Dysfunctional Dynasty

Happiness (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

A bold, illuminating and uncompromising contemporary drama of humiliation and denial vividly acted out by a remarkable ensemble cast, Happiness is a formidable achievement which more than affirms the promise shown by its young director, Todd Solondz, with the rather over-praised Welcome to the Dollhouse. The title is heavily ironic in the case of Happiness, which is set among an extended suburban family in Solondz's native New Jersey.

The parents of this dysfunctional dynasty, played by Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser, are on the verge of breaking up after 40 years of marriage. One of their daughters (Jane Adams) is a lonely and naive idealist, unlucky in love and work. Another daughter is a successful author (Lara Flynn Boyle) who turns the tables on a sexually frustrated neighbour (Philip Seymour Hoffman) by returning his smutty phone calls.

The third daughter (Cynthia Stevenson), projects an archetypal all-American homemaker image which disguises the fact that her marriage is sexless; later her psychiatrist husband (Dylan Baker) is revealed as an unrepentant paedophile who preys on his son's school friends.

In a multi-charactered scenario as skilfully structured and executed as Short Cuts, the inter-connected protagonists also include a promiscuous and physically abusive Russian taxi driver (Jared Harris), a middle-aged divorcee (Elizabeth Ashley) determined to attract the Gazzara character, and a despairing overweight woman (Camryn Manheim) who exacts lethal revenge on a man who rapes her.

Writer-director Solondz stripes bare the veneers of respectability, acceptability and cosiness with which these characters mask their secret lives. Cringe-inducing embarrassment is a recurring feature in Solondz's movies, not just for the characters he creates but for the audience which is drawn into their lives and fates.

There are more than a few such moments to get audiences wriggling uncomfortably in their seats during this film which is rendered all the more unsettling by its spurts of very black humour and its keen sense of life's absurdities. Happiness makes for riveting and challenging cinema.

Last Night (members and guest only), IFC, Dublin

The bright, multi-talented Canadian actor, writer and director, Don McKellar, makes an impressive feature film directing debut with Last Night, one of 10 international productions commissioned to coincide with the millennium. McKellar extends his brief well beyond the currently fashionable theme of millennial angst, setting his film in the last six hours before the end of the world.

Most unusually for a movie with such an apocalyptic theme, Last Night is devoid of explosions or even a pervading sense of doom. In McKellar's imaginatively thought-out scheme of things, there is an air of calm acceptance of inevitability among the population as the end nears. Nor is there any explanation for the fate of our planet - even though it is clear that something is amiss given that the sun still shines as the clock ticks closer towards midnight.

Set and shot in Toronto, McKellar's cool, quirkily humorous and often moving picture concentrates on observing the behaviour of disparate characters as they spend their last six hours before the end of the world. McKellar himself plays Patrick, the pivotal character who is trying to get out of spending his last hours with his parents and relatives who have organised a traditional Christmas dinner, to relive happy memories on their last night.

Patrick is distracted when he comes into contact with a woman (the excellent Sandra Oh), who is stranded after her car is stolen as she is on her way home to fulfil a suicide pact with her husband (David Cronenberg). And Patrick's best friend (Callum Keith Rennie) has his own agenda of sexual acts to be experienced before time runs out.

McKeller derives wry amusement from how the minutiae of life still bother his characters as their final hours ebb away, and his film is notably strong on such incidental details. On his broader canvas, there is a touching dignity about the resignation with which most of these people approach their fates. Simultaneously this thoughtful and poignant meditation prompts its viewers to reflect on how we ourselves would respond in a similar situation.

Black Cat White Cat (members and guests only), IFC, Dublin

Although Emir Kusturica's frantic and ferocious epic Balkans allegory Underground won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995, it received such a critical bashing in some quarters that its Sarajevo-born director vowed he was quitting movies.

A year later, however, he was back behind the camera to make a documentary on gypsy musicians, and that project evolved into Black Cat White Cat, which returns him to the milieu of his Time of the Gypsies - and reunites him with its writer, Gordon Mihic - for a tale of double-dealing involving a petty criminal and the leader of a group of gypsy gangsters in a settlement on the Danube.

Clearly still smarting from the attacks on Underground, Kusturica's new film is strenuously apolitical. There are nods to Fellini in the gallery of grotesques with which Kusturica populates the picture, and in its frequently surreal imagery: a pig chewing a battered old car; an amply built cabaret performer with a truly unique method of pulling nails out of wood. Featuring a largely non-professional cast and shot almost entirely in the open air, the film is gleamingly photographed by Thierry Arbogast, most memorably in a pre-coital scene of two young lovers stripping as they chase each other through fields of sunflowers.

With its abundance of references to his earlier work Black Cat White Cat plays like Kusturica's greatest hits, but without their emotion or depth, and it registers as a minor achievement by his standards. Some of the slapstick sequences are surprisingly coarse, and for all its vitality and colour, the film is too slight and overstated to sustain two hours of screen time.

Crush Proof (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex Santry, UCI Tallaght

Paul Tickell's raw, vigorous Irish film, Crush Proof, establishes its ambitions as an urban western with a striking early shot of young gang members travelling on horseback over a Dublin flyover, and those aspirations are evident in later scenes when the gang ride seven abreast into the Dublin mountains and when the camera follows a horseback chase after a motorcyclist through the woods. More arch are references such as the line, "I think you better get out of Dodge, Miss Titty".

Played in a sharp, edgy performance by Darren Healy, Neal, the movie's pivotal character, is an amoral rebel without a cause. Freshly released from prison, he is refused permission by his ex-girlfriend to see their child, his father is an alcoholic who can't even remember Neal's name, and his mother, who has embarked on a lesbian relationship, disowns him. And he learns that his beloved horse died while he was behind bars. When Neal seeks revenge on his former friend and drug-dealing partner who informed on him, a tragic accident triggers off a frenzied sequence of events in which Neal's past catches up with him. All the while, an unorthodox detective is doggedly on his trail, keeping in contact with him over a stolen mobile phone.

Pulsating with energy, the abruptly edited Crush Proof takes a somewhat romanticised if never sentimental view of the pony kids or urban cowboys at its centre, and it distinctively captures their milieu. The expletive-littered screenplay by James Mathers undoes some of these achievements by placing implausibly fruity dialogue in the mouths of characters such as Neal, whose most frequent refrain is "ask me bollix".

The Last Bus Home (15) Selected cinemas

The soundtrack of familiar and authentic-sounding original music in The Last Bus Home harks back to the angry self-righteousness of punk rock. Written and directed by Johnny Gogan, the movie opens on the day in 1979 when the Pope came to Dublin and closes 13 years later on the day when Ireland decriminalised homosexuality for consenting adult males. For much of its duration, the film concentrates on the problems of a self-destructive punk band, the Dead Patriots, and as it ponders why bands put so much work into getting off the ground only to throw it all away, the film directly questions whether they are afraid of success.

The narrative gradually shifts the emphasis on to the band's young gay drummer and his traumas in coming out. That transition is rendered all the more awkward by an overload of melodrama in the later stages, although John Cronin's expressive portrayal of the gay drummer helps, as does Annie Ryan as his sympathetic ally, the band's firmly independent manager. Brian F. O'Byrne is left with an underdeveloped role - as the band's strident and homophobic lead singer - until the movie's quite neatly resolved coda.

Forces of Nature (12) General release

This contrived romantic comedy features Ben Affleck as Ben, a buttoned-down young man employed to write blurbs for book jackets and about to travel home from New York to Savannah, Georgia for his wedding when circumstances prevent him from flying. Instead he finds himself making a most circuitous journey by road, reluctantly teaming up with eccentric fellow traveller played by Sandra Bullock. While Forces of Nature aspires to achieve the heights of such engaging opposites-attract movies as It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby, it falters in the flimsily plotted screenplay by Marc Lawrence, a veteran of television's Family Ties. Director Bronwen Hughes, whose background is in commercials and music videos, does little to help beyond adding some cutesy slo-mo footage of the changing weather. The result is altogether closer to a retread of Planes, Trains & Automobiles with Bullock in the John Candy role. Looking like she's been following the Ally McBeal diet, Bullock seems ill at ease, and, crucially, there is absolutely no chemistry between her and the engaging Affleck. The cast also includes Maura Tierney as Ben's fiancee, and as her mother, Gwyneth Paltrow's much-thanked actress mother, Blythe Danner.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (18) General release

Aficionados of the genre will welcome this latest exercise in knowing teen horror. Directed by Danny Cannon, this sequel features Freddie Prinze Jr, Mekhi Pfeifer and the singer, Brandy, and in the starring role, Jennifer Love Hewitt reprising her role as the much-suffering student Julie James, who is still haunted by dreams in which she is pursued by the psycho-killer who tried to kill her in the original. Guess what happens next.