Jazz in the key of Ray

Sweet and Lowdown (12) Selected cinemas

This film, belatedly arriving here, was launched at the Venice and Toronto festivals last September and is the first of two movies from the remarkably productive Woody Allen to reach us this year; his latest, Small Time Crooks, is due in November. Sweet and Lowdown unites Allen's key creative passions, movies and jazz music, in one film, which is shaped as a faux documentary on an allegedly brilliant jazz guitarist, Emmet Ray. Ray, the opening titles inform us, recorded several classics on the RCA Victor label in the 1930s and was regarded as second only to Django Reinhardt in his heyday. His putative status is embellished by on-screen contributions from, among others, Nat Hentoff, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen himself.

Played with terrific panache by Sean Penn with the cheesiest of grins and sleaziest of moustaches, Emmet Ray is revealed as an outrageously vain and self-deluding character who drops women as casually as he picks them up and tries to justify his bad behaviour by putting it down to the artistic temperament of a genius. The boorish, arrogant and patronising guitarist is also a part-time pimp and a kleptomaniac who, we are told, once stole an alarm clock from Hoagy Carmichael, causing him to miss a recording session. And his idea of a night out is take a woman down to the local rubbish pit to shoot rats. When one date complains, he protests, "Well, I brought sandwiches".

Unexpectedly, Ray softens a little when he falls for a mute, sweet-natured laundry worker engagingly played by Samantha Morton, the versatile young English actress from Under the Skin and the recent Jesus' Son. Morton and Penn both received Oscar nominations earlier this year for their performances in Sweet and Lowdown, which also features Uma Thurman as an aspiring novelist, Anthony LaPaglia as a contract killer, and director John Waters as a hotel manager. Although it suffers from an abrupt shift of narrative and tone in its later stages, Sweet and Low- down finds Woody Allen in spirited form. He has established an easy target for humour in the definitive jerk that is Emmet Ray. He milks those opportunities, sometimes to uproariously funny effect, as when Ray devises an elaborate new way to make his entrance on stage.

The recent vogue for mockumentaries is wearing thin and running out of ideas, but Sweet and Lowdown belongs among the best of the genre with This is Spinal Tap and Allen's own brilliant Zelig from 1983. In fact, one prominent British critic found Sweet and Lowdown so convincing when he saw it at the Venice festival last year that he believed Emmet Ray actually existed.

The period detail is impeccably captured in the film which is strikingly photographed by Zhao Fei, the Chinese cinematographer of Raise the Red Lantern on his first American movie. And given the context and Allen's passion for the music, the soundtrack is strewn with jazz classics.

- Michael Dwyer

Gone in 60 Seconds (15) General release

A loose remake of a little-known 1974 smash-em-up, Gone in 60 Seconds bears the unmistakable stamp of its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Con-Air, Armageddon). It's big, it's brash, it's star-heavy and it has a hard rawk soundtrack that tries to tell you what you should be thinking all the time (when you can hear yourself think, that is). Like the designer sports cars it attempts to fetishise, it's an unashamed celebration of corporate testosterone and commercial power. But, more importantly than any of that, it's just not very much fun.

Directed by Dominic Sena (best known for his commercials work, although he did make the underwhelming Kalifornia) in a murky palette of saturated acidgreens and burnt-oranges, the film is constructed as a low-slung star vehicle for Nicolas Cage, as the retired car thief forced back into doing one last job to save little brother Giovanni Ribisi from psycho-Cockney villain Christopher Ecclestone. That job involves stealing 50 specified makes of car and delivering them to Ecclestone within two days. Cage assembles a team of old buddies (Robert Duvall, Vinnie Jones . . . who ever thought we'd see those names side by side?) and the obligatory old flame (Angelina Jolie, fetching in blonde dreadlocks).

As usual, Bruckheimer has assembled his ensemble cast with some care, then wasted their talents on underwritten, sketchy characterisations. Complaining about this is futile - presumably it provides nice paychecks to some good actors (and to Vinnie Jones), allowing them to do good work elsewhere, or at least get a new swimming pool.

But even taken on its own terms, this is one of Bruckheimer's worst movies. Predictable, stodgy as hell, badly plotted and full of even more loopholes than usual, it's also deeply humourless. Worst of all, the car-chase action - the raison d'etre of the whole thing - is deeply unimpressive, paling in comparison not just with such classics of the genre as Bullitt or The French Connection, but even with more recent attempts such as last year's Ronin.

In fact, the final, climactic setpiece, involving a traffic-jammed bridge, a high-powered car and a strategically-placed ramp, is so badly done that it may remind Irish audiences of Biddy's tragic encounter with the tractor in Glenroe. All in all, a strong contender for worst blockbuster of the summer.

- Hugh Linehan

The Road to El Dorado (General) General release

The second classical animation from the DreamWorks studio arrives with little of the fanfare that accompanied its predecessor, Prince of Egypt, and it's not hard to see why. It's not that The Road to El Dorado is an unmitigated disaster - there are some impressive sequences, and an admirable attempt to get away from the cloying sentimentality of so many animated features. But the central conceit - of reviving the format of the Road to . . . movies starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby - never really comes off.

As voiced by Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh, Tulio and Miguel, the two 16th-century hero-adventurers who find themselves unwittingly embarking on a search for the mythical South American golden city of El Dorado, are wisecracking Generation X-ers (aren't Kline and Branagh a little old for this?). Stowed away aboard the ship of the Spanish conquistador, Cortes, they succeed where thousands of others have failed, and find the entrance to the city, where they are hailed as gods and become embroiled with the machinations of the evil high priest.

There are some good things along the way - a few impressive set-pieces and even a couple of decent gags - while it's a relief to see an animation which doesn't tread the same old hoary Disney path of cuddly cub/child becomes handsome beast/man. But an uneven script and sometimes tacky artwork rob the story of much of its narrative flow. And, most importantly, the entire movie is disfigured by the uninspired, banal, tuneless songs of Elton John and Tim Rice.

- Hugh Linehan

The Book That Wrote Itself (Club) IFC, Dublin

Showing for a week at the IFC, having made its way around Irish and international film festivals over the last year or so, Liam O Mochain's spoof-documentary is a sort of celebration of blagging, featuring O Mochain himself as a young Irish writer determined to bring his Celtic mythological novel to life by re-enacting it in the contemporary settings of Dublin, Wexford, Cork, Galway and, finally, at the Venice Film Festival, where he pops up at press conferences to ask silly questions of the likes of George Clooney, Melanie Griffith and assorted other Hollywood luminaries.

Like any good scam, The Book That Wrote Itself sounds more interesting than it actually is - O Mochain's personality (or, it may be quibbled, the personality of his "character", Vincent Macken) quickly becomes wearing, as does the maladroit acting, and blurry video image (the version I saw was a 16 millimetre print transfer). The much-hyped Venice sequence isn't actually very funny, either. Given the plodding and predictable realism of many Irish films, it may seem harsh to criticise a no-budget film which attempts to play with notions of textuality and truth, but it needs to be done with a little more sharpness than this.

- Hugh Linehan