AFFLICTION
**
USA
A deeply troubled cop starts to disintegrate.
A formula destruction of an unconvincing character, not helped by some of Nolte's most irritating overacting yet and  unnecessary voiceover narration, reminiscent of paranoid 1950s subject studies.
dir: Paul Schrader
cast: Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe

AFTERGLOW
****
USA
Two couples with marital problems unknowingly swap partners.
A mature, haunting, thoughtful, quietly moving marriage drama.
dir: Alan Rudolph
cast: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Johnny Lee Miller, Lara Flynn Boyle

THE APOSTLE
*
USA
A Texas preacher on the run from the law takes a new name and goes to Louisiana.
A dull, offensively simple-minded, proudly and patronizingly preachy celebration of preaching for the sake of preaching, without a trace of spirituality.
dir: Robert Duvall
cast: Robert Duvall, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Bob Thornton

AS GOOD AS IT GETS
****½
USA
An obnoxious novelist with an obsessive compulsive disorder is transformed by a hard-edged waitress and a gay neighbour.
A romantic comedy that deals with bitter and imperfect lives and personalities, yet simultaneously strives to exude warmth and simplify and solve everyone's problems. In many ways it's a miracle - and a delight - that it still works, but it's more likely due to the engaging, clever characterisations.
dir: James L. Brooks
wr: Mark Andrus, James L. Brooks
cast: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear

AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
**½
USA
A hit-and-miss James Bond parody, and even the hits aren't right on-target, but amusing enough.

BOOGIE NIGHTS
***½
USA
A well-endowed young guy becomes a sensation in the 70s porn industry.
As a satire of the porn industry, it takes an exceptionally easy target, even if it does manage a perfect score. It takes several further easy, predictable routes and its length testifies to its overindulgences, but it impresses greatly as it develops into an unorthodox and moving family drama.
wr/dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
ed: Dylan Tichenor
pd: Bob Zembicki
cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina

THE BUTCHER BOY
***
USA
In the 1960s, an imaginative Irish boy must live with an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother.
A surreal and chilling rites-of-passage tale, though not always as involving as its arresting final few reels.
dir: Neil Jordan
cast: Eamonn Owens, Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Alan Boyle, Brendan Gleeson, Milo O'Shea, Ian Hart, Sinead O'Connor

CHASING AMY
****
USA
A comic writer falls in love with a lesbian.
A warm, witty and intelligent study of relationships and budding preferences in the 1990s.
wr/dir: Kevin Smith
cast: Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee, Dwight Ewell, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith

CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
****½
Iran
A boy loses his older sister's shoes, so they must share his pair.
A beautifully textured and detailed tale of childhood and innocence. Captivating, enjoyable and uplifting. The child actors are a revelation.
dir: Majid Majidi
cast: Amir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahare Sediqi, Mohammad Amir Naji, Fereshte Sarabandi, Nafise Jafar-Mohammadi

CLOCKWATCHERS
**½
USA
A great indie cast is sabotaged by some painfully unnecessary voiceover narration.

CONTACT
***½
USA
A devoted, atheist astronomer receives signals of civilization from a distant star.
An unexpectedly profound and gripping sci fi, for the most part disallowing Hollywood to rear its ugly head. The stunning sound and visual effects receive as much care and attention as the central issues of religion and the universe.
dir: Robert Zemeckis
cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett

COP LAND
*½
USA
A glossy, cliché-ridden, earnest and pretentious thriller about a lone righteous cop in a small town full of corrupt cops that out of an otherwise superb cast picks Sylvester Stallone to focus on and even attempts to reinvent him as a method actor. He seems to have interpreted this as encouragement to hold on to the one face expression more stubbornly.
dir: James Mangold
cast: Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert de Niro, Peter Berg, 

DARK CITY
***½
USA
An amnesiac wakes up hunted by the law in a strange futuristic universe.
The world created by this intelligent sci-fi is noirish, nightmarish, stunning and haunting. It completely loses track once however, once it goes beyond these borders. Its achievements are never anywhere near as overwhelming as its ambitions.
dir: Alex Proyas
ph: Dariusz Wolski
pd: George Liddle, Patrick Tatopolous
cast: Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY
***½
USA
A writer suffering from writer's block recalls the parallels between his life and his fiction.
Routine Woodyism still makes for a clever, layered, witty and entertaining picture.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
cast: Woody Allen, Judy Davis, Kirstie Alley, Richard Benjamin, Elisabeth Shue, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Julie Kavner, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, Eric Bogosian, Caroline Aaron, Bob Balaban, Hazelle Goodman, Henry Goodman, Eric Lloyd, Tobey Maguire

DONNIE BRASCO
***
USA
An FBI undercover agent poses as a petty thief in order to infiltrate the mob.
A tense, fast-moving gangster picture from a fresh perspective. Generally well done, though it lacks emotional impact.
dir: Mike Newell
cast: Johnny Depp, Al Pacino, Anne Heche, Michael Madsen, Bruno Kirby, James Russo

THE EDGE
***
USA
An aging millionaire and a younger photographer, both in love with the old man's wife, must rely on each other to survive after a plane crash in Alaska.
Not particularly cinematic but an intelligent, compelling thriller, well served by Mamet dialogue.
dir: Lee Tamahori
wr: David Mamet
cast: Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Elle McPherson

FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL
*****
USA
A documentary loosely based around interviews with a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a mole rat expert and a robot designer.
The premise initially appears ill-fated - the characters seem odd but not engaging and you expect the film to quickly desensitise you to its quirks and self-destruct. But then gradually and subtly, it unfolds into a funny, oddly moving and profound meditation on the human condition, the individual's place within a society and existence in general, masterfully and imaginatively presented by an exceptionally gifted filmmaker.
dir: Errol Morris
ed: Shondra Merrill, Karen Schmeer
m: Caleb Sampson

THE FULL MONTY
**½
UK/USA
Six unemployed men organize a striptease act, intending to go 'the full monty' and take all their clothes off.
A spectacularly and somewhat bizarrely successful lower-class comedy. Original it may be, but the jokes are forced and the premise was never feature length material.
dir: Peter Cattaneo
cast: Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, William Snape, Steve Huison, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber

FUNNY GAMES
****
Germany
Two young men terrorize a family on vacation.
Among cinema's most discomforting thrillers in that it terrorises the most sacred of instistutions. Disturbing and difficult to sit through but stubbornly gripping.
wr/dir: Michael Haneke
cast: Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering

GATTACA
***
USA
In what an ominous intertitle introduces as the “not too distant future”, expectant parents are able control their child’s genetic make-up and recruiting firms can access details regarding a person’s genetic make-up and assess his/her job qualifications based on these alone. Ethan Hawke dreams of becoming an astronaut but he can’t because he was born in the wrong, non-genetically-controlled way. So he borrows genetic samples from Jude Law (who was conceived as an ideal specimen) and assumes his identity in an effort to fulfill his dreams.
   Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s is an inconsistent view of the future. While genetic research has advanced to the point that scientists can predict a new-born baby’s life expectancy from a blood sample and astronauts can rationally hope to travel to one of Saturn’s moons, a big rocket science office has to get by without decent security or the primitive video camera surveillance which was so practical and readily available even in the late 1990s.
   Furthermore, Niccol falls into that same old trap (which can be dated back at least to the invasion paranoia pictures of the 50s) of presenting the future as a time when everybody talks like a drone. Despite several centuries of history that suggest language will keep evolving, Niccol comfortably hypothesises that language will have devolved by the time this “not-too-distant future” arrives. Far too many sentences in his picture finish with someone getting addressed by their given name (in a similar fashion to the way they do it in daytime soap opera to remind you of who’s who exactly). It’s true that he might be trying to make a point this way, but it’s not an approach that makes his points believable. His ideas are conceived in the grand scale of the highfalutin, Kubrick-derived kind of sci-fi, but his dialogue grounds his picture firmly in the B-grade, dehumanised category.
   This picture was his debut and it established the general pattern his career is still following to this day. He has continued to consistently keep coming up with some of the most thought-provoking concepts in modern Hollywood, but he inevitably ends up pushing them in directions which are either obvious or overblown. He’s too much of a fan of classical narrative conventions where the hero has to risk losing the girl of his dreams (before she decides she really does love him, even if she doesn’t understand why) or where he has to prove himself to an estranged family member in what is staged as a highly emotional climax. He’s a frustrating filmmaker: he presents you with great, cellophane-wrapped food for thought, then he quickly swallows it up and shits it out right in front of you. You can sum up his creative output with the same phrase you could sum up the perfume-ad visual style he relies on here: glossy but hollow.
   The acting (and by extension, the direction of the actors) is another element that prevents you from getting emotionally involved. Ethan Hawke’s performance is a vacant one. Maybe this is intentional (and intended to serve as a commentary on the fluid nature of identity or some such thing), but the problem is that he doesn’t give off the impression that this is indeed the case. Since you rarely see him do anything other than be doe-eyed and solemn, it seems safer to surmise he’s just wooden. As the love interest, Uma Thurman looks and sounds like an unintelligent robot (she’s capable of giving a solid performance but more than just about any other movie star she seems to need heavy direction to be coerced into it). Jude Law is restricted to a wheelchair but he comes off as the most energetic of the three in that his delivery is the most mannered.
wr/dir: Andrew Niccol
cast: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Alan Arkin, Gore Vidal, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Shalhoub, Blair Underwood

GOOD BURGER
*
USA
One of those stupid comedies that don't aspire to very much at all and still fail. Not just unfunny but tedious.

GOOD WILL HUNTING
**½
USA
A self-destructive young janitor has remarkable scientific talents. A caring psychiatrist shows him the way.
Preachy, by-the-numbers lesson on how to find the genius in you if you are in a Hollywood feature. Wildly and mysteriously successful. Maybe it was the sugar-coated, unreal realism; or the hilarious amount of irrelevant coarse language.
dir: Gus Van Sant
cast: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Minnie Driver, Stelan Skarsgård, Ben Affleck

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
**½
USA
A troubled hitman goes to his high school reunion.
A confused, unfunny, unsuspenseful and largely unnecessary waste of a clever concept. Joan Cusack is, as always, a highlight.
dir: George Armitage
cast: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven, Hank Azaria

HANA-BI
****
USA
A solemn cop is troubled by responsibilities towards his dying wife, a partner shot and handicapped in front of him, and the widow of another.
Beyond the drawn-out and distracting stylistics that particularly occupy the first half, moments of tender beauty and humour accumulate towards a moving finale.
dir: Takeshi Kitano
cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu

THE HANGING GARDEN
****
Canada
Haunted by his miserable childhood, a seemingly well-adjusted gay man returns to the home he deserted as a teenager.
A colourful, surreal, often savagely funny, but deeply emotional and affecting study of a scarred man trying to make good with his traumatic past and estranged family.
wr/dir: Thom Fitzgerald
cast: Chris Leavins, Troy Veinotta, Kerry Fox, Sarah Polley, Peter MacNeill, Seana McKenna, Christine Dunsworth

HAPPY TOGETHER
****½
Hong Kong
Two dysfunctional Asian lovers in Buenos Aires are continually drawn to each other.
The story is almost a distraction to all the mood-evoking going on. Confidently directed, the picture is full of resonant scenes and moments of great beauty.
dir: Wong Kar Wai
ph: Christiopher Doyle
cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Leslie Cheung, Chen Chang

HENRY FOOL
****½
USA
The people who didn't tap into the subtle wisdom and loveliness of Hal Hartley's early films mistook this one for a testament to his maturation. It's no such thing. Harley was a mature filmmaker from the outset and all that separates this [not coincidentally perfectly wise and lovely] dramedy from his earlier ones is that he's stingier with the comedy and the melancholy that was quiet and restrained in Trust and Simple Men is here amplified and brought to the forefront. It's an approach that - working, as it is, off a plot about a pretentious writer and an antisocial garbageman-poet, as well as a quirky-whimsical score - reeks of undergrad hollowness to begin with, but becomes more digestible and resonant as the characters grow meatier and more life-like.
   It's longer than Hartley's previous films and less contained - almost sprawling tone-wise if you compare it to The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men. In some sense it's also more ambitious, and probably more flawed. But ultimately it's just as charming and big-hearted.
wr/dir: Hal Hartley
cast: Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak, Parker Posey, Maria Porter, James Saito, Kevin Corrigan, Liam Aiken, Miho Nikaido, Gene Ruffini, Nicholas Hope, Diana Ruppe, Veanne Cox, Jan Leslie Harding, Chaylee Worrall, Christy Romano

HERCULES
**
USA
Disney's deplorable lowpoint as far as their 90s animations are concerned, with absolutely nothing to recommend for it.

THE HOUSE OF YES
***
USA
An arch, mannered stage-to-screen transfer about the brand of quirky-dysfunctional-family that has an unfortunate power hold over inexperienced writers. It's too sassy for its own good, but Parker Posey - living up her rare shot at a lead role - makes it more entertaining than it has any right to be.
wr/dir: Mark Waters
cast: Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr., Geneviève Bujold, Rachael Leigh Cook

THE ICE STORM
****½
USA
Anguish and unfulfilment among suburban families in Connecticut 1973.
A lovingly crafted, patiently executed and tremendously moving family drama.
dir: Ang Lee
wr: James Schamus
cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Jamey Sheridan, Elijah Wood

IN & OUT
*½
USA
Hollywood clearly needed to learn a bit more before it attempted this artificial, unconvincing and offensive coming-out comedy inspired by Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech for another well-intentioned but shallow Hollywood take on gay issues.
dir: Frank Oz
cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, Matt Dillon, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Selleck

IN THE COMPANY OF MEN
***
USA
Two young businessmen seduce a vulnerable woman with the intention of destroying her emotionally as a revenge on women.
A cold and particularly disturbing look at destructive relationships and power struggles in the 90s.
wr/dir: Neil LaBute
cast: Aaron Eckhart, Matt Malloy, Stacy Edwards

JACKIE BROWN
***½
USA
Various complex and illegal activities revolve around a flight attendant.
A woefully overlong and uneven but entertaining and atmospheric tribute to a 70s icon, with a disconcertingly warm and nostalgic undercurrent.
wr/dir: Quentin Tarantino
cast: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert de Niro, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton

KUNDUN
***
USA
The life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama.
A long, detailed and visually stunning but emotionally uninvolving biopic. The script is the weak link.
dir: Martin Scorsese
ph: Roger Deakins
pd: Dante Ferretti
cast: Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, Sonam Phunstok, Gyatso Lukhang, Robert Lin, Tengo Gyalpo

L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
*****
In 50s Hollywood, crime and corruption are discovered within the system.
A cool, atmospheric and completely satisfying neo-noir. The period glamour and corruption are peerlessly balanced, as are the performances.
dir: Curtis Hanson
wr: Brian Helgeland, Curtis Hanson
ph: Dante Spinotti
cast: Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell, David Straithairn, Danny DeVito

LIAR, LIAR
*
USA
Moronic, cheese-infested mug-fest of a glossy, rapidly outdated variety, revolving around the aggressively wacky antics of an attention-seeking star with a cute kid and a shallow, sentimental last-minute reunion.

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
****½
A Jewish waiter marries a Catholic teacher just before World War II, during which he and his young son are taken to a concentration camp. There, he pretends it's all a game to protect his son.
A brave, hilarious, sentimental and profoundly moving blend of slapstick and the Holocaust. A genuine celebration of the human spirit with a great big heart, as well as a unique and powerful anti-war statement.
dir: Roberto Benigni
m: Nicola Piovani
cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini

A LIFE LESS ORDINARY
***
USA
A generally entertaining and occasionally impressive, but fatally underconceived romantic thriller.
dir: Danny Boyle
cast: Ewan McGregor, Cameron Diaz, Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo, Ian Holm, Stanley Tucci, Dan Hedaya

LIVE FLESH
****
Spain
Pedro Almodóvar's is a rare gift among moviemakers: he makes sex look enjoyable. And Liberto Rabal gets to enjoy a fair amount in this gem of a thriller, which Almodóvar adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel, relocating the action from London to Madrid.
   Rabal plays a prostitute's son, who gets into a sticky situation with a pair of cops at the age of 20 and through very little fault of his own ends up spending the next six years in jail. Upon release, he makes it his goal to seduce the two cops' remarkably voluptuous wives.
   Though it makes for relatively breezy viewing in light of its status as a revenge melodrama, this one isn't as fluffy as the majority of Almodóvar's earlier concoctions. By the end there even appears to be a political edge to some what transpires, though it's too loose and irregular to be called an undercurrent.
dir: Pedro Almodóvar
wr: Pedro Almodóvar, Jorge Guerricaechevarria, Ray Loriga
cast: Liberto Rabal, Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri, Ángela Molina, José Sancho, Penélope Cruz, Pilar Bardem, Álex Angulo

LOST HIGHWAY
****
USA
After unsettling events around the home, a saxophonist is accused and imprisoned for murdering his wife.
Many have dismissed or embraced this as a self-parody. Either way, it's an  unsettling, hypnotic oddity with a fantastic soundtrack. Sample plot development: Half-way through the film, the central character is morphed into a completely different man, with his own separate life. There is no explanation.
dir: David Lynch
cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake

LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND
**
USA
A slow, muddled and completely misguided queer tale about an aging British novelist's obsession with an American teen idol.

MADE IN HONG KONG
***½
Hong Kong
A low-budget feature about disaffected youth, very much inthe vein of films like "The 400 Blows" (1959) - high on freeze frames, jump cuts, juvenile delinquency and irresponsible parenting. Confident direction makes it all feel comletely fresh anyway.
wr/dir: Fruit Chan
cast: Sam Lee, Neiky Yim Hui-Chi, Wenbers Li Tung-Chuen, Amy Tam Ka-Chuen, Carol Lam Kit-Fong, Doris Chow Yan-Wah, Siu Chung

THE MASK OF ZORRO
***
USA
A brain-dead but entertaining modern Hollywood re-interpretation of the Zorro legend, full of remarkably pretty people.

MEN IN BLACK
**½
USA
A gargantuan box-office hit about a secret agency that exterminates alien life on Earth. Only occasionally funny.

MRS. BROWN
**½
UK
Queen Victoria develops a controversial friendship with a servant.
The performances are brilliant and the production meticulous, but the heart - and oxygen - is nowhere to be found.
dir: John Madden
cast: Judi Dench, Billy Connolly, Geoffrey Palmer, Anthony Sher, Gerald Butler, Richard Pasco, David Westhead

MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING
***½
USA
Captivating Hollywood fluff of the highest grade. Entertaining, perfectly cast and unpatronizing, for a change.

PRINCESS MONONOKE
***½
Japan
A dark, earnest Hayao Miyazaki anime, more philosophical and contemplative than just about any other cartoon. The story is set in medieval Japan, at the dawn of the Iron Age, and involves a mythical forest in danger of destruction from greedy industrialists.
   One of the most striking elements of the picture - beyond imagery of things like giant, crazed boars covered in swarming maggots - is the absence of the classical, pedantic line that clearly separates good from evil in family-oriented viewing. Miyazaki is addressing some very familiar ecological issues in a genre that is notoriously averse to things like subtlety and complexity and yet, you never sense him passing judgment or trying to force-feed you. His characters are remarkably complex - the villain who runs the weapons factory is a strong-minded woman who provides jobs for lepers and ex-prostitutes. Nothing is simplified for pre-pubescent minds - who are still likely to be won over by the imaginative visuals.
   The middle act drags and the two-hour-plus running time is still uncalled for. But you’re prone to look past such things in light of the massive scope and ambition. Something like Disney’s “Hercules”, made in the same year, looks all the more obscene in comparison.
dir: Hayao Miyazaki
voices of: Yôji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yûko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi, Masahiko Nishimura

ROMY & MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
****
USA
An underrated comedy with spot-on timing, particularly from Lisa Kudrow and Janeane Garofalo. Great fun.

SCREAM 2
***½
USA
Lives up to its exemplary original. Clever, hilarious fun.

STARSHIP TROOPERS
**
USA
I may have missed something here but I don't particularly care to catch up on it.

THE SWEET HEREAFTER
*****
Canada
The effects of a tragic bus accident on a small town.
A sensitive, riveting study of a town in grief.
wr/dir: Atom Egoyan
cast: Ian Holm, Caerthan Banks, Sarah Polley

TASTE OF CHERRY
***½
Iran/France
It's so easy to mistake careful, poignant observation for banality in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami that it becomes dangerously tempting to reconsider the banality - when it is genuine - as careful observation instead. Elements of both can be found in this, his Palme d'or-winning study of a middle aged man's deliberation of why life is and isn't worth living.
wr/dir: Abbas Kiarostami
cast: Homayon Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi Mir Hossein Noori

TELLING LIES IN AMERICA
**½
USA
An insecure immigrant boy makes good. Recycling not worthy of the honest performances, particularly those from Brad Renfro and Calista Flockhart.

THE THIEF
****
USA
Russia 1952, aboard a train, a struggling single mother meets a magnetic but unreliable soldier.
A compelling, unsentimental and heartbreaking tale of an under-privileged childhood. Intelligently and sensitively directed and acted.
wr/dir: Pavel Chukhraj
cast: Vladimir Mashkov, Yekaterina Rednikova, Misha Philipchuk

TITANIC
***
USA
A 101-year-old former movie star remembers her romance as a suicidal bride-to-be with a third-class artist aboard the Titanic.
The production is meticulous and the hour-long climax undeniably compelling, but the romance is unconvincing, the dialogue risible and the male lead wooden.
wr/dir: James Cameron
pd: Peter Lamont
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bill Paxton

TOMORROW NEVER DIES
***
USA
At this point in time Bond is delivering more regularly than at any other time since Connery left the franchise. Solid, fast-moving entertainment.

TWO GIRLS AND A GUY
**½
USA
An unremarkable and uncomplicated account of a menage-a-trois, though it's well-acted.

ULEE'S GOLD
***
USA
A reclusive beekeeper risks his life to help his son and save his daughter-in-law.
A slow, mostly uninvolving study of an uninteresting character. Ultimately puzzling as to what it's been trying to achieve, and perhaps failed to.
dir: Victor Nunez
cast: Peter Fonda, Patricia Richardson, Christine Dunford, Tom Wood, Jessica Biel

WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
****½
USA
A remarkable documentary of a horrific event, gripping and harrowing to the point that it's sometimes difficult to sit through.
dir: William Gazecki

WAG THE DOG
****½
USA
A Hollywood producer is turned to in an effort to help disguise a presidential candidate's sex scandal. The media is promptly overrun by news of a fictional war.
A savage, hilarious and almost prophetic political satire.
dir: Barry Levinson
wr: Hilary Henkin, David Mamet
cast: Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Anne Heche, Woody Harrelson, Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, Kirsten Dunst

WELCOME TO SARAJEVO
***
UK/USA
A British journalist in Sarajevo gets emotionally involved with a Bosnian orphan.
Harrowing at times but it opts for the obvious way out and the BBC side of the story.
dir: Michael Winterbottom
cast: Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Emira Nusevic

WILDE
***½
USA
Oscar Wilde suffers for his long-repressed homosexuality.
Like many biopics, this falls into the trap of narrating rather than exploring the man's personal life. However, this man's personal life was quite a fascinating one, especially as presented with such assured direction and solid ensemble acting.
dir: Lewis Gilbert
cast: Stephen Fry, Jude Law, Jennifer Ehle, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Jones, Judy Parfitt, Michael Sheen, Zoë Wanamaker, Tom Wilkinson

THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
***½
UK/USA
An impoverished young woman befriends a rich American woman, who offers her a trip to Venice and the opportunity to break free from her wealthy and imposing aunt as well as her poverty.
A classy, eloquent, satisfying Henry James adaptation.
dir: Iain Softley
ph: Edouardo Serra
cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, Alison Elliott, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Gambon

WINTER SLEEPERS
***½
Germany/France
A road accident affect the lives of two couples in an isolated mountain town.
An intriguing, well-crafted meditation on destiny, alienation and the effect that communication - or lack thereof - can have over the two.
dir: Tom Tykwer
ph: Frank Griebe
m: Rheinhold Hell, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tom Tykwer
ed: Katya Dringenberg
cast: Ulrich Mattes, Marie-Lou Sellem, Floriane Daniel, Heino Ferch, Josef Bierbichler, Laura Maori Tonke

YET TO SEE:

BIG ONE, THE (Moore);
BREAKDOWN (Mostow);
CAREER GIRLS (Leigh);
CURE (Kurosawa);
DESTINY (Chahine);
EEL, THE (Imamura);
EVE'S BAYOU (Lemmons);
FACE/OFF (Woo);
GADJO DILO (Gatlif);
GUMMO (Korine);
LIFE OF JESUS (Dumont);
LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (Herzog);
MA VIE EN ROSE (Berliner);
MEN WITH GUNS (Sayles);
MIRROR, THE (Panahi);
MOTHER AND SON (Sokurov);
NIL BY MOUTH (Oldman);
REGENERATION (MacKinnon);
RIVER, THE (Tsai);
SAME OLD SONG (Resnais);
SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN... (Dick);
SUNDAY (Nossiter);
SWINDLE, THE (Chabrol)



TOP 10 TO SEE:
MOTHER AND SON
THE MIRROR
NIL BY MOUTH
THE RIVER
THE EEL
SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST
FACE/OFF
EVE'S BAYOU
CAREER GIRLS
GADJO DILO