Every reason for fear and loathing

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (18) General release

Overwrought and overlong, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a lurid, heavy-handed and tiresomely over-extended screen treatment of a wild and crazy psychedelic excursion recounted in a classic Rolling Stone article and spin-off book by gonzo journo Hunter S. Thompson. The year is 1971, and the film inserts footage of Nixon and Vietnam in the sketchiest of attempts to establish a historical, political or social context.

Prefaced by Dr Johnson's view that "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man", the movie chronicles the druggy exploits of sports writer Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his corpulent attorney, Dr Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), when they travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with a car-boot full of pharmaceuticals, ostensibly to cover a motorbike race. The eclectic soundtrack includes such obvious material as White Rabbit and One Toke Over the Line, along with the ironically used Magic Moments and You're Getting to be a Habit with Me.

The fertile imagination of Terry Gilliam, who took over as director shortly before shooting when Alex Cox was fired, is rarely in evidence in this brashly over-the-top, scattershot remembrance, purveyed with the sledge-hammer subtlety of Oliver Stone and the naivete of a post-1960s hippie apologist.

It fails to engage despite the most valiant efforts of the consistently interesting and never predictable Johnny Depp, admirably deadpan with pate shaved and teeth almost permanently clamped on a cigarette-holder, and Benicio Del Toro, shirt open to exhibit the beer belly he so assiduously grew for the movie. As it flounders into its fourth and final half-hour, it merely evokes that boring feeling of detachment one might have at a party where everyone else is chemically altered to feel as if they're on another planet.

"Henry Fool" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

After the trivial three-part exercise that was Flirt, Hal Hartley makes another mis-step with the altogether more ambitious but thoroughly disappointing Henry Fool. Set in a rundown district in the New York borough of Queens, it features an imposing screen newcomer, Thomas Jay Ryan, as the eponymous character, a paroled convict who turns up in the area and inveigles himself into the home of the Grim family which, as you may gather from the name, is dysfunctional.

In complete contrast to the voluble, domineering intellectual Henry, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is a shy, nerdy and truly hapless garbage collector who dabbles in poetry and lives with his sexually promiscuous sister (Parker Posey) and acutely depressed mother (Maria Porter). Although wholly self-absorbed and preoccupied with writing his memoirs, Henry finds time to encourage Simon to express himself in his poetry, with unexpected consequences.

A veteran of the US indies at 39, Hal Hartley delivers some more outrageous humour in this tragi-comic Faustian fable, which he describes as "a story of ambition, talent and influence". His sixth feature film, it is, as one has come to expect from Hartley, replete with shrewd social observations, and typically sharp, irony-laden dialogue and interconnected vignettes.

However, the new film (not quite so new given that it has taken 14 months to get here after its Toronto Film Festival premiere) falls far short of Hartley's earlier, more assured and more focussed achievements in The Unbelievable Truth, Trust and Amateur. A characteristically idiosyncratic and digressive feature from Hartley, Henry Fool makes too many superfluous digressions, which over-stretch the material and undermine its intermittent flashes of brilliance. It merely skims over most of the more serious issues upon which it touches, and its structure is too rambling and insubstantial to engage the mind over a running time of over two and a quarter hours.

"Hope Floats" (12) Nationwide

The opening scene of Hope Floats promises far more than the film ultimately delivers. Happily married housewife Sandra Bullock is shocked when she turns on the television to see her best friend confessing to an affair with her husband, on a daytime talk show. Angry and confused, Bullock returns with her young daughter to the home of her eccentric mother (Gena Rowlands) in Texas, where she struggles to make sense of what has happened. Having left her small town years before as a triumphant prom queen with an apparently glittering future, Bullock finds the local response to her extremely public humiliation is a mixture of glee and fake sympathy. The exception is Harry Connick jnr, himself a returnee from a "good job" in California, and now working as a local handyman. From there on, events unfold with wearying predictability.

This is the second film directed by actor Forest Whitaker whose debut, Waiting to Exhale, also looked at women persevering in the face of disillusionment, betrayal and pain. But Hope Floats is a less interesting and far more schmaltzy affair, with the notable exception of Mae Whitman's excellent portrayal of a young girl's reaction to her parents' separation. The usually excellent Rowlands is reduced to a cliched cipher in the role of the dotty mother, while Connick doesn't have to do much more than look enigmatically handsome. Bullock's dewy-eyed performance becomes increasingly irritating as the film wends towards its inevitable, upbeat finale, accompanied by a slushy country-rock soundtrack clearly calculated to appeal to the Garth Brooks constituency.

"Blade" (18) General Release

Is he a man? Is he a vampire? Oh my gawd, he's both. Stephen Norrington's glossy spin on vampire lore is a futuristic action-and-gore fest, based on a well-known American comic-book character. A tortured soul with super-human powers of survival, Blade is determined to prevent the elite vampire race from taking over the world. ("They're everywhere.")

As Blade (Wesley Snipes) swaggers through the windswept streets in a flurry of black leather, dogged at every turn by the vampires' petulant leader (Stephen Dorf), the filtered lighting, slick sets and soundtrack suggest a (very long) pop video, or a commercial. We wait for a jeans or lager label to heave into view, but are bombarded instead with technically dazzling make-up and digital effects. In relentless succession over 120 minutes, characters are decapitated, eviscerated, stabbed or sprayed with bullets, disintegrating first into tiny silver fragments, then into a bloody smear. The days of garlic, crucifixes and gothic romanticism begin to take on a nostalgic glow; even Buffy The Vampire Killer looks appealing in retrospect - at least it had a sense of humour.

Helen Meany

"The Odd Couple II" (12) General release

The bickering relationship between mismatched roommates Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar originated in Neil Simon's play, The Odd Couple, when it opened on Broadway in 1965, starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney. It played for two years and won Tony awards for Simon, Matthau and director Mike Nichols. In 1968 Simon astutely turned his play into a witty feature film in which Matthau and Jack Lemmon sparked off each other as the central characters. The story's next incarnation was as an entertaining television series in which Jack Klugman and Tony Randall were perfectly cast as cranky Oscar and fussy Felix. For reasons best known to himself, Neil Simon recently embarked on a sequel to the 1968 movie which reunites Matthau and Lemmon with Howard Deutch, who directed them in another forgettable sequel, Grumpier Old Men. In the flaccid, hopelessly contrived scenario for The Odd Couple II, Oscar and Felix have not met in 17 years and are thrown together again when the son of one is about to marry the daughter of the other. Amazingly, neither of the old grumps had any knowledge of this relationship.

Simon's slovenly screenplay ladles on the cliches as it puts the pair through the all too familiar routine of tiresome mishaps and bristling antagonism, and the result is embarrassing to watch. I would have walked out were I not watching the movie on a plane.