Art imitating immortality

What Dreams May Come (15) General release

A haunting and captivating audio-visual experience, Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come demands - and rewards - the willing suspension of disbelief. This highly ambitious undertaking is a metaphysical fantasy assembled in a succession of breathtaking images which create the sensation of watching classical paintings in motion. The film's title is taken from the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/ Must give us pause". The story opens on Lake Como as two American holidaymakers meet when their boats collide, and they fall head over heels in love. Chris (Robin Williams), a doctor, and Annie (Annabella Sciorra), a painter, marry and have two children.

Then their idyllic family life is shattered. The two children are killed in an accident; four years later Chris himself, trying to save the lives of others, is killed in another horrific accident. Annie is left alone and disconsolate.

So begins Wards's melancholy meditation on the themes of life, love and death. In the afterlife depicted here, individuals are liberated from their earthly identities and free to create their own worlds. To remain close to Annie, Chris retreats into a painted world based on his wife's art; after he dies, he wakes up in a bed of brush-stroked flowers whose petals move in the wind. When the grief-stricken Annie commits suicide and is sent to hell, Chris, like Orpheus, embarks on a journey into the underworld as he attempts to save her.

What Dreams May Come is based on a 1977 novel by Richard Matheson, who wrote it for his wife and described its subject as "survival after death". Matheson's work has provided the imaginative basis for films such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Omega Man and Duel. In 1978 when Stephen Simon was producing the film of Matheson's time travel romance, Somewhere in Time, the author presented the producer with What Dreams May Come.

Twenty years later the novel has finally been realised as a feature film. To adapt it for the screen Simon chose Ron Bass, the screenwriter of, among others, Rain Man, Sleeping With The Enemy, The Joy Luck Club, My Best Friend's Wedding and the imminent Snow Falling On Cedars. However, in his exposition of a slender but difficult narrative, Bass burdens the film with some gauche dialogue, bland philosophising and misadvised pop psychology.

Fortunately, when Stephen Simon was finding a director for the project, he chose the visionary New Zealand film-maker Vincent Ward, whose work on Vigil, Map Of The Human Heart, and in particular, The Navigator, testify to his boldness of imagination and visual inventiveness. Ward's passionate and adventurous approach to his material in What Dreams May Come transcends the limitations in Bass's screenplay for a movie in which form triumphs over imperfect content.

And what form! The film is constructed and designed in a series of dazzling visual compositions inspired by 19th-century painting and evoking Monet, Van Gogh and Caspar David Friedrich for the heavenly sequences, and Dali and Hieronymous Bosch for its visions of hell. There is a seductive hallucinatory quality to the images achieved by art director Eugenio Zanetti, lighting cameraman Eduardo Sierra and the remarkable special effects artists. Because of its spiritual nature, What Dreams May Come inevitably evokes such films as It's A Wonderful Life, Field Of Dreams and Three Colours: Blue, and while it does not pack their heady emotional punch, Ward's film remains an admirable undertaking - a moving, tender and beautifully realised reflection on the power of love.

Enemy Of The State (15) General release

In the recent paranoia-steeped pursuit thriller, Mercury Rising, Alec Baldwin played an evil and utterly unscrupulous National Security Agency official determined to kill a young autistic boy who unwittingly cracks a top secret national security code.

In Tony Scott's even more paranoid chase movie, Enemy Of The State, Jon Voight plays an even more ruthless National Security Agency executive, Thomas Brian Reynolds who, as the movie opens, sets up the murder of a Maryland congressman (an uncredited Jason Robards). "Privacy has been dead for 30 years because we can't risk it," Reynolds declares. "The only privacy left is the inside of your head."

Unfortunately for Reynolds - who employs the most hi-tech, all-penetrating surveillance systems - the murder has been captured on camera by a wildlife photographer (Jason Lee), and the tape is passed on to an unwitting Washington DC attorney, Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith).

Pulling out all the stops to recover and destroy the incriminating tape, Reynolds and his eager young team of computer freaks draw on an array of surveillance equipment - which would make the most elaborate gadgetry in a James Bond movie seem medieval - to devise a smear campaign against Dean which involves electonically tagging his clothes, bugging his home and his mobile phone, cancelling his credit cards, and regularly calling up a satellite to keep him in their sights.

Movie references abound in Enemy Of The State, from the recent The Truman Show to the great post-Watergate paranoia thrillers, Three Days Of The Condor, The Parallax View and most explicitly, The Conversation - on which it precisely models one sequence of outdoor surveillance and which it also invokes in the casting of an authoritative Gene Hackman as a mysterious operator whose image on his old identity badge picture is identical to Hackman's appearance in The Conversation.

Although its screenplay is needlessly convoluted and it builds to a compromised conclusion that's hard to swallow, Enemy Of The State operates efficiently as an energetic thriller which is never allowed to flag and, and as a pursuit picture ought to do, it contains some remarkably well-staged chases over rooftops, on foot, on bicycle and by helicopter. Despite its multi-charactered scenario, the movie is essentially a star vehicle for the ever-rising Will Smith, whose disarming personality carries it off with ease. The cast also includes Gabriel Byrne, Tom Sizemore, Lisa Bonet, Regina King and James LeGros, along with a number of young actors best known from the indie scene - Loren Dean, Barry Pepper, Scott Glenn, Jake Busey, Ian Hart and Jamie Kennedy - most of whom play Reynolds's lackeys as the most impeccably coiffured and sharply dressed young men in the US secret services.

The Mighty (12) General release

Two young outsiders are drawn together in adversity in Peter Chelsom's low-key melodrama, The Mighty. Set in Cincinnati, it features Elden Henson as Max, a bulky gentle giant of a boy who is slow-witted and withdrawn, still traumatised from witnessing his father murdering his mother.

Kieran Culkin (brother of Macaulay) plays his new neighbour, Kevin, a sharp-witted, diminutive youngster who suffers from a progressive degenerative condition. Kevin uses the Arthurian legend to help Max improve his weak reading - and to instil in him something approaching the confidence and daring of a Knight of the Round Table.

United as one, with little Kevin perched atop Max's broad shoulders, they take on the school bullies and help out a woman whose purse has been stolen. Chelsom, the English director who made Hear My Song and the entertainingly offbeat Funny Bones, invests their knightly exploits with misfired elements of magic realism.

In this well-intentioned but contrived tale, Chelsom elicits sturdy, credible performances from the two young actors at the film's centre, and Culkin in particular. That helps, given that the movie's adult characters are reduced to mere ciphers, although Sharon Stone works earnestly to project her character, that of Kevin's caring mother. Gena Rowlands and Harry Dean Stanton are left stranded with underwritten roles as Kevin's grandparents, while Meat Loaf and Gillian Anderson are cringe-inducing as low-lifes who say things like, "He's all growed up".

The Governess (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

In a demanding role which requires her to be on screen virtually throughout the film, Minnie Driver's limitations become all too apparent. This is what happens in The Governess, the first feature film written and directed by Sandra Goldbacher, who started out in short films and in arts documentaries for the BBC. The Governess opens in 1840s London, and introduces Driver's character, Rosina da Silva, as a member of the city's Sephardic Jewish community.

When her father is murdered and leaves her family destitute, Rosina poses as a Gentile to get work as a governess with a family on a remote Scottish island. In this pot-boiler which boils exceedingly slowly and all too obviously, Goldbacher devotes an inordinate amount of timeto getting down to the inevitable business of Rosina getting involved in a secret affair with the paterfamilias (Tom Wilkinson), a pioneer of photographic experiments. Lighting cameraman Ashley Rowe achieves many striking widescreen visual compositions in The Governess, aptly enough for a film which has photography as one of its concerns. Unfortunately, the movie's turgid pacing undermines whatever interest might be sparked by the conventional, slow-burning affair at its centre.

Hugh Linehan adds:

T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous (PG) IMAX Cinema, Dublin

Since the invention of IMAX in the late 1960s, most films in the large-screen format have been documentaries about the natural world. T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous pushes the envelope a little further, bringing computer-generated images into the mix, and delivering them in 3D form. The results are quite spectacular, even if the storyline doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

The "wonders of the natural world" subject matter is reminiscent of many other IMAX productions, and there's an awful lot of waiting around in this 55-minute film before the much-vaunted dinosaurs make their all-too-brief appearance. All of which hardly matters, because the 3-D picture is so enthralling, giving the impression that objects and characters are almost within touching range, and that the pictures have real depth.

One wonders about the possibilities of the medium in the hands of an imaginative visionary like Tim Burton - for the moment, we have to make do with the journeyman skills of director Brett Leonard, whose most notable previous credit was the deeply silly Lawnmower Man. But in a holiday season not exactly overflowing with fine family movies, T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous is a good bet for a post-Christmas outing.