The cutting edge in Cork

With three cinemas in operation throughout the day, along with seminars and other events around the city, it has become difficult to give more than a snapshot of proceedings at the Murphy's Cork Film Festival, but the overall impression this year was of solidity and confidence based on good foundations.

Among the most notable events was the official re-launch of the long-established Federation of Irish Film Societies as the more contemporary-sounding (but rather po-faced and joyless-sounding) Access Cinema. Not just window-dressing, the change of nomenclature indicates an expectation within the non-mainstream exhibition sector that, after what seems like a never-ending string of reports and consultations, the Arts Council may finally be stirring itself to do something concrete about supporting cultural cinema outside the major urban centres. One hopes they're right, and that, with spending freezes looming, the boat has not been missed again.

Access Cinema was launched by documentary-maker Alan Gilsenan, who spoke of the importance of maintaining a space for different voices and cultures in an increasingly homogenised world. As Gilsenan pointed out, there's nothing at all wrong with multiplexes or Hollywood movies, but there is something wrong if they're the only thing available. Like the monotonous, multinational franchises which increasingly line our shopping streets, they pretend to offer more, but end up giving less.

The same concerns recurred in Road II, Gilsenan's sequel to his groundbreaking 1988 film, The Road to God Knows Where. The films were shown back-to-back in the Kino, and the contrast was fascinating to see. Where the 1988 Road was a powerful polemic, driven by the disgust and anger of its twentysomething protagonists at the dismal reality of 1980s Ireland, the new film (shown last night on RT╔) is more diffuse, its tone more uncertain. Youthful anger is replaced by middle-aged agnosticism, a function in part of the fact that, as one member of the audience pointed out in the Q&A session afterwards, the voices are almost exclusively middle-class (Gilsenan explained that, not surprisingly, the more marginalised interviewees from the first film had proved impossible to find). Several of the participants, such as Observer journalist Henry McDonald and junior minister Mary Coughlan, are now pillars of the media and political establishment, and the general tone was of rueful acceptance. Where Road II runs into trouble is in Gilsenan's attempts to create a visual iconography for the contemporary Ireland which is his subject. The first film hammered home its message with bleak sequences of wind-swept, litter-strewn housing estates, stray horses and kids running amok over rubbish dumps. Shot on film by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, these images were criticised at the time for their "lack of balance", but have proved remarkably powerful and enduring. This time, Gilsenan's extended montages of motorways, building sites and shopping malls, using digital tape, become oppressive without really achieving the stated objective of depicting our brave, new, plastic, franchised world. There's not much I miss from the 1980s, but Road II' s excessively jittery, hand-held style had me longing for the return of the good, old-fashioned camera tripod.

Funnily enough, exactly the same techniques from the same director yield superb results in Zulu 9, an 11-minute drama which Gilsenan directed as part of this year's batch of Short Cuts, the Irish Film Board/RT╔-funded short film scheme. Deploying surveillance-type footage, hand-held camera, aerial photography and multi-layered soundtracks, this explosive miniature thriller-cum-tragedy follows the consequences as the driver of a speeding truck carrying dangerous chemicals realises that there are people trapped in the back. It's a superb piece of work, which won the Audience Award for best Irish short film.

With a couple of honourable exceptions, the Short Cuts films have been criticised in the past for their blandness and lack of risk-taking, but there was a little more edge to be seen in this, the seventh year of the scheme. No harm, either, is the new insistence on a maximum running time of 12 minutes, which leads to a welcome brevity and economy of style. Pluck, Neasa Hardiman's surreal satire about a husband's obsession with his wife's facial hair, has a wryly elliptical script by Emma Donohue. Saturday, Paul Farren's comic depiction of a row between two Dublin suburban families, has excellent performances and a nice twist in its tale.

White, Emer Reynolds's "post-apocalyptic feminist horror" story, starts promisingly but its punchline lacks subtlety, while Chris McHallem's well-achieved black comedy, This Little Piggy, preys effectively on our worst fears and prejudices about taxi drivers and what they get up to.

The TG4/Irish Film Board-funded Oscailt scheme hasn't been around as long as Short Cuts, but also seems to be getting into its stride. Jennifer Keegan's black comedy, Cake, benefits from the presence of two of our best screen actors, Brendan Gleeson and Charlotte Bradley, and displays assured direction from Keegan, whose first venture into drama this is after making some excellent observational documentaries. Another film-maker with a background in documentary, Anne Crilly, makes an affecting drama debut with Limbo, which draws parallels between the experiences of the families of the "Disappeared" in Northern Ireland, and of women whose unbaptised children were refused final rites. In an era when most shorts tend towards the flippant or the youthful, this is a serious and adult piece of work which suffers a little from uncertain mise-en-scene. By contrast, Audrey O'Reilly's Clare Sa SpΘir is an amiable comedy of domestic disharmony, while Paul Mercier's Tubberware is an engagingly off-the-wall spoof.

For many people, Cork means shorts, and specifically the various international and Irish competitions for short films. The big winner this year was Give Up yer Aul Sins, Cathal Gaffney's animated interpretation of recordings of children in 1960s Dublin schoolrooms, which won both the Best International and Best Irish Short prizes (with a total of €14,000 in prize money). Steven Benedict won the Clare Lynch Award for Best First Irish Short for his film, Escape, which, according to the jury, "unsentimentally portrays a decisive personal moment in the volatile world of a deaf teenage girl".

Where most of the films mentioned here were supported by the recently-expanded Film Board (its new employees seemed to be everywhere at this year's festival), RT╔ or TG4, not everyone in Ireland draws money from the well of State broadcasters or funders to make their films. Director Frank Berry and producer Donal Ruane have attempted the even more difficult task of telling a feature-length story without outside finance. It would be churlish not to acknowledge the level of commitment and effort this requires, but sadly their Wicklow-set romantic drama, This Time Round, falls short of the standards of storytelling and performance which would enable it to find a wider audience.

As the Beast Sleeps is also unlikely to find a cinema audience, but Harry Bradbeer's adaptation of Gary Mitchell's play about post-ceasefire Loyalist confusion is a straight-ahead, powerful piece of TV drama, anchored by Stuart Graham's perfectly-judged central performance as the gunman forced to choose between old friendships and new realities.

The Northern Ireland depicted in As the Beast Sleeps could hardly be more different from the world of Teenage Kicks, Tom Collins's delightful, affectionate portrait of The Undertones' meteoric rise to pop stardom in the late 1970s. Collins, a Derryman himself, wisely concentrates on the band themselves, with veteran D.J. John Peel (the man the band blame for their rise to fame, and who wants Teenage Kicks played at his funeral) doing the interviews and narration. Like the band themselves, this is an exuberant, heart-warming film, which isn't afraid to allow time to hear entire songs (they weren't that long, after all).

Of the bigger, international titles in the programme, Alejandro Almenabβr's superbly-made Gothic ghost story, The Others, was introduced in the Opera House by one of its stars, Fionnula Flanagan, who turns in probably the best screen performance of her career, as the Mrs Danversish housekeeper who comes to work for war widow Nicole Kidman and her two children in a fog-shrouded mansion on the Channel Islands. That rare thing these days, a supernatural chiller with not one special effect (a part from the occasional creaking door), The Others is a real treat which gets a general release in a couple of weeks' time. Also due for release next month, Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff's interpretation of Daniel Clowes's cult comic book, is an engagingly meandering and deadpan study of teenage contrariness, in the shape of self-declared misfits Thora Birch and Debra Azar.

Not scheduled for release yet, Werner Herzog's Invincible is a striking parable, based on a true story, about a Jewish strongman whose variety performances incense the Berlin Nazis in the years before Hitler comes to power. It may explore themes which have been touched on in several other films of the last few years, but in its fascination with theatricality and the extremes of human nature, Invincible is quintessential Herzog, and the best dramatic work the director has done in years.