"Jerry Maguire" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Nominated for five Oscars including best picture and best actor (Tom Cruise), Cameron Crowe's exuberant, sharply scripted romantic comedy, Jerry Maguire, features Cruise on terrific form in the title role, as a successful sports agent whose growing disillusionment with the greed-motivated nature of the business prompts an overnight conversion.

Proposing a shift in emphasis from quantity to quality, in order to give more care and time to less clients, he writes a "mission statement" which he circulates to all his colleagues: The Things We Think And Do Not Say. The Future Of Our Business. Or so lie thinks. While some of his colleagues just might think along the same lines, they certainly are not prepared to say if they do, and it's only a matter of days before Jerry Maguire is taken out to lunch and thrown out of his job.

Only one member of the staff believes in him enough to go with him: Dorothy Boyd (the very promising Renee Zetlweger), a single mother working in the accounts department. Bad-mouthed by his former employers, he retains just a single client - the brash and erratic Rod Tidwell (the vibrant Cuba Gooding Jr), a minor footballer on an Arizona team. And to complete his change of life, Jerry and his publicist fiancee (Kelly Preston) break up.

Jerry's journey to redemption follows a circuitous path as he learns a lot about life, love and the real world. However, even though it turns sentimental in its calculatedly upbeat finale, this engaging entertainment is unusually uncompromising for a Hollywood studio movie and it mostly steers clear of the pitfalls which could befall such a scenario.

That the movie convinces, and essentially succeeds, as it does is greatly to the credit of its writer-director, Cameron Crowe, the former Rolling Stone journalist who wrote the key 1982 teen movie, Fast Times At Ridgemount High before turning director with the under-rated Say Anything and the fairly slight Singles. Crowe has said that Jerry Maguire is based on the possibility that failure is the only road to true success.

In his shrewd and skilfully structured screenplay, Crowe brings the powers of observation, he developed and displayed as music journalist to bear on the precisely captured personality and milieu of Jerry Maguire. As a director, Crowe paces the movie expertly, regularly delivering pleasant surprises to the audience and building to an impeccably judged, emotional finale which unerringly hits the feel-good factor. And he elicits winning performances from a very well-chosen cast.

The role of Jerry Maguire was first offered to Tom Hanks, who turned it down, and then to Tom Cruise. Fitting the part like a glove, Cruise acts with panache and apparent ease in a spirited physical performance, his eyes catching the panic behind the killer smile.

In its picture of a massive and powerful sports management company - and a world where the public has an unprecedented awareness and interest in fees, takings, successes and losses - Jerry Maguire can be read as a thinly-disguised commentary on Hollywood, with its hugely influential agencies and stars and the ever-increasing public obsession with star salaries and the box- office.

Underlining these parallels is the central casting of Tom Cruise the most bankable movie star in the world today - with Jerry Maguire, he becomes the first actor to star in six consecutive movies to take over $100 million in the US alone. And few actors, if any, exert such firm control over both image and career as Cruise does.

It's all the more startling, then, to read in the movie's publicity information Cruise's comment on the world of sports agents: "Where can you get more of a highly concentrated pursuit of pure money?"

"Blood and Wine" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

The new Bob Rafelson film Blood and Wine, his most compelling for some time, is regarded by Rafelson as "part of a trilogy of studies of dysfunctional families" in which he has directed Nicholson - continuing on from Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens in which Nicholson plays a son and a brother, respectively.

In Blood and Wine Nicholson plays a stepfather, Alex Gates, a Florida Keys wine dealer with a history of cheating on his wife Suzanne (Judy Davis), a recovering alcoholic. And Gates is regarded with contempt by his stepson, Jason (Stephen Dorff). Aspiring to the wealth of his rich clients, Gates schemes to steal a necklace worth over a million dollars from one of them, whose Cuban nanny, Gabriella (Jennifer Lopez), is Gates's lover. "I'm going to take you places, baby," he leers.

To carry out the plan Gates teams up with an old friend, a paroled convict, Victor Spansky (Michael Caine), who is suffering from emphysema and who pointedly comments that there is no such thing as honour among thieves. Complications arise when Jason gets involved with Gabriella - and when Suzanne confronts Gates with his lies and is knocked unconscious by him, to be found by Jason who becomes intent on revenge.

It is unwise of Bob Rafelson to raise expectations by linking Blood And Wine in a perceived trilogy with Five Easy Pieces and The King Of Marvin Gardens, the two finest films of his career. The Blood And Wine screenplay by Alison Cross falls far short of the depth and ambition of those two earlier films.

However, as a well-plotted thriller with a few too many lapses of coincidence, it is certainly a return to form after his dreadful Man Trouble, which also starred Nicholson. And Blood And Wine benefits considerably from the solid central performances, with Nicholson, Caine and Davis on stronger form than they have been for some time, while Dorff holds his own despite being in such experienced company.

"Kansas City" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The veteran American director, Robert Altman, now 72, emerged from his 1980s wilderness of minor filmed plays to make an auspicious comeback earlier this decade with two sparkling gems in The Player and Short Cuts. Unfortunately, he has followed them with two deeply disappointing efforts - the wretchedly haphazard Pret-a-Porter and now, Kansas City.

The new film is set in Altman's home town in 1934 on the eve of an election, when it thrived as a centre of crime and illegal gambling during the Depression. Kansas City exhibits a strong sense of period detail and it features a strong jazz score comprising compositions by, among others, Count Basie, Joe Williams and Lester Young.

However, at the core of the movie is a wearisome tale of a disturbed young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who, for reasons best known to herself, kidnaps a politician's wife (a woefully wasted Miranda Richardson) in the hope of freeing her con-man husband (Dermot Mulroney) from a notorious gangster played, in the film's sole impressive performance, by Harry Belafonte.

Arguably the most irritating actress in cinema today, Jennifer Jason Leigh capsizes the movie through her shrill, painfully mannered performance - a truly bizarre hybrid of Jean Harlow and James Cagney impersonations.