SUPERBLY EXECUTED

"Dead Man Walking" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Capital punishment has regularly provided emotive subject matter for cinema, most notably in recent years in films from America (The Executioner's Song), Britain (Dance With A Stranger) and Poland (A Short Film About Killing). A number of new American movies on the theme will include Bruce Beresford's Last Dance, due here in June and featuring a deglamorised Sharon Stone on Death Row, and the imminent film of John Grisham's The Chamber.

First and foremost, there is Tim Robbins's exemplary Dead Man Walking, the second film directed by Robbins, an accomplished actor in his own right, after the clever political satire, Bob Roberts. The mood is significantly more sombre in the factually based Dead Man Walking, which explores its theme with a rare balance and moral complexity.

Sean Penn plays Matthew Poncelet, a convicted killer who has been on Death Row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for six years, having been found guilty of raping a teenage girl and murdering her and her boyfriend. Poncelet is a composite character based on two condemned criminals. Susan Saran don plays Sister Helen Prejean, the real life humanitarian nun and social worker who becomes Poncelet's pen friend, and then his spiritual adviser in the days leading up to his scheduled execution by lethal injection. Sister Helen's book, Dead Man Walking, provided the basis of Tim Robbins's screenplay, and she served as a consultant on his film.

When Sister Helen first visits Poncelet in prison, she is warned by the chaplain to be careful, that Ponce let will take advantage of her in any way he can. The chaplain, a conservative priest who expresses surprise that she is not wearing a habit, is played by Scott Wilson, who himself played one of the condemned killers in Richard Brooks's fine 1967 film of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

Sister Helen is faced with a crisis of conscience when confronted by the distraught parents of the murdered teenagers, and again when Poncelet reveals himself as a white supremacist who expresses his admiration for Hitler and his endorsement of terrorist bombings of government buildings. Robbins's beautifully directed film tackles these moral dilemmas with balance and restraint while deftly shifting sympathies as it confronts the cold arrogance of the shifty eyed Poncelet and subtly reveals the vulnerability he tries to disguise.

The film road to repentance and redemption eschews the special pleading and narrative compromises that have undermined so many other films on the subject. And the key setting of the prison where Poncelet is confined is eerie only in the sense of its mundane, institutional trappings and routines, and the director of photography, Roger Deakins, works dexterously within these confines.

The film builds in accumulating power to a wrenching but unsentimental ending, and there is a chilling scene when the meaning of its title becomes clear. The strong supporting cast features Celia Weston, R. Lee Ermey and Raymood J. Barry as the traumatised parents of the young murder victims, Roberta Maxwell as Poncelet's mother, and Lois Smith as the mother of Sister Helen.

At the film's dramatic core are two vivid, expressive and minutely detailed performances which complement each other perfectly in the role that won her a well deserved Oscar last week, Susan Sarandon is dignified and aptly understated, while Penn's hypnotic performance acutely catches both the callousness and the fear behind the penetrating stare of Poncelet. Dead Man Walking is a thoughtful and riveting film made with intelligence, integrity and great skill.

"Othello", (12), Screen at D'Olier Street, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

When a Shakespearean actor makes his directorial debut with Othello it's not surprising that his interest will lie in the quality of the performances, which triumph here over visual flair or excitement. Oliver Parker has pared the text ruthlessly to emphasise the hectic passion and electric sexual attraction between the Moorish soldier Othello (Laurence Fisbourne) and the "super subtle Venetian", Desdemona (Irene Jacob). The sense of claustrophobia in Shakespeare's most domestic tragedy is heightened by the constant, rather static, use of closeup, often with two characters in the frame, one behind the other.

Kenneth Branagh as Iago delivers his monologues knowingly to camera, relishing the role, which he plays with a boyish charm, wooing the camera, then playfully covering it with his hand as he refers to the net that shall enmesh them all". Speaking the verse with great ease and intelligence, he brings flashes of humour to his asides, and seems more an almost likeable prankster who becomes emboldened by the success of his ruses, than the diabolical plotter of performance tradition.

Laurence Fishburne's Othello is free from rhetorical posturing he conveys the emotional turmoil of Othello with conviction and pathos. Irene Jacob, whose heavy French accent impedes her delivery of the verse, is nevertheless a beautiful, moving Desdemona, showing strength as well as vulnerability. The direction of the love scenes is overwrought at times with Othello advancing on their gauze enclosed bed with an expression of almost comical intensity. Desdemona would have had cause to be more than a little intimidated by him physically, before he ever harboured thoughts of killing her.

Apart from the atmospheric opening sequence in Venice which shows Desdemona arriving by gondola for her clandestine marriage to Othello, David Johnson's camera rarely pulls back from the characters' faces this is essentially a chamber piece, which sacrifices many of the racial, social and religious resonances of the play, while maintaining a sufficiently rapid pace to uphold the plausibility of the plot, which must encompass Othello's shift, on the slightest of evidence, from utter devotion to his bride, to the pitch of jealousy which allows him to say "yet she must die, else she'll betray more men".

"Rendez vous In Paris" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

A compendium of three delicately nuanced vignettes, Eric Rohmer's breezy Rendez vous In Paris continues the veteran director's preoccupation with the emotional problems of young and youngish French lovers. Each of the three separate stories hinges on chance encounters and romantic assignations in Paris the city is the movie's sole recurring character.

In the first story a young woman, suspecting her boyfriend of secret rendez vous with another woman at a Beaubourg cafe, is approached by a charming young man and she arranges to meet him at the same cafe. In the second, a woman dissatisfied with her relationship embarks on a series of romantic meetings with a young professor in the gardens and parks of Paris before making a fateful reservation at a Montmarte hotel. The third deals with a young painter who takes one woman, a Swedish interior decorator, to the Picasso Museum, and falls for another woman he sees there.

There is an appealing and unaffected quality about the cast of Rendez vous In Paris all of whom are under 30 and Eric Rohmer, who turned 76 yesterday, has clearly lost none of his wit, curiosity and powers of observation, although it might have been wiser had he placed the three stories in reverse order, given that the first is much the most amusing. And Paris is photographed with the same affection accorded Manhattan by Woody Allen an Madrid by Pedro Almodovar.

"A little princess" (PG) Savoy Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Forget the sugary Shirley, Temple version this adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron is a well realised, lovingly designed film that manages to steer clear of cloying sentimentality while generating magic, fantasy band. Setting the story during the first World War, scriptwriters Richard la Gravanese and Elizabeth Chandler have brought a multi cultural twist to this tale of the triumph of spirit and imagination over pusillanimous pragmatism.

When 10 year old Sara Crewe's beloved, widowed father (Liam Cunningham) leaves for the Western Front, he enrols her in a boarding school for wealthy girls in New York, under the stern eye of Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron). Lonely for her father and her dead mother, Sara (Liesel Matthews) keeps her spirits up, winning affection from her schoolmates, and a black servant girl, by her gift for storytelling, enthralling them with exotic tales from India, where she was born. Scenes from these stories are interwoven with the main plot, and drenched in bright light and shades of yellow and saffron, contrasting with the gothic green tones of the boarding school, with its gloomy interiors and intimidating scale.

Sarah's self confident, questioning intelligence is viewed as defiance by Miss Minchin, excellently played, with witch like fervour, by Eleanor Bron. She takes particular pleasure in turning Sarah into a servant after her father is believed to have been killed in the war and his fortune lost. Declaring that Sarah has to be schooled into the "realities of life", Miss Minchin is the sort of teacher who believes in brutalising and frightening children "for their own good", because that's the way life is.

Bringing new life to a Victorian morality tale about the importance of self sacrifice and restraint, Cuaron's film, enhanced by Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and Bo Welsh's picture book design, is a celebration of spontaneity, generosity and courage that will appeal especially, but not exclusively, to pre-teenage girls.

"Stolen Hearts" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

"We never really talk" is a familiar complaint from women to their male partners, and in the Australian director Bill Bennet's romantic comedy Roz (Sandra Bullock) takes every opportunity to vent her frustration on her boyfriend of seven years. Frank (Denis Leary) a plasterer and hapless petty thief, has landed one last job before giving up the criminal life and settling down. As usual it backfires and the pair are tracked by the FBI as well as Frank's bumbling accomplices, as they take over an opulent beach house on Rhode Island, in possession of a valuable Matisse painting.

When a wealthy neighbour, Evan (Stephen Dillane) takes an interest in Roz, he precipitates the long threatened crisis in the relationship, with Roz trying to impress the name dropping guests at Evan's house party and Frank committing a series of social gaffes. Repetitive, if occasionally humorous scenes, stock characters and a slow build to the denouement do little to distract from the main theme how to remain committed in a relationship while keeping boredom and paralysis at bay. But with these two dimensional characters and the pedestrian, sit-com script and direction, who cares?