Man on the Moon (15) General release

Before seeing Man on the Moon last week, I knew little about Andy Kaufman beyond barely remembering him as quite an irritating actor on the Taxi sitcom and having a vague awareness of his cult following as an off-the-wall comedian who died young. After seeing the film I cannot say I know a great deal more about him, given that this biopic is altogether more concerned with re-staging Kaufman's regularly notorious comic routines than in offering an illuminating picture of the man who was described as "the first performance artist".

Or so it would seem. As Man on the Moon progresses on its tour through the rise and fall of Andy Kaufman, it takes on an unexpectedly hypnotic charge, albeit one that at times seems as voyeuristic as watching a car crash - an apt enough reference in the case of a vain, self-indulgent man who clearly was utterly undeterred by public opinion and whose life appeared to be a series of accidents waiting to happen.

The difference is that there was nothing accidental about the trouble into which Kaufman's routines landed him. Every offensive joke and prank was devised with the deliberate intention of provoking his audience, and if hatred was the reaction he elicited, then that appeared to make him happy - in as much as this deeply insecure, neurotic and self-destructive young man ever seemed to be happy.

He took his stream of sexist references to extremes when he challenged women to "inter-gender wrestling", which he clearly enjoyed. As the film shows, he was so appalled by an audience's insistence that he perform as his Taxi character, Latka Gravas, that he instead chose to read aloud The Great Gatsby - all of it - in an affected English accent. Most obnoxious of all was the alter ego he devised for himself - the vulgar, bloated and belligerent Las Vegas lounge singer, Tony Clifton.

Milos Forman, the Czech emigre who directs Man On the Moon, clearly empathises with dislikeable characters, given that most of his American movies have been devoted to unattractive personalities such as the scheming, hate-filled composer, Salieri in Amadeus; the coldly manipulative womaniser, the Vicomte de Valmont in Valmont - Forman's screen treatment of Les Liaisons Dangereuses; and the eponymous pornographer in The People Vs. Larry Flynt.

Depth and insight are rarely found in Forman's generally self-important and overblown movies, and while Man On the Moon operates brilliantly on one level, in its elaborate recreation of Andy Kaufman's comic routines, there are no other levels in this sketchy movie, scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also wrote Ed Wood and Larry Flynt. In a key line of their screenplay,Kaufman tells the woman who becomes his wife, "You don't know the real me" - to which she replies, "There isn't a real you."

However, the masterstroke of this film is the casting of Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, and Carrey responds with a rich, wholly submerged performance, delving deep into his character's strange, contradictory personality to inform his impeccable re-enactments of the comic's act. Carrey transforms the film into a fascinating synthesis of Kaufman's life and art, which appear indistinguishable from each other - just as the recurring "boy who cried wolf" aspect of Kaufman's comedy ensured that audiences never knew for sure what was for real in his shows and what was being faked. This gave those shows a knife-edge that uniquely heightened his anarchic humour.

Michael Dwyer

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (15) UGC Cinemas, Ster Century, Dublin; Kino, Cork

He may be the granddaddy of modern American indie cinema, but Jim Jarmusch shows he can still show the youngsters a few tricks with this marvellous, elegiac, often very funny genrebending thriller. Actually, it's a moot point whether the word "thriller" really applies to such a polyrhythmic, downbeat, amiably slouching film, but Jarmusch has taken his key cues from such familiar genres as the Mafia movie, the ghetto drama and the samurai epic and fashioned them into something new and highly original.

Forest Whitaker is Ghost Dog, a professional hitman who lives his life according to the codes of the ancient samurai, swearing fealty to a middle-ranking gangster (John Tormey) who saved his life once. Unfortunately, Tormey's fellow mobsters operate by a messier set of rules, and when an assassination goes wrong, they set out to take their revenge on Whitaker.

Such are the bare bones of Jarmusch's story, but its real pleasures are to be found in its accretion of detail - like the wonderfully comic portrayal of ageing Mafia types, the best seen on screen since Donnie Brasco, or perhaps even GoodFellas. As the isolated, enigmatic Ghost Dog (a role created specifically for him), Whitaker is hugely impressive; shambling yet elegant, gentle but capable of sudden violence. The influence of Jarmusch's heroes, Akira Kurosawa and Sam Fuller, can be seen clearly here, but what's most impressive is how he succeeds in bringing their concerns into a contemporary setting, without any self-consciously arch ironising.

With his regular collaborator, the great cinematographer Robby Muller, he creates a strange, mythic world-within-a-world on the streets of New York, using a deceptively simple camera style, underpinned by RZA's evocative hip-hop soundtrack. It all makes for a stark contrast with Wim Wenders's flailing attempts at American urban myth in The Million Dollar Hotel. Jarmusch has done what Wenders has conspicuously failed to do for years - made a great, European-style art movie in the US.

Hugh Linehan

Claire Dolan (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Finally getting a well-deserved release here two years after it was launched at Cannes, the gritty low-budget US indie, Claire Dolan, is the second feature from the New York writer-director, Lodge Kerrigan, whose earlier Clean, Shaven was seen here only on Channel 4. In her finest, most complex performance to date, Katrin Cartlidge plays the title role, as an emotionally brittle thirtysomething from Howth, Co Dublin, who works as a prostitute in New York to pay off a substantial unspecified debt, which involves harsh interest payments, to her unscrupulous pimp, Roland Cain.

Cain is played with chilling, menace-dripping presence - and in a remarkable stretch of range - by the Irish actor, Colm Meaney. An utterly callous operator, Cain claims to have known Claire since she was 12, and he declares that she was born, and will die, a whore. Claire is depicted as a sophisticated, businesslike woman, regularly changing home and identity to keep her clients at a distance from herself, and the only man to whom she responds emotionally in the film is a gregarious, divorced taxi driver (Vincent D'Onofrio) who finds it difficult to accept the fact of her prostitution.

That dilemma is addressed unflinchingly in this hard-edged and sombre moral tale directed with distinction by Kerrigan in a cool, austere visual style which echoes Claire's clinical approach to the so-called oldest profession. This thoughtful, sombre and sobering moral tale is precisely assembled in classically formed compositions in which primary colours are conspicuously absent, and its paranoia-inducing atmosphere is heightened by the imagery of the sleek New York skyscraper architecture it captures so eerily.

Michael Dwyer

Janice Beard: 45 wpm (15) Selected cinemas

Irish actress Eileen Walsh turns in a fine performance in the title role of Clare Kilner's quirkily surreal debut feature, about an office temp with Walter Mitty-ish dreams, who "armed only with an over-active imagination and the typing speed of an average boxer dog", leaves her Scottish home for the big city, in search of the job which will enable her to pay her agoraphobic mother's medical bills. There she encounters old schoolfriend Frances Grey, queen bitch Patsy Kensit, and handsome but scheming office boy, Rhys Ifans, becoming embroiled in industrial espionage and salsa dancing along the way.

Reminiscent at times of Australian feminist-kitsch comedies such as Muriel's Wedding, this all seems quite promising for the first half-hour or so, with Kilner setting her story in a stylised world of extreme, saturated colours and off-beam sets, and Walsh geekily charming as the eccentric Janice.

Unfortunately, things start to go wrong with the introduction of Ifans, surely a shoo-in for the title of Britain's Most Annoying Actor at the moment. As the rather silly espionage plot takes over, the film loses its charm and becomes a rather tedious slapstick comedy. A pity, because there are signs in the opening reels of a genuinely original directorial talent at work. Hugh Linehan

Cradle Will Rock (15) Selected cinemas

The third film directed by actor Tim Robbins, the sprawling and uneven Cradle Will Rock registers as a deep disappointment after his achievements with Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking. A highly ambitious and factually-based production set in New York in 1936, it deals with the problems besetting the staging of Marc Blitzstein's socialist musical, The Cradle Will Rock, by the young Orson Welles and John Houseman in the face of opposition from right-wing politicians.

At times, however, and all too often, Robbins allows his film to be as naive as the sub-Brecht musical at its core, and he overloads the dramatic baggage by introducing a superfluous sub-plot involving the deteriorating relationship between Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) and Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) whom he commissions to paint a vast mural in Rockefeller Centre.

The movie's glibness and heavy-handedness evoke unhappy memories of misfired literary-themed ventures such as Alan Rudolph's shallow and dull picture of the Algonquin set in Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, and John Turturro's rambling and tedious movie about a turn-of-the-20th-century theatre company in Illuminata.

There over a dozen principal characters in Robbins's heavy-handed film, and many of them are reduced to caricature, most gratingly in the insulting mimicking of Welles and Houseman by Angus MacFayden and Cary Elwes, respectively. Only Emily Watson, Cherry Jones and Hank Azaria emerge with credibility from a cast that also includes Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Cusack and John Turturro.

Michael Dwyer

Circus (18) General release

It does no favours to director Rob Walker, but it's impossible to avoid comparing Jarmusch's intelligently comic crime thriller with Walker's shallow, silly, deeply unimaginative foray into similar territory. British cinema seems to be obsessed at the moment with trying to replicate whatever surprise hit has most recently spurred that weary battle-cry of another "British film renaissance". Having had to endure two years of pale Full Monty imitations, it seems we're now fated to be swamped by Johnny-come-latelies jumping on the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels bandwagon.

Like the execrable Love, Honour and Obey, Circus is based on the simple notion that English gangsters are inherently funny, so there's not much need to write a decent plot around them. How wrong can you get? These characters, cardboard cut-outs to a man (and occasional woman), need all the help they can get. Unfortunately what they do get is a deeply implausible plot which the film's writers probably thought was devilishly cunning, but which lacks even one real surprise.

Along the way, John Hannah, as the supposedly suave conman hero, makes Pierce Brosnan look like a method actor. Famke Janssen, as Hannah's wife, is there for strictly decorative purposes, while a host of familiar Brit TV faces mouth their notvery-funny lines without much conviction (Eddie Izzard, in particular, should really have a word with his agent about all these third-baddie-from-the-left roles he's getting). Shot in photogenic Brighton with all the pzazz and depth of a car advertisement, this is a cynical, depressing little film.