Prepare yourself for cyber noir

The Matrix (15) General release

Dextrously playing with multiple levels of reality and illusion, Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix is a roller-coaster of a movie which never lets up during two-and-a-quarter hours of terrific special effects and dazzlingly choreographed action sequences.

Nothing is quite what it seems in this intriguingly devised science-fiction opus, which is put together with such sheer panache it hardly matters that there's rather less to it than meets the eye. Making the scheme that drove The Truman Show seem benevolent by comparison, the present-day setting of The Matrix is, in fact, a dystopian future world where humans live in a state of false reality and everything is a total fabrication created by sinister humanoid computers. Laurence Fishburne authoritatively plays Morpheus, the leader of a small band of human rebels, and Keanu Reeves is ideally cast as the wide-eyed protagonist, Thomas Anderson, a laid-back computer hacker whom they identify as the potential saviour of our race. A reluctant hero, he's told he is The One, and he's re-named Neo - an anagram of "one", as it happens - and introduced to new layers of reality as the rebels prepare to fight back.

This premise is infused with dollops of spiritual philosophy which is there to be bought into or glossed over in a movie where form truly triumphs over content. The screenplay by the Wachowski brothers abounds with references - to the Bible, Greek mythology, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, cyberpunk novels, and to other movies such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, the two Termi- nator pictures, Hong Kong action cinema and the work of John Woo, and the violent Japanese anime cartoon genre.

The Wachowski brothers were writers for Marvel Comics before making their first film, the stylised, atmospheric, lesbian-themed, film noir, Bound. The Matrix, their second film, is cyber noir with its dark, metallic tones, recurring torrential rain and absence of sunshine - even though the characters, like rock stars in night-clubs, wear smartly designed sunglasses all the time. Under the guidance of the Hong Kong action maestro Yuen Wo Ping, the actors perform most of their own stunts with the aid of invisible wires - leaping and staying suspended in mid-air, running up and across walls and somersaulting as if they were defying gravity, and engaging in vigorous, balletic kung fu fighting. Driven by a pumping techno score, the breathless pace of the movie is heightened further by the use of revolutionary rapid-fire photography in which an actor appears to move faster than a speeding bullet. The Matrix is a singular audio-visual experience. Expect at least one sequel.

Get Real (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

A sweet-natured and engaging picture of coming of age and coming out, Simon Shore's Get Real features the promising Ben Silverstone, who was the young Humbert Humbert in the recent Lolita, in a winning portrayal of Steve, a perplexed 16-year-old coming to terms with his homosexuality - and getting a crush on the school's head boy and star athlete, John (Brad Gorton).

They become aware of each other's sexual preferences in a telling sequence when they meet at a public toilet in a Basingstoke park. However, it is the unconfident Steve who reacts with joy while the closeted John responds with fumbling embarrassment.

Based on a stage play, What's the Matter With Angry?, which is comfortably opened out by its author, Patrick Wilde, Get Real is an attractive-looking and dry-humoured entertainment which only over-reaches itself when it ventures into Dead Poets' Society territory for its finale. And it all seems positively innocent compared to the sexual frankness of the recent TV series, Queer as Folk.

It is a superior film to the screen adaptation of Jonathan Harvey's similarly-themed play, Beautiful Thing, like which (and like Queer As Folk) it gives its young central character a larger-than-life young woman as his best friend. In Get Real Charlotte Brittain sparkles as the overweight confidante who is on her 48th driving lesson.

The Red Violin Screen at D'Olier Street, Omniplex, Santry, Dublin; Capitol, Cork; Omniplex, Galway

The Quebecois writer-director, Francois Girard, follows his cleverly conceived musical biopic, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, with a biography of a musical instrument in The Red Violin. Spanning over 300 years and five countries, this commendably ambitious project begins with the manufacture of the violin by a temperamental master craftsman in 17th-century Italy and follows its progress through its various owners - whose experiences invariably turn from exhilaration to tragedy. In 1792 the violin is acquired by an Austrian monastery where it comes into the hands of a child prodigy (Christoph Koncz) who's taken on by a French impressario (Jean-Luc Bideau). Towards the end of the 19th century, nomadic gypsies have moved the instrument to England, where it is sold in Oxford to a composer and musician (Jason Flemyng) whose sexual passion for a novelist (Greta Scacchi) fuels his creative surges. The journey continues in 1965 when it is owned by a party official (Sylvia Chang) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes in present-day Montreal where descendants of the violin's former owners vie to buy it at a keenly-contested auction. Samuel L. Jackson plays an American expert hired to appraise the instrument, and Colm Feore, who played Glenn Gould for director Girard, is the auctioneer in this sequence which inter-cuts the story's extended flashbacks to link all the narrative strands together.

Sumptuously designed by Francois Seguin and strikingly photographed by Alan Dostie, The Red Violin succumbs to the inevitable problem of portmanteau movies in that some of its stories are less interesting than others. The excision of the risible Oxford sequence certainly would enhance the progress of this diverting drama, which keenly builds the tension during the final auction sequence.

Eternity and a Day (Members and guests only) IFC

A two-hour film by Theo Angelopoulos? Surely some mistake. Every couple of years this singular Greek director releases a vast filmic meditation, staggering under the weight of symbolism and history and lasting anything up to four-and-a-half hours. Coming after Ulysses's Gaze, his extraordinary Balkan odyssey, Eternity and A Day seems remarkably terse - despite its title. But it is recognisably an Angelopoulos film, his most accessible yet.

In the beauty of its imagery and its determination to suspend time, or at least, to dissolve past and present, this is a characteristic work, although its tone is elegiac rather than didactic. As a terminally ill poet (Bruno Ganz) prepares to enter a sanitorium, he takes his leave of the city around him, of his dreams, of his writing, of his childhood, and his estranged, dead, wife. Drifting like a wraith through the fog of Thessaloniki, amid his words and his memories, he comes across an Albanian boy whom he rescues from street labour and reluctantly agrees to drive to the border.

In one of the film's most arresting sequences they approach the border's high wire fencing on which bodies are suspended, inert, possibly dead, and simply stare silently at this contemporary image of misery. Homelessness, exile, loss and longing bind these two characters and are the recurrent themes, while the rhythm of the sequence shots, the long takes and tracking shots establish a dreamlike mood, in which figures (real or imagined) from the past walk through the frame: a 19th-century poet, the writer's wife and family picnicking on the beach, and dancers at a wedding party. Imaginative and physical space are superimposed in a style reminiscent of Antonioni.

While the scenes on the beach with his young, passionate wife tend towards excessive sentimentality, perhaps this is unavoidable in a film that is exploring the ripples of reminiscence and nostalgia. This is softer, more emotional and in some ways, more obvious, than Angelopoulos's other work, yet it has a memorable, moving grandeur.