A Clockwork Orange (18) General release

Finally going on cinema release today, 29 years after it was first released in the rest of the world, Stanley Kubrick's controversial, highly influential film of the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess proves it is still powerful after all these years. At its centre is a bravura performance from Malcolm McDowell, the most complex and compelling of his career, as Alex, an amoral young man obsessed with sex, "ultra-violence" and Beethoven. Alex is the leader of the Droogs, a white-clad, bowler-hatted gang of four who speak in Nadsat, a self-devised dialect with Biblical and Russian influences.

This is a story which was conceived in violence - the film's depiction of a woman brutally attacked by the Droogs was based on a vicious assault by four American army deserters on Burgess's first wife in London in 1944, when she was pregnant and he was abroad on military service. And the book was written while Burgess was under the false impression that he was terminally ill with a brain tumour.

The scenario which grew out of those circumstances is, perhaps unsurprisingly, cold, cynical and nihilistic. The setting is a dystopian England of the near future - as viewed by Kubrick's film from the perspective of 1971. In this corrupt and repressive society - populated by adults portrayed as predatory, ineffectual or authoritarian - the Droogs operate lawlessly and hedonistically, and the film immediately zeroes in on their activities during what Alex describes as "a wonderful evening".

It begins at the Korova Milk Bar, where fibreglass nude figures serve as furniture, and continues as they come across an Irish tramp singing Molly Malone in a tunnel where their looming silhouettes establish an ominous signal of the violence that will follow. Later, at a suburban house named Home, they beat and kick the owners, a writer and his wife, while Alex croons Singin' in the Rain, before gagging the husband and leaving him to watch helplessly while they set about raping his wife.

Seeing A Clockwork Orange again this week, I was surprised that these scenes seemed less violent than I had remembered them from previous viewings, and not just because movies are so much more violent three decades later. The explanation is that Kubrick set up these sequences with such a malevolent air that it powerfully suggested the consequences, and as Hitchcock, in particular, demonstrated time and again, what is suggested can often be more horrifying than what is graphically depicted.

Employing extreme wide angles, Kubrick treats the violence in a stylised, ritualistically choreographed manner. Classical music - which heightened the futuristic beauty and sense of wonder of his previous film, 2001 A Space Odyssey - is used to layer the violence with sinister overtones. What is questionable is Kubrick's depiction of the victims of this violence as flawed, weak and even grotesque, as if they deserved their fates - and even more dubious is his blurring of the distinctions between sex and violence in the film's view of rape.

As it happens, the most explicit violence in the film is inflicted on Alex. Sentenced to 14 years in prison for murdering a woman with a phallic sculpture, he is taken under the wing of the paternal chaplain (played by the Irish actor, Godfrey Quigley), the only truly sympathetic adult character in the film and its moral centre.

Alex volunteers for the Ludovico technique, a form of aversion therapy proposed by the Minister for the Interior as a way of eradicating criminal violence and making more jail space for political offenders. The Ludovico technique involves strapping Alex in a straitjacket and his face in a headlock while his eyes are prised wide open as he is subjected to a relentless parade of sexual and violent pornography. And the story turns full circle.

For all the reservations it raises, A Clockwork Orange still registers as a haunting and fascinating picture which raises questions about the nature of violence and society which remain pertinent today. The product of an unique vision, it is disturbing yet hypnotic, and continues to exert a charge that regularly astonishes.

Being John Malkovich (15) Screen at D'Olier St, UCI Tallaght, Ster Century, Dublin; Capitol, Cork; Omniplex, Limerick; Omniplex, Galway

Spike Jonze, an award-winning director of pop promos and commercials, makes a highly confident feature film debut with the hilariously offbeat and remarkably original fantasy film, Being John Malkovich, which offers a clever new spin on Andy Warhol's much-quoted theory on the opportunity for 15 minutes of fame.

It features John Cusack as Craig Schwartz, a wan, scruffy and dedicated puppeteer struggling to make money as a street performer with his rather risque enactments of stories such as Abelard and Heloise. After 10 years of marriage his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) appears altogether more enamoured of the menagerie she brings home from the pet store where she works. Conceding that he will never make a living from his puppetry, Craig becomes a lowly filing clerk - literally lowly in that he has to move in a permanently stooped position within the five-foot-high offices of LesterCorp. "Low overhead," explains his 105-year-old employer (Orson Bean), who apologises for his speech impediment - even though he doesn't have one.

Everything changes when Craig discovers a passage that leads into the brain of the actor John Malkovich, an experience which lasts 15 minutes before the explorer is abruptly ejected by the New Jersey Turnpike. Maxine (Catherine Keener), the icy colleague he desires, comes up with the idea of charging the public for experiencing that feeling of 15 minutes of fame through the surrogate experience of temporarily being John Malkovich.

From this gleefully bizarre premise screenwriter Charlie Kaufman assembles a labyrinthine story which is utterly unpredictable as it piles twist upon turn and takes one daring leap after another, pushing the premise to unimaginable extremes and somehow imbuing it with a perverse logic. Complex as it may sound, it proves entirely accessible. And it becomes unexpectedly affecting in its later stages.

It is particularly acute on the nature of fame, and the real John Malkovich playing a perception of himself, sends himself up with relish - and a laudably self-deprecating sense of humour - as a self-obsessed actor with jaded hauteur. A running gag turns on how easily recognisable Malkovich is, but nobody remembers any movies he's been in apart from "the one about the jewel thief" - even though he has never made such a movie.

The playing of the other key actors is equally deadpan, as it has to be, with both Diaz, unrecognisable in sloppy clothes and an unflattering wig, and Keener, in the reverse of the many good-natured women she has played in US indies, comfortably cast against type in roles which would more usually be offered to the other.

Blending Bunuellian surrealism with (Groucho) Marxist humour, the movie's inventive screenplay exudes a very keen sense of the absurd and reveals an exceptionally promising talent in writer Charlie Kaufman whose screenplay is his first to be filmed. Despite his MTV background Spike Jonze's direction is surprisingly restrained and is never in thrall to the flashy visuals and furious cutting seen in most movies from graduates of the pop promo.

Being John Malkovich has deservedly been nominated for three Oscars - best director, original screenplay and supporting actress (Keener).

Superstar (12) General release

In this spinoff from the US TV comedy series Saturday Night Live, Molly Shannon plays her small-screen character, Mary Katherine Gallagher, an Irish-American schoolgirl who is gauche and hyperactive and wears thick horn-rimmed glasses and short plaid skirts. The character made her debut on the TV show in 1995 when she shocked a pious Catholic priest (played by Gabriel Byrne in a guest appearance) by raising her leg up on a stool and revealing her sensible white cotton underwear.

The movie follows her determined quest to be the recipient of a full-blown Hollywood-style kiss; she senses an opportunity when Catholic Teenager magazine organises a "Let's Prevent Venereal Disease" talent contest which offers the prize of a role as an extra in a movie with positive moral values. The favourite to win is Mary Katherine's chief rival at the co-ed St Monica's High School, the good-looking Evian (Elaine Hendrix), who is forever organising charitable events - jogging for glaucoma, selling chocolate bars for Bosnia - and going out with the school heart-throb, Sky (Will Ferrell) after whom Mary Katherine lusts.

Working part-time as "the rewind girl" in a video store, Mary Katherine empathises with the put-upon heroines of movies such as Carrie and Sybil, which she quotes extensively to explain her feelings. Like Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon, she also talks to the trees - and even practices kissing on a favourite oak. And she learns from her grandmother (Glynis Johns) how her parents died a horrific death during an Irish stepdancing contest which went fatally wrong.

While it is never as witty or as sharp as Clueless, Superstar is so amusingly silly and littered with such off-the-wall movie references that it proves hard to resist. Shannon throws herself into the central role with aplomb, and one of the funniest aspects of the movie is how it makes no attempt to disguise how she and Will Ferrell, in particular, look much too old to be high school students.