A selection of screen savers

Life is a rollercoaster for Donald Clarke as he experiences the many highs and occasional lows in the first days of the Dublin International Film Festival.

A diplomatic incident was narrowly avoided at the launch of the Jameson's Dublin International Film Festival last Friday when Kieran Tobin, commercial director of Irish Distillers, the sponsor's parent company, introduced the festival director, Michael Dwyer, as an "éminence grise".

This newspaper's film correspondent, whose kinship with the likes of Peter Mandelson and Cardinal Richelieu has not previously been remarked upon, and whose head remains largely ungreyed, took the remark in good spirit. "Well, not so grise," he chuckled.

With that out of the way, the audience settled down to watch The Mighty Celt, the directorial début of northerner Pearse Elliott. Those of us who disliked Elliot's script for last year's Man About Dog, a considerable hit at the Irish box office, were pleasantly surprised by the unforced pace and easy rhythms of the new film. The picture, a variation on Ken Loach's Kes, but with mammals, tells the story of a young boy's experiences training a prodigiously nippy greyhound.

Gillian Anderson, playing the lad's mother, does a mostly excellent job mastering the always-tricky northern accent, and Robert Carlyle is reliably amiable in the role of the father, but the superb juvenile lead, Tyrone McKenna, is unquestionably the star of the piece. Great things await him.

After the obligatory parade of talent up the aisle of the Savoy One - during which one of the producers, brother of a well-known MEP, was introduced as "Paddy Lou McDonald" - ugly amounts of drinking took place in a night club popular with media personalities.

Frankly, a hangover is the last thing you need while sitting in front of Michael Winterbottom's hopeless 9 Songs, which played at lunchtime on the festival's second day. Interspersing mind-bogglingly explicit sex scenes with live footage of whiney indie rock bands, the film - bravely and, quite correctly, awarded a certificate by our censor - comes across as an accidental parody of some of the worst excesses of experimental film-making. At one point a depressed character, attending yet another annoying rock gig, dares to explain that you can be alone in a room with 5,000 other people. Oh, please!

Speaking of pretentious rubbish, let us welcome back Jean-Luc Godard. Mindful of reactionaries who think that Miles Davis went mad when he brought in the electronics and who berate Joyce for not sticking with the lucid style he developed for Dubliners, I am always reluctant to write off everything Godard, once the most exciting director on the planet, has been up to for the past 30 years. But Notre Musique, in which the great man paddles about Sarajevo talking nonsense, is the work of a director with little regard for his audience. It does, however, contain the most hilariously naive use of Native American culture since Oliver Stone's The Doors. Twaddle at 24-frames-per-second.

After these two misfires, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, as unconventional as the Godard, but infinitely more involving, came as an absolute tonic. An unreliable documentary telling the story of the director's troubled family - his mother's mental instability following electric shock treatment, his own abuse at the hands of foster parents - the film uses contemporaneous pop music and scratchy 8mm footage to construct a dazzlingly complex cinematic lattice. Caouette's dubious decision to show his mother's psychotic outbursts in potentially exploitative detail and his relentless self-absorption are off-putting, but the film would not be what it is without its moments of queasiness.

It is interesting to note how viewers' interests have changed at film festivals. Twenty years ago who would have thought that there would be twice as many people at a screening of a Japanese animation aimed at children than there would be at a Jean-Luc Godard film? Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns did indeed - by my very rough calculations - seem to draw in double the number of punters as did Notre Musique. Morita, as animation enthusiasts may have guessed, works for the mighty Studio Ghibli, which brought audiences such dazzling Hayao Miyazaki entertainments as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. The new film, in which a young girl gets transported to a kingdom ruled by cats, is rich in surreal charm, but has little of the complexity of the Miyazaki films. Nonetheless, wise kids should love it.

If you haven't got a mad Japanese cartoon to hand, anything to do with the Third Reich should pull in the punters. Sure enough, a Sunday afternoon screening of Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (Der Untergang), a hugely impressive study of the last days of Hitler, was packed. Much has been made of the way the film allegedly humanises its subject, but, though Bruno Ganz's overpowering lead performance has its nuances, you wouldn't say that the Fuhrer comes across as anything other than a raving nutcase. The film's greatest achievement is to make sense of the complex dynamics between doomed Nazi leaders. Corinna Harfouch's chilling portrayal of Magda Goebbels is one of the best supporting performances of the festival so far.

For the past two years, DIFF has fallen in Oscar season and has allowed punters a chance to glimpse some short-listed actors appearing in films still to reach our cinemas. The nomination of the young Colombian Catalina Sandino Moreno as Best Actress was the closest thing to a surprise in that category this year. But her unhurried, precisely focused performance as a drug mule in Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace fully justifies the Academy's uncharacteristic leap towards the unknown. Marston's picture is a decent piece of issue-based film-making which, particularly in the central sequence where Maria and her friends have to endure the flight to New York with stomachs packed full of cocaine, features moments of quite unbearable tension. Sadly, the film-makers don't quite know what to do with their characters when they get them to the US.

Sean Penn must surely have felt he was in with a chance of a nomination for his performance in the interesting, if not entirely successful Assassination of Richard Nixon. As it transpired, Academy voters clearly took note of the tooth-marks in the scenery and concluded that Penn needs a strong, assertive director - this is Niels Mueller's début feature - to contain his inclinations toward hamming it up. Telling the mostly true story of a troubled salesman who decided to take his grievances against America out on its commander-in-chief, the picture is rich in dark comedy and features fine supporting performances from Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle, but is a little relentlessly one-note (mad, madder, maddest) for my taste.

Maybe next year, Woody Allen loyalists, such as this writer, who have continued to defend the director's recent output will be able to congratulate their hero on some sort of Oscar nomination for the fine Melinda and Melinda. The picture, which slyly examines similar events from both a comic and a tragic perspective, screened on Valentine's night, though there is more bad news than good news here about the perils of falling in love. Following in the footsteps of Jason Biggs, John Cusack and Kenneth Branagh, this year's surrogate Woody is the excellent Will Ferrell. Amazingly for this director, the picture is set in New York's Upper East Side and features jolly jazz and flaky young women.

Mention of awards brings us to playwright Martin McDonagh's début short film Six Shooter, which was nominated for a BAFTA this year. This tense, hilarious film, in which a feisty Rúaidhrí Conroy annoys a depressed Brendan Gleeson on a train journey, features gloriously distasteful dialogue and ends with the sort of Sam Peckinpah-inspired shoot-out that McDonagh's grisly theatre work has always seemed to long for, but could never comfortably accommodate. Six Shooter preceded Tarnation and - with apologies to the éminencenot-so-grise, who is opposed to the awarding of prizes at this festival - we acknowledge those two films as the highlights so far.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival continues until February 20th. See www.dubliniff.com. Donald Clarke wraps up the festival next Tuesday