Sleepless in cyberspace

You've Got M@il (PG) General release

In Ernst Lubitsch's delightful 1940 comedy The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play a pair of shop assistants who hate each other, but don't realise they are falling in love through the exchange of anonymous letters. Nora Ephron's reworking of the idea for the 1990s has Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as e-mail pen pals whose burgeoning affair is restrained by their respective relationships, Ryan's with self-satisfied newspaper columnist Greg Kinnear, Hanks's with hyperactive literary agent Parker Posey. Unknown to each other, in "real" life they are also bitter business rivals, with Ryan struggling to save her bookshop from the depradations of Hanks's big-bucks chain store.

It's a typically Ephron strategy, taking the bare bones of a classic romantic comedy and updating it for the Starbucks-slurping, laptoptoting generation, and must have seemed a sure-fire hit with the reunited Sleepless In Seattle team of Hanks and Ryan (indeed, You've Got M@il has already done very well at the US box office, and will probably pack them in here as well).

But there's a slackness in the plotting, dialogue and characterisation that makes this a less toothsome confection than Sleep- less In Seattle or the Ephron-scripted When Harry Met Sally. Whereas both those films whirred like well-oiled machines through the familiar will-they-won't-they schematics, propelled by sharp one-liners and liberally sugared with audience-friendly sentimentality, you could sense a sharp mind at work beneath the schmaltz, one which understood the dynamics of romantic comedy and how to make it fizz in a modern context. Here, though, Ephron seems to have lost the knack, peppering her plot with extraneous characters who never rise above the cartoonish. There's an awkward attempt to contrast the protagonists' respective family backgrounds - Ryan feels the burden of saving the shop left to her by her mother, while Hanks's father is an exemplar of male fickleness - which never seems remotely convincing.

Setting the action on her home turf of New York's Upper West Side should have given Ephron the opportunity to inject a little spikiness into proceedings, but the only sign of that is in Posey's edgy character ("she makes coffee nervous", remarks Hanks in one of the movie's few good lines). Here, you feel, is a brief glimpse of the real world of literary Manhattan, but the movie is so intent on hitting its demographic targets that it blankets everything else in blandness. It's also a good 20 minutes too long - unforgivable in this kind of thing, and symptomatic of the flabbiness of the whole enterprise.

Hugh Linehan

Your Friends & Neighbours (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

A practising Mormon who lives in Indiana with his wife and two young children, the screenwriter and director, Neil LaBute, is firmly establishing himself as one of the caustic and provocative observers of contemporary adult sexual attitudes and behaviour. LaBute made an auspicious film debut two years ago with In The Company Of Men, an abrasive contemporary drama of misogynistic male corporate executives subjecting a vulnerable young secretary to manipulation and humiliation.

He follows that with an even more coruscating picture of the sex lives of misanthropes in Your Friends & Neighbours, and broadens his scope to focus on both sexes for a revealing picture of three men and three women and their mostly unsatisfying sexual relationships. With cool detachment and brutal honesty, LaBute turns his probing lens on them as he rips down the cosy facades with which they try to delude themselves and each other that nothing is wrong.

Jerry (Ben Stiller) is a loquacious drama teacher and furtive adulterer whose wife, Terri (Catherine Keener) complains that he talks far too much when they're having sex. Impotence has destroyed the sex life of their married friends, Barry and Mary (Aaron Eckhart and Amy Brenneman), and Barry confesses to one of his male friends, Cary (Jason Patric) that he can only be sexually fulfilled by masturbation.

Then there is Cary himself, a single man and much the most misanthropic of the protagonists. When we first see Cary he is avidly rehearsing for sexual activity - complete with tape machine to record his bon mots. The sixth character in the scenario is Cheri (Nastassja Kinski), an art gallery assistant who figures in several variations on the same scene in LaBute's deliberately repetitive set-up. The formal structure also entails entirely eschewing exterior shots - which intensifies the movie's tightly framed, claustrophobic compositions - and not disclosing the jokily rhyming names of the six characters until the closing credits.

LaBute's insightful scheme of things allows no space for upbeat contrivances, and he is merciless as he casts a withering eye over these mostly unsympathetic characters to reveal - and question - their sexual power games and their propensity for deceit, betrayal and cruelty. To that end he employs some startlingly frank dialogue - which is never more startling than in the truly candid monologue which issues from Cary during a confessional session between the three men in a locker room. Jason Patric's no-holds-barred performance as Cary is the strongest in the film, and features the usually underused actor at his adventurous best.

This unapologetically feel-bad movie certainly will not be to everybody's taste and its candour may well prove offensive - or squirm-inducing - to some viewers, but such candour is rare in contemporary American cinema and the film serves as an ideal antidote to all those anodyne romances between perfectly groomed superstars.

Michael Dwyer

Hamam: The Turkish Bath (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Born in Istanbul 40 years ago, Ferzan Ozpetek moved to Rome while in his teens and studied film there, worked as an assistant to young turks such as Ricky Tognazzi and directed countless commercials before making his film debut with Hamam. Aptly enough, this intriguing contrast in cultures was filmed by Ozpetek in the two cities he knows best - Istanbul and Rome - and there is no doubting which city comes off best in that comparison.

Rich in incidental detail and accompanied by a seductive, percussive score, Hamam is a subtle, attractive and involving mood piece which features Alessandro Gassman (son of the Italian matinee idol, Vittorio Gassman) as Francesco, an uptight, work-obsessed Italian who runs an interior design business in Rome with his wife, Marta (Francesca d'Aloja), who is drifting apart from him. The death of his aunt in Istanbul prompts Francesco to travel to Turkey to survey his inheritance, a hamam, a backstreet Turkish bath which has seen better days. Initially tempted to accept an offer from a property developer, he decides instead to restore the hamam with the help of its custodian, his wife, son and daughter.

The hamam symbolises for Francesco the slow, languorous atmosphere of Istanbul as he becomes beguiled by the city and he loosens up and relaxes into its warmth and the hospitality of his hosts - to the point where he allows himself to release the simmering homerotic tension which develops between him and their son, Mehmet (Mehmet Gunsar).

To exploit that angle - which is relatively coyly handled - the film's US distributor misleadingly released the film under the ambiguous title of Steam; presumably because of that angle, the Turkish Ministry of Culture barred the film from being Turkey's national entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar last year.

Michael Dwyer

Perdita Durango (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Rosie Perez is the eponymous, gun-toting heroine who, together with her murderous lover (Javier Bardem, star of Jamon, Jamon and Golden Balls) sets out on a violent spree of murder and kidnapping across the Mexican-US border in Spanish director Alex de la Iglesias's undistinguished exercise in trash, adapted from a novel by Wild At Heart screenwriter Barry Gifford. With so much shouting, gunfire, blood-soaked ritual and noisy sex taking place along the way, you have to admire de la Iglesia's achievement in making such a thoroughly tedious movie.

Hugh Linehan