Rushmore (15) - Selected cinemas
One of the most original and refreshing American comedies in years, Wes Anderson's Rushmore is an exuberant and strangely touching - though never mawkish - picture of a precocious 15-year-old scholarship student at the exclusive private school, Rushmore. Played by Jason Schwartzman, Max Fischer is a self-absorbed, self-destructive fantasist whose grades suffer as a result of his numerous extra-curricular activies - editing the school paper, running a variety of clubs and writing and producing plays for his drama group. Around the same time that he is put on academic probation by the headmaster, Dr Guggenheim (Brian Cox), Max falls head over heels for the new English teacher, Miss Cross, a young widow played by Olivia Williams (a survivor from The Postman), and he finds a benefactor in the self-made steel tycoon, Mr Blume (Bill Murray), who despairs of his own twin sons, the most oafish students at Rushmore. Further complications arise when Blume also falls for Cross.
A wholly endearing and deceptively light comedy that is wonderfully quirky, Rushmore builds confidently on the promise shown by its director, Wes Anderson, and his co-writer, Owen Wilson, with their amusing low-budget first feature, Bottle Rocket, which went directly to video here. Their assured and imaginative work on Rushmore delightfully draws its many strands together in a finale which features Max's effects-driven stage play about the Vietnam war.
In his film debut, Jason Schwartzman, the son of actress Talia Shire (and nephew of Francis Ford Coppola), exhibits a marvellously droll screen presence, while Bill Murray is a treat in his sharpest performance since Groundhog Day. The movie is accompanied by a truly eclectic and infectious score drawn mostly from British hits of the 1960s and 1970s such as Concrete and Clay, Here Comes My Baby, Oh Yoko and Ooh La La.
Late August, Early September/Fin Aout, Debut Septembre (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The gifted French writer-director Olivier Assayas - who, like the great Francois Truffaut, was a film critic before he turned to making his own movies - was the subject of a timely retrospective at this year's Dublin Film Festival which offered Irish viewers a rare opportunity to see Assayas's films, of which only one, Irma Vep, had been released here. The title of his seventh feature, Fin Aout, Debut Septembre, refers to the film's starting point in late August and to its conclusion just over a year later, as Assayas follows the experiences of four Parisians as they try to deal with the realities and responsibilities of adult life. In a long-standing tradition of French cinema, they talk all the time, reflecting on their fears, anxieties and hopes, on the things that matter: friendship, love, sex, commitment, security, work, mortality and death.
The pivotal character is the restless publishing editor, Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric) who has ended his live-in relationship with the mildly neurotic Jenny (Jeanne Balibar) and embarked on an affair with the more relaxed Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), a designer. Coming out of a long relationship - which clearly still holds a good deal of affection and sexual attraction for himself and Jenny - Mathieu is reluctant to set up home with Anne right away.
The movie's other principal character, and the oldest of the four, is the novelist, Adrien (Francois Cluzet), who despairs at the commercial failure of most of his books and who, as he turns 40, is struck by the reappearance of an old illness. Emerging from a 10-year relationship with Lucie (Arsinee Khanjian) which ended in bitterness, Adrien is secretly involved with an adoring 15-year-old, Vera (Mia Hansen-Love).
Assayas composes his film of their lives in an elliptical style over six chapters which observe the characters at crucial points over an eventful year. Fragmentary as this structure is, with each chapter ending with a fade to black, it exerts a compelling hold on the viewer as it reveals layers of the protagonists' personalities. Such is the openness and expressiveness of the naturalistic performances Assayas elicits from his superb ensemble cast that it is impossible to tell where the improvisation he encouraged begins or ends. Not that that is likely to bother anyone who gets caught up in this compelling, mature and deeply affecting movie. It is imbued with the tenderness, humanity, acute observation and unforced exposition of a Truffaut, and I cannot think of higher praise than that.
The Thomas Crown Affair (15) - General release
So there's this urbane and unattached Scottish-born millionaire who keeps boredom at bay by pulling off a major art heist from a high-security building in New York. And there's this woman, an impeccably dressed and extraordinarily intuitive insurance investigator who melts his resistance as she sets out to ensnare him. The narrative outline for the new version of The Thomas Crown Affair sounds remarkably like the premise for the recent Entrapment, with the crucial difference that there was a 40-year age gap between the protagonists of Entrapment and they never did get it on after all their coy flirting.
Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, the stars of The Thomas Crown Affair, are 48 and 45, respectively, and they get together with a passion for sex on a floor, a staircase, even in a bedroom. Not only that, but they're naked, too - most unlikely behaviour for fortysomethings in these prim, ratings-conscious Hollywood studio days.
Of course, scenes like that would have been taken for granted back in the late 1960s, although there were none in the original 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair in which foreplay between the two stars, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, consisted of a teasingly staged erotic chess game - which is eschewed by the remake, although it does retain the mind-bending Oscar-winning song, The Windmills of Your Mind, which is performed in a variety of versions.
The original film, directed by Norman Jewison, was an ultra-chic crime caper in which the underestimated McQueen was the epitome of cool and the split-screen trappings were very much of their time. The new version, directed by John McTiernan, is standard-sleek, bookended by a cleverly executed theft of a priceless Monet from a Manhattan museum and by a slick finale humorously inspired by a prominently featured Magritte painting.
It's the filling in this sandwich - if I may mix my metaphors - that is stodgy, and the narrative is often simply daft with Russo's snooping character demonstrating the most remarkable powers of deduction, which helps, admittedly, given that the investigating detective (Denis Leary) is none too bright.
The embellishments to Russo's character do not enhance her credibility: she is one of those insurance people who wears sunglasses indoors, swallows a soft drink in two gulps, speaks any number of languages and never wears the same outfit twice. Brosnan's Thomas Crown, meanwhile, merely has to be suave morning, noon and night. This, incidentally, is the third film (after The Nephew and The Match) produced by Brosnan and Beau St Clair through their company, Irish DreamTime.
Mickey Blue Eyes (15) - General release
Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley's company, Simian Films, produced the romantic comedy, Mickey Blue Eyes, for which she stays off screen while he takes the starring role in his latest slim variation on his trademark movies persona: a floppy-haired, eyelid-batting Englishman who's fumbling and uptight but charming and well-intentioned. It worked for him in Four Weddings and in Notting Hill, so why shouldn't lightning strike thrice? And to some extent, it does.
This time Grant plays Michael Felgate, an English auctioneer in New York where he becomes involved with an Italian-American schoolteacher (Jeane Tripplehorn), only to learn too late that her father (James Caan) is a Mafioso who runs The La Trattoria. Soon the extended Family offers Felgate such unsolicited assistance as burning down the New York showrooms of the rival Sothebys. His future father-in-law coaches him in talking Italian (replace "t" with "d"), and Felgate is forced to pose as an out-of-town gangster known as Little Big Mickey Blue Eyes.
While the movie treads familiar ground, it does so at a fairly cracking pace under Kelly Makin's workman-like direction and with sharp comic timing from a mostly spirited cast. Tripplehorn seems oddly remote from the rest of the players and defuses any hope of sexual chemistry with Grant, but Grant himself is perfectly deadpan and Caan, in a witty reversal of his role as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, plays parody with panache. The cast also includes Burt Young, James Fox and the husky-voiced, pizza-faced Joe Viterelli who also features in the not dissimilar Mafia comedy, Analyse This, which opens here next month.
Croupier (members and guests only) - IFC, Dublin
The new film from Get Carter director Mike Hodges is a quite intriguing picture of a would-be novelist, Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) who reluctantly resumes work as a casino croupier and finds himself becoming deeply involved with the milieu despite his aversion to it. "In life there is a choice: be a gambler or a croupier," is Jack's philosophy and he repeatedly states that he does not gamble. Instead, he is hooked on watching people lose.
Few people are quite what they seem, and most are playing games away from the roulette tables in this cynical study in deception and desperation dispassionately observed by its narrator, Jack, who unexpectedly finds rich material for a novel at last - and finds himself drawn away from his lover (Gina McKee) by a colleague (Kate Hardie) and by an enigmatic South African gambler (Alex Kingston).
The screenplay is by Paul Mayersberg, who wrote Nicolas Roeg's Eureka and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and is given proprietorial credit with direct Hodges. The tight narrative begins to unravel with the introduction of a weakly plotted robbery scheme, but Clive Owen's immersion in his role keeps the movie grounded and the film offers some worthwhile insights into its shady, late-night world. An Irish-German-French-British co-production, it was produced by Jonathan Cavendish of the Irish company, Little Bird.
Cookie's Fortune (12) - Screen at D'Olier Street, Ster Century, Dublin
To describe Robert Altman's output as a film-maker in the 1990s as erratic would be an understatement, given his abrupt shifts from the highs of The Player and Short Cuts to the shallowness of Kansas City and The Gingerbread Man to the nadir that was the execrable Pret-a-Porter. He remains off-form with Cookie's Fortune, a slender social comedy which opens promisingly enough but feels like a short story unwisely stretched out over two hours.
The setting is the sleepy small Mississippi town of Holly Springs. The venerable Patricia Neal plays the eponymous Cookie, a pipe-smoking widow who, pining for her late husband, takes a gun from his collection and commits suicide. Her manipulative, grasping niece, Camilla (Glenn Close) discovers Cookie's body and makes her death appear like murder, and Cookie's close friend and tenant, the heavy-drinking Willis (Charles S. Dutton) is suspected of the apparent crime. That Willis is black and the story is set in Mississippi raises suspicions of racism which clearly do not interest Altman. He becomes altogether more preoccupied with drawing Camilla as a hate-figure, scorning her greed and self-importance and cocking a sneer at the tacky local production of Salome which she is directing - and for which she takes a joint writing credit with Oscar Wilde.
Close responds with the only option left open to her, by chewing up the scenery and spitting it out as she struggles to inject some life into a meandering and flaccid yarn which is so laid-back at times that it turns soporific. The other members of an underused cast include Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Chris O'Donnell, Donald Moffat, Ned Beatty, Lyle Lovett and soul singers Rufus Thomas and Ruby Wilson.
