A dream come true

Misunderstood and seriously underestimated by American reviewers, Neil Jordan's imaginative and visually inspired venture into psychodrama, In Dreams, makes for accomplished and deeply unsettling cinema all the way from its haunting underwater prologue to its perversely logical - and shocking - coda. While Jordan adheres to - and plays with - the conventions of the genre, the film is indelibly marked by recurring themes from his own earlier films.

There is a hallucinatory atmosphere about the opening sequence as divers with torches swim through the deep waters of a New England ghost town which was drowned to create a reservoir three decades earlier. The camera moves on to dry land to introduce the ostensibly idyllic life of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening), an illustrator of children's books, and her young daughter, Rebecca (Katie Sagona), as they wait at their lakeshore home for Claire's husband (Aidan Quinn), a long-haul pilot, to return home.

But Claire is in pain, brought on by her vivid premonitions of a young girl being abducted in a forest - which prove to be horribly true. Another idyllic setting, the woodland staging of Snow White featuring Rebecca and her classmates in angelic costumes, turns into an even more traumatic reality with the unnerving sight of angel wings caught in a briar and the realisation that Rebecca is missing.

It transpires that Claire, whose empathy with children is established in her books and in her maternal love for her daughter, is psychically connected to a deranged killer - the edgy, sad-eyed Vivian (Robert Downey Jnr), who was subjected by his mother to horrific cruelty as an unwanted child. Claire's life is overtaken by her nightmarish visions - even when she and her husband are making love - but nobody believes her, and she is regarded as delusional by her husband, her psychiatrist (Stephen Rea) and the detective (Paul Guilfoyle) on the case.

With accumulating intensity, In Dreams follows Claire and Vivian along parallel lines which begin to converge as the drama reaches their inevitable showdown. Ominously, the film's primary colour is red: in Claire's clothing, the kimono her husband buys her, the BMW she impulsively crashes into a lake, the imperilled girl named Ruby, the abundance of apple imagery (which is succinctly explained in an aside), and the bloodshed. The film's roots are in the novel, Doll's Eyes by Bari Wood (whose book Twins was the basis for David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers). Doll's Eyes was originally adapted for the screen by Bruce Robinson, who shares the screenwriting credit with Jordan - who later radically reworked it.

In Dreams registers firmly as a product of Jordan's distinctive cinematic sensibility and visual flair, and in its theme of trusting childhood innocence be-spoiled, it evokes Jordan's collaboration with Angela Carter on The Company of Wolves, with its eerie spin on Little Red Riding Hood, and his film of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, with which In Dreams shares a deeply disturbed protagonist irreparably damaged in childhood.

The casting of Annette Bening in the crucial role of Claire Cooper is inspired, and Bening, a bright talent and striking screen presence who has rarely been stretched by her roles, responds with an alert, selfless and hypnotic performance. The film's gifted lighting cameraman, Darius Khnodji (who lit Delicatessen, Se7en and Evita) brilliantly heightens the disorienting atmosphere which permeates the movie, and that spooky effect is further enhanced by Elliott Goldenthal's rich, lush and creepily lyrical score.

Michael Dwyer

eXistenZ (15) UCIs, Virgin, Dublin

The key creative credit is superfluous in the case of eXistenZ, which has David Cronenberg's auteurist fingerprints stamped all over it. Working from his first original screenplay since the 1982 Videodrome and employing a keen line in subversive humour, Cronenberg fashions a futuristic thriller which playfully blurs the line between reality and illusion as it follows its characters through an elaborate, state-of-the-art virtual reality game.

Refreshingly less mannered than usual, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, who's introduced as the goddess of games design whose latest invention is eXistenZ, an organic game system which, when downloaded into humans, accesses their central nervous systems, transporting them on a wild ride in and out of reality. In a narrative strand inspired by a meeting between Cronenberg and Salman Rushdie, a fatwa is placed on Allegra by a realist underground movement and after an assassination attempt on her, she goes on the run with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a security guard who is a virgin to virtual reality games because of his phobia about having his body penetrated.

Encouraged by Allegra, Ted reluctantly agrees to have the necessary apparatus fitted - a bioport, a small permanent spinal jack inserted just above the belt-line into which the UmbyCord (yes, it is a form of umbilical cord) is plugged. Because Ted is a novice, the game is explained to him - and through him, to us - with consequences not for the squeamish.

This is Cronenberg at his jokiest and mildest, and eXistenZ is his first picture to get a 15 certificate here. Cronenberg Lite, perhaps, but marked throughout by the director's preoccupations with conspiracy, paranoia, reality levels, the dangers associated with creativity and, inevitably given the context, grotesque imagery in the clever, elaborate special effects created by Jim Isaac.

Michael Dwyer

The Waterboy (12) General release

Providing further evidence that audience taste can never be underestimated, the low-brow, low-budget comedy The Waterboy became the biggest surprise hit of last year in the US, taking over $160 million at the box-office. Its inexplicable success continues the seemingly inexorable rise of its star, Adam Sandler, a Saturday Night Live alumnus of clearly limited range whose speciality is playing stupid. Sandler is reunited with Frank Coraci, his director on the altogether more entertaining The Wedding Singer, for The Waterboy, in which Sanders adopts one of his irritating would-be funny voices to play Bobby Boucher, a gauche and backward 31-year-old who makes Forrest Gump seem like Bill Gates.

The best thing about this puerile fare is Kathy Bates as Bobby's wildly possessive mother, who serves up huge snakes for dinner, recommending the knee as the tastiest part.

Michael Dwyer

At First Sight (15) General release

The information that At First Sight is based on a true story documented by the physician and author Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist On Mars should be enough to send shivers up the spine of anyone who squirmed through the saccharine, Sackssourced Awakenings. Blandly directed by Irwin Winkler, the dull, heavy-handed and rambling At First Sight is only partly redeemed by the reliable Val Kilmer's subtle, sensitive portrayal of a blind man who undergoes experimental cataract surgery to restore his sight. The movie's ponderous progress is further undermined by a trite and sketchy subplot of his father's rejection of him. The otherwise unremarkable cast includes Mira Sorvino as the architect with whom Kilmer's character falls in love, an unrecognisably aged Kelly McGillis as his protective older sister and Bruce Davison as the eye specialist.

Michael Dwyer

The Honest Courtesan (18) General release

Marshall Herkowitz's film clearly aspires to the feminist revisionism of many other recent costume dramas, but this historical romance, set amongst the courtesans and nobility of 16th century Venice, is too sanitised and simple-minded to offer anything more than vapidities about the place of women in a pre-modern society.

Catherine McCormack plays Veronica, a young woman prevented from marrying the man she loves (Rufus Sewell) because of her inferior social status, and inducted instead by her mother (Jacqueline Bisset) into the ranks of the courtesans, high-class prostitutes who tend to the sexual needs of the city's aristocracy. Her on-again, off-again affair with Sewell notwithstanding, she becomes Venice's most famous courtesan, servicing all its most powerful men. But disaster (ho hum) looms with the arrival of plague and an ensuing witch hunt.

With lumps of clunky dialogue interspersed with slow-motion, sun-dappled sequences which wouldn't look out of place in a 1970s shampoo commercial, Herkovitz's anachronistic Venetians have been so scrubbed, flossed and deodorised that they look nothing like the inhabitants of a 16th-century demi-monde, while cinematographer Bojan Bazelli provides the burnished glow which has become wearyingly predictable in recent Shakespeare adaptations. Indeed, one imagines that The Honest Courtesan will be marketed directly at the audiences who flocked so enthusiastically to see Shakespeare In Love; if so, they should be warned that this is a much more pallid and plodding affair.

Hugh Linehan

Fire (Members and Guests) IFC, Dublin

The themes of Fire are not dissimilar to those of The Honest Courtesan, although writer/director Deepa Mehta's story is set 400 years later, in contemporary New Delhi. Any further comparison would be misleading, because this is a well-crafted, thoughtful film which intelligently explores the tensions and contradictions that exist in a society undergoing enormous cultural change.

Shabana Azmi plays Radha, a woman trapped in a loveless, barren marriage to Ahok, the head of a household that also includes his invalid mother Biji (Kushal Rekhi) and his cynical younger brother, Jatin (Jaaved Jaaferi). When Jatin reluctantly agrees to an arranged marriage, despite his attachment to his Chinese mistress, the arrival of the self-confident young bride, Sita (Nandita Das), opens new possibilities of freedom for Radha, and leads ultimately to the collapse of this decayed and self-destructive clan.

Mehta's film, shot in English, skilfully interweaves Western and Eastern motifs. Its critique of this patriarchal society is expressed through a convincing realistic depiction of the household and a series of metaphors based on Hindu parables. Handsomely shot by Giles Nuttgens and subtly played by its leading actors, Fire is a skilfully made, well-told drama of domestic conflict and female empowerment.

Hugh Linehan