Evocation of a dying era

The Hi-Lo Country (15) IFC, Dublin

It was a long-held but unrealised ambition of the late Sam Peckinpah to make a feature film of Max Evans's novel, The Hi-Lo Country, which was inspired by the experiences of Evans's best friend and written to immortalise him. From soon after its publication in 1961, Peckinpah persisted with his plans to bring the novel to the screen, with various actors attached to the project at different stages, but he failed, not least because of protracted complications regarding the film rights to the book.

Ten years after Peckinpah's death in 1984, one of his regular actors, L. Q. Jones, was playing a supporting role in Casino and he brought the book to the attention of his director, Martin Scorsese. When his own schedule precluded him from directing The Hi-Lo Country, Scorsese decided to produce it and invited the English director, Stephen Frears, to direct it; Scorsese had produced Frears's first US movie, The Grifters. Appropriately, they engaged Walon Green - who had made his screenwriting debut on Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch - to adapt Evans's novel for the screen.

The film opens on an extended prologue in the New Mexico prairie town of Hi-Lo during the late 1930s and the forming of a firm bond between two young men - Big Boy Matson (Woody Harrelson) and Pete Calder (Billy Crudup) - who meet when one buys a horse from the other. Reunited after their wartime service, they return to a changed HiLo where the wealthy rancher, Jim Ed Love (Sam Elliott) has been buying up many of the small holdings in the area. Resisting his overtures, the two proud-spirited young men are intent on maintaining their status as independent operators. Meanwhile, Pete is shaken by the discovery that Mona (Patricia Arquette), the woman he has longed for, has married Jim Ed's foreman while he was away at war, and Pete resumes his relationship with the loyal Latina, Josepha (Penelope Cruz). There are further complications when Pete learns that Big Boy is passionately involved in a secret affair with Mona.

The Hi-Lo Country is so replete with themes that preoccupied Peckinpah throughout his career - close male friendships; the threatening of old values by modernity - that it is easy to understand why he invested so much time and energy in his attempts to make it into a film. In the hands of Stephen Frears, it remains essentially true to the spirit of Peckinpah and registers as a thoughtful and elegiac evocation of a dying era at a key point in its transition.

However, one would have expected Peckinpah to inject the drama with somewhat more vigour and panache than Frears delivers in a film that is over-stretched in the early stages of its unnecessarily sprawling narrative. That said, the film gains in momentum as it proceeds, heightened by set-pieces such as a tense card game and a dramatic blizzard sequence, and by the handsome wide-screen visual compositions lit by Oliver Stapleton. The period detail is distinctively captured in Russell J. Smith's production design and enhanced by Carter Burwell's infectious score.

The principal actors are wellchosen, with Woody Harrelson revealing Big Boy's boisterous, risk-taking and indomitable personality with flair and ease, and Billy Crudup intensely catching Pete's shy, moody, introspective nature. A notable supporting cast includes James Gammon as a rancher who helps out the two young men, westerns veteran Katy Jurado as a fortune-teller, Cole Hauser as Big Boy's fiery younger brother, and Rosaleen Linehan expressively denoting the fears of their mother who already has seen their father and their grandfather die violent deaths.

Michael Dwyer

Playing by Heart (15) Selected cinemas

In writer-director Willard Carroll's ensemble drama about the intersecting lives and romances of 11 different Los Angelenos, love means having to say you're sorry an awful lot. Despite the fact that they're uniformly successful, prosperous and handsome, Willard's characters spend a lot of time trying to resolve the mistakes and right the wrongs for which they feel responsible.

Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands are a prosperous couple whose long and apparently happy marriage is threatened by the eruption of events from the past; Madeleine Stowe and Anthony Edwards are conducting an extramarital affair; Dennis Quaid is a loner who accosts people in bars to tell them stories; Gillian Anderson is a theatre director whose fear of being hurt causes her to rebuff the attentions of nice suitor Jon Stewart; Angelina Jolie and Ryan Phillippe are young clubbers whose stop-start relationship seems doomed to failure; and Ellen Burstyn is by the side of her terminally-ill son (Jay Mohr) for his last few days of life.

There are lots of opportunities here for over-the-top sentimentality, and Playing By Heart certainly has its moments of pure mawkishness, but the cross-cutting between the various plots ensures that things never become boring. Some of these stories work better than others, and some (Stowe's and Edwards's in particular) are irritatingly underdeveloped, but old troupers Connery, Rowlands and Burstyn acquit themselves admirably, and Jolie and Phillippe are so gorgeous-looking they hardly need a script.

In addition to his impressive cast, Carroll has some pretty hefty assistance behind the camera. Vilmos Zsigmond's lush cinematography presents a lush, very upmarket (and very Caucasian) LA, while veteran composer John Barry's retro-jazzy score, combined with a music soundtrack ranging from Chet Baker to Moby, adds to the glossy magazine-style feel of the whole thing. It would be easy to sneer at this imaginary world, where everybody's good-looking and nobody seems to worry about money - it's certainly a long way from the Los Angeles of Robert Altman's Short Cuts - but Playing By Heart is actually rather good fun, if you're in the mood for some classy soap opera.

Hugh Linehan

Doug's 1st Movie (Gen)

Hot on the moneyed heels of The Rugrats Movie, Doug will be recognised by cable-access parents because it's another safe-sounding, catchy theme tune emitting regularly from the telly. (In our house last spring the sound was the cue for "Come on, let's get those shoes on, it's nearly time for school".)

The would-be-quirky creation of cartoonist Jim Jinkins, Doug is a 12-year-old mensch with romance in his soul and a never-ending streak of moral dilemmas with which to contend. Unlike the Rugrats, Doug is dull.

The movie mixes the TV show's usual recipe of pre-teen personal anxieties with a stew of paranoid conspiracy theory pulled sloppily from the Zeitgeist. The "plot" pits Doug and his pals against an all-powerful local villain who is committing the one social evil recognised by contemporary youth and pop culture: he's polluting a lake.

Doug's 1st Movie has its cute moments, but it glazed-over this father and did little better for the kids. Seven-year-old Louie's verdict was forgiving: "If you think that's boring, Dad, you should watch it on the telly every morning."

Harry Browne