One day in the valley

Magnolia (18) Selected cinemas

One of the most ambitious and perceptive writer-directors of his generation, Paul Thomas Anderson, now 30, builds on the abundant promise of his first two films, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights with the highly adventurous Magnolia, an enthralling mosaic of nine intertwined stories set over the course of one eventful day and night in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, where Anderson himself grew up.

The movie opens on a quirky prologue recalling bizarre examples of fate and coincidence from different periods in the 20th century. "These are not matters of chance," the voiceover insists. "These things happen all the time". It's an amusing device which sets up the chain of coincidences which link the scenario's disparate characters over the course of a confidently sustained 188-minute running time.

The principal characters in Anderson's skillfully drawn urban microcosm include a dying television mogul (Jason Robards); his much younger wife (Julianne Moore) who belatedly realises how much she loves him; a child prodigy (Jeremy Blackman) who is the star contestant in the longrunning TV quiz show, What Do Kids Know? and whose unloving father (Michael Bowen) lives off his son's success; and that show's ostensibly wholesome presenter (Philip Baker Hall), who leads a secret life as an adulterer.

Then there are the presenter's alienated, drug-addicted daughter (Melora Walters); the lonely, good-natured policeman (John C. Reilly) who falls for her; a onetime star of that children's quiz show who's now an edgy, sexually confused fortysomething (William H. Macy); a brash but inwardly insecure sex guru (Tom Cruise) who makes a lucrative living out of instructing other men how to deal with and exploit women; and the quiet, dutiful nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who cares for the dying mogul.

All these emotionally bruised characters are treated with understanding and sympathy in Anderson's deftly interwoven narrative which plugs into their inner torments as it takes them on journeys of self-awareness, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Certain themes echo off each other - estranged family members, dying patriarchs, unfulfilled ambitions, bitter regrets - as Anderson constructs contrasting mirror images of the protagonists and their worlds.

In engineering the conclusion of this human tapestry, Anderson makes, perhaps, just one false move - an extended, apparently Biblical-sourced sequence which seems disruptive in the context of the movie's lucid, thoughtful exposition. However, by the time it occurs, the movie has exerted such a firm hold that it is pardonable.

Magnolia is richly, imaginatively photographed by Robert Elswit, who has worked on all three of Anderson's films, and its melancholy mood is wonderfully enhanced by Aimee Mann's soundtrack, from which one track is sung, in turn, by all the key characters, in a beautifully-judged montage sequence.

Anderson affirms his distinctive skill with actors in the superb ensemble work he elicits from his consummate cast, many of whom - Moore, Hoffman, Walters, Macy and Reilly - he featured in Boogie Nights, along with the characteristically authoritative Robards and Baker Hall, and - cast against type and letting loose in a startling, revelatory performance - Tom Cruise.

Michael Dwyer

The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (Gen) Cinemas nationwide

These are Sesame Street muppets, as opposed to the earthier Muppet Show gang recently featured in Muppets in Space, so in theory this is for younger kids. In practice, most of today's Irish toddlers aren't especially familiar with any of these critters, and countless allusions will sail safely over their heads.

Still, while the interruptions of Bert and Ernie may be an acquired taste, they shouldn't be long catching on to the charms of infantile Elmo, obnoxious Oscar, constantly consuming Cookie Monster and the rest. And though the Sesame Street humans are pretty vapid, the less-furry cohort of the cast has been bolstered by Mandy Patinkin as a perfectly villainous villain. (And less-furry is relative: a couple of muppets could be buried in his eyebrows.)

Adults will also be diverted by a handful of irreverent jokes and a rather ravishing Vanessa Williams, dressed in nothing but trash. But fear not: this is sweet, harmless stuff, with a simple, non-threatening quest narrative, plenty of primary colours and songs to purchase popcorn by.

Harry Browne

The Virgin Suicides (15) Selected cinemas

As a teenager, Sofia Coppola co-wrote Life Without Zoe, her father Francis's excruciatingly self-indulgent segment of the 1989 portmanteau film New York Stories. She went on to do a good impression of a rabbit frozen in headlights when playing Al Pacino's daughter in the deeply disappointing Godfather III. Then she disappeared from view for a decade - according to the publicity notes for The Virgin Suicides, she's been "pursuing her interest in photography, designing for her clothes line . . . and staging a production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Bernice Bobs Her Hair for her father's tradition of summer theatre performances for their neighbourhood in Napa". Hmmm . . . one might be tempted to diagnose a bad case of Daddy's Little Princess, especially since Coppola's directorial debut is co-produced by her father's company, American Zoetrope. That, in a way, makes The Vir- gin Suicides all the more impressive as a debut of style, wit and great originality, especially since its subject happens to be the trials of being a well-to-do American daughter.

Based on Jeffrey Eugenides's novel of the same name, Coppola's film charts a few catastrophic months in the life of the five beautiful, doomed Lisbon sisters, as seen through the eyes of their awe-struck teenaged neighbours in a prosperous American suburb during the mid-1970s. When the youngest sister (Hanna Hall) commits suicide, the neighbourhood boys become increasingly obsessed with the mysterious Lisbons, a fascination deepened by the strict, no-dating rules imposed by their parents (the excellent James Woods and Kathleen Turner). Meanwhile, all around, trees are being felled as Dutch Elm Disease ravages the suburbs: decay, death and dreams of sexual ecstasy haunt the neighbourhood.

Coppola handles this material with great enthusiasm, playing the 1970s nostalgia card with a vengeance - entire sequences could almost be mistaken for shampoo ads of the period - while the faux-easy listening score from French duo Air adds to the sense of dreamy, woozy post-pubertal languor. The sisters (admirably played by Kirsten Dunst, Chelse Swain, A.J. Cook and Leslie Hayman) are mythic figures, tragi-comic symbols of troubled adolescence, but always very human.

In a way, The Virgin Suicides does for The Partridge Family what David Lynch's Blue Velvet did for The Hardy Boys, subverting a familiar iconography to make it new, fresh, a little scary and sometimes very funny.

Hugh Linehan

The Filth and the Fury (Club) IFC, Dublin

A rather different view of the 1970s can be found in Julien Temple's bracing return to the subject of The Sex Pistols, a band he first put on film more than 20 years ago, in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. In his new documentary, Temple unearths previously unseen footage from the vaults and adds new interviews with John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock (the one who got booted out in favour of Sid Vicious), all of whom are filmed, True Crime-style, with their faces in shadow.

All these protagonists are now middle-aged, as is Temple, but he resists any temptation to go for a smoother, more "mature" style in The Filth and the Fury (the title comes from a tabloid headline following the infamous Bill Grundy TV show escapade). The Cultural Studies types who have been dissecting the corpse of punk rock for years now are kept at bay - this is the story as told by the Pistols themselves, and not anyone else. In particular, it's another opportunity for John Lydon to vent his spleen against the band's manager, Malcolm McLaren, and McLaren's claim to have been responsible for the whole thing.

Some may carp at this approach - after all, writers such as Jon Savage have made cogent observations on the Pistols phenomenon, some of which, like Lydon's debt to older English music-hall traditions, appear, unacknowledged, in The Filth and the Fury. Also, at this remove, the hoary old punk claim to have swept away the pompous prog-rock dinosaurs who ruled the roost at the time seems a little dubious. Didn't Pink Floyd, Genesis et al go on to megastadium glory in the early 1980s? And were the 1970s not actually the decade of glam and disco rather than ELP and Yes? The truth is that pop history is an ever-shifting story, depending on who's doing the writing. What The Filth and the Fury achieves is to append a rather exhilarating footnote to one of its most exciting and influential chapters.

Hugh Linehan

Saving Grace (15) General release

Winner of the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Festival (although it's hard to see why), Nigel Cole's comedy attempts to do for cannabis sativa what Whisky Galore did for hard liquor. Brenda Blethyn plays Grace, a recently-widowed Cornish lady, who discovers that her late husband has left nothing behind him but a mountain of debt. Faced with financial ruin, and the prospect of having to sell her beloved manor house, she hatches a plan with her gardener (Craig Ferguson) to put her green fingers to use by growing a bumper marijuana crop in double-quick time.

Things, not surprisingly, don't quite go according to plan, although one wishes the screenwriters had not lost the plot as implausibly as they do towards the end of this otherwise pleasant and undemanding effort, which owes more to the TV whimsy of Ballykissangel or Hamish Mac- beth than to the Ealing style it is clearly attempting to copy.

Hugh Linehan

The Whole Nine Yards (15) General release

The lamentable modern subgenre of yuppies-meet-mobsters gets another undistinguished addition to its ranks with this would-be black comedy, set in Montreal, with Matthew Perry proving again that the only Friends star with real movie prospects is Lisa Kudrow. Here, Perry is a hapless dentist, trapped in a loveless marriage (to Rosanna Arquette, wildly over-acting as a Quebecois bitch-from-hell). Cue the arrival next door of notorious professional hitman Bruce Willis and, before you can say "Analyze this, Mickey Blue Eyes", we are launched on a wearily familiar narrative curve.

Clearly, someone out there thinks this sort of stuff is funny, and perhaps with leading players less wooden than Perry and Willis it might have been. Probably not, though.

Hugh Linehan

Down to You (15) General release

Teen dreams Freddie Prinze Jr and Julia Stiles play college sweethearts in this sickly-sweet, will-they-won't-they romantic drama. Both had hits last year with enjoyably sassy high school movies - Prinze in She's All That and Stiles in Ten Things I Hate About You - but Down to You has none of those movies' charm. Directed by Kris Isacsson, who does a clunky job in both departments, it's Mills & Boon-type campus tale of lurve lost and found, told with little energy and less humour.

Hugh Linehan

Also released today in selected cinemas, The Miracle Maker (General) is an animated feature based on the life of Jesus, with a voice cast including Ralph Fiennes, Julie Christie, Ian Holm and Richard E. Grant.