Death of innocence

"Lolita" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street; Ormonde, Stillorgan; Omniplex, Santry, Dublin While neither of today's mainstream releases are strictly remakes, both are reworkings of previously filmed material. One is considerably more accomplished than the other, and the big surprise is that the former, Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, the filmmaker behind such excesses as 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal.

When it was announced that Lyne was embarking on a new movie based on Lolita, anyone could have been forgiven for fearing the worst. However, Lyne has never exercised such caution and restraint as he does in his treatment of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, making the hysteria whipped up about the movie in Britain and America seem entirely bogus.

The screenplay by the New Yorker writer and former film critic Stephen Schiff is an altogether more felicitous adaptation of the book than Stanley Kubrick's 1962 movie of Lolita, even though that version's Oscar-nominated screenplay was by Nabokov himself. Unwisely, Nabokov transposed the setting from the late 1940s to the comparatively more liberal early 1960s, and in the film's other misguided move, Kubrick sacrificed the story's atmospheric American setting by shooting it in England and dropping in US locations as mere backdrops. Adrian Lyne sensibly re-located the story to its original post-war period and filmed it on distinctively captured locations as Lolita and Humbert Humbert take to the road and travel from one tawdry motel to another. The film begins at the end of the road for Humbert as he sprawls bloodstained over the wheel of his zigzagging car with a gun on the seat next to him and the police closing in around him.

Before he is apprehended, he looks back in anguish on his life, beginning with the time when he was 14 and fell in love with a girl of the same age in Cannes. "Whatever happens to a boy at 14 will mark him for the rest of his life," intones Humbert whose life is haunted by the girl's death from typhus four months later. "The shock of her death froze something in me," he says, "and I kept looking for her for the rest of my life."

Twenty-six years later, in 1947, the avuncular Humbert finds her surrogate when he goes to New England on a teaching post and is offered lodgings by a widow, Charlotte Haze. Neither she nor the house is to his taste, and he is about to make his excuses and leave when he espies her pig-tailed 13-year-old daughter, Lolita, sprawled on the lawn under the gentle spray of a water sprinkler. She smiles at him, revealing a brace on her teeth, and he is instantly besotted.

When mother and daughter compete for his attention, Lolita is sent off to boarding school and briefly kisses Humbert on the lips before she leaves, in what he describes as "a transcendent experience". To get closer to Lolita, he marries her mother to whom he feeds sleeping pills so that he can avoid having sex with her, and he longs for his step-daughter's summer holidays.

An incestuous affair begins with the levels of control shifting as Lolita becomes more confident in their relationship, while he becomes wracked with guilt and doubt. Director Lyne goes to great pains not to depict any explicit sexual activity - even hiring a 19year-old body double for scenes in which Humbert and Lolita touch - but the sheer creepiness of paedophilia is not left understated. That point is made firmly, particularly in one scene where Lolita sits on his lap while reading comics, and the sexual arousal of both of them becomes evident through their changing facial expressions.

His hypocrisy is illustrated when he warns her that, as she is so young, people might take advantage of her. The shadowy, ominous presence of the predatory playwright, Clare Quilty, which enflames Humbert's accumulating paranoia and jealousy, is depicted ambiguously as possibly a figment of his imagination - until the two paedophiles finally meet in a violent confrontation. Meanwhile, Humbert, a man wholly obsessed - and torn between lust and remorse, fear and self-loathing - is finally destroyed by his obsession.

Adrian Lyne's uncharacteristic circumspection forces him away from the humour at the core of Nabokov's novel, and his film is undermined by a few lapses of narrative logic, and by the kind of arch symbolism familiar from his more prurient films. Nevertheless, his Lolita is ultimately responsible and mature, and it gains in authority from the complex, finely judged performance of Jeremy Irons whose haunted eyes, hesitant movements and measured narration catch Humbert Humbert in all his emotional turmoil.

In her film debut, Dominique Swain precisely captures Lolita's conflicting qualities of innocence and precociousness, while Frank Langella is outrageously flamboyant as the evil Quilty and Melanie Griffith makes Lolita's unctuous mother sad and sympathetic. Sadness is the keynote to Lyne's melancholy film, and it is underscored by Ennio Morricone's mournful music.

"City Of Angels" (12) Nationwide Here come the men in black, this time in the form of angels who have swapped their wings for chic all-black ensembles set off by long, loose coats. It's not clear from City Of Angels if all such ethereal spirits dress so smartly; maybe it's just because these angels are based in Los Angeles. They gather in duos on precipitous perches high above the city, on skyscraper roofs, on the Hollywood sign, or in groups on deserted beaches, all the time looking meaningfully into the distance while Gabriel Yared's lush score throbs on the soundtrack.

They wander invisibly among the population, tuning into the thoughts of lesser mortals or waiting in hospitals to guide the dying into an unspecified afterlife. One of them, who calls himself Seth and is played by Nicolas Cage, steps out of line when he finds himself drawn to Dr Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan), a heart surgeon who listens to Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker when she's working in the operating theatre. She is suffering a crisis of confidence after one of her patients dies unexpectedly. Somehow he manages to make himself visible to her; somehow she never objects when he follows her all over the city. Could this possibly be lurve? Will Seth give up on eternity and become a mere mortal so that finally he can experience what it is like to touch, to feel, and more to the point, have sex with Dr Maggie? Will she really believe that, well, he really is an angel, and will she drop her stuffy doctor lover (Colm Feore) for him? One does not need to be psychic to predict the consequences in this ponderous and simplistic New Age spin on the mystical and rather pretentious 1987 Wim Wenders movie, Wings Of Desire. Surprisingly, this new version, directed by Brad Silberling following his debut with Casper, has received the Wenders imprimatur. "It's done with respect," Wenders told the New York Times. "It's not just, `Look, ma, no subtitles'." Chac'un a son gout, Wim.

After running away from explosions in three hectic action movies, Nicolas Cage must have welcomed the stillness of his role in this mostly turgid yarn, while Meg Ryan switches from playing cute to serious-but-cute. Innocuous stuff, it doesn't grate like last year's ghastly angel movie, Michael, with its winged, chain-smoking John Travolta, but as a far-out romantic fantasy, it lacks the passion that sparked Ghost earlier this decade.

At least City Of Angels is easy on the eye, being bathed in the gorgeous images captured by the mobile camera of the gifted John Seale, an Oscar-winner last year for The English Patient.

Hugh Linehan adds: "Liar" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

With a cast including Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Rosanna Arquette, it's hardly surprising that the shadow of Quentin Tarantino looms large over this indie psychological thriller from identical twins Jonas and Josh Pate. The addition to the mix of Michael Rooker, who specialises in playing violent sadists (most memorably in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), signals that male violence is likely to be the subject here, and so it proves. The Pate brothers' occasionally ingenious, always stylish but often rather silly movie finds an appropriate device (in both senses of the word) for its rather wordy script in that very American institution, the lie detector test. Roth plays a wealthy young ne'er do well, hauled in by detectives Penn and Rooker to take a polygraph test about his suspected involvement in the murder of a young prostitute (Renee Zellweger, last seen in Jerry Maguire, the Pates clearly have a talent for casting). Shifty, evasive and clearly untrustworthy, Roth keeps trying to turn the tables on his adversaries as the plot unfolds through a series of flashbacks. The revelation that he is subject to epileptic fits during which he has no control over his actions becomes a recurring motif, along with Penn's financial troubles with shady loan shark Ellen Burstyn and Rooker's suspicions that his wife (Arquette) is having an affair. These three stories, it becomes clear, are connected in unexpected ways, leading to a final violent denouement. This interweaving narrative is handled with some flair by the Pates, aided by veteran cinematographer Bill Butler, whose compositions accentuate the nightmarish claustrophobia of the whole thing. But the script is too didactic in ramming home its points about truth and lies, and the closing scenes are formulaic and ridiculous. The very strong cast, though, makes it worth a look.

The epilepsy organisation Brainwave has protested that Liar "presents an unacceptably negative portrayal of epilepsy and does not accurately represent the experience of living with the condition". The IFC has co-operated with Brainwave and will be displaying its comments and materials during the film's run.

The free outdoor screening of John Ford's The Quiet Man, which could not go ahead last weekend due to bad weather, has been rescheduled for tomorrow night at 10 p.m. in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin. This replaces the scheduled screening of My Darling Clementine, which has been cancelled. For ticket information, call 01-671-5717.