deserted planet (Peter Facinelli) is not quite what he seems. Somewhere amidst the savage, pared-to-the-bone editing there are indications that Spader and Bassett might have turned in a couple of good performances, but everything is subordinated to the pursuit of what is a fairly routine Alien-style narrative, propelling us to a deeply predictable violent denouement within less than 90 minutes. There is a strong argument to be made that movies are generally too long at the moment, but Supernova is most definitely too short - the resulting film ends up looking more like a trailer than a feature.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's stylish 1946 classic, A Matter of Life and Death, is reissued in a new print at the IFC for a week from today. David Niven memorably plays the RAF pilot who bales out of his blazing plane without a parachute - and whose right to go on living is debated in a celestial court. The earthly sequences are in colour while Heaven is depicted in monochrome. The confident fantasy that results can hardly have been what the British Ministry of Information had in mind when they proposed the film as a propaganda piece to promote Anglo-American relations.