Chancer in the dark?

Dancer in the Dark (15) Selected cinemas

The promotional campaigns for Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, which inexplicably won the Palme d'Or for best film and the best actress award for Bjork at the Cannes Film Festival in May, have been proving more interesting than the movie itself. Generally, it would suffice to emblazon the advertisements for a major Cannes prize-winner with these citations, but not in the case of von Trier's film, which has divided audiences more sharply than any movie for many years.

In Britain, the distributors of Dancer in the Dark struck a note of desperation when they advertised that viewers who did not love the movie would get their money back; to qualify for a refund, the viewer would have to leave the cinema within the first 30 minutes of the film.

Last weekend the film's Irish distributors, Clarence Pictures, took an advertisement in this newspaper, bracketing von Trier's film with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Hitchcock's The Birds as 20th century works of art which were originally treated with critical disdain before receiving their due recognition in later years. This is preposterous; more pertinent reference points for von Trier's film would be the Eurovision Song Contest and the Australian soap, Home and Away.

Daft as a brush, and about as visually interesting as one for most of its extended duration, Dancer in the Dark is a pointless and deeply self-indulgent exercise.

Set in the US, in Washington state in 1965, and filmed almost entirely in Sweden, it features the Icelandic singer-songwriter, Bjork, as Selma, a Czech immigrant who works in a textile factory and lives in a trailer with her 12-year-old son. Suffering from a hereditary disease which is causing her to lose her eyesight, she saves diligently for an operation that could save her son from blindness.

In her spare time Selma and her close colleague, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) are involved with an amateur company in rehearsing a production of The Sound of Music, in which Selma is cast in the lead as Maria. Meanwhile, the police officer (David Morse), from whom she rents her trailer space, is having financial problems because of his wife's profligate spending and has his eye on Selma's savings.

Von Trier's film had been touted as his homage to the Hollywood musical, and to Jacques Demy's 1964 all-singing French musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which featured a luminous young Catherine Deneuve (who vainly attempts to look plain in a headscarf in von Trier's film).

Like many Hollywood musicals, the story line that links the songs in Dancer in the Dark is slight, trite and corny, and this is the only element of the homage which von Trier gets right. The musical routines, which are pitifully few over the course of two hours and 20 minutes, are entirely lacking in either ambition or distinction and devoid of the razzamatazz which, for example, director Spike Jonze achieved in his three-minute promo for Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet single.

The experience is akin to watching the tasteless Springtime for Hitler musical within Mel Brooks's The Producers, but that was meant to be simultaneously funny and cringe-inducing, unlike von Trier's ineptly choreographed and merely risible efforts in Dancer in the Dark.

The new songs written and performed by Bjork in the movie are mostly undistinguished apart from the closing piece, New World, from which the overture is also taken. Her central performance is embarrassing to watch. Selma is a much-suffering martyr heroine in the tradition of Emily Watson's pivotal character in Breaking the Waves, but utterly devoid of the wrenching emotional authenticity of Watson's searing performance in that infinitely superior von Trier picture.

To be fair to Bjork, however, it would be hard to imagine any more experienced actor making much of the threadbare and grossly manipulative screenplay concocted by von Trier in Dancer in the Dark. Instead of this movie eventually acquiring the critical reputation of The Rite of Spring or The Birds, I suspect that someday von Trier will come out with his hands up and tell us he was just having us on.

- Michael Dwyer

Dinosaur (PG) General release

Disney's latest animated feature kicks off with an exhilarating sequence in which a dinosaur egg is removed from its nest and borne through forests, down rivers, into the air, flown across mountain ranges and over the sea, to be dropped on a small island where the story proper begins. It's a bravura demonstration of the technical capabilities of Disney's new digital animation department, fusing computer-generated imagery with (heavily treated) live-action landscapes.

The trouble is that, impressive though it is, it feels a little too much like a technical exercise. Disney's distribution arm has done very well in recent years out of its relationship with Pixar, the acknowledged leader in the digital field with its Toy Story movies. Not surprisingly, the company wants to maintain its own overall dominance in the world of animation by keeping up with the digital Joneses, and Dinosaur represents the first fruits of that ambition. For years, classically animated films have included digitally generated elements, but this is Disney's first foray into fully digital animation. The problem is that Pixar has so successfully annexed the more "cartoonish" end of the market that Disney has been forced to go in another direction. Dinosaur is therefore closer in visual style to the hyper-realistic creations of Jurassic Park than the more stylised world of A Bug's Life. But the demands of traditional Disney-style storytelling, with its anthropomorphic characters, comic interludes and unabashed sentimentality, don't sit very well with such a level of realism. The dinosaurs here have to talk and show a range of emotions (though thankfully they're not required to sing or dance), and at times you can see the strain this causes the unfortunate beasts.

At one point, Dinosaur was due to be directed by Paul Verhoeven from a script by Wild Bunch writer Walon Green. If Verhoeven's subsequent work on the likes of Starship Troopers is anything to go by, we could have expected a far gorier, messier affair, but Green's influence can still be seen in the Western-inflected plot line, in which a young iguanodon, Aladar, helps a herd of dinosaurs escape the consequences of a meteorite collision by trekking across a dangerous desert to a lush promised land (shades of Red River). Along the way, Aladar must persuade the herd that its militaristic leader, Kron, is wrong in his harsh philosophy of survival of the fittest, which raises the intriguing but unexplored possibility that his species's subsequent extinction might have been due to such woolly liberalism.

Despite its uncertain tone, and a plot which is uncharacteristically confused for a Disney movie, Dinosaur does have plenty of spectacular moments that pre-teens in particular should enjoy. But whether the hyper-real route in digital animation is best suited to the company's traditions and house style is open to question - perhaps it's a case of back to the drawing board.

- Hugh Linehan

The Little Vampire (PG) General release

The second of this week's releases aimed directly at the mid-term break market, The Little Vampire might be seen as a slightly riskier undertaking than Dinosaur. After all, vampires have not been seen up until now as suitable for the under-12s, particularly in an era of bowdlerised fairy tales and over-protective adults. Add in the fact that director Uli Edel's previous credits include the movie version of Hubert Selby Jr's controversial Last Exit to Brooklyn and Madonna's sado-masochistic flop, Body of Evidence, and parents might approach this particular offering with some caution. But Edel's adaptation of Angela Sommer-Bodenburg's best-selling book is a charmingly rendered modern fantasy which children should find enjoyable and not particularly frightening.

Nine-year-old movie veteran Jonathyan Lipnicki (Jerry Maguire, Stuart Little) is our hero, transplanted to the Scottish highlands with his family, where he encounters a friendly young vampire (Rollo Weeks) and his family, including vampire dad Richard E. Grant. Together, they set out to find the amulet which will release the family back to the mortal world, confronting a nefarious vampire hunter (Jim Carter) along the way. It's all done with good humour and some style, making for a more than passable entertainment on a rainy autumn afternoon.

- Hugh Linehan

What Lies Beneath (15) General Release

Director Robert Zemeckis, of Forrest Gump fame, is sure to score with his latest offering, a Hitchcockian suspense movie starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Complete with ghosts, fog, thunder, lightning and a house reminiscent of Psycho, this is a film that will appeal to the Halloween taste for things ghoulish.

Like many a Hitchcock classic, here terror comes in middle class garb, and is all the more terrifying for not being immediately obvious. Its been a year since workaholic scientist, Dr Norman Spencer (Ford) betrayed his faithful wife Claire (Pfeiffer). But with the affair over, Norman feels that he has left behind his one mistake. He can now concentrate on his ever-absorbing work and near perfect marriage.

But after the couple's one daughter leaves for college, Claire is left alone in their darkly atmospheric lakeside New England home. She begins to hear noises and imagines terrible things about her new neighbours. Norman dismisses his wife's fears as mere delusion, and Claire seeks the help of a psychiatrist. But as the apparition of a young woman continues to haunt her, Claire slowly discovers a terrible truth.

What Lies Beneath successfully updates the old-fashioned suspense movie genre, making full and effective use of modern movie techniques and special effects along the way. There is more than a nod in the direction of classic films like Psycho, and the creepy house, which acts as the central set of the movie, is so well realised that in one light it looks benign while in another it appears thoroughly malignant.

What carries this essentially old-fashioned movie is a finely realised script and a very strong cast in Ford and Pfeiffer. Both are excellent, and Ford in particular has such a strong screen presence that you could watch him sleep for 10 minutes and be totally absorbed. The seamless interaction between the two leads on screen makes you wonder why they were never cast together before.

What Lies Beneath is a well-crafted, tense, scary and, in short, excellent movie that sees film return to what it does best: tell a good yarn well. But one word of advice: if your friends see this film over the Halloween period, don't let them tell you the twist.

- Ian Kilroy