Direct to Video
Shown at the Dublin Film Festival earlier this month, If These Walls Could Talk (18) is a three-part drama set in the same house at 22-year intervals as different occupants weigh up abortion as an option. The first section is set in 1952 when a young widow (Demi Moore) finds herself pregnant after a single sexual encounter with her brother-in-law, at a time when information on abortion was extremely difficult to find, even for Moore's character, a nurse.
For the second episode the film moves to 1974 as homemaker Sissy Spacek embarks on a university course now that her children are growing up. She is taken aback to learn that her pregnancy test is positive, and while her husband assumes she will have the child, she has to rely on her feminist teenage daughter for abortion information.
The final segment is set in the present, when a student (Anne Heche) finds herself pregnant by her married university professor (Craig T. Nelson); her visit to a family planning clinic run by a doctor, played by Cher, coincides with pickets by an antiabortion prayer group.
Even though it suffers from so much dramatic compression that it borders on soap opera, the 1952 episode is the most credible in the film - and the most unsettling, as the nurse clumsily tries to abort herself with a knitting needle. The second episode is more facile in its set-up and the feminist daughter speaks like a student advice manual. The final story, directed by Cher, is the most uneven, shifting its emphasis from the pregnant student to the doctor played by Cher, and turning wildly melodramatic.
Kevin Dowling and Geoff Burton's Australian film, The Sum Of Us (18) comfortably opens out a stage play by David Stevens and deftly skirts sentimentality in its absorbing picture of Jeff (Russell Crowe), a gay young Sydney plumber whose amorous adventures are regularly complicated by his liberal widower father, Harry (Jack Thompson). Both father and son are looking for love, but Harry is all too over-eager to play matchmaker for his son - to the point of mortifying Jeff when he leaves porn magazines around for the arousal of his son's partners. The interplay between the veteran Thompson and the fast-rising Crowe is beautifully judged in this warm and engaging movie.
The provocative gay Canadian actor and director, Bruce LaBruce, whose credo appears to be that nothing succeeds like excess, goes to extremes in Hustler White (18). With explicit references to Sunset Boulevard - and Andy Warhol's Flesh, the film features Tony Ward as an accident-prone Hollywood hustler and LaBruce himself as a mysterious man on his trail. In this meandering yarn the production values are of a higher standard than in LaBruce's tacky previous films, the humour is more outrageous and the sex scenes included some activity that I, in my innocence, had never ever imagined.
Cinema to Video
The most high-profile of the March releases is Twister (PG) - director Jan De Bont follows Speed with an effects-driven action-adventure movie in which spectacular tornadoes sweep their way through Oklahoma. Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Carey Elwes are the hapless humans introduced in the calm before the storm. These people are all cardboard cut-outs, but the effects are terrific, although their impact will be diminished on the small screen.
John Herzfeld's 2 Days In The Valley (18) is a dexterously plotted crime drama set over the course of an eventful 48 hours and skilfully juggling the interconnected fates of disparate characters: a cold-blooded hitman (James Spader) and his resourceful colleague (Danny Aiello); an Olympic skier (Teri Hatcher) frustrated at coming fourth in Lillehammer, and her ex-husband (Peter Horton) who is alleged to have had an affair with Spader's lover (Charlize Theron); a suicidal television director (Paul Masurzky), the nurse (Marsha Mason) he meets in a cemetery, and her much-suffering sister (Glenne Headly) who works for a rude, selfish English art dealer (Greg Crutwell); and a pair of vice cops, one of whom (Jeff Daniels) is embittered and volatile while the other (Eric Stoltz) longs for promotion to the homicide division.
Sean Penn's second outing as a director, The Crossing Guard (18) is a brooding drama suffused with a deep sense of loss and grief as it acutely observes the corrosive impact on a middle-aged man (Jack Nicholson) of his young daughter's death caused by a drunken driver. It is six years on from the tragic accident and the driver (David Morse), riddled with guilt and remorse for his crime, is about to be released from prison. Its symbolism tends to be heavy-handed, but there is a raw, unsettling power to Penn's film and it builds to a wrenching conclusion.
Douglas McGrath's handsome and elegant new version of the Jane Austen novel, Emma (Gen) elicits vivid performances from an eclectic international cast: Ewan McGregor as the dashing Frank Churchill, Jeremy Northam as the confident Mr Knightley, Greta Scacchi as Emma's newly-married former governess, Alan Cumming as the calculating Mr Elton and Juliet Stevenson as the snob who becomes Mrs Elton. In the title role Gwyneth Paltrow, clearly a star in the making, displays a radiant screen presence.
As sunny, warm and attractive as its Brittany locations, A Summer's Tale (Gen), the latest movie from the veteran French film maker, Eric Rohmer, deals with the romantic experiences of a young man (Melvil Poupaud) on a summer holiday in Dinard. Another commendable recent French movie Les Apprentis (15), Pierre Salvadori's sharp comedy which features Franois Cluzet and Guillaume Depardieu as two hopeless failures who share a dilapidated Parisian flat from which it seems they will never escape.
For audiences of all ages, James And The Giant Peach (Gen) is Henry Selick's refreshing and charming live-action/animated treatment of Roald Dahl's book, in which a young boy (Paul Terry) is orphaned and sent to live with two horrible aunts (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes). With Pete Postlethwaite and the voices of Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss and David Thewlis.
Bernardo Bertolucci's first film in 15 years to be set and shot in his native Italy, Stealing Beauty (15) is a contrived, rambling and obvious picture of a 19-year-old American (Liv Tyler) spending a summer holiday in Tuscany, where she finds her biological father and loses her virginity. Accompanied by a grating soundtrack which appears to have been chosen at random from a jukebox, Stealing Beauty squanders the talents of a cast that includes the promising young Tyler, along with Donal McCann, Sinead Cusack, Jeremy Irons, Jean Marais and Stefania Sandrelli.
At the bottom of this month's barrel are the witless and irritating Multiplicity (12), in which Michael Keaton plays a man who finds himself pulled in so many different directions that he decides to have himself cloned; the saccharine Phenomenon (PG) with John Travolta unconvincingly cast as an easy-going mechanic turned into a genius with telekinetic powers by a mysterious force; and John Landis's abysmal The Stupids (PG), featuring Tom Arnold and Jessica Lundy, is based on a series of children's books and follows the misadventures of an unusual family with a knack for elaborate misinterpretations of the most ordinary things.
Videos to buy
A number of this month's rental releases are also available on sell-through: Emma, James and the Giant Peach, A Summer's Tale and Les Apprentis. New retail releases of note are 12 Monkeys, Mighty Aphrodite, Get Shorty, The Indian in the Cupboard, Casino (in widescreen), Truffaut's 1973 Une Belle Fille Comme Moi and 1979 Love on the Run, and the fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary on the 1992 campaign to have Bill Clinton elected, The War Room Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, banned in the Republic, is now available to buy in the North, if one is so inclined. It costs £9.99.
