Sex and politics and, yes, rock'n'roll

"Primary Colors" (15) General release

Finally arriving here six months after its US opening, Mike Nichols's Primary Colors is worth the wait; a sharp, cynical and scintillating political satire based on the controversial book by the former Newsweek columnist, Joe Klein, who hid under the mask of "Anonymous" until his cover was blown. The incisive and acerbic screen adaptation is by Elaine May, the former wife and stage partner of director Nichols.

The opening sequence introduces Jack Stanton, the progressive governor of a small American state and a candidate in the upcoming presidential primaries; prematurely grey and played with a soft southern drawl by John Travolta, he is, of course, a fictional character. We first observe him visiting an adult literacy class, where he is moved to tears by stories of humiliation. Then he picks up the woman who's teaching the class.

But he is sufficiently convincing to persuade Henry Burton, the idealistic grandson of a celebrated black civil rights leader, to join the campaign. Played by the gifted young British stage actor, Adrian Lester, Burton is the film's narrator and its George Stephanopoulos surrogate. The candidate's other key handler, based on James Carville, is a sly, self-declared redneck strategist played by Billy Bob Thornton.

There are times when both handlers regret throwing everything behind Stanton and we observe them groaning when their man seems to have talked himself into a corner - only to bounce back triumphantly. It becomes more complicated when Stanton's sex drive goes into overdrive. His wife, Susan (Emma Thompson) is shown to be deeply upset over all the allegations of adultery, but she remains fully supportive of him in public. As the blunt-spoken (and lesbian) campaign trouble-shooter, played by Kathy Bates, tells Stanton: "I wish we'd castrated you when we had a chance."

Primary Colors is a rich, sophisticated entertainment which echoes The Candidate in its picture of a presidential hopeful with nothing much more than image going for himself, and the recent documentary, The War Room, in its riveting picture of the Clinton campaign for the White House. Heading an exemplary cast in which Kathy Bates and Larry Hagman are especially noteworthy, John Travolta gives the finest performance of his career to date.

"Still Crazy" (15) General release

Ageing rockers are soft targets for lampooning, as the 1983 This is Spinal Tap proved with its spot-on take on the brittle egos and clashing temperaments of a fading English heavy metal band attempting a comeback tour. Given that Spinal Tap was such a definitive spoof, it seemed like director Brian Gibson was involved in a redundant exercise earlier this year when he started shooting Still Crazy, which deals with a bickering 1970s rock band on the comeback trail.

With its bittersweet picture of disparate despairing men who are getting on in years and getting nowhere until they seize one last chance at doing something with their lives, Still Crazy inevitably evokes another, more recent success: The Full Monty. Still Crazy is altogether more plausible and more entertaining than The Full Monty, and a whole lot funnier. The surprise is that its take on the band members is ultimately so affectionate.

The sprightly screenplay is by Dick Clement and Ian la Fresnais, past masters at exploring male-male relationships in the television series, The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. They also shared the screenplay credit with Roddy Doyle on Alan Parker's film of The Commitments, which so exuberantly followed the uphill progress of a younger, but no less volatile band line-up.

Still Crazy is set 21 years after the break-up of the once-popular group, Strange Fruit, whose old hits included Tequila Mocking- bird. With the prospect of cashing in on the 1970s revival through a European tour and a gig at the Wisbech festival, they reluctantly reform. However, just as their music is rooted in the past, their relationships to each other remains based in all their former antagonisms - which soon resurface, along with some new ones. The consequences are strewn with witty one-liners - example: "You worshipped the ground he vomited on" - and put together with a keen eye for detail. The producers hired Chris Difford of Squeeze to write Strange Fruit's lyrics, with Jeff Lynne and Mick Jones (the Foreigner one, not the Clash singer-guitarist) providing music, and Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley to produce the recordings. And they got Gary Kemp, who turned from Spandau Ballet to acting, to advise the actors on what the press book euphemistically describes as "the manners and habits of rock stars".

The band members - who, in another pop tradition, have wonderfully nondescript names like Les Wickes and Ray Simms - are played with panache, and admirably straight faces, by Stephen Rea, Jimmy Nail, Timothy Spall, Bruce Robinson, and Bill Nighy, who is superb as the vain, glazed-eyed lead singer, a character so pitiful that one could as easily cry as laugh at his self-deluded behaviour. Helena Bergstrom is a delight as his demanding Swedish second wife, a perfect parody of the exotic Yoko-esque second wife and band-wrecker, and there's also Juliet Aubrey as the band's ever-patient former PA, Hans Matheson as the cute young guitarist they recruit, and a perfectly droll Billy Connolly as the band's roadie and the movie's narrator.

"La Vie De Jesus" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Bruno Dumont's low-key, naturalistic first feature, La Vie De Jesus, dispassionately views a group of bored, disaffected young people in a dull, deprived provincial town in northern France - a place so devoid of life that the shops rarely seem to open and most of the population appears to stay indoors all the time.

Clearly influenced by the humanist cinema of the great Robert Bresson, Dumont's film takes its title from that of a book written in 1863 by the French theologian, Ernest Renan, which demythologises Christ. Dumont says that his intention was "to regenerate the meaning of the life of Jesus, to show that there is a humanism in Christianity that they don't teach in the Church or in the schools".

The principal character in his film, the 20-year-old epileptic and unemployed Freddy (David Douche) spends his days with his best friends, aimlessly driving around on their mopeds or marching together in a brass band, or having sex with his girlfriend (Marjorie Cottreel).

Employing non-professional actors and giving them minimal dialogue, Dumont acutely catches the emptiness in the lives of these characters - and offers none of the hope engendered by TwentyFour-Seven (see VCR column). He also pinpoints their potential to release that frustration in violence, as when they target a young Arab immigrant. Incidentally, the sex scenes are unusually graphic and reportedly were performed by body doubles.

"I Want You" (18) Kino, Cork

Just as La Vie De Jesus played the Cinematek in Cork before opening in Dublin, so Michael Winterbottom's latest film, I Want You, goes on release at Cork's Kino cinema today, ahead of its Dublin opening. Winterbottom's film, like Dumont's, is set in a bleak, depressed environment - in this case, the fictional English seaside town of Haven; it was shot in Hastings.

Winterbottom's moody, intense drama is intriguing for much of the time as it introduces its protagonists and their relationships to each other in the manner of a jigsaw. They include Alessandro Nivola (from Face/Off) as an ex-convict who returns home to Haven; his former lover, a hairdresser (Rachel Weisz) who is platonically involved with a sexually frustrated disc-jockey (Ben Daniels); an inquisitive, mute 14-year-old Bosnian refugee (Luka Petrusic) who spies on her; and the boy's older, sexually promiscuous sister (Labina Mitevska).

The title, I Want You, is taken from the Elvis Costello song which the ex-convict plays repeatedly during foreplay. Suffused with water imagery and strong on atmosphere, the film is strikingly photographed by Slawomir Idziak, one of Kieslowski's most frequent collaborators. The screenplay is by Eoin McNamee, the Co Down writer whose adaptation of his novel, Resurrection Man, was released here earlier this year. While his screenplay for Winterbottom's film attracts and sustains interest for much of its first hour or so, it never fully delivers on what it promises, opting instead for a pat resolution when the final pieces of the jigsaw slot into place.

To mark its 25th anniversary, William Friedkin's once-notorious horror movie The Exorcist is re-released here from today. It will be covered in tomorrow's Weekend section.