Hardcore Hedonism

Cinema to Video

"Boogie Nights" (18)

Paul Thomas Anderson's provocative and exhilaratingly well-made film spans seven years onwards from 1977 in an ambitious epic chronicle of the Los Angeles hardcore porn film industry. Powering along at a driving pace for a vibrant two and a half hours, it captures a vivid picture of a hedonistic era of drugs and sex excesses, glaringly tacky clothing and pounding disco music. Into this tawdry neon underworld comes an impressionable 17-year-old dishwasher (an immensely confident Mark Wahlberg) who finds a surrogate family in the extended entourage of a skinflick director (Burt Reynolds) who turns him into a porno star. The fine cast also features Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Heather Graham and John C. Reilly.

"The Ice Storm" (18)

Set in New Canaan, Connecticut over Thanksgiving weekend in November 1973, Ang Lee's adult drama based on Rick Moody's novel is both acerbic and sensitive in its exploration of disillusionment dawning on post-Sixties suburban liberals - many of them adulterous - at the time of the Watergate crisis. Leading an excellent cast are Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver.

"The Sweet Hereafter" (15) , avail- able from August 19th

Winner of the runner-up prize at Cannes last year, Atom Egoyan's compassionate but unsentimental film of the Russell Banks novel effectively moves back and forwards in time as it captures the deeply truamatic impact of a school bus crash on the residents of a small town in British Columbia. Heading a fine cast, Ian Holm plays a lawyer who offers to represent the grief-stricken parents.

"In & Out" (15) from Friday next

Inspired by Tom Hanks's acceptance speech when he won his Oscar for Philadelphia, Frank Oz's witty comedy follows the consequences when an Oscar-winning actor (Matt Dillon) declares live on television that his former small-town teacher (a spirited Kevin Kline) is gay. With Joan Cusack as Kline's fiancee, Debbie Reynolds and Tom Selleck.

"The Wings Of The Dove" (15)

Iain Softley's lush, accomplished and touching film of the Henry James novel features a radiant Helena Bonham Carter as the spirited Kate Croy who is refused permission to see the lowly-paid socialist journalist, Merton Densher (Linus Roache). Allison Elliott co-stars as the secretly ailing American heiress who travels to Venice with the secret lovers.

"The Devil's Advocate" (18)

Taylor Hackford's modern-day spin on Faust is set in a Manhattan law firm where a hotshot ambitious young Florida lawyer (Keanu Reeves) finds himself working for a brilliant legal eagle (Al Pacino) - ominously named John Milton - who seeks his soul. Although it suffers by comparison with Rosemary's Baby, which it frequently evokes, and its final sequence is quite superfluous, this is a polished, sleekly designed entertainment with Reeves and Pacino, both on fine form, joined by Charlize Theron and Judith Ivey.

"Resurrection Man" (18)

The fast-rising young Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, gives an intense and commanding performance as a psychotic Belfast killer which anchors Welsh director Marc Evans's grim, bloodsplattered movie of Eoin McNamee's novel set in 1975 as the Shankill Butchers carried out their atrocities. Given its subject matter, it is, inevitably, a violent film, often gruesomely so to the point where it borders on the voyeuristic. It also features Brenda Fricker, John Hannah, Geraldine O'Rawe and Sean McGinley.

"The Myth of Fingerprints" (15)

When an American family reunites for Thanksgiving, festering frustrations and resentments come to the surface in Brad Freundlich's sometimes ponderous but well-observed emotional drama which features strong performances from Noah Wyle, Julianne Moore, Roy Scheider, Blythe Danner and James Le Gros.

"Lawn Dogs" (18)

John Duigan, the Australian director of The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, is distinctly off form with this quite heavy-handed tale of class divisions involving a good-natured young man (Sam Rockwell) and the rich suburbanites whose lawns he mows for a living. Mischa Barton plays the 10-year-old girl who befriends him with predictable consequences. In an act of self-censorship, the distributors have toned down the language and brief nudity, but not, apparently, the language.

"Lucie Aubrac" (15), from August 17th

Claude Berri's factually based but frankly rather dull drama is set in France in 1943 during the German Occupation. It gains in strength from Carole Bouquet's firm performance as a Lyon schoolteacher determined to save her husband (an unusually lacklustre Daniel Auteuil) from Nazi imprisonment and a death sentence.

"The End of Violence" (15)

One strand of this pretentious, self-important Wim Wenders film features Bill Pullman as a wealthy Hollywood producer who has made his fortune out of selling mindless violence on the screen; the other has Gabriel Byrne as a brilliant computer scientist developing a massive top-secret public surveillance operation.

Direct to Video

"The Blackout" (18)

A considerable disappointment from Abel Ferrara after his return to form recently with The Funeral, The Blackout features Matthew Modine as a permanently stoned Hollywood movie star who gets deeper into drink and drugs when his girlfriend (Beatrice Dalle) has an abortion and leaves him.

When the film moves forward 18 months in time, Matty has moved from Miami to New York where he is clean and sober, attending AA meetings and involved with another woman (Claudia Schiffer). However, he remains truly haunted by nightmares that he may have murdered his former lover during a particularly heavy binge in Miami when he blacked out.

This laborious and often uninvolving movie is further undermined by the cardboard performances of Dalle and, in her film debut, Schiffer, and by Dennis Hopper permanently on autopilot as a warped porn video director. The sole feature which sustains interest is the gritty central performance of Modine, throwing himself into a role in which he is firmly cast against type.

"Telling Lies In America" (15)

Brad Renfro, who showed such promise in The Client, impressively plays a 15-year-old Hungarian immigrant, Karchy, living in Cleveland, Ohio with his father (Maximilian Schell) in this cynical morality tale confidently directed by Guy Fleder. Set in the early 1960s, it's based on an untypically understated and sensitive autobiographical screenplay from the sensationalist, Joe Eszterhas.

An exuberant Kevin Bacon plays the slick disc-jockey who takes Karchy under his wing - as a cover for payola. It also features the young Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a supporting role as the brash but inwardly insecure high school student who gives the boy a hard time - and, as the grocery store colleague Karchy is so eager to impress, Calista Flockhart, the radiant star of the highly entertaining (and underestimated) TV series, Ally McBeal.

"The Substance Of Fire" (15)

Three-time Tony nominee Daniel Sullivan brings an award-winning off-Broadway play to the screen with thoroughly tedious results in this angst-ridden account of yet another dysfunctional American family. The harsh, self-deluding and Holocaust-obsessed paterfamilias is a publisher of expensive academic tomes who stubbornly refuses to accept the economic realities of his profession. Ron Rifkin, who originated that role on the stage, depicts him as an awkward, dislikeable man, and his much-suffering family is played by Timothy Hutton, Sarah Jessica Parker and Tony Goldwyn, with Gil Bellows (from Ally McBeal) as Goldwyn's gay lover.

"Kiss Me, Guido" (18)

Shown at the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in Dublin last weekend, Tony Vitale's comedy of errors features the handsome model and soap opera actor, Nick Scotti, as a naive young Italian-American who works in a Bronx pizza parlour and dreams of becoming the next Robert De Niro. Deciding to move to Manhattan, he answers a Village Voice ad seeking a GWM to share an apartment; in his innocence he thinks GWM stands for "guy with money" rather than "gay white male", and he finds himself sharing with a gay actor-choreographer. The subsequent clash of sexualities - and more archly, stereotypes - makes for fairly slight but amusing material which is handled with a good sense of humour.