LIVING AND LYING

"Donnie Brasco" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Oniniplex, UCIs, Dublin

In the clever and caustic French film A Self Made Hero, now showing at the IFC. The central character an impostor who fakes a heroic identity for himself during the second World War declares at the outset that the best lives are invented. In Mike Newell's moody, taut and deeply involving gangster drama, the factually based Donnie Brasco, the title refers to the false name adopted by the daring FBI agent Joe Pistone when he reinvented himself as part of a meticulously elaborate scheme to infiltrate the Mafia in the late 1970s.

The film's incisive screenplay by Paul Attanasio is based on the book, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life In The Mafia, written by Pistone in the aftermath of leading this dangerous double life. Johnny Depp plays Pistone, who adopts the identity of a crooked jeweller named Donnie Brasco, and Al Pacino is Lefty Ruggiero, the minor gangster whose trust he wins and who warms to Donnie as a surrogate son and leads him into the inner sanctum of crime.

Living on the edge because of the fatal risk of ever letting his mask slip, Pistone emerges as an utterly driven and methodical man whose unswerving dedication to his work puts great strain on his marriage and his relationship with his three young daughters. His dilemma is compounded by the deadly secrecy of his work, the long periods he has to be away and out of contact with his family, and the bond that grows between him and Lefty, the trusting friend he intends to betray. For all his years of service to the Mafia and his boast of committing 26 killings, Lefty remains at the bottom of the criminal heap and be gains a renewed sense of self-importance from his close relationship with Donnie.

The tension which permeates the film accelerates in a number of scenes when Donnie's cover is threatened with exposure. He goes with the mobsters to a Japanese restaurant where all the diners are expected to remove their footwear, but he has his tape recorder hidden in one of his boots and has to come up with a quick-witted solution to avoid removing the boot. In another sequence, Donnie is with the gangsters in an airport when he has to deal with being recognised by an old friend.

His response to both these situations, and his gradual immersion into his assumed persona, registers an apt ambivalence which suggests that he is getting so deeply into character that he may be beginning to adopt the violent credo of the mob. Meanwhile the film dispassionately observes the lifestyle of the gangsters with their power structures, codes of loyalty and internecine struggles.

It is appropriate that the grimy milieu of Donnie Brasco is far removed from the more glamorous environment of gangster movies such as The Godfather and Casino, given that the iconoclastic new movie resolutely refuses to glamorise the criminal characters who largely populate it. Donnie Brasco is a thoughtful, sturdy drama with unusually strong and complex character development, which is very much to the credit of its screenwriter Paul Attanasio, a former Washington Post film critic whose impressive screenwriting credits include Quiz Show, which also featured a morally compromised character at its core, and the television series, Homicide: Life On The Street.

This admirable film marks an assured departure for - and is the best to date from the versatile English director Mike Newell, whose varied credits include Dance With A Stranger, Into The West, An Awfully Big Adventure and Four Weddings And A Funeral. The film benefits considerably from Newell's clear, cool, unfussy direction, and from the inquisitive outsider's point of view he brings to bear on subject matter which is traditionally handed to Italian-American film-makers.

The film is charged by the subtly developed chemistry between its principal characters, played in riveting performances by Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. In his finest performance in years, Pacino is remarkably restrained and low-key and all the more effective for that, while Depp comes of age in a mature, intelligent and deadpan performance. Sharing screen space with Pacino for most of the movie, Depp acquits himself admirably in the company of a brilliant actor on terrific form. The strong supporting cast notably includes Michael Madsen, Anne Heche, Bruno Kirby and James Russo. And in its art direction and costume design, the movie captures an authentically sleazy late 1970s look.

"Liar Liar" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCls, Dublin

A huge box-office success in the US, the new Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar features the elastic-faced star as a character to whom lies and deceit come easily. However, unlike Joe Pistone/Donnie Brasco, Carrey's character is an oleaginous lawyer and pathological liar, so patently insincere that he's like a chameleon in that he adapts himself to whomever happens to be around him and always tells them what he believes they want to, hear. Clearly, he is ideally suited to defending the borderline cases which other lawyers would not take in good conscience.

The joke on which the movie pivots comes when the lawyer's young son, despairing at his father's latest unfulfilled promise to visit him on his birthday, makes a wish that Dad could tell the truth for just 24 hours. When that wish comes true, the stage is set for a showcase of Carrey's comic ability as his morally bankrupt character is faced time and again with the problems engendered in his life and profession when he cannot lie.

In Carrey's remarkably physical routine, he performs quite astonishing contortions of his face and body and he appears more eager-to-please and over-the-top than ever before - which may be too hard-to-take for some viewers who - regard Carrey as an acquired taste they have no wish to acquire.

However, even those disbelievers would be hard-pressed not to be impressed by the sequence in which Carrey mugs himself in an attempt to stay out of the courtroom for the day, or the scene when he tells all the senior partners of his firm exactly what he thinks of them; thinking he's just joking, they find it all hilarious. And it is, too.

The film founders when it turns sentimental and Carrey begins to recognise the error of his ways, but the mushiness gives way again to frenzied comedy. It is much sharper than Carrey's first collaboration with director Tom Shadyac on the first Ace Ventura movie, and it is far superior to Shadyac's last movie, The Nutty Professor, not least because Carrey is a far superior comic to Murphy.

"Basquiat" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

In Basquiat the painter Julian Schnabel turns film-maker with a dramatised picture of his friend and fellow artist, the Haitian-American, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Passing over Basquiat's upper middle-class background, Schnabel's film sketchily charts his progress from 1979, when we see him living in a cardboard box and operating as a graffiti artist in New York, to his embracement by the New York art scene, and on to his death from a heroin overdose in 1988, at the age of 27.

Basquiat was described by the New York Times as the art world's closest equivalent to James Dean", but there is little in Schnabel's film beyond the fact that the artist died young that suggests how and why such iconic status could be perceived. In this unilluminating portrait of the artist, Basquiat registers as a merely petulant, self-destructive personality, an angry young man turned tormented celebrity.

An earnest Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat heads a cast that includes Michael Wincott, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Courtney Love and, as Andy Warhol, David Bowie. However, only Del Toro and Walken make any significant impression, and then only briefly, while Bowie's Warhol impersonation is closer to the caricature doled out by Crispin Glover in The Doors than to Jared Harris's glacially aloof presence in the recent I Shot Andy Warhol.