Malick's Back. . .

The Thin Red Line (15) General release

He may have been away for more than 20 years, but The Thin Red Line is immediately recognisable as a Terrence Malick film, its elements familiar to anyone who's seen Badlands and Days Of Heaven - there's the celebration of the beauty of the natural world contrasted with the cruelty and folly of human behaviour, a narrative so diffuse and rambling it seems designed to point up the futility of existence, and a reliance on voiceover to an extent unacceptable in most cinema (in the English-speaking world, at least).

Malick's loose adaptation of James Jones's novel takes place on the island of Guadalcanal in 1942, the turning point of the Pacific War, with the tide beginning to turn in favour of the Americans for the first time. The story is deceptively simple. C-for-Charlie company is landed on the island as reinforcement in the ongoing battle, meeting no resistance at first, but ordered to push towards a hill heavily fortified by the Japanese. With his men suffering heavy casualties, Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) refuses to obey the order of the driven Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) to mount a full-frontal assault.

The hill is finally taken by a small group of volunteers, and the company advances, killing and capturing many Japanese before being relieved and granted a week's leave. Returning to the front, Private Witt (James Caviezel), a non-conformist who we've seen AWOL with a Melanesian tribe in an idyllic setting before the battle, deliberately sacrifices his life to save the company.

Malick takes this material and shapes it into an elliptical, dreamlike and sombre narrative which seems less concerned with a realistic depiction of war than with a philosophical meditation on death and transcendence. In fact, his characters - the sensitive captain, the psychotic colonel and the cynical sergeant - are rarely more than cardboard cut-outs, and one of the disconcerting things about The Thin Red Line is the way in which it occasionally resembles the simplistic second World War blockbusters of the 1960s and 1970s - a resemblance accentuated by the unnecessary and distracting appearances of movie stars like John Travolta and George Clooney in minor supporting roles.

But this certainly isn't The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far and nor is it Saving Private Ryan. The classic way of shaping a narrative out of the chaos of war has been to concentrate on a small group of men, and travel with them through hell and back. Superficially, The Thin Red Line follows this schematic line, but disrupts it at every turn.

Characters drift in and out of view, and it's easy to become confused as to which one is which. The effect is reinforced by the overwhelming use of voiceover, traditionally a way of aligning the audience with a particular subjective point of view. Here, though, we get internal monologues from several different characters - our point of view is fluid and shifting all the time. But these monologues are remarkably similar - it's as if our omniscient narrator is shifting from one soldier to another, like the possessing demons of some horror films. Meanwhile, the camera keeps sliding away from the action to focus on details of the tropical paradise in which the carnage is taking place, or to pick up the play of sunlight on a distant hill.

Malick's purpose in all of this is unclear, or even suspect - the pre-lapsarian imagery sometimes threatens to descend into the most risible hippy-dippiness, and the recurring slow-motion cutaways to one soldier's memories of his beloved wife recalls the worst kind of soft-focus, girl-on-a-swing excesses of the early 1970s. Such fears of sentimentalisation are undercut by the film's a-rhythmic, unpredictable editing, which keeps upsetting our expectations and resolutely avoids satisfying our craving for narrative closure. It's a cinematic strategy which convincingly evokes the chaos of war, and also (more importantly, perhaps) keeps drawing our attention to the presence of the artist/film-maker, Malick himself. Rarely in the last 20 years has a Hollywood studio allowed such creative latitude to the director of a big-budget film.

All of this could be dreadfully self-indulgent, and some viewers are likely to find The Thin Red Line pretentious and boring, but for those willing to submit to its singular, uncompromising vision, Malick's hugely ambitious film delivers an extraordinary three-hour experience, while John Toll's colour-saturated cinematography and Hans Zimmer's swelling score ensure that it remains fixed in the memory for a long time.

Festen (Members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The Dogma '95 group of Danish directors caused a minor stir when they issued their "vow of chastity" for a valid modern cinema, shorn of such fripperies as artificial lighting, post-produced sound, or music. The mixed reaction was informed as much as anything by the suspicion that the whole thing was a provocative post-modern prank, got up by the de facto leader of the group, Breaking The Waves director Lars von Trier. Festen (Celebration) is the first film released here to proclaim its adherence to the group's principles, but the second film from 29-year-old Thomas Vinterberg (who abides by Dogma 95's rules in not being credited).

Set over the course of one evening in a country hotel, Festen observes the preparations for the 60th birthday party of the hotel's owner, Helge (Henning Moritzen). The arrival of his children - successful eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), anthropologist Helene (Paprika Steen) and violent black sheep Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen) - soon reveals that this is no happy family reunion. The suicide a few months earlier of Helge's other daughter hangs over proceedings, and tensions explode to the surface at dinner when Christian makes a speech denouncing his father as a sexual abuser. Trapped in the remote hotel, the party turns into a violent farce where drunkenness, fighting and racist abuse replace the stately middle-class rituals of the planned celebration.

Vinterberg's remarkable film was originally shot on digital video, with the jerky, hand-held camerawork and blurred images (sometimes as rough-looking as the most amateurish home video or surveillance tape) contributing to the film's wilful and subversive aesthetic. The sense of absurdism recalls Lars von Trier's The Kingdom and Breaking The Waves, both of which anticipated to some extent the principles of Dogma '95, but this is no arid technical exercise - the stripped-down look is married with a set of uniformly good, brutally honest performances. While the theme of shattered bourgeois complacency is hardly new, it's undercut by the jarring disjunction between subject and style, and by the ever-present possibility that Vinterberg is playing an elaborate and cynical game. In an era when most feature films slavishly adopt a set of bland production values characterised by visual conservatism and smoothed-out edges, Festen looks truly radical and contemporary.

The Opposite Of Sex (18) General release

Don Roos's wonderfully acidic romantic comedy proves that you can make a film about gay characters without either retreating into the ghetto of Queer Cinema or resorting to the banalities of middle-of-the-road fare like In And Out. The story is narrated, with wisecracking asides, by Christina Ricci, who proves again what a remarkable young talent she is (she was only 17 when The Opposite Of Sex was shot). Ricci plays Dedee Truitt, blonde, 16 years old and cynical as hell, who runs away from her Louisiana home and arrives on the Indiana doorstep of her schoolteacher half-brother (Martin Donovan) and his handsome but not too bright boyfriend (Ivan Sergei), wreaking havoc within a few short weeks.

Donovan, who has never really recovered from the death from AIDS of his former lover, Tom, tries to maintain his detachment from the sequence of catastrophes into which he is plunged by Ricci's behaviour, but soon finds himself trailing across the country in her disaster-filled wake, accompanied by Tom's sister (Lisa Kudrow), who has been carrying a torch for him for years.

The Opposite of Sex takes no prisoners in its depiction of the tangled love lives and unrealistic dreams of its protagonists. Ricci's narration makes mischief from the very start, when she warns us that: "I don't have a heart of gold, and I don't grow one later", and this hardboiled attitude makes the film's affection for its motley cast of characters all the more effective. Donovan succeeds in making something memorable out of what could have been a thankless role, while Kudrow proves that there's more to her range than Phoebe in Friends. Roos's screenplay is peppered with truly funny lines - in particular, there's a great gag about on-screen gay kissing, turning it back on the audience in a way that should cause uncomfortable shifting in many seats. The Opposite of Sex is worth seeing for this moment alone, but there's plenty more to enjoy in this smart, sassy movie.

Loved (Members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Erin Dignam's slow-moving, bleak film raises interesting questions about love and free will, but shrouds them in an implausible plot and heavy-handed staging which makes the basic premise difficult - if not impossible - to accept. Robin Wright Penn plays the former lover of a man accused of inciting a woman's suicide, called to testify in a preliminary hearing by prosecutor William Hurt, who wants to prove a pattern of abusive behaviour stretching back over several years. Wright Penn refuses to blame her lover for her own past suffering, and slowly develops a tentative friendship with Hurt.

All of this proceeds at a snail's pace, not helped by an excessively manipulative musical score and a tendency for the script to descend into a kind of sedated psychobabble. The film was produced by Wright Penn's husband, Sean Penn, who also makes an ill-judged cameo appearance as a vagrant idiot-savant.