Castles in the airport

"The Castle" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Ormonde Stillorgan, Omniplex Santry, UCIs, Dublin

The title of this offbeat, good-natured and very witty Australian comedy derives from the adage that a man's home is his castle. In this case the home is an unprepossessing house right next to a small airport. The man who owns it - and believes he bought it as a bargain - is Darryl Kerrigan (played by Michael Caton), a tow-truck driver who notes that the location of the house "would be handy if we had to fly somewhere".

Darryl lives with his loving and ever-patient wife (Anne Tenney), their hairdresser daughter (Sophie Lee) who marries a Greek kick-boxing accountant, and their naive son (Stephen Curry) who, with his father, is forever seeking out apparent bargains which are generally useless. Their other son (Wayne Hope) is serving an eight-year jail sentence for armed robbery.

Their simple, contented lives are disrupted when plans are made to expand the adjacent airport and a compulsory purchase order is slapped on their home. However, the authorities have not anticipated the sheer tenacity with which the indomitable Darryl resists their plans, taking the case all the way to the High Court of Australia.

Writer-director Rob Stitch's cheap and cheerful movie looks as cheap as its very low budget allowed, but this never matters in the case of such a consistently funny film. It evokes Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You in its principal themes but jettisons the sentimentality which undermined Capra's film in favour of some sharp, characteristically quirky, Australian humour. And while the movie regularly pokes fun at the characters and their foibles, it views them with affection and without condescension.

There is no fat on this lively romp which is performed with deadpan panache by a solid, mostly unfamiliar cast led by the excellent Michael Caton, a veteran of Australian television. The supporting players notably include the fine character actor Charles (Bud) Tingwell as a benevolent retired QC, and Tiriel Mora as an inept lawyer who actually dictates his letters - to himself, before he gets down to typing them.

"Dr Dolittle" (PG) Nationwide

Of the 350 or so movies which have been nominated for best picture in the history of the Oscars, one of the least meritorious nominees has to have been Richard Flesicher's bloated 1967 musical, Dr Dolittle, featuring Rex Harrison as the man who could talk - and sing - to the animals. Its source material, the Dolittle stories of Hugh Lofting, are given a new, hi-tech spin in a tiresome non-musical version directed by Betty Thomas.

Cinema's new Dolittle is Eddie Murphy, an actor who crossed over so smoothly and promisingly from television comedy into movies in 48 Hrs, which he topped with sharp, engaging performances in Trading Places and the first Beverly Hills Cop movie. Unfortunately, Murphy's limitations became more and more evident with what followed, to the point where he has become one of the most deeply predictable actors on the screen.

Although he exercises a modicum of restraint in Dr Dolittle - mercifully restricting the use of his hyena laugh and exaggerated, wide-eyed reaction shots - Murphy remains singularly bland as the San Francisco doctor whose ability to hear and talk to the animals causes coitus interruptus with his wife and threatens the merger of his practice with a large corporation. The movie's anti-corporate greed message rings entirely hollow.

Dolittle's human patients are replaced by a menagerie which includes a suicidal tiger (voiced by Albert Brooks), bickering rats (John Leguizamo and Rene Santoni), and a monkey (Phil Spector) with a drink problem. Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock, Gary Shandling and Julie Kavner are among the other off-screen actors who provide the voices of the animals in this slender yarn punctuated by crude, anal-fixated "jokes". The knowing sensibility Betty Thomas brought to her previous pictures, The Brady Bunch Movie and the Howard Stern vehicle, Private Parts, is rarely evident in Dr Dolittle, apart from an aptly-used clip from the old television series, Mr Ed (which featured the eponymous talking horse), and a scene where Dolittle gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an ailing rat - the only time I laughed during the entire movie.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"Lost In Space" (PG) Nationwide

The original television series Lost In Space, which aired from 1965 to 1968, was the brainchild of schlock maestro Irwin Allen, best known these days for 1970s disaster epics like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Like most good sci-fi ideas it took an old tale - in this case that of the marooned traveller - and relocated it in the (then) distant future of 1997, when a pioneering space family, the Robinsons (ho, ho) are blown off course to the furthest ends of the universe.

The previous credits of director Stephen Hopkins (Blown Away, The Ghost And The Darkness) and Akiva Goldsman (Batman And Robin, The Client) don't give much cause for hope that we're going to see anything out of the ordinary, but the new Lost In Space is a surprisingly smart and very stylish reworking of the old series. A lot of this is due to astute casting - William Hurt as the pa- terfamilias plays the role of Dysfunctional Dad to the hilt, incapable of making any emotional connection with his troublesome brood. Matt Le Blanc only has to tweak his Joey persona in Friends to play the brave but numb-skulled pilot of the craft, and further TV-based starpower is provided by Lacey Chabert (the helium-voiced munchkin from Party of Five) as rebellious teen Penny. The better-than-you'd-expect cast list also includes Mimi Leder and Heather Graham, and Gary Oldman takes yet another bad guy role as the villainous Dr Zachary Smith.

We've seen Oldman in this part too often, but fortunately he doesn't ham it up too much this time, acting as a sardonic counterpoint to the main action. And the action is terrific - ingenious effects, original design and a helter-skelter plot make this a rarity among blockbusters, actually justifying its running time of over two hours. The closing credits brashly proclaim "To be Continued", although mediocre box office results in the US put that in some doubt. But this is one of the few recent releases that looks as if it might have the legs to justify a Star Trek-style franchise in years to come.