Soft-hearted festive fare

"George Of The Jungle" (PG) Nationwide

The modest roots of Sam Weisman's breezy, appealing comedy, George Of The Jungle, are in a mildly cultish animated cartoon series which ran on ABC Television in the late 1960s. In essence a Tarzan spoof, it had as its motif the clumsy, navigationally-challenged George swinging from a vine - and crashing headlong into a tree. In the movie he is engagingly played by a pumpedup Brendan Fraser.

It makes for good-humoured slapstick entertainment with a keen sense of the absurd, and Fraser remains admirably deadpan throughout, even when he's talking about his faithful dog, Shep - who happens to be an elephant. His other friends are Ape, the wise, highly intelligent gorilla (voiced by John Cleese) who raised him and is his surrogate parent, and Tookie-Tookie Bird, a toucan.

Their idyllic jungle existence is disrupted by the arrival of two Americans on safari - the heiress Ursula Stanhope (Leslie Mann), whose hair remains perfectly permed in primitive conditions, and her patronising stuffed-shirt fiance, Lyle Van De Groot (Thomas Haden Church). Never having seen a woman before, George is puzzled by her shape and observes that she's "a funny looking fellow". When George finds himself attracted to her, Ape proffers the trashy novel, Coffee, Tea Or Me? as a guide to courtship rituals.

The knowing, self-referential tone of the humour also involves a narrator referring to one scene, for example, as a "waterfall set"; a jungle porter speaking to camera on the subject of classic comedy; and when Shep the elephant decides to dispense with a bone for a retake. The later stages of the movie mine the successful fish-out-of-water territory of Crocodile Dundee when Ursula brings George to San Francisco.

By Michael Dwyer

"A Further Gesture" (PG) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

Scripted by the Belfast-born writer Ronan Bennett and directed by the Austrian film-maker Robert Dornhelm, A Further Gesture is a political thriller based on an idea by Stephen Rea, who also stars in the film as Sean Dowd, a Provo who escapes from the Maze and heads for New York. Working as a dish-washer, the dour Dowd is befriended by Guatemalan political exiles who share his sense of displacement in the US. When he learns of their plans to assassinate a man who has killed and tortured many of their countrymen, the film evokes the movie tradition of ex-convicts going in for one last job as he offers his expertise in these matters.

The most dramatically effective sequence in A Further Gesture comes at the beginning - the protracted and impressively staged break-out from the Maze. The pace slackens when the narrative moves to the US, and the film is weakened by narrative contrivances which render it politically simplistic and ultimately over-ambitious.

Stephen Rea, who is in virtually every scene of the film, commands the attention in his acute picture of a lonely and alienated but determined man. The sketchily-drawn supporting characters under-use a capable cast that includes Rosanna Pastor (from Land And Freedom) as the Guatemalan woman with whom Dowd forms a tender relationship, along with Alfred Molina, Jorge Sanz, Brendan Gleeson and Sean McGinley.

By Michael Dwyer

"Home Alone 3" (PG) Nationwide

If Tomorrow Never Dies for James Bond, then there's no reason why the same shouldn't be true for other profitable franchises like John Hughes's Home Alone. With Macaulay Culkin now in his 18th year, it was clearly time to source a new moppet who would keep the family home safe from intruders. Step forward, Alex D. Linz, eight-year-old veteran of One Fine Day and countless TV commercials, and possessor of a smile so winsome he makes Culkin look like Harvey Keitel.

This isn't the only change. Alex hasn't taken over Macaulay's character, so this is a whole new kid with a whole new family and a whole new bunch of crooks to contend with - international criminals searching for a stolen computer chip which has ended up installed in a toy car. So there's no Joe Pesci or Daniel Stern to mug up frantically; these baddies are less cartoonish, which seems a mistake, as the main attraction of the original film was its Tom And Jerry quality.

Apart from the new cast, new location and new director (Raja Gosnell, who edited the first two films), all the other elements are in place, including the obnoxious siblings, the scary old neighbour who turns out to have a heart of gold, and the Heath Robinson traps our diminutive hero sets for his enemies. But there's an awful lot of waiting around before we get to the slapstick, and younger members of the audience at the screening I attended were getting very restless. One extended sequence involving a video camera strapped to a remote-controlled toy is superbly achieved, though, and the denouement is as wham-bam violent as in the earlier movies, which may cause parents some concern but doesn't seem to bother the youngsters one whit.

By Hugh Linehan

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

Hailed mistakenly in some circles as a sort of Scandinavian version of Trainspotting, the first film from Danish director Nicolas Wending Refn, set in the milieu of Copenhagen's drug-dealing, criminal under classes, has none of the intelligence and style of Danny Boyle's film.

Refn employs hand-held camera and available light to follow Frank (Kim Bodnia) and his partner Tony (Mads Mikkelsen) around the streets of the city as they do their violent work and chat, mostly about sex. Clearly what's being attempted is the style of the grittier sort of American independent movie, and its antecedents like Scorsese and Cassavetes, although the effect is more reminiscent of attempts by European pop groups to ape American mannerisms. Refn may go on to make something more interesting, but Pusher is a piece of juvenilia best ignored.

By Hugh Linehan

"Someone Else's America" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Not much better is Someone Else's America, a soft-hearted tale of immigrants in New York which has a short run at the IFC until next Wednesday. Goran Paskaljevic's comedy stars Miki Manojlovic and Tom Conti as middle-aged friends, one Montenegrin, the other a Spaniard, struggling to make a life for themselves in the United States while still haunted by their families and their loneliness.

Manojlovic is an expressive actor with a lived-in face that at least reflects the harshness of the life his character has led, but Conti plays his role as an Hispanic buffoon not far in spirit from Fawlty Towers's Manuel. This stagey, claustrophobic little film never manages to make you care very much about either of them, and, despite the title, feels as if it was made by someone who has never been to America, except perhaps to scout locations.

By Hugh Linehan

Today's sixth new release is Free Willy 3 The Rescue (General cert; nationwide). This time Willy the whale and his entire pod are endangered when they move into an area of the Pacific where unscrupulous whalers are killing off the whale population. Jason James Richter once again plays Willy's closest human friend, Jesse, now 17 and working on an oceanic research vessel tracking whales. The director is Sam Pillsbury, best known for making The Scarecrow and The Quiet Earth in his native New Zealand.