Mel to the rescue

The Patriot (15) General release

There comes a point towards the climactic stages of The Patriot when Benjamin Martin, the South Carolina militia leader played by Mel Gibson, charges into battle with one hand gripping the reins of his horse and the other proudly hoisting the American flag aloft, billowing in the wind as John Williams's score surges on the soundtrack.

This dramatically contrived gesture is the iconic scene in a film which celebrates the tenacity and sheer determination of the outnumbered militia, and their shrewd guerilla tactics against the massed forces of the British during the American War of Independence.

In this first venture into serious subjects by Roland Emmerich, the German director of Independence Day and Godzilla, matters of historical accuracy and depth take a back seat to the priorities of creating a sweeping epic entertainment. As already has been noted, the movie's depiction of the British is uniformly negative, while it suggests that its peripherally featured black characters rarely had it so good.

The narrative devised by Saving Private Ryan screenwriter Robert Rodat - which has been unkindly summarised as "Braveheart meets The Waltons" - introduces the Benjamin Martin character as a widower and former soldier who has renounced fighting to raise his seven children and work his sprawling plantation. He is prompted back into action when his family is threatened by the British in the person of the sadistic, lip-curling Colonel Tavington (Jason Isaccs), a despicable cad with no qualms about killing children or injured soldiers.

Martin recognises the folly of armies lining up and marching against each other like moving targets just waiting to be picked off - an observation made emphatically by Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon - and armed with a tomahawk, a knife and a rifle, he opts for guerilla tactics to take on the British. Rallying many of his former fighting colleagues around him, Martin is transformed by events into a driven, bloodthirsty vigilante.

The Patriot is essentially an old-fashioned epic punctuated by consistently impressive setpieces, from its neatly staged furtive ambushes to its spectacular grand-scale battle sequences, and it is assembled in a succession of handsome visual compositions lit by Caleb Deschanel. Although never as stirring or as dramatically adventurous as Gladiator, to take a pertinent recent example, Emmerich's film succeeds in exerting a solid narrative hold over a running time close to three hours.

After his ventures into arthouse for The Million Dollar Hotel and into animation on Chicken Run, Mel Gibson is back on familiar ground, gritting his teeth and knitting his brow as he takes on the forces of oppression. Heath Ledger, the young Australian actor from 10 Things I Hate About You, is impressive as his eldest son who goes to battle against his father's wishes. But, proving once again that evil characters are often the most interesting, Jason Isaacs smoothly steals every scene he's in as the snide and callous Colonel Tavington.

Essex Boys (18) Selected cinemas

British cinema's current preoccupation with producing crime movies continues with this factually-rooted thriller inspired by reports of a 1995 case involving the discovery of three dead bodies in a Range Rover in Essex. As directed by Terry Winsor, Essex Boys eschews the jokey, matey caper approach of such recent rubbish as Love, Hon- our & Obey, and dispenses with the usual Britpop-packed soundtrack in favour of a brooding dramatic score.

While we should be grateful for such mercies, Essex Boys nevertheless amounts to little more than another drab-looking and thoroughly predictably plotted picture of dishonour among thieves. When the camera draws our attention to an imposing glass window on the first floor of a nightclub, we just know that some unfortunate stuntman is going to come crashing through it within minutes. When, half an hour into the movie, the long-suffering wife of the central criminal character says, "Now's the time to call it a day", there's another 80 minutes to run, so we know he's not going to go straight.

In that central role a sneering, snarling Sean Bean plays Jason Locke, who has been released from prison after serving five years for armed robbery; his viciousness is first demonstrated when he brutally deals with an informer. Alex Kingston, who plays Dr Elizabeth Corday on ER, is cast as Locke's patient, abused wife, and Charlie Creed-Miles (from Nil By Mouth) plays the film's narrator, the rather naive but enterprising young mini-cab driver taken under Locke's wing.

The influence of GoodFellas is obvious throughout Essex Boys, but there is none of the depth, style or panache of Scorsese's film about Winsor's protracted, poorly structured effort. In Sean Bean's portrayal of Jason Locke, Essex Boys does prove that British cinema can depict an English character who is just as ruthless and repellent, and as devoid of redeeming features, as the colonel played by Jason Isaacs in The Patriot.

In his second screen appearance this week, Tom Wilkinson plays another relatively less venal character, and his declaration towards the end of Essex Boys that "It ends here", uncannily echoes his line in the later stages of The Patriot that "It ends today". In both cases, Wilkinson's character is proved wrong.

Beau Travail (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Born in Paris and raised in several African countries by her schoolteacher parents, Claire Denis is a film-maker whose work deserves to be seen more widely here. Although not quite as deeply involving as her best work (Chocolat, Nenette et Boni), her latest film, Beau Travail, is a moody, intriguing and visually remarkable drama inspired by Billy Budd - both the Herman Melville novel and the Benjamin Britten opera, extracts from which feature on the soundtrack.

Denis transposes this story of suppressed homosexual yearning and jealousy from its 19th-century British navy setting to a present-day French Foreign Legion unit based at a remote African desert outpost in the Gulf of Djibouti. The drama's sexual tension is heightened by the arrival of an attractive young recruit (Gregoire Colin) whose presence threatens the relationship between the sergeant-major (a surprisingly haggard-looking Denis Lavant from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) and his commander (Michel Subor).

Dialogue is minimal and a languorous mood is established as the soldiers go about their daily rituals of strenuous exercise, breaking rocks in the hot sun, playing war games and meticulously ironing their uniforms. The result is a telling and atmospheric picture of loneliness and repressed longing in a world of regimented discipline and physically punishing routine. This man's world is acutely observed by Claire Denis and her regular director of photography, Agnes Godard, as they train their lenses on the toned bodies of the legionnaires and the strikingly beautiful African landscapes.

Of Freaks and Men (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The Russian director Alexei Balabanov followed his robust and immensely assured 1997 thriller, Brat, (Brother), which ended an all-too-short run at the IFC last night, with Of Freaks and Men, which opens today. Both films concentrate on amoral characters in St Petersburg, feature the versatile Viktor Sukhorukov in leading roles, and are distinctively photographed by Sergei Astakhov.

However, in contrast to the vivid realism and present-day setting of Brat, Balabanov opts for a highly stylised period setting for Of Freaks and Men, which takes place around the turn of the 20th century. Its prologue, following the arrival of the sinister Johann (Sergei Makovetsky), an immigrant pornographer, in St Petersburg, is treated like a silent movie - in black-and-white and with inter-titles instead of dialogue. Having introduced several other key characters and posting a caption that "years went by", the film turns sepia-tinted for the subsequent scenes, which employ both dialogue and inter-titles.

These sequences explicitly document the degradation of two women from wealthy families - one the daughter of an engineer who welcomes the potential of the cinematograph, the other the blind mother of adopted Siamese twins. The agents of their exploitation include Johann, who coerces them into posing undressed for flagellation photographs, and his lackey (Victor Sukorukov) who surreptitiously circulates the pictures.

The film dubiously implies that both women derive masochistic pleasure from the humiliation to which they are subjected before the camera. The only innocent victims in the overwrought scenario of Of Freaks and Men appear to be the young Siamese twins who are described as freaks by the unscrupulous perverts intent on achieving and abusing power.

Following his depiction of contemporary St Petersburg as a lawless and violent city in Brat, Balabanov clearly is setting out here to establish that corruption was always rife in the city. However, he made his case with considerably more conviction and dramatic power in Brat, a far superior film to Of Freaks and Men.

Thomas and the Magic Railroad (General) General release

Thomas the Tank Engine makes his cinema debut in a movie featuring Mara Wilson (from Matilda and Miracle on 34th Street) as an 11-year-old girl who takes the wrong train on her way to see her grandfather (played by Peter Fonda) and ends up in the town of Shining Time, where she embarks on an adventure to the Island of Sodor, the toy world where Thomas the tiny blue steam engine lives. Alec Baldwin co-stars as Mr Conductor in the film, which is directed by Britt Allcroft.