Adventures on the wagon

"My Name Is Joe" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

The title of Ken Loach's admirable new film, My Name is Joe, is the first half of a sentence which finishes: "and I am an alcoholic" - words uttered at an AA meeting by an unemployed Glaswegian, Joe Kavanagh, after taking years to summon the courage and willpower to confront his problem. Scripted by Paul Laverty, who wrote Carla's Song for Loach, My Name is Joe charts familiar Loach territory - a run-down urban area where unemployment and poverty are rife - and the drugs epidemic, which Loach tackles head-on for the first time. Regardless of its ostensible familiarity, the drama subtly kicks in with Loach's trademark, apparently effortless skill.

Joe (Peter Mullan) is 37, off the drink for almost a year, and feels he has achieved nothing else in life beyond the surrogate family of inept amateur footballers which he coaches. Then he meets Sarah (Louise Goodall), a dedicated community health worker, and he tentatively becomes involved with her. He also feels compelled to take direct action when one of his young footballers, an ex-junkie, and his drug-addicted girlfriend become the helpless prey of unscrupulous dealers. As the pressures escalate, Joe has to cope with another, personal one - his determination to avoid alcohol as a balm - in this gripping, angry and accomplished social drama which is by turns moving and tender.

Eschewing cosy resolutions, it is made with Loach's characteristic humanity, vitality and unerring skill for drawing viewers into the drama and holding them with a vice-like grip. As it builds in dramatic power, the film is charged by the vivid, naturalistic playing of a fine cast, and in particular Peter Mullan, who received the best actor award at Cannes this year for his quite exceptional performance.

One minor caveat: the accents of some of the supporting players are so thick that some of the dialogue is lost in the delivery.

"Funny Games" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The latest film from the uncompromising Austrian film-maker and playwright, Michael Haneke, Funny Games is as chilling and as subversive as could be expected by anyone who saw and admired his 1992 drama, Benny's Video - the only Haneke movie to be released in Ireland. Given that the compelling narrative of Funny Games relies so much on the element of surprise - and Haneke unleashes some radical surprises - it would be unfair to reveal too much about it beyond that it sets up a scenario of a wealthy couple and their young son being held captive in their lakeside summer home by a steely, determined young man and his introverted lackey.

What's more important than what happens on screen is the recurring point in Haneke's work as a film-maker - the relationship between the viewer and onscreen violence. That theme was arrestingly examined in Benny's Video - in which the 15-year-old, video-obsessed Benny becomes so desensitised to the reality of violence that he almost casually commits murder - and it is taken to certain extreme cinematic lengths in Funny Games.

Peter, the more cold-blooded of the two kidnappers, is played to particularly sinister effect by Arno Frisch in his first movie since he played the protagonist of Benny's Video six years ago. In Funny Games, which Haneke describes as his "anti-Tarantino film", Peter and his accomplice pointedly refer to cartoon violence when they call themselves Tom and Jerry, or Beavis and Butt-head.

Haneke begins to challenge directly the position of the spectator as one of conspirator when Peter winks at the audience and invites the viewer's participation, asking, "You're on their side, aren't you?" and "Do you think they have a chance of winning?"

Even though Haneke is mercifully sparing in the levels of violence he depicts in Funny Games, it remains a draining and deliberately disturbing film. As Hitchcock demonstrated time and again, what is suggested off-camera can prove far more unsettling than what is shown, and that unease is heightened in Haneke's film which chooses instead to concentrate on the aftermath, the often horrific physical consequences of that violence. You have been warned.

"Les Miserables" (12) General release

After the last two literary adaptations from Danish director Bille August, The House of Spirits and Smilla's Sense of Snow, one feared the worst for his new version of Victor Hugo's classic and much-filmed novel. Those previous films represented the worst tendencies of the "Europudding", wrenched out of their original context, packed with international names, and reduced to a mid-Atlantic blandness which lost almost everything that was worthwhile about the original novels. Les Miserables is not entirely free of such faults, but greater care has been taken here to fashion a coherent and gripping narrative. (It may also be true that Hugo's 19th-century novel is more suited to cinema than were the magic realism of The House of Spirits or the quirky metaphors of Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow).

August's version, from a screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, benefits from compelling performances in the two pivotal roles. As the freed convict-turned-philanthropist Valjean, Liam Neeson brings the requisite physicality, emotion and tragic sense to the part, while Geoffrey Rush, as Valjean's nemesis, the cold, repressed policeman Javert, invests the role with the same ambiguity and complexity he demonstrates in another current release, the excellent Elizabeth.

The other star names fare less well, with Uma Thurman as the indigent prostitute Fantine adding to an increasingly lengthy list of underwhelming performances. Claire Danes, as Fantine's daughter (and Valjean's ward) is better although at times she merely seems to be reprising her performance in Romeo and Juliet.

Shot in wide-screen in a palette of muted colours, this Les Miserables, like several of its predecessors, seems somewhat over-stately and middlebrow in its presentation, but that's only to be expected. After all, Jean-Paul Le Chanois's 1957 version, with Jean Gabin as Valjean, was one of the purest expressions of the "cinema du papa" so derided by the Nouvelle Vague, but it's still a fine, gripping melodrama. August's film is a similarly unsurprising but well-crafted film that delivers the goods on its own, rather conservative terms.

"Ronin" (15) General release

The caper movie is supposed to be making a comeback in the next few months and if so, this thriller marks the beginning of the trend - although veteran director John Frankenheimer seems intent on avoiding the brash cheekiness associated with the classics of the genre. Imagine The Italian Job directed by a glum depressive and you'll have some idea of Ronin - who, we are informed in a portentous prologue, were medieval Japanese mercenaries, samurai banished from the court because they had failed to protect their master. Their modern-day equivalent is a rag-bag of assassins and arms experts assembled by a mysterious Belfast woman (Natascha McElhone) in Paris to steal a tightly-guarded briefcase. Chief among this gang are former Secret Service man Robert De Niro and gangster Jean Reno, who instantly bond over a few Gitanes and realise their fellow-mercenaries - and their assignment - may not be all they seem.

From there on, Ronin takes us on a convoluted, rather nonsensical and highly violent tour of the French countryside (shot almost perversely by Frankenheimer in steely, overcast greys - the Riviera has rarely looked so bleak), as betrayal succeeds betrayal, and everyone realises that nobody else can be trusted. The world-weary De Niro and plucky Reno stay at the centre of the action, but other conspirators, including an implausible Jonathan Pryce as a ruthless Irish republican, keep bobbing into view. It's not entirely unenjoyable, and there are some spectacular car chases (especially the climactic sequence back in Paris, prominently featuring the tunnel in which Princess Diana died), but Ronin is never as much fun as you might expect, largely because of its downbeat characterisation and austere visual style.

"Titanic Town" (15) Selected cinemas

Like several other recent films set in Northern Ireland, Titanic Town, directed by Roger Michell from Anne Devlin's screenplay of her own novel, attempts a comic view of the Troubles. Set in Belfast in 1972 (but mostly filmed on a London housing estate), it stars Julie Walters as an Andersons town housewife who finds her street has become a free-fire zone between the IRA and the British army, putting the lives of her family at risk every day. Walters decides to take action when an old friend is killed by a stray IRA bullet, and tries to mobilise her neighbours against the violence. The film follows her attempts to avoid manipulation by either side, and the consequences for her family, especially her eldest daughter (an excellent performance by newcomer Nuala O'Neill) when they are ostracised by their community.

Michell seems fascinated by the surreal cinematic possibilities of the story, and his bizarre juxtapositions are often startling, with soldiers falling, wounded, in the middle of quiet-looking suburban streets and armoured cars churning across neatly-tended lawns. The intertwining of the personal and the political is Titanic Town's key visual motif - although at times it's taken too far, as in a scene where two young lovers stroll down a street, oblivious to the very stagey-looking riot unfolding behind them.

But Michell and Devlin never manage to reconcile their film's more serious elements with its absurdism. Although Walters, and Ciaran Hinds as her woebegone husband, are impressive, other characterisation descends too often to sitcom level, with shrieking republican harridans, prissy middle-class "Peace Women" and plummy British officials all drawn with the broadest of strokes. Incidentally, Titanic Town marks a small piece of history by being the first film permitted to shoot on the grounds of Stormont, courtesy of Mo Mowlam, and the building makes an impressively forbidding debut.

"Rounders" General release

A rounder, it quickly becomes apparent, means a poker player who knows all the angles and makes a living at the table. One such is Mike McDermott, played by the ubiquitous Matt Damon, in his fourth film to arrive here this year. "They all know me as a small-timer, but that's about to change," the cool, cocky McDermott advises us in his voice-over. Then he gets fleeced.

He loses so much that he has to drop out of law school and make money driving a delivery van, but his classmate and lover (Gretchen Mol) is pleased, relieved he has quit gambling. The movie leaps forward nine months, to the release from prison of McDermott's best gambling buddy, the aptly named Worm (Edward Norton), and McDermott is back at the card table with the stakes rising perilously higher.

Rounders marks a certain return to form for director John Dahl, who followed The Last Seduction with the forgettable

Unforgettable. His principal influence here is clearly Martin Scorsese, not just in the obvious precedent of The Color of Money, but unavoidably in Mean Streets, in the portrayal of a volatile, self-destructive character luring his best friend off the straight and narrow.

Although saddled with a surfeit of narration and an essentially conventional narrative, Dahl's film is commendably strong on detail and atmosphere as it observes the ritualistic card-table combat of smoke-filled gambling dens through the lenses of its formidable French cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier.

The movie's ace card is its cast, with the easily underestimated Matt Damon and the highly adventurous Edward Norton sharply contrasted, along with such solid supporting players as Martin Landau, John Turturro, Michael Rispoli, Famke Janssen, and John Malkovich, who sports an unintentionally hilarious accent as a sleazy, Oreo-addicted Russian card shark named Teddy KGB.

"Dead Man's Curve" (15) Virgin, Dublin

Under the opening credits of Dead Man's Curve, a college psychiatrist (played by Dana Delaney) advises two curious students of the likely symptoms of suicidal personalities. Reading The Bell Jar is one, she says, along with listening to music by Suzanne Vega, The Smiths, or "anything from the 1980s". As for movies, she cites "any period piece, Scandinavian films, and anything by a first-time writer-director, I hate those" - just before the final credit, for first-time writer-director Dan Rosen, pops on to the screen.

Rosen, who scripted the caustic but over-wordy ethical conundrum comedy The Last Supper, is on surer ground for his directing debut, a very dark comedy in which the aforementioned students, Tim and Chris (Matthew Lillard and Michael Vartan) plot to kill their room-mate, Rand (Randall Batinkoff). The plan is to make his death look like suicide in the knowledge that it is college policy to then treat their semester's work sympathetically in the light of the trauma they will have experienced, thus ensuring them a straight-A average and facilitating their progress to Harvard.

In this contemporary spin on Rope, Compulsion and Swoon, it helps that Rand is the least sympathetic student on campus - a mean-spirited boor who publicly browbeats his pregnant girlfriend. Nor are his scheming roommates paragons in any respect - Tim is brashly manipulative, while the more sensitive Chris is morally weak. Rosen's resolutely cynical movie is peppered with off-the-wall humour, in which two investigating police officers are the butt of most jokes - when Chris tells one that Rand's girlfriend is from Canada, the cop asks: "Is she Canadian?", and the college chancellor won't let the cops smoke in his office even though he's smoking a pipe at the time.

The movie is played with deadpan panache by its mostly unfamiliar young cast, with Matthew Lillard (from Scream) acutely etching a study in evil as the ruthless Tim. The soundtrack integrates Shark's strong, original score with music by Seismonic, Suzanne Vega, The Smiths and those classic 1980s depressives, Joy Division.