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American Beauty (18) General release

As it gradually peels away the facades behind which its principal characters live, the enthralling and commendably ambitious American Beauty reveals itself as a seriously dark comedy embracing the themes of middle-aged crises, teenage angst, self-delusion, materialistic longing, suburban alienation, masculine insecurities, generational chasms and conflicts, and communication breakdown.

Both satirical and clearly socially concerned, this is a mature, thoughtful and subversive picture made with a deliberately unnerving candour and shot through with a jagged sense of humour which renders it very funny, shockingly so at times.

And even though it treads territory previously mined with acuity - in films as diverse as The Graduate, Ordinary People, Blue Velvet, The War of the Roses, The Ice Storm, Affliction, Happiness and Pleasantville - it is highly original. Astonishingly, this richly accomplished film is the work of a writer and a director who had never worked for the cinema before this.

The film's pivotal character, played by Kevin Spacey, is Lester Burnham, a deeply dissatisfied 42-year-old man. He is going through the motions of a now loveless marriage to a real estate agent, Carolyn (Annette Bening) who adopts a phoney perma-smile in public and throws herself into her work with hyperactive zeal to hide from her personal and professional frustrations. The time will come when Lester will confront her with the accusation that she is joyless.

Their only child, Jane (Thora Birch), is a high school student who feels utterly remote from her parents, believing that they have lost interest in her as they so clearly have in each other. The dinner table, where Jane sits in the centre, becomes a battleground in which Carolyn's choice of show tunes as wallpaper music fails to thaw the icy, hostile atmosphere.

Another dysfunctional family of three, the ironically named Fitts family, moves in next door: a gruff, violent martinet (Chris Copper) who has retired from the marines, his downtrodden wife (Allison Janney) who is emotionally removed from the world inside and outside her home, and their video-obsessed, dope-smoking 18-year-son, Ricky (Wes Bentley). The two neighbouring offspring become intrigued with each other as Jane realises that Ricky is filming her on video from his bedroom window. Meanwhile, Lester becomes fixated on his daughter's precocious best friend (Mena Suvari) and he begins to fantasise about her. Lester has other things on his mind, such as the fact that he is threatened with the sack at the advertising magazine where he has been working for 14 years. Embittered by a life of regrets and dashed dreams, he reflects ruefully on his late teens when he had his whole life ahead of him and so much appeared possible. This is merely the outline of a superbly acted film which goes on to reveal layers of information regarding these principal characters, their personalities, preoccupations and interlinked fates. Its simmering power is heightened by the precise, measured direction of Sam Mendes, who eschews the flashy editing style preferred by all too many directors terrified of alienating the 15-24 age group.

Sensitively orchestrating its shifting tones and moods, Mendes allows the movie and the people who populate it to breathe, and never hesitates to pause for an extra beat or two in a scene to allow it all to sink in all the more deeply. It is shot with terrific visual flair by the brilliant veteran, Conrad Hall, who is now 72 and, in collaboration with Mendes, devised three distinct shooting scenes for the movie - for the main body of the film, for the fantasy sequences and for the video footage.

American Beauty stands, by any standards, as a remarkable cinema debut for Mendes, a 34-year-old Englishman whose acclaimed theatre work has notably included Othello, The Birthday Party, The Plough and the Stars, Glengarry Glen Ross, Company, The Glass Menagerie, The Blue Room and still running on Broadway, a radical reworking of Cabaret which stands as one of the most richly imaginative, powerfully emotional and spine-tingling productions I have ever experienced. The perceptive and incisive screenplay of American Beauty is the work of Alan Ball, a playwright and television scriptwriter who wrote it as a response to growing up in a deeply conservative Georgia town where community life was, he says, "emotionally barren" and "people were shut down and living in total denial", like the characters in American Beauty.

That title is ambiguous in a film which reflects on how we may have preconceived notions about things, but the truth often turns out to be something we never even considered - and how the place where we find true beauty might be where we least expect it.

- Michael Dwyer

A Room for Romeo Brass (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Writer-director Shane Meadows follows up his impressive feature debut, TwentyFourSeven, with another lyrical, off-kilter look at the extraordinary details in ordinary lives. Working in the tradition of Ken Loach, 25-year-old Meadows adds weight to his claim to be one of the most promising film-makers working in Britain today with this thought-provoking and affecting work.

Set on a working-class Nottingham estate, A Room for Romeo Brass follows the fortunes of two schoolboys, Romeo and Knocks, next-door neighbours and friends on the cusp of adolescence, whose friendship is put under strain when they meet a local eccentric, Morell (Paddy Considine). Morell has a crush on Romeo's sister, and tries to use him to get to her. Meanwhile, Romeo's father returns in search of reconciliation with his family, and Knocks faces an operation on his damaged spine.

Meadows interweaves these stories with skill and ingenuity - one of the pleasures of the film is that you never quite know where it's going to go next. In particular, there's an undercurrent of potential violence which erupts in a truly shocking manner without being sensationalist, and which causes the viewer to rethink what has happened up to that point. In this, as in other ways, A Room for Romeo Brass impresses with its unforced realism, reinforced by the unshowy but telling performances of an impressive cast, especially the two young leads.

Meadows wrote the script with an old friend, Paul Fraser, basing it on their own memories, and their depiction of childhood is both optimistic and refreshingly unsentimental, propelled by an evocative soundtrack which includes everything from Christy Moore to The Specials to Beck.

- Hugh Linehan

House on Haunted Hill (18) General release

When the notorious Z-movie director William Castle released the original House on Haunted Hill in 1958, he billed it as being in "Emergo", a new process which apparently consisted largely of dangling luminous skeletons over the audience's heads. Unfortunately, this new version doesn't attempt anything so spectacular, but it lives up to its trashy roots with a vengeance. If you like your gore by the bathfull, and your victims shrieking all the way to their demise, then you'll love William Malone's remake.

God only knows what Geoffrey Rush is doing here, beyond taking a cheque for his impersonation of Vincent Price. Rush plays amoral theme-park mogul Steven Price (ho ho), who along with his manipulative wife (Famke Janssen) invites a select group of ne'er-do-wells to spend the night with him in the Vanacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane - now empty, but once the site of "experiments that brought human torture to new depths of depravity". One by one, they get the chop in various nasty ways, as the old house gradually comes to life (in the form of some rather disappointing special effects - one would have hoped that executive producer and techno-whizz Robert Zemeckis would have come up with something better).

The best thing that can be said about House on Haunted Hill is that it doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is - unlike the similarly-themed recent remake of The Haunting, which collapsed under the weight of its own pomposity and excess. This is cheap, cheerful junk, directed with unpretentious energy by Malone. But Rush should really have a quiet word with his agent.

The good, the bad and the beautiful: a scene from Sam Mendes's American Beauty

- Hugh Linehan