"Twister" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

The disaster movie, that genre so beloved of studios and audiences in the 1970s, is back with a vengeance as Twister and Independence Day stand as massive box office successes in the US, well ahead of every other movie released there this year. Putting in peril assorted cliche types - carefully (and cynically) chosen to represent gender, age and racial groupings - is big business all over again.

Back in the days of Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and Earthquake, those characters were played by big name stars backed up by solid supporting players, and The Towering Inferno, one of the most entertaining of the genre, had Steve McQueen and Paul Newman in the leading roles, not to mention Faye Dunaway, William Holden and Fred Astaire down the credits.

These days the technology is the star, allowing producers to cast disaster movies with inexpensive B-list actors who lack the muscle to complain about how threadbare their roles are, and ensuring that the real money can be spent on elaborate special effects. That formula paid off handsomely for Steven Spielberg's vastly overrated Jurassic Park, which became the biggest box office blockbuster of all time, and has been employed lucratively in the production of Independence Day (which opens here two weeks from today) and Twister.

The people who populate both these new movies are cardboard cut outs for the film makers to play around with while they get down to their raison d'etre - the belated unleashing of spectacular special effects. When the action swings into overdrive, it's impossible to care a whit for the fates of the cliche types threatened with disaster, and getting down to business is such a protracted process, in both films, that there are ample windows for blatant product placement. Both films, incidentally, are directed by Europeans - Independence Day by the German, Roland Emmerich and Twister by the Dutchman, Jan De Bont.

Steven Spielberg is the executive producer of Twister and its screenplay is by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and his wife Anne Marie Martin. Twister opens with a prologue set in the summer of 1969, as the rural Harding family batten down the hatches during a tornado warning.

Cut to the present day and Jo (Helen Hunt), the young daughter of that family, is a scientist who has developed an equipment pack to transmit valuable data about the behaviour of tornadoes and give vital earlier warning signals. This invention is called Dorothy, in a nod to the heroine of The Wizard of Oz who was taken in a tornado from Kansas to Oz.

Dorothy also functions as a kind of surrogate child for Jo and her former professional and marriage partner, Jonas (Bill Paxton), now a weatherman; he just happens to turn up with the divorce papers and his new lover on the afternoon when Oklahoma is facing its biggest storm in half a century. In a spin on the corrupt scientist in Jurassic Park, Cary Elwes is cast as the villain of the piece, a sneering, corporate sponsored rival scientist.

A former lighting cameraman, Jan De Boot turned director two years ago with the fast moving and hugely entertaining Speed, in which the adrenalin was kept pumping all the way by the movie's eventful scenario.

In Twister, however, De Boot is more sparing in the first two thirds of the movie, which is essentially the calm before the storm and he takes too long to cut to the chase, 50 to speak, and saves most of his eggs for the basket that is the third act.

When the mile wide tornado hits Oklahoma, the special effects department pull out all the stops for a thrilling spectacle which is brilliantly shot and edited and makes powerfully effective use of sound. You'll believe a cow can fly - and a house and a massive juggernaut - and if you plan to witness this spectacle, see Twister in the cinema with the biggest screen and with the best sound system - and don't even think about waiting to see it on video.

"Blue in the Face" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin.

Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's Blue in the Face is an opportunistic spin off from Wang's much more accomplished recent Auster adaptation, Smoke, made in a week, with money and time left over from the earlier shoot.

Set in and around the Brooklyn cigar store run by the Harvey Keitel character, Auggie Wren, in Smoke, the entirely improvised Bhie in the Face purports to be an affectionate portrait of the borough of Brooklyn, its history and allegedly colourful local characters - hardly any of whom is played by actors from Brooklyn.

The result is a flimsily contrived, rambling and grating piece of nonsense with passable contributions from Keitel, Michael J Fox in a goatee and Jim Jarmusch, and shrill and inept performances from the cringe inducing Mel Gorham and Roseanne, whose attempt at improvisation has all the subtlety of fingernails scratching a blackboard and is arguably the worst performance in the entire first century of cinema.

Hugh Linehan adds:

"Rainbow" (PG) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.

Willy Lavendal plays a ten year old New Jersey boy who is led by a mysterious dog to the end of a rainbow, in this disappointing children's fantasy, which never manages to be as magical as it hopes. Along with his brother and friend, he discovers how to enter the rainbow, where the children's interference leads to an ecological catastrophe.

With the aid of their magician uncle (Bob Hoskins, who also directs), the children have to redress the imbalance they caused before the world is destroyed.

Technology buffs may be interested in the fact that the film is shot on Digital High Definition Video rather than the customary 3 millimetre film. High Definition has been much touted as the future of cinema, but in this case, even in the hands of veteran Oscar winning cinematographer Freddie Francis, it looks dull and flat.

One of the supposed advantages of digital technology is the opportunity it affords for manipulation of the images in post production, but the special effects in Rainbow are unlikely to please even the most impressionable child.