Gladiator (15) General release
Hollywood's short-lived flirtation with producing vast dramas set in ancient Rome peaked in 1959, when Ben-Hur swept the board at the Oscars and became a huge commercial success. It was followed by such sturdy epics as Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire, but the extravagant excesses of the notoriously profligate Cleopatra in 1963 heralded the death knell for this most expensive of genres.
Over three decades later, and with the advantage of cost-saving technology, the genre has been revived - and vigorously revitalised - in Gladiator, a stirring, robust epic which breathes new life into one of the most familiar of storylines. So familiar, in fact, is this that it features several characters from the undervalued Fall of the Roman Empire, which featured Alec Guinness as the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and Christopher Plummer as his son and successor, Commodus.
Gladiator opens in the winter of AD 180, when the Roman Empire stretches from the deserts of Africa to the north of England, and Marcus Aurelius (now played by Richard Harris) is nearing the end of his 12-year campaign against the Barbarians of Germania. The film's scale and ambition are evident from the spectacular opening battle sequence which ends that campaign in victory for the emperor.
The inspirational leader of his troops is the Spanish general, Maximus (Russell Crowe) who, after three hard years of fighting, wants nothing more than to return to his wife and young son. The ageing emperor proposes one last duty for Maximus, whom he describes as "the son I should have had" - to become the protector of the Empire and rid it of corruption. However, the son he has, the petulant, cowardly Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) is loath to lose the power he believes is his right.
Sold into slavery, Maximus is bought by a wily former gladiator, Proximo (Oliver Reed) and brought to Rome where the new emperor, Commodus, has organised 150 days of life-or-death games at the Colosseum to curry favour with the bloodthirsty populace. The stoic, imperturbable Maximus draws on all his military tactics and experience to survive the conflicts he faces in the arena, where he is the last to know how many and what form of opponents will be set against him. "Thrust this (sword) into another man's flesh and they will applaud you and love you for it," Proximo advises him.
The movie powerfully captures both the heightened theatricality and the sheer savagery of this ritual spectacle - the masks, the fans, the groupies, the bookies, the fighter who wets himself before entering the arena, the baying voyeurs in the crowd and the corpulent compere (an unrecognisable David Hemmings) who eggs them on.
The sequences in the Colosseum are elaborately staged, viscerally charged, and shot and cut with hyperactive energy by lighting cameraman John Mathieson and film editor Pietro Scalia. And the film is marked by the mastery of visual style we have come to expect from its director, Ridley Scott, whose uneven career has spanned ranges from such memorable achievements as Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, to forgettable dross such as Legend, 1492 and GI Jane.
The nerve centre of Scott's splendid new production is his casting of the excellent Russell Crowe, who plays Maximus as the personification of honour and valour. In his final film role, Oliver Reed - who died while on location for the movie in Malta a year ago this month - gives one of his most engaging, least mannered performances, and it is entirely appropriate that Gladiator is dedicated to his memory.
Michael Dwyer
Best (15) Selected cinemas
"Where did it all go wrong?" as the bellhop inquires in the world's most hackneyed George Best joke. If Mary McGuckian's biopic of the great, flawed Manchester United footballer invites the same question, then the answer is more complex than it might at first appear.
Leaving aside for a moment the dire history of football in the movies, McGuckian's film, co-written with her husband and star, John Lynch, fails the key test of the biopic - transmuting the base material of true events into the stuff of resonant drama. In a sporting context, the yardstick is surely Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, which took the story of boxing champ Jake La Motta and turned it into brutal, beautiful art.
The comparison may be unfair - McGuckian is no budding Scorsese, as her previous two films, Words Upon the Windowpane and This is the Sea, showed - but the principles still apply. The great sporting movies (and there are not many) make poetry from the most primal human instincts; the good ones at least convey something of the smell of ruthless competition and the ultimate inevitability of failure. Oliver Stone's recent Any Given Sunday, for example, while no masterpiece, was a fan'seye view of the high-octane sub-culture of American football.
Best, by contrast, never rings true in its depiction of the changing world of 1960s English soccer. Lynch himself struggles to make something of the role, but fails to find a way around his character's passivity. His Best is a cipher, a wide-eyed innocent turned alcoholic, but never truly tragic. While one can make some allowances for a limited budget, the film is hobbled by its plodding structure, framed as a flashback of Best's memories, inspired by the 1994 death of his mentor, Sir Matt Busby (the late Ian Bannen, in his last performance). The 1994 sequences, with Roger Daltrey implausibly impersonating Best's old drinking buddy, Rodney Marsh, never achieve the tone of tragic pathos to which they aspire, and the scenes from George Best's heyday in the 1960s are equally unconvincing.
McGuckian does achieve some success with what might have been expected to be the most difficult part of the enterprise, mingling archive material with new footage for a reasonable approximation of Best in action, but once the action moves off the pitch, we're into a hackneyed world of drinking bouts and dolly birds, rendered with stilted clumsiness.
Hugh Linehan
Snow Falling On Cedars (15) Selected cinemas
The breathtaking widescreen imagery achieved by lighting cameraman Robert Richardson is much the most striking feature of the disappointing Snow Falling On Cedars. Based on the 1995 best-seller by David Guterson, the film marks the American debut of the Australian film-maker, Scott Hicks, after his breakthrough with Shine.
The new film opens on deliberately blurred images of a fisherman's death. It is not clear to the viewer how it happened, nor is it clear to anyone else; nonetheless, it leads to a young Japanese-American being charged with murder. The setting is the 1950s on an island in the Pacific Northwest where wartime tensions still linger and the racial tensions are heightened during the trial of the Japanese-American man when the anniversary of Pearl Harbour dawns.
Ethan Hawke stolidly plays the reporter covering the trial and the former teenage sweetheart of the accused's wife (Youki Kudoh). Max von Sydow does a scene-stealing turn as the wily, eccentric defense counsel, with James Rebhorn well cast as his opposite number on the prosecution and the always reliable James Cromwell as the no-nonsense judge.
Unfortunately, the screenplay by Ron Bass and Scott Hicks clutters potentially interesting material in the unwisely convoluted structure of its exposition - and in its withholding of crucial evidence from the principal characters until well after the movie has shown its hand to the cinema audience. Its secondary theme of the treatment meted out to the island's Japanese population during the war seems a flimsy and underdeveloped sideshow compared with Alan Parker's deeper treatment of a similar theme in Come See the Paradise.
Michael Dwyer
Hanging Up (15) General release
Steeped in schmaltz and blandly directed by Diane Keaton, Hanging Up marks a new nadir, if such can be imagined, in the screenwriting efforts of sisters Nora and Delia Ephron. This glib and vacuous yarn deals with three sisters who appear to spend most of their adult lives talking to each other on their cellphones about their ailing, irascible father (played by Walter Matthau as yet another of his grumpy old men).
One sister (played by Keaton) is a successful magazine publisher in New York, another (Meg Ryan at her most irritating) organises events and parties for a living in Los Angeles, and the third (Lisa Kudrow) is an aspiring soap actress. None of them is rendered remotely interesting in this shallow, slender story which piles on the treacly sentiment with all the subtlety of its twee, piano-tinkling score.
Michael Dwyer
The Long Good Friday (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The 20th anniversary reissue of John MacKenzie's gritty, influential London gangster movie puts such wretched recent excursions into the genre as Circus and Love, Honour & Obey firmly in their place. Working from a cracking screenplay by Barrie Keeffe, MacKenzie fashioned a remarkably prescient picture of its time as it followed the entrepreneurial ambitions of a Cockney gang leader enthusiastically embracing Thatcherism to develop a major property scheme in the city's Docklands.
Played in a bravura performance by Bob Hoskins in an early leading role, Harold Shand is a hardened, determined criminal who is virulently anti-drugs and strives for more legitimate business ventures with the help of his shrewd lover (Helen Mirren), an American Mafioso (Eddie Constantine) and corrupt local politicians. However, his plans are thwarted and his criminal empire crumbles when his gang tangles with the IRA.
The two young Provos served up as sexual bait to Shand's gay sidekick are played by a young Pierce Brosnan and Kevin McNally, who plays the husband of the journalist based on Veronica Guerin in John MacKenzie's latest film, When the Sky Falls, which opens here next month.
Michael Dwyer
