Going on video rental from Monday week, Trainspotting (18) reunites the Shallow Grave team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, writer John Hodge and actor Ewan McGregor for an astonishing screen treatment of Irvine Welsh's scabrous novel of junkies in the underbelly of Edinburgh. It is, by turns, shocking, chillingly unsettling, blackly humorous, bursting" with energy and startlingly surreal. The fine young cast also features Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd and Ewen Bremner.
Available from next Friday, Spike Lee's deeply concerned and passionate anti drugs drama, Clockers (18) features Harvey Keitel as a cynical homicide detective investigating the murder of a Brooklyn, drugs dealer. John Turturro, Mehki Phifer and Isiah Washington are in the solid cast.
Now on release, Oliver Stone's Nixon (15) employs a fragmented structure to draw a critical but unexpectedly sympathetic picture of the 37th President of the US. However, the sheer repetitiveness of that structure only emphasises the sense of deja vu the film evokes. Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen are very impressive as Nixon and his wife, Pat, and the formidable cast includes James Woods Bob Hoskins, Ed Harris, Mary Steenburgen and Paul Sorvino.
Stonewall (18) is the late Nigel Finch's involving and illuminating picture of the run up to the Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village area in 1969, which became a pivotal event in the gay rights movement. Fred Weller plays an idealistic new boy in town and Guillermo Diaz is the drag queen who befriends him.
Pick of the foreign language movies now on release has to be Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (15), a consistently intriguing Ruth Rendell adaptation, based on A Judgement in Stone (the title of the original story). Updating the story and re locating it - to wintry Saint Malo, Chabrol's film features Sandrine Bonnaire as the enigmatic young woman hired as a maid by a well to do family, whose main concern for her is how much work they can get out of her.
Isabelle Huppert co stars as the inquisitive local postal clerk who befriends the maid and encourages her to strike back at the exploitative family.
The Flower of My Secret (15), which marks a welcome return to form for Pedro Almodovar, is a rich, captivating and emotional melodrama, with Marisa Paredes excellent as a woman who, in her forties, has to face the realisation that her husband no longer loves her, and is consequently unable to maintain the lightness of tone that permeates the romantic novels she pseudonymously churns out.
Readers in Northern Ireland now have the opportunity to rent Paul Verhoeven's reputedly risible Showgirls (18), which is banned in the State although, by all accounts, pirated copies are in plentiful supply.
SELL THROUGH
Commendable foreign language films new to, or rereleased on, the market include Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour, Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen and Alfonso Arau's Like Water For Chocolate. Worth noting, too, are Patricia Rozema's tantalising debut film, "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing", Paul Schrader's underrated The Comfort of Strangers and Tom Di Cillo's very funny film set story, Living in Oblivion.
