Distinctly deja vu

Snatch (18) General release

A distinct whiff of deja vu permeates Snatch, the latest in a long line of recent British gangster movies spawned by the unexpected success of Guy Richie's low-budget film debut, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. These offshoots - among them Circus, Essex Boys and the execrable Love, Honour & Obey - have been most notable for their tiresomely formulaic screenplays, witless dialogue and arch performances. Any one of them could aptly be re-titled Stock Characters Scraping Barrels.

The densely plotted and breathlessly pacy Snatch is in a different league, as it ought to be, coming from writer-director Guy Richie himself. One might reasonably have expected Richie to follow Lock Stock with something completely different for his heavily-touted sophomore feature. However, while Snatch is not in any respect a sequel to Lock Stock, it is initially burdened with such an air of familiarity that it makes one wish that Richie had made more of an effort to expand his horizons.

Once again Richie conjures up a London underworld more rooted in movie genre references than in any contemporary reality. Again it is populated by amoral characters (several played by Lock Stock actors) spouting snappy dialogue as they indulge in nefarious crimes and cunning double-dealing. Most of these men are distinguished by their calculated idiosyncracies and such nicknames as Brick Top, Boris the Blade, Jack the All-Seeing Eye, Bullet Tooth Tony, and Franky Four Fingers - whose gambling addiction explains the absence of a fifth digit. Yet again women and the forces of the law are peripheral to this universe.

Richie cleverly uses a bank of security monitors to follow the progress of a cheeky diamond robbery in Antwerp which has far-reaching consequences for the yarn's inter-connected protagonists. These events are observed by the movie's narrator, the dim, blundering Turkish (Lock Stock actor Jason Statham) who is involved in unlicensed boxing promotion with his equally naive sidekick, Tommy (Stephen Graham). Seeking a fighter to take part in a rigged bare-knuckle bout, they set their sights on Mickey O'Neill (Brad Pitt), a shrewd, copiously tattooed Irish Traveller who packs a lethal punch.

The diverse strands of this serpentine narrative gradually mesh as Richie pumps up the rhythm, using exaggerated sound effects, ironic use of music (Golden Brown, Dreadlock Holiday Ghost Town), succinctly abbreviated plot advancement and blink-and-you'll-miss-them expository flashbacks. However much it feels like more of the same after Lock Stock, Snatch proves as entertaining as Richie's first film, and altogether more technically ambitious and adroit.

In a fine ensemble cast which notably includes Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina Rade Sherbedgia and Sorcha Cusack (in a cameo as Mickey's mother), it is Pitt's witty, charming performance that steals the movie, as he engagingly milks the running gag that Mickey's accent proves incomprehensible to English ears. Alan Ford (the narrator in Lock Stock) is the movie's other delight, perfectly cast as the callous, menacing Brick Top whose gaze is as withering as his put-downs. And Vinnie Jones, as Bullet Tooth Tony, gets one of the movie's best lines when asked if he should be addressed as Bullet or Tooth and he replies, "You can call me Susan if you like".

Michael Dwyer

La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin The prolific French film-maker Patrice Leconte is one of those directors, like Ang Lee, whose choice of material and treatment of it is never obvious or predictable. Leconte follows the recently-released The Girl on the Bridge, an unconventional, black-and-white romantic fairytale, with the sombre costume drama, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, which is factually inspired by a chain of events on the small French island settlement of Saint-Pierre off the coast of Newfoundland in the mid-19th century.

In a drunken rage a sailor, Neel (Emir Kusturica), kills his captain and is sentenced to death. There is neither a guillotine nor an executioner on the island, and while the authorities await the arrival of both, Neel is placed in the custody of the island's army captain (Daniel Auteuil), in an unlocked cell in the courtyard of the captain's residence.

Neel's fate captures the attention of the captain's devoted wife (Juliette Binoche), known to the islanders as Madame La. An independent spirit in this stiflingly conformist community, she arranges for Neel to become her gardener and general handyman while making it clear to him that she does not regard him as a servant. "Men can be bad one day and good the next; they change," she believes. The governing classes, however, are appalled by her relationship with this convicted killer, and by the general acceptance of him by the islanders.

This bleak, brooding drama is Leconte's second period picture, after Ridicule, with which it shares a deep distrust of authority and an undisguised contempt for bureaucracy and social hypocrisy. The tone of the new film, however, is darker and harder-edged, as reflected in its muted colour schemes, and Leconte's regular preoccupation with tragic consequences is evident throughout as the shadow of death clouds the relationship formed between the prisoner and the captain and his wife.

Leconte's casting of Emir Kusturica - the Serbian director of Arizona Dream, Underground and Black Cat, White Cat - proves well-judged: Kusturica's endearing performance eschews gentle giant cliches. The redoubtable Daniel Auteuil is appropriately low-key as the fatalistic captain whose life is redeemed by his loving marriage. As the strong-willed and compassionate Madame La, Juliette Binoche gives a luminous performance that is hauntingly expressive and ranks among her very best work for the cinema.

Michael Dwyer

Gossip (18) General release

Director David Guggenheim moves unsteadily from television and documentaries into feature films with the topical Gossip, which taps into the media fascination with scandal, preferably sexual. "Gossip and news are the same thing," the handsome, conniving student, Derrick (James Marsden) declares to his fellow students and his smug lecturer (Eric Bogosian).

The son of a wealthy family, Derrick lives in a vast, over-designed Manhattan loft apartment with his room-mates, Jones (Lena Headey), one of the many students he finds sexually attractive, and Travis (Norman Reedus), an art student portrayed as stereotypically unkempt.

The film operates from a promising premise: a communications class assignment on the link between news and gossip provides the springboard for the three students to manufacture and spread a malicious rumour regarding the sex life of a chaste fellow student (Kate Hudson), which leads to her boyfriend (Joshua Jackson) being accused of date rape.

However, in the hole-filled scenario devised by Gregory Poirier and under the heavy-handed direction of Guggenheim, it also leads on to more and more preposterous dramatic contrivances, squandering its potential and eventually sinking under the weight of its utter implausibility. James Marsden, who plays Cyclops in the current release X- Men, works diligently to ground the material in credibility, but his efforts are undermined by the movie's sheer silliness.

Michael Dwyer

Me Myself I (18) Selected cinemas

Not to be confused with the new Farrelly Brothers' comedy, Me, Myself and Irene (which opens in two weeks' time), Australian film-maker Pip Karmel's debut feature is a "what if?" comedy in a similar vein to the 1999 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, Sliding Doors. Firmly targeted at the romantic comedy market (which has had a lean time of it so far this year), its initial premise is more interesting than anything that follows.

Rachel Griffiths plays Pamela, a successful thirtysomething journalist with no social life and a loudly ticking biological clock. Knocked unconscious in a car accident, she finds herself transported into a parallel universe, where she swaps places with her alter ego, who did marry her childhood sweetheart (David Roberts) 13 years before, and is now a suburban housewife with three children. As Griffiths settles into her "new" life, she has to come to terms with the pleasures and the messy realities of being a mother, and also with the less than ideal state of her marriage.

In the hands of Karmel (a former editor who received an Oscar nomination for her work on Scott Hicks's Shine) Me Myself I is a disappointingly flat exploration of potentially interesting themes. Griffiths has proved her talent in recent years in films as diverse as Muriel's Wedding and Hilary and Jackie, but she struggles here with the clunky dialogue and the - even worse - occasional internal monologue. There's an overall sense that any spikiness in her character has been removed for fear of offending anyone, and her character is oddly muted and undeveloped.

That's bad enough, but with the exception of the three children (Yael Stone, Shaun Loseby and Trent Sullivan), every other character in the film is pure cardboard, whether in the shape of the bland love interest (Sandy Winton) or the awful neighbours, drawn in the now rather cliched Australian suburban grotesque style.

Hugh Linehan