The black side of life

American Psycho (18) Selected cinemas

After the adolescent ejaculations of American Pie and the menopausal breakdowns of American Beauty, the land of the brave and home of the free gets its third titular mention within a year in Mary Harron's version of Brett Easton Ellis's controversial, satirical novel. Like its two American predecessors, American Psycho is, at least in part, a meditation on US masculinity in crisis. In Harron's film, it's New York in the late 1980s, that hothouse of capitalist alpha maledom already immortalised in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (and, far less successfully, in Brian De Palma's risible Bonfire of the Vanities).

Speaking of Stone, we should give thanks that this project did not, as seemed possible at one stage, end up with him as director and Leonardo Di Caprio in the leading role. The original novel had scenes of quite mind-boggling gruesomeness, as its protagonist, Wall Street uber-yuppie Patrick Bateman, indulged his tastes for serial murder, extreme sexual violence and cannibalism. One shudders to think what Stone would have got up to with such material, but Harron adopts a much cooler approach, keeping nearly all the violence outside the frame and concentrating on the often very funny black comedy.

Her focus is on the bizarre rituals of the narcissistic, misogynistic tribe of which Bateman is a member, and its obsession with clothes, consumer durables and designer labels - the best scene in the film is an hilarious game of one-upmanship between Bateman and his friends as they compare the quality of each other's business cards. Almost as good are the monologues in which Bateman lovingly deconstructs the work of such AOR pop greats as Phil Collins, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News.

This obsession with surfaces and the superficial is mirrored in Harron's highly stylised visual sensibility. Shot in widescreen, with a quintessentially 1980s palette of black, grey and silver, American Psycho remains distant and ironically detached from its subject matter, even in its goriest moments. The approach is effective at first, but runs into difficulty as the plot progresses. Because, apart from the violence, the real problem with the film - as with the book - is that it's essentially a one-gag idea, and the law of diminishing returns begins to set in after the first 30 minutes.

As Bateman, the Welsh-born actor, Christian Bale, delivers the best performance of his career so far. Resembling no one so much as a young Tom Cruise, he clearly relishes the opportunities the film offers for satirising the modern male obsession with appearance and grooming, linking it explicitly with psychosis and violence. It's an idea which has cropped up in movies before (Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men springs to mind), but has rarely been so remorselessly pursued to its logical conclusion. The strong supporting cast, particularly Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon and Chloe Sevigny, bring different styles of acting to the mix, adding to the disturbing ambience.

Hugh Linehan

One Day in September (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

An exemplary feature-length documentary which effectively combines diligent investigative reportage with intelligently employed archival footage, Kevin Macdonald's One Day in September rigorously explores the background to, and repercussions of, the murder of 11 members of the Israeli delegation by Black September terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

The film begins by putting this tragic event in context. This was the first Olympics in Germany since the 1936 Games in Berlin, which were used for Nazi propaganda, and the film claims that the security in Munich was deliberately lax, to ensure a free and easy atmosphere. The narrator, Michael Douglas, notes the special significance of the event for the Israelis who were among the many athletes to attend an Olympics memorial service at Dachau, just six miles away from the stadium in Munich.

On the evening of September 4th, the Israeli delegation went to the theatre to see Fiddler On the Roof and arrived back at the Olympic village around midnight. Less than five hours later, eight Palestinian terrorists, dressed as athletes, scaled the perimeter fence and broke into the Israeli team quarters. They took eight men hostage. When a coach, Moshe Weinberg, tried to help a wrestler who was attempting to escape, he was shot and killed.

The film chronicles the often incredible events which ensued over the course of the next 24 hours, as the terrorists demanded that 236 named political prisoners be freed in exchange for the safe return of the hostages. The Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, described the demand as "blackmail of the worst kind". The German government thought it could negotiate with the Black September members; it was wrong. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee forged ahead with its view that the show must go on. We see footage of athletes sunbathing and playing tennis while, just a few yards away, the lives of the Israeli hostages are threatened. And the huge international media presence on the ground seizes on a story that is much bigger than sport.

Director Macdonald intercuts this footage with moving, present-day testimonies from bereaved relatives of the hostages - most poignantly in the cases of Ankie Sprinkler, the widow of the Israeli fencing coach, and Schlomit Romano, who was a baby at the time her wrestler father was murdered by the terrorists. After a great deal of effort, Macdonald also secured an interview with the single surviving member of the Black September gang.

One Day in September reveals a deeply unsettling web of bureaucratic incompetence, security gaffes, communication breakdown, corporate insensitivity and suspected cover-ups. It is tightly structured and makes good, sparing use of slow-motion, and features a score which blends music by Philip Glass with period tracks from Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and contemporary material by Craig Armstrong.

This sobering and riveting documentary is one of those rare factually-based films which - like All the President's Men, for example - plays like a gripping thriller even though we are in no doubt about its shocking outcome. It deservedly received the Oscar for best documentary feature earlier this year.

Michael Dwyer

The Ninth Gate (15) General release

The belatedly arrived latest film from Roman Polanski, The Ninth Gate, which opened in France last summer, returns the Paris-based, Polish film-maker to the theme of Satanism which he explored with masterful skill in his powerfully suggestive 1968 witchcraft drama, Rosemary's Baby. Unfortunately, the new film, while not without merit, never approaches that achievement in terms of depth, dramatic tension or emotional involvement.

A goateed, bespectacled Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso, a shrewd, mercenary American "book detective" who specialises in tracing and authenticating rare books. His latest assignment is offered by a wealthy demonology scholar, Boris Balkan, who has acquired a rare 17th century volume on satanic invocation, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows. Only two other copies of the book exist - one in Portugal, the other in France - and Balkan offers Corso a substantial fee to track down those copies and check their authenticity.

Given the nature of the book which is the subject of Corso's quest, and the clearly sinister personality of the man who has hired him, this does not have the makings of a straightforward case, as all those who their movies will have realised well before Corso realises that his life is in danger. The narrative operates from a promising premise, and the creepy atmosphere is heightened by the dark, menacing air established by cinematographer Darius Khondji's moody lighting and Wojceich Kilar's ominous score. However, the screenplay, on which Polanski was one of three collaborators, is too slack to sustain that eerie atmosphere and it allows the drama to disintegrate in an unwisely protracted finale.

A later sequence set among hooded protagonists at a black mass inevitably recalls the orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and in a further coincidence, Polanski's film, like Kubrick's, elaborately and convincingly recreates New York street scenes in European studio sets. The always interesting Johnny Depp is reduced to playing a mere cipher in The Ninth Gate, and the juicier roles are seized upon by the perfectly overstated Frank Langella as Boris Balkan, Lena Olin as an enigmatic widow, and Barbara Jefford as a one-armed baroness who recalls seeing the devil when she was 15. "It was love at first sight," she says in the movie's best line.

Michael Dwyer

Battlefield Earth (12) General release

Critics in the US have already leapt with glee on this sci-fi action movie, pronouncing it a turkey of considerable magnitude. Some have even proposed it as a very early contender for Worst Film of the Century. In the spirit of contrariness, it would be nice to find something good to say about this version of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's 1983 novel. No such luck - Battlefield Earth is truly, truly awful.

The premise is simple. Things are not looking good for the last remnants of the human race. It's bad enough that Earth has been over-run by marauding aliens; insult is added to injury when those aliens turn out to be 10-foot-tall crusties with platform boots and dubious personal hygiene; worst of all, the nastiest, baddest alien is played (none too subtly) by John Travolta. Of course, it only takes one brave man (the unfortunate Barry Pepper) to come out of the wilderness, saying he's mad as hell and not going to take it any more, and before you can say "Star Wars rip-off", the rebellion is under way . . .

Battlefield Earth is something of a vanity project for Travolta, a long-time Scientologist who has been trying for years to bring Hubbard's novel to the screen. One wishes he hadn't bothered - even the most avid fans of sci-fi popcorn are likely to blanch at the hilariously dreadful dialogue, inept plotting and dreary special effects served up in this ludicrous farrago. Poor old Forest Whitaker, as Travolta's henchman, looks deeply bewildered at finding himself in a movie which seems destined to achieve so-bad-it's-good cultdom at some point in the future - but not just yet.

Hugh Linehan

The director of One Day in September, Kevin Macdonald, is interviewed by Hugh Linehan in tomorrow's Weekend. And One Day in September, the book based on this documentary, is reviewed on the Weekend books pages by Patrick Comerford.