Incredible, but true

"The People vs. Larry Flynt" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

The Czech film-maker, Milos Forman, established himself on home ground in the 1960s with a trio of well-observed, naturalistic movies mostly featuring non-professional actors - Peter And Pavla, A Blonde In Love and The Fireman's Ball. Moving to the US, he directed Taking Off, a timely and very funny 1971 picture of the American middle-class coping, with the 1960s counter-culture.

Over the next 26 years, Forman made just six movies, two of which won him Oscars - the superbly acted but overrated One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the shrill and shallow Amadeus. He delivered a dissatisfying treatment of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, a hopelessly dated and naive movie of Hair, and the rarely seen Valmont, which was over-shadowed by Stephen Frears's film of the same story in Dangerous Liaisons.

Forman's films became increasingly marked by a bogus liberalism, an unconvincing high-mindedness and an overblown sense of self-importance, and it comes as no surprise that these misjudgments undermine his new movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt. Opening on scenes of Flynt's impoverished childhood peddling moonshine in Kentucky, the film chronicles his prolific womanising and his rise as a pornographer with Hustler magazine; his relationship with Althea Leasure, a bisexual and under-aged stripper who became his fourth wife; the boost in his magazine's sales after Flynt published illicitly-taken photographs of a nude" Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and Flynt's unlikely, though brief, conversion as a born-again Christian by Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of the US president at the time, Jimmy Carter.

The movie goes on to chart the assassination attempt on Flynt which paralysed him from the waist down and left him heavily dependent on pain-killing drugs, while Althea herself became addicted to drugs and contracted AIDS, and Flynt's many court battles, culminating in his Supreme Court case which resulted in a landmark decision in favour of free speech. Flynt's lawyer, Alan Isaacman, successfully argued that a spoof Campari advertisement published in Husder - claiming that the high-profile and deeply conservative Rev Jerry Falwell had his first sexual experience with his mother in a backwoods outhouse - was protected speech under the First Amendment.

Forman's film benefits considerably from the quality of its performances - Harrelson, who is rarely off-screen, is remarkably assured and immerses himself in the role of Flynt; as Althea, rock singer Courtney Love is very affecting in her first substantial film role; and the very promising Edward Norton plays the articulate and persuasive lawyer, Alan Isaacson, with panache.

The often gimmicky casting of the supporting roles includes James Carville, Bill Clinton's election campaign strategist, as a conservative Ohio county prosecutor; Donna Hanover, the television reporter who is married to the Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, as Ruth Carter Stapleton; and Flynt himself in a cameo as the Ohio judge who first convicted Flynt of obscenity and pandering. James Cromwell, who was the gentle farmer in Babe, plays, the virulently anti-porn financier, Charles Keating.

Substituting incident for insight, the uneven screenplay for The People vs. Larry Flynt is the work of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whose previous collaboration on a biopic was for Ed Wood. For much of its duration, as it gallops through the highs and lows in Flynt's eventful life, For man's film of their screenplay makes for a sharp and entertaining portrait of a character whose sheer multiplicity of experiences would seem incredible were they not based on fact.

Where the film falters, and ultimately fails, is when it diverges from the facts, when it chooses to soft-peddle Flynt's utterly routine exploitation of women for his own sexual gratification and his financial greed. For a film dealing with sex and pornography, it is remarkably coy and it flees from confronting or even noting any of the most degrading imagery published in Hustler. And it dubiously implies that the magazine was some sort of boon to working-class men because it was devoid of the pretensions of Playboy.

This simplified, idealised and self-satisfied portrait of a pornographer goes further off the rails in a tacky and quite spurious sequence of Flynt standing before an American flag and showing images of Nazi concentration camps, the Ku Klux Klan and the Vietnam war, for the purpose of making the pornography of Hustler seem less obscene by this heavy-handed comparison.

"The Empire Strikes Back" (Gen) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

The vastly over hyped Star Wars. Special Edition series continues with the re-issue of the second and much the most satisfying of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner and originally released in 1980. The first draft of the screenplay was completed by the accomplished Leigh Brackett, whose credits included Rio Bravo and El Dora do before her death in 1978, and it was completed, under the supervision of series creator George Lucas, by Lawrence Kasdan, a screenwriter who had yet to turn director with Body Heat.

The narrative takes up after the destruction of the Death Star as Darth Vader continues his quest to dominate the galaxy. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hammill) is offered spiritual advice by the diminutive Jedi master, Yoda, and is delivered a startling revelation by Darth Vader who is determined to have him fight on the side of the dark forces. Meanwhile, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) uneasily get involved in a romantic relationship.

In The Empire Strikes Back the effects work is excellent, as one would expect, but working within a structure tighter than Star Wars - and with a tone substantially darker - it builds on the scene-setting achievements of Star Wars and is much stronger on narrative and character development. And the finale should have admirers of the series longing for the next episode. They have not long to wait - Return Of The Jedi opens here a fortnight from today.