Puritans, aesthetes and aliens

"The Crucible" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

In his illuminating 1987 memoirs, Timebends, Arthur Miller notes how his rival, Clifford Odets, in an outburst of "competitive resentment", denigrated Miller's play, The Crucible, as "just a story about a bad marriage". First staged on Broadway in January 1953 and devised as an allegory about Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Miller's play has proved Odets well and truly wrong, by enduring long beyond the passing of the McCarthyite era.

Forty three years on, the play comes to the cinema screen and lights it up in a thoughtful and intelligent adaptation by Miller himself, which deservedly has earned him an Oscar nomination. It is not the first cinema treatment of the play in 1957, Raymond Rouleau directed Simone Signoret, Yves Montand and Mylene Demongeot in a French film version scripted by Jean Paul Sartre - in Timebends, Miller notes that Sartre seemed "to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities".

The new version is the second film directed by the young English film maker, Nicholas Hytner, after his exuberant treatment of another theatrical subject in The Madness of King George, and it stars Daniel DayLewis in his first film since Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father four years ago. As in Sheridan's film, Day Lewis plays the victim of a miscarriage of justice in The Crucible - John Proctor, a farmer living with his wife and two children in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.

Winona Ryder, last seen with Day Lewis in The Age of Innocence, plays Abigail Williams, a young woman who had sex with Proctor when she was a servant in his house and was thrown out subsequently. As the film opens, Abigail is in the woods, leading a group of teenage girls in frenzied dancing, and drinking a charm of animal blood to curse John Proctor's wife, Elizabeth (Joan Allen). She is observed by her uncle (Bruce Davison), a local minister who is horrified, and later interrogates her. She responds with defensive accusations, and one rash lie leads to another with a mounting delirium that sets the notorious Salem witch trials in motion.

Nicholas Hytner's film of Miller's adaptation is robust and impassioned cinema which makes for searing and sobering, tragic drama. In its contemporary resonances, it addresses the present day Salems of fundamentalist extremists, sinister cults and herd mentalities around the world - and the fear of adolescent sexuality - as it follows the horrific consequences in this poisonous atmosphere of suspicion, betrayal, persecution, hypocrisy and hysteria. And in its great final scene, with its echoes of Calvary, it takes an unambiguous stand against capital punishment.

Adroitly opened up from its appropriately claustrophobic stage origins, Hytner's film, impeccably designed by Lily Kilvert, was shot against the rugged landscape of Hog Island, an uninhabited bird sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast. Crucially, Miller's screenplay retains his eloquent period dialogue - and it is delivered by a superlative cast.

Winona Ryder, who has never seemed at ease in a period film before this, catches both the bitterness and vulnerability of the vengeful Abigail. Joan Allen, who was so impressive as the president's wife in Nixon last year, brings a vivid purity to the part of the pious Elizabeth Proctor. As Judge Danforth, the chief interrogator, Paul Scofield exudes authority and determination in his dogged pursuit of convictions and executions.

Devoid of any grand heroics, Daniel Day Lewis's subtly nuanced performance as John Proctor - a flawed character who has refused to accept responsibility for his adulterous actions - begins on a low key note and gradually builds in power. His sunburnt features lined with bewilderment at his fate, Day Lewis's Proctor finally achieves a powerful and dignified redemption in the film's chilling, unforgettable, closing sequence.

"The Portrait of a Lady" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Great were the expectations when Jane Campion made it known that she would follow her achievements in An Angel At My Table and The Piano, both riveting accounts of women laced with adversity in times past, with a cinematic interpretation of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady. Campion seemed the ideal film maker to bring to the screen the story of James's creation, Isabel Archer, a sensitive but independent woman in the tradition of Campion's previous principal characters.

To make the project even more enticing, the director chose an eclectic international cast headed by Nicole Kidman as Archer. The project reunited Campion with her regular lighting cameraman, the gifted Stuart Dryburgh, and Janet Patterson, her production and costume designer from The Piano. And Campion enlisted Laura Jones, the Australian writer who so skillfully adapted Janet Frame's autobiographies for An Angel At My Table, to write the screenplay for The Portrait of a Lady.

For readers unfamiliar with the novel, Isabel Archer is a young American woman who, while visiting her English relatives in 1872, startles them when she turns down a marriage proposal from the personable Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant), choosing instead to gain some experience of the world. The one supportive relative is her consumptive cousin, Ralph Touchett (Martin Donovan) who encourages his dying father (John Gielgud) have some of his fortune to Isabel.

Rather than facilitate the freedom she desires, that substantial inheritance draws the attentions of a duplicitous friend, Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey) and her friend and secret lover, Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), a selfish, callous and lazy artist who marries Isabel for her money and dominates and degrades her with psychological violence.

Unfortunately, Jane Campion's film of The Portrait of a Lady is a sad disappointment. It opens with an odd sequence set in present day Australia as young women talk about kissing, and the title appears on one of their hands. One bears with this, assuming that it has some relevance beyond the most obvious, until its pointlessness becomes apparent.

As the movie moves into the past, it takes on a gloom laden atmosphere and proceeds with a lamentable inertia for much of its duration, the drama becoming as suffocating as Isabel's utterly unwise marriage to Gilbert Osmond. Some elements of the original story disappear entirely in the movie - such as the first three years of that unhappy marriage - while Campion proffers such grating additions as a fantasy sequence of Isabel in bed with two suitors and her cousin.

As cold and remote as Gilbert Osmond himself, this Portrait of a Lady is further undermined by Laura Jones's screenplay which distils the internal drama of the novel as heavy handed melodrama personified by John Malkovich's hammy performance as Osmond, a thin variation on his calculating seducer in Dangerous Liaisons.

Weeping her way through this vale of tears and subjected to a succession of daunting close ups, Nicole Kidman works earnestly at an expressive performance and partly succeeds. Only Martin Donovan, as the ailing but caring Ralph Touchett, and Barbar Hershey, as the conniving Madame Merle, emerge with any significant credit from this overwrought enterprise.

"Mars Attacks!" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

We come in peace," declare the smiling little creatures with bulging eyes and huge brains who land on earth in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! - but they don't mean a word of it and within seconds the gleefully destructive extra terrestrials are eradicating everyone in sight. The premise is a familiar one from the alarmist Bmovies which proliferated in the 1950s, and Burton affectionately parodies that genre with the benefit of a big budget that allows for lavish 1990s production values and special effects.

Time and again, the movie also seems to be spoofing the similarly themed but inferior Independence Day, even though Burton's picture was shot before that opened. Inevitably, echoes abound of Burton's - earlier work and of The Nightmare Before Christmas - and, coincidentally Toy Story - in the most accomplished creation of Mars Attacks! the transmutation of a chihuahua's body and the head of its owner, a television reporter (Sarah Jessica Parker) who's straight out of Clueless.

Slow to get started, Mars Attacks! jumps into overdrive with the landing of its computer generated Martians and Burton maintains the lively pace through to the tongue in cheek finale when virtually all of the cast has been exterminated. That distractingly stellar cast includes Jack Nicholson in a dual role - on wicked form as a shifty eyed US president and less. happily cast as a sleazy Las Vegas land developer.

As a gung ho general, Rod Steiger looks like he has wandered out of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, while Paul Winfield plays his calmer colleague as a spot on Colin Powell impersonation. Glenn Close is a snooty First Lady with busy young Nathalie Portman as the Chelsea Clinton surrogate.

The generally intolerable Martin Short is very funny as the president's lecherous press secretary, who lures a conquest into "what we call the Kennedy room" at the White House in another fabulous creation, Lisa Marie plays that conquest, a Martian heavily disguised under a towering beehive hairstyle. And entering to the opening bars of It's Not Unusual, a deadpan Tom Jones plays himself.

Another singer of popular music, the late Slim Whitman, surely would be spinning in his grave at 78 r.p.m. if he knew the function his yodelling vocals serves in this cheerful entertainment, which is indelibly stamped with Tim Burton's trademark warped humour. This is his most all out comedy since Beetlejuice, though not nearly as creepy.

"Bound" (18) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Screenwriting brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski - who scripted the laughable Stallone/Banderas yarn, Assassins - show they are capable of far more substantial material with the clever, dark humoured thriller, Bound, which also marks a notable directing debut for them. Clearly influenced by those much better known film making brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, the Wachowskis have fashioned a quite unpredictable modern day film noir in Bound.

After an off putting opening in which the dialogue feels too self consciously hard boiled, their movie commands the attention as it unravels a murky tale of crime and duplicity. The protagonists are vibrantly etched by Joe Pantoliano as Caesar, a criminal involved in money laundering Jennifer Tilly as Violet, his underestimated lover, and Gina Gershon as Corky, their new neighbour, a tattooed lesbian excon who comes between them.

There are a number of well judged and serpentine narrative twists that engage the attention all the way. The tense drama unfolds against a highly confident visual style and it is peppered with some wild and very funny dialogue.

At the core of this tale of shifting loyalties and double crossing is the lesbian relationship that blossoms between the two leather clad women, Corky and Violet, who are played with panache by Jennifer Tilly in an unexpectedly sharp performance which defiantly upturns her usual typecasting, and Gina Gershon, who initially resembles Sandra Bernhard, but, refreshingly, without Bernhard's irritating, sneering mannerisms. The very promising Gershon is that rare species, an actress who was in Paul Verhoeven's lambasted Showgirls and survived.

"Welcome to the Dollhouse" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.

The winner of the major prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Todd Solondz's interesting but overrated Welcome to the Dollhouse is carried much of the way by the remarkable 11 year old actress at its centre, Heather Matarazzo. Wearing geeky glasses and even worse clothes, she plays the unhappy and unfortunate Dawn Weiner, the middle child in a middle class New Jersey family.

Dawn gets a hard time from her fellow students who call her "lesbo" and daub her locker with insulting graffiti, and she is virtually ignored by parents who dote on her over cute young sister. Dawn's computer obsessed older brother plays in a band, and she develops a crush on their blithely unaware lead singer. Meanwhile, one of the school thugs (Brendan Sexton Jr.) threatens to rape her, and her only friend is a boy in her neighbourhood who also is regularly reviled at school.

The physical resemblance between Heather Matarazzo and director Todd Solondz, which jumps out from publicity photographs of them, suggests that this cynical black comedy is an auto biographical exercise.

In its unsentimental picture of adolescent angst, the movie yields more than a few acute and cringe inducing observations on the cruelty of youngsters to each other, and on the solitary turmoil of Dawn, even though at times it seems unduly drawn to her foul mouthed detractors.

Solondz's screenplay loses its hold in the later stages, when it is just too over plotted for its own good. However, he has made a true discovery in the excellent young Matarazzo, and another in Brendan Sexton Jr, who touchingly reveals the soft centre masked by his character's brash bravado.