Short cut to disappointment

"The Gingerbread Man" (15) Nationwide

How times change. Back in the 1970s Robert Altman and Francis Coppola were to the forefront of adventurous American film-making, producing memorable movies of the calibre of Altman's The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and Coppola's The Conversation and The Godfather. Now they're making John Grisham adaptations. One of the more positive things that can be said about Altman's Grisham picture, The Gingerbread Man, is that it is somewhat more compelling than Coppola's turgid film of Grisham's The Rainmaker. It rains incessantly during The Gingerbread Man which, the credits tell us, is "based on an original story by John Grisham" - original, that is, in the sense that it is not based on an already-published Grisham yarn. Little about the story itself is original, however - it deals, as always for a Grisham scenario, with a southern lawyer who finds himself drawn into a web of deceit and danger.

At least this lawyer is a little older, wiser and more cynical than the idealistic young paragons played by Tom Cruise in The Firm, Matthew McConaughey in A Time To Kill and Matt Damon in The Rainmaker. A bearded Kenneth Branagh - who, when bespectacled in the film, resembles his fellow Belfast native, Gerry Adams - plays Rick Magruder, an attorney from Savannah, Georgia, who gets thrown into turmoil after spending a night with a waitress, the charmingly-named Mallory Doss (Embeth Davidtz).

She tells him that her father, a fundamentalist zealot played by Robert Duvall, is stalking her, and the consequences involve sinister threats to Magruder and to his two children who live with his ex-wife (Famke Janssen). In an ironic piece of casting, Robert Downey Jr plays the alcoholic private detective hired by Magruder to protect Ms Doss.

This is a disappointingly conventional and consistently thrill-free thriller which also marks a relatively inauspicious American debut for Changwei Gu, the gifted Chinese lighting cameraman of Ju Dou and Farewell My Concubine. Much of the cast, which includes Daryl Hannah and Tom Berenger, is stranded with feeble material - although Kenneth Branagh's sturdy performance gives the movie an edge of credibility, as does the enigmatic playing of Embeth Davidtz, who showed so much promise as the Jewish maid of the Nazi played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. As the rain buckets down and Mark Isham's score pounds away on the soundtrack, The Ginger- bread Man gradually disintegrates before our eyes and sinks in an overwrought finale. Apparently Robert Altman originally opted for a more interesting, open-ended final sequence, but this met with blank expressions and disfavour from those scientifically-selected US preview audiences who are shown movies at test screenings and now serve as the barometer of international cinematic taste.

The rejection of Altman's original plans to end the movie leaves little evidence of his trademarks as a maverick film-maker who thrived in the 1970s and - after spending the 1980s in a wilderness of making small, barely-released movies - seemed to have made a comeback in the early 1990s with the punch of The Player and Short Cuts before receding into decline with Pret-a-Porter and Kansas City.

Michael Dwyer

"Ponette" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

In Arthur Penn's 1975 film, Night Moves, the private eye played by Gene Hackman famously - and quite unfairly - compared the experience of seeing Eric Rohmer's My Night With Maud to watching paint dry. Should Penn's gritty thriller ever get the remake treatment, it would be more apt if the private eye cited Victor Erice's vastly overrated The Quince Tree Sun as a point of comparison. Or Jacques Doillon's serious-minded but achingly slow-moving Ponette.

The eponymous Ponette is a four-year-old girl who survives a car crash which kills her mother (Marie Trintignant). When her distraught father (Xavier Beauvois) has go away on a business trip, he leaves Ponette in the care of her aunt and two young cousins in a small French village. After her aunt tells Ponette that her mother is with Jesus, the little girl becomes convinced that her mother will be resurrected. Doillon's painstaking picture, which finishes on an unlikely, sentimental note, is concerned with the themes of grief and loss and how they impact upon somebody so young, innocent and vulnerable as a four-year-old girl. Whatever about the film's turgid pacing, it is the huge demand placed upon its young actress which is the most disquieting feature of this manipulative film. Certainly, the jury at the 1996 Venice Film Festival was convinced otherwise and gave the festival's best actress award to Victoire Thivisol, the expressive and inexperienced actress who plays Ponette. And it is not uncommon for young actors playing pivotal roles to work long hours on film sets - but very rarely in roles of such intensity.

Significantly, the press notes for Ponette are dominated by the views of a psychologist, Marie-Helene Encreve, who was employed by Doillon to study the children working on the film and to call a halt to filming whenever she deemed necessary.

Encreve says she saw Victoire Thivisol three times a week during the film's three-month shoot. However, she does not appear overtly concerned that Victoire and her young co-stars "worked with surprising intensity, very likely owing to the total segregation of this period spent away from their homes and their daily lives".

She admits that Victoire "casually" told her of a technique she used when Ponette is shown crying on screen. "She would ask Jacques Doillon to tell her off as long as it was severely enough to frighten her," notes Encreve, as if this request allegedly made by the child justified that process. And to achieve one single scene in which Ponette had to look sad, Encreve notes that Doillon did 24 re-takes of the scene - which lasts two minutes on screen and took a whole day to shoot.

"For a young child, a meeting with a director and reading a script can be either a good or a bad experience," Encreve concludes, adding: "Victoire had a good meeting." Others may have grave reservations about that conclusion.

Michael Dwyer

"Armageddon" (12s) Nationwide

It has been a bad year for the Chrysler Building on film. Destroyed by fireballs in Deep Impact and blown up by over-enthusiastic soldiers in Godzilla, Manhattan's most handsome skyscraper goes tumbling to the ground yet again in Armageddon, the second end-of-the-world spectacular to hit our screens this summer. Charlton Heston provides the opening explanatory voiceover in suitably Cecil B. De Millenarian tones, but it's hardly necessary - we're all familiar with the basic premise from Deep Impact. A big lump of rock is hurtling through space towards Earth. If it hits, it's goodnight and God bless for all forms of life on the planet. Unlike Deep Impact, though, which concentrated on the personal and family dramas of its protagonists, Armageddon goes for a Boys' Own approach, shamelessly plundering movies from The Dirty Dozen to The Right Stuff along the way. Bruce Willis is the miner who leads his crew of roughnecks on a space shuttle mission to drill a nuclear weapon deep enough into the core of the asteroid to split it in two and blow it off course. A host of rising stars and reliable character actors, from Steve Buscemi to Billy Bob Thornton, step up to deliver their competent one-liners amid the fireworks, while Liv Tyler, as Willis's beloved daughter, provides the romantic interest with Ben Affleck (as well as some excruciating attempts at tear-jerking in which poor old Bruce tries yet again to extend his acting range).

Armageddon bears the unmistakable imprint of its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, and director Michael Bay - that is to say it's big, dumb, loud and cheerfully vulgar, with lots of music, flashy editing and hyperactive camera movement. The scenes of annihilation are lavish and lovingly detailed - there's an aerial shot of Paris reduced to one big crater from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - but the film fails to tie the central plotline into any real sense of what's happening in the outside world, even in cartoon form. On its own terms, though, it delivers its predictable goods without taking itself too seriously.

Hugh Linehan

"The Adventures Of Robin Hood" (General) IFC, Dublin

In 1938, The Adventures of Robin Hood was the equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer or James Cameron production today, representing Warner Brothers' most expensive investment ever at a cost of over £2 million dollars. Rereleased in a sparkling new print which captures the full, vivid glory of the three-strip Technicolor process, this is a film which most will be familiar with from Saturday afternoon showings on television, but it more than repays a visit to the cinema to see it in its original form. Errol Flynn is the quintessential, swaggering Robin, with Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains suitably oily and conniving as Guy of Gisbourne and Prince John, and Olivia De Havilland as Marian gets more scope than most women in modern action movies. Peppered with exhilaratingly choreographed action from director Michael Curtiz (who took over from William Keighley when Warners decided more vigour was needed), this is a delightful, witty, sumptuous-looking entertainment. The IFC is offering a special admission price of £5 for families (two adults, two children) and its usual membership requirement does not apply, as the film has a general certificate, making this one of the best deals in Dublin at the moment for a family outing.

Hugh Linehan