Dynamic, thrilling, epic cinema

"Michael Collins" (PG) On 70 screens across the country

Writing about Neil Jordan's Michael Collins when I first saw the film back in August, I described it as the most important film made in or about Ireland in the first century of cinema. Seeing Jordan's riveting film for the second time last week only reinforces that view. Never before has any film spoken quite so eloquently and quite so powerfully to Irish audiences.

This is dynamic and thrilling epic cinema which dramatises a crucial period in this country's history with tremendous flair and at a driving pace. Inevitably, there is some compression, omission and use of composite characters along the way, given that the film is covering six turbulent years in just two hours and 12 minutes. There is such a wealth of detail and incident to absorb and digest on seeing Michael Collins for the first time that, in an era of so many grossly over extended movies, here is one which might profitably have been allowed to run longer.

Bristling with kinetic energy, this deeply resonant film takes on events which will be familiar to Irish audiences all the way to Collins's assassination in the closing sequence, and one of its many achievements is to treat those familiar events with the urgency and excitement of a thriller. Some commentators - a number of whom had not seen the film and were working from hearsay arid conjecture - have chosen to misinterpret the film's treatment of these events as Provo propaganda and an IRA recruitment film, and one British daily newspaper has gone so far as to call for the film to be withdrawn.

This is to miss entirely the thrust of Michael Collins as it follows one man's journey from orchestrating large scale violence, and murder to the point where he recognises that violence will no longer serve his purpose and that the time for peace and political negotiation has come. Most unusually for a political drama, Jordan brings a rare degree of objectivity to bear on his heartfelt and thoughtful treatment of complex issues in this admirable film.

The film begins at the end, in the summer of 1922 after Collins was ambushed and killed at Beal na mBlath in West Cork, as his girlfriend, Kitty Kiernan, and his staunch ally, Joe O'Reilly, try to come to terms with his death. "Some people are what their times demand," O'Reilly observes. That opening scene is preceded by a short roll of text describing Britain as the "foremost world power at the time and Ireland as Britain's "most troublesome colony".

Turning to the subject of Michael Collins, the text states: "His life and death defined the period in its, triumph, terror and tragedy. This is his story."

Shaped as one extended flashback which follows that poignant meeting between Kitty Kiernan and Joe O'Reilly, Jordan's film takes up the story of Michael Collins in 1916, when he was 25. The action cuts to the GPO and the Rising in the first of several sequences to make bountiful use of Anthony Pratt's meticulously constructed recreation of O'Connell Street on a vast Grangegorman set.

Suddenly, we are witnessing our country's history bursting vibrantly and vividly into life before our eyes. "The game's over, Harry, we lost again," are the first words spoken by Collins as he and his close friend, Harry Boland, surrender. They are lined up with other participants in the Rising as a Dublin Castle detective singles out the ringleaders - Pearse, McDonagh, Clarke, James Connolly on a stretcher - who in, the next scene are executed one after another.

"What happens next time?" Boland asks Collins. "We won't play by their rules, Harry," is his reply. "We'll invent our own." Cut to 1918 when they are released from prison and Collins, already established as a forceful speaker at public rallies, elaborates on his plans: "We'll be an invisible army. Our uniform will be the dress of the man in the street". Quoting Peter Pan, Collins expresses the belief that everything is possible if you wish it.

As Collins sets his campaign of guerilla warfare in motion, we see him recruit a dozen young, single, working class men, his "12 Apostles" to carry out his crackdown one "informers and collaborators".

"You're good at bloody mayhem," Boland tells Collins in a reference which echoes Collins's comment, during a sitting of the illegal Irish government, that he is "minister for gun running, daylight robbery and general mayhem". Eamon de Valera is shown serving Mass in and plotting his escape from Lincoln Jail. In a rare humorous scene, the escaping Dev is given a fur coat to wear. "Pretend you're a whore," he is told, to which he replies, "All I'm missing is the high heels".

In one of the film's several outstanding sequences which so effectively cut back and forwards between dramatically charged action and quieter interludes, Jordan cross cuts between a tender moment shared by Collins and Kitty Kiernan in the Gresham hotel, and the 12 Apostles, young assassins on bicycles, as they seek out their victims and gun them down with varying degrees of nervousness and confidence.

The retaliation that follows is swift and shocking and provides the film with one of its most powerful sequences, the Bloody Sunday massacre in Croke Park. Men and boys watch from the stands as Tipperary leads Dublin on the scoreboard - and then the cheerful atmosphere is shattered as armoured cars, resembling some - primitive concepts for a robot, invade the pitch. A footballer, puzzled, nonchalantly lobs the ball over one of the vehicles. He is mown down and the body count escalates.

When Dev is free and back at the Cabinet, the tensions between him and Collins mount. Dev advises the Cabinet that there is a slim possibility the British might want to talk: "If we are to negotiate as a legitimate government," he says, "our armed forces must act like a legitimate army". He proposes "large scale engagements", to which Collins responds: "You mean like in 1916. The great heroic ethic of failure. All marching in step towards slaughter We might as well save them the bother and blow our brains out." This is not what we were taught at school.

As the Downing Street negotiations loom, Dev appoints Collins to lead their team. "I'm no good at talk," Collins protests. "I'm just a yob from West Cork." Rather than depicting the talks - which would have proved dramatically unwieldy at such an advanced stage of the film - the film cuts to their aftermath and the subsequent divisions.

The Civil War is shown as a montage of explosions and attacks as bitterness mounts on all sides. When de Valera arranges the rendezvous with Collins in West Cork, Joe O'Reilly warns Collins that he would be crazy to go. While Sine ad O'Connor sings He Moved Through The Fair on the soundtrack, the camera swoops high above the "bandit country" for an ominous overhead shot and the ambushers get into position, as Collins is driven to his assignation through Beal na mBlath - and the sequence cross cuts with a quiet sequence in which Kitty Kiernan enthusiastically shops for a wedding dress in Clerys.

The film ends on newsreel footage of his funeral, which was attended by over half a million people, and a final caption declares: "He died, paradoxically, in a final attempt to remove the gun from Irish politics".

A salutory history lesson with a burning relevance for the continuing consequences for this country of the events it depicts and dramatises, Neil Jordan's Michael Collins makes its points firmly and lucidly, with an admiration for its subject, what he did and what he tried to do, and it achieves this without resorting to the emotive trappings employed so often in political cinema to work up bloodboiling indignation in a target audience.

Collins is depicted as a charming and seductive personality a determined pragmatist who is not without self doubt, and a man with a capacity for violence and the ability to see when it had toe stop.

Jordan's most mature, adventurous and accomplished film to date, Michael Collins is epic in scope and scale and it is fuelled by a dynamic energy and by a firm, cool headed focus on its subject. Liam Neeson is physically every inch The Big Fella and he settles into the part with supreme ease and flair, delivering his finest and most complete screen performance to date.

In the difficult role of Kitty Kiernan, the only woman in the film with more than a couple of lines to speak, Julia Roberts plays the role with charm and grace, persuasively establishing the dilemma of a woman who was romantically involved with Harry Boland before falling in love with his best friend, Michael Collins, and who fears for the lives of both men in their dangerous pursuits.

Her character also serves to flesh out the humanity of both men in their hours away from their campaigns, and in her interludes with them individually or together, to offer breathing spaces and pauses for reflection amid the tumults of activity. As Harry Boland, Aidan Quinn underplays the role with a quiet strength and firmly captures the transitions in his close relationships with Kiernan and Collins. Evoking memories of Francois Truffaut's Jules Et Jim, Jordan's depiction of "this emotional triangle tenderly and touchingly develops all three relationships within that triangle.

The superlative cast also notably features Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Charles Dance, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Gerard McSorley, Sean McGinley and Brendan Gleeson. But the revelation is Alan Rickman's terrific performance as Eamon de Valera - arguably the most daunting of roles in that, of all the characters in the film, his is the most familiar to contemporary audiences from radio and television. Precisely catching the nuances in Dev's delivery and uncannily resembling him as a young man, Rickman plays him as a shrewd, cunning manoeuvrer with an ever alert eye for his own survival.

The film reunites Neil Jordan with Chris Menges, who was the lighting cameraman on Jordan's first film, Angel, and whose robust and imaginative visual style adds immeasurably to the power of Michael Collins. The film is deftly edited by J. Patrick Duffner and Tony Lawson, features excellent costumes designed by Sandy Powell and is accompanied by a gorgeous, swelling score composed by Elliot Goldenthal. It makes marvellous use of its many Dublin locations, capturing the city on film more strikingly than any film to date - and the special effects are so impressive that it's a wonder the Four Courts are still standing today.

"Antonia's Line" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

Given the arcane processes involved in nominating and selecting films in the Oscars category for best foreign language film, it's no surprise that most of the best non English language films of recent years have failed even to be nominated. That said, this year's winner, the Dutch entry, Marleen Gorris's Antonia's Line, is a more satisfying movie than most of the recent winners in the category.

Gorris's elegiac movie is centred around women, and one in particular, the eponymous Antonia, an octogenarian who, on her deathbed, recalls her eventful life. This pastoral picture is structured in flashbacks and it spans half a century from the aftermath of the second World War to the present as the staunchly independent Antonia returns to the village where she was born and becomes a mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother.

Played by Willek Van Ammelrooy, Antonia is surrounded by an assortment of eccentrics in this glowingly lit and idealistic movie which is, by turns, surreal and sentimental. The film finds director Gorris in surprisingly mellow mood after her deliriously anti male first film, A Question of Silence - even though the men in Antonia's Line are mostly rapists, idiots, patriarchal ogres or mere sperm suppliers.

"L'Amore Molesto" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Shown in competition at Cannes last year, the Italian drama, L'Amore Molesto is the third feature film from the Neapolitan theatre director, Mario Martone, whose Falso Movimento company is regarded as one of the most significant in Italian avant garde theatre. The basis of L'Amore Molesto is a 1992 novel by Elena Ferrante, who is from Naples and lives in Greece.

The film deals with the quest upon which Delia, a young Bologna based artist, embarks when she returns home to Naples for her mother's funeral, as she attempts to puzzle out the background to the mother's apparent suicide, a verdict Delia is unwilling to accept. As she is drawn deeper and deeper into her mother's secret life, Delia herself is forced to confront and come to terms with suppressed memories from her own past.

The result is an occasionally muddled but consistently intriguing drama with strong performances from Anna Bonaiuto as Delia and Angela Luce as her mother. The movie captures the atmosphere of Naples so distinctively that the city itself becomes one of the principal characters in the story.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"The Fan" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex UCis Dublin

The new film from super glossy director Tony Scott (which opened without a preview last week) deserves its own special place in the Hollywood hall of failures. From its opening shot - overly reminiscent of Neil Jordan's Interview With The Vampire - to its predictable climax, The Fan borrows from numerous movies from Strangers On A Train to Falling Down. It also cannibalises some of the great films of its own star, Robert De Niro, who seems to be descending more and more into self parody these days.

Here he plays a divorced, struggling salesman who is also a fervent supporter of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. When the Giants' expensive new pitcher (Wesley Snipes) hits a bad patch because of a power struggle within the team, the deranged fan decides to lend a hand.

This depressingly banal film has De Niro in a woefully weak copy of his previous performances in Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy (with a dash of Cape Fear at the end). Why the greatest movie actor of his generation feels impelled to do this kind of tat is a mystery, but no amount of flashy camerawork can disguise the lack of imagination at work here.

. Today's other new release is Fled (18), a chase movie directed by the former actor, Kevin Hooks. In a narrative clearly inspired by Stanley Kramer's 1958 movie, The Defiant Ones, which starred Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, Fled features Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin as escaped convicts - one black, one white - who are handcuffed together. It will be reviewed here next Friday.