MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

Leaving Las Vegas (18s) Screen on D'Olier Street

Already tipped as a leading contender in several categories at this year's Oscar ceremonies, the British director Mike Figgis's downbeat, tragic romance confirms the promise of earlier films such as Internal Affairs and Liebestraum.

Nicolas Cage, who has just won a Golden Globe for this performance, plays Ben, a screenwriter doggedly intent on committing suicide by drinking himself to death. Fired from his job in Los Angeles, he burns all his possessions and heads for Las Vegas to complete his objective. Arriving in the city, he picks up a prostitute, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), and the two enter a relationship.

Figgis triumphantly transcends the potential pitfalls of cliche and sentimentality with these two damaged characters. Cage has had an unfortunate tendency to go over the top in previous roles - here he gives a perfectly judged performance, one of the best portrayals of a drunk ever seen on film, while Elisabeth Shue, most of whose previous film work was indisposable pap like Cocktail and The Karate Kid, is given the opportunity to demonstrate that she is an actress of real quality.

Leaving Las Vegas succeeds as an affecting, highly romantic love story which manages to shift mood impressively between the violent humiliations suffered by the characters and the tender relationship that develops between them. As a film, it's far from perfect - there's an irrelevant and distracting cameo performance by Julian Sands as a Latvian pimp, and the soundtrack is sometimes laboured and repetitive (Figgis seems to be under the impression that Sting is a good singer). But the Irish American cameraman Declan Quinn does his best work to date, exploiting the grainy quality of the Super 16 millimetre film stock to full effect in depicting the twilight world in which the protagonists live.

Figgis has suffered in the past at the hands of the major studios, and on this evidence he might be better advised to continue making low budget, independent movies. With Leaving Las Vegas, he has made the kind of film that the studios would have either ignored or ruined. ironically, its success probably ensures that Hollywood will be beating a path to his door again.

Waiting To Exhale (15s) Savoy, Virgin, UCI, Omniplex

A good man is hard to find for the four protagonists in Forest Whitaker's version of Terry McMillan's best selling novel. Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon smile through the tears in the tradition of the soul divas who crop ups regularly on the film's soundtrack. Houston is in thrall to a married man, Bassett is going through a painful divorce, Devine has reconciled herself to a single life and Rochon finds herself with a string of unreliable types who can't even satisfy lierin bed.

Waiting To Exhaled is a glossy chocolate box of a movie, and not without its pleasures. Whitaker, making his cinema debut as a director, gets good individual performances from the four actresses, but the film is over long and the characters' stories are clumsily interwoven. Even Houston, in her first film since the execrable and hugely successful The Bodyguard, is reasonably adequate, although completely upstaged by Bassett as the spurned wife.

The middle class world that these women live in is reminiscent of pop videos for the lusher end of the soul market, with lots of expensive clothes silk sheets and cut glass decanters - a long way from the ghetto violence of most recent American black movies. With soundtrack music by Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Roberta Flack, among many others, Waiting To Exhale is the cinematic equivalent of one of those Music For Lovers compilations - unabashedly sentimental, slickly produced and intermittently enjoyable.

"Sabrina", (PG) Savoy, Virgin, UCI Coolock, Tallaght, Omniplex, Santry

A number of questions will keep you occupied during the longueurs of Sydney Pollack's latest film, but the most pressing one must be why he bothered to make it. Maybe the dearth of decent screenplays is even more acute than we had suspected. An updated version of Billy Wilder's romantic fairytale from 1954, it tells the story of Sabrina (Julia Ormond) daughter of a chauffeur to a wealthy family in Long Island, dazzled by their lifestyle and besotted with the playboy son, David (Greg Kinnear).

When she returns, transformed, from a stint in Paris, David finally takes notice, so much so that she has toe be taken off the scene by his phlegmatic older brother Linus (Harrison Ford), in case his interest in her jeopardises a business deal that hinges on his engagement to a millionairess.

It's not just that Julia Ormond has to follow Audrey Hepburn in the role of Sabrina perpetually wide eyed and tremulous, she simply doesn't have the presence to carry it off. While Harrison Ford has been given some of the more amusing lines, he seems very wooden too, and even looks less than his best. The direction is extraordinarily clumsy, with the entire - dispensable - Paris episode a series of the most banal visual cliches, complete, mais bien sur, with strains of La Vie en Rise.

It's odd the way, having mooched around Paris in gawky schoolgirl mode, Sabrina is suddenly wrapped in Gallic chic on her return home, but even less convincing is the depiction of the Larabee family, with their gaudy taste, ostentatious parties and appalling dress sense. Sydney Pollack's idea of "old money" seems to entail characters clutching glasses of champagne at all hours of the day. If you're still interested, look out for the original on video.