Divorcing Jack
Directed by David Caffrey. Starring David Thewlis, Robert Lindsay, Rachel Griffiths.
The humour is consistently black - and sometimes jaw-droppingly irreverent - in Caffrey's sprightly film of Colin Bateman's novel set in the run-up to the election of Northern Ireland's new prime minister. Thewlis plays an abrasive Belfast newspaper columnist whose drunken adulterous fling with a woman he meets in a park ends abruptly when he finds her dead in bed. Soon he has the RUC, IRA, UVF and the British army on his trail . . .
Antz
Directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson. Voiced by Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Gene Hackman, Anne Bancroft.
Allen provides the voice of Z, a timid worker ant who falls in love with the colony's beautiful princess (Stone) and becomes an unlikely termite war hero in this handsomely achieved computer animated feature which makes a few concessions too many to adult viewers in its preoccupation with Allen's trademark neurotic humour.
The Exorcist
Directed by William Friedkin. Starring Max Von Sydow, Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Lee J, Cobb.
Twenty-five years after it was first released in a blaze of controversy, Friedkin's film of William Peter Blatty's novel of satanic possession still stirs up the scares. Although overwrought at times, it remains an adventurous and influential exercise.