HEY, THEY'RE ONLY KIDS

"Kids" (18s), Virgin, UCI Coolock, Tallaght

"Kids have sex, kids take drugs, kids party, kids have fun," declares Larry Clark, the American cult photographer and chronicler of teenage sexuality, who makes his directorial debut with this ambiguous film. It arrives amid a lather of controversy and hype about its fly on the wall scenes of young adolescents having sex, scoring drugs, drinking, partying and hanging out, during 24 hours in New York in midsummer.

A fiction that strives for realism, Kids has an unknown, non professional cast and a deliberately unpolished visual style, photographed by Eric Edwards with hand held cameras and close ups. Using muffled sound and elliptical, slang ridden dialogue written by a 19 year old skate boarder, Harmony Korine, it is based on the 53 year old director's observation of a group of New York adolescents whom he befriended.

In the almost total absence of adults there are no checks, no limits on the teenagers' behaviour. Living for the moment, not thinking about consequences, they attempt to act out their fantasies. The focus of the film is on (heterosexual) male sexuality, as represented by Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), the "virgin surgeon", whose aim is to deflower as many virgins as possible - because they're clean and they'll remember him - and his aggressive, skate boarding pal Casper (Justin Pierce).

Juxtaposed with the swearing, bragging and shoplifting exploits of this unappealing pair is the search for Telly by Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), a 16 year old who discovers she is HIV positive after a single sexual encounter - with Telly - and whose plight becomes the only cautionary tale amid an egregious absence of moral judgment.

While the boys have appropriated the hand and back slapping street style and body language of young black men, their attitudes are aggressively racist, as well as sexist and homophobic, We see them banging out in Washington Square Park, getting stoned, taunting a gay couple and descending en masse on a young black man who gets in their way, beating him unconscious. Any boy who isn't sufficiently macho is baited with "bitch" or "pussy", and they brag to each other about their refusal to wear condoms.

It is its resolute neutrality of tone that has caused offence, and which distinguishes Kids from, for example, Bertrand Tavernier's LAppat, in which the French director's determination to find something to blame for his teenage characters' anomie, leads him to the rather simplistic scapegoating of the pernicious influence of American media and consumer culture. Here the only message Clarke conveys, obliquely, is the importance of safe sex. The rest is just "telling it like it is" - or is it? Speculation about his intentions is inevitable; following his photographic collections Tulsa, Teenage Lust and Larry Clarke 92, which captured scenes of teenage suicide and auto erotic asphyxiation, Kids reprises Clarke's preoccupation with teenage sex. Although it is aimed, he says, at teenage viewers, the age certificate the film has received in the US, UK and here precludes that possibility and we are left wondering what the film has to offer an adult audience, other than voyeurism.

With the passivity, even coercion, of Telly's female sexual partners and the titillating, reductionist camera angles, particularly in the final scene where Casper has intercourse with the drugged, comatose Jennie, Clarke has treaded an uncomfortable line between depicting teenage sex and exploiting it, and has masked prurience with a carefully constructed, documentary style authenticity and the self consciously brash flaunting of shock value.

"Mr Holland's Opus" (I5s), Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex

After all that, there's a wistful innocence about Stephen Herek's bland schoolroom drama as it plods with pedestrian competence through three decades of American youth, from the early 1960s to the Nineties, tracing the growth of Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfus) from frustrated composer of a great American symphony, to inspired music teacher and mentor with a nod in the direction of Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life.

Although attempting to include each decade's events and icons it resolutely avoids political commentary, while the John F Kennedy High School appears to be a drug free, trouble free haven. It's a fine, sympathetic performance from Dreyfus, however, which manages to convey a genuine, and catholic, love of music and almost compensates for the schematic treatment of the successive waves of pupils, but cannot overcome the absurdly sentimental finale.

"Swimming With Sharks", (members only) IFC

Who'd want to work in Hollywood? "Out here, it's kill your parents, fuck your friends and have a nice day," Kevin Spacey informs his callow new assistant Guy (Frank Whaley) in George Huang's debut film, an acidic movie biz satire in the tradition of The Big Knife and The Player. Spacey applies himself with relish to the role of monstrous studio executive Buddy Ackerman, whose favourite sport is reducing his PAs to grovelling mush at least five times a day. Huang, himself a former assistant to executives at Universal and Columbia, makes it clear what the deal is: if you can take the humiliation and abuse for a few years, you too can become one of the elite. It's a Faustian pact which Spacey's character constantly exploits, taunting and daring Whaley to walk out on him, and give up his dream of a life in movies.

Working cleverly within the limitations of a very tight budget, Huang cross cuts between a small number of locations and characters to create a convincingly nasty and very witty portrait of the way the studio system works. As with The Player, a lot of the fun is derived from the Tinseltown epigrams ("The only meetings worth going to are the ones that can't start without you"). Whaley is good as the ambitious young assistant, and Michelle Forbes's credible as an ambitious producer, by the movie belongs to Spacey, who makes this a hat trick of brilliant monsters following his roles in The Usual Suspects and Seven. Buffs may groan at the heavy handed references (the main plotline revolves around a screenplay written by someone called Foster Kane ho, ho), but they'll enjoy all the movie chit chat, and there's a misanthropic twist at the end that should satisfy cynics everywhere.

"Money Train", (18s), Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCI

The basketball movie White Men Can't Jump was a big success a couple of years back for Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, so it's not surprising to see the two reunited in this formula action comedy, dubbed White Men Can't Hump by one wag in the preview audience. Harrelson and Snipes play two subway cops who also happen to be adoptive brothers.

While snipes is an exemplary officer, and a hit with the ladies, Harrelson is a gormless failure and compulsive gambler who relies on his brother to bail out of his scrapes. When the two team up with a feisty new female officer (Jennifer Lopez) to track down a murderous psychopath, Snipes inevitably gets both hiss man and the girl, while Harrelson loses his job and resolves to rob the Money Train, which picks up the collected fares from New York's subway stations.

Money Train's main claim to fame is the criticism it received in America for supposedly inspiring a copycat attack on a subway booth. Apart from that, it's just another brainless action film, although it's always fascinating to observe how Hollywood tiptoes nervously around the race issue (as in White Men Can't Jump, the shared love interest of the two male leads is conveniently Hispanic).