"Looking for Richard", (12), Screen on D'Olier Street, Dublin.

"You know Shakespeare? Sheakespeare. You like it? That's good, yeah, that's great, great." The guy in the shades and reversed baseball cap is Al Pacino and he's ambling through Manhattan with his pals, trying to generate a bit of enthusiasm on the street for the Bard.

Pacino's genuine determination to bring Shakespeare's Richard III to the widest possible audience is evident throughout this enthusiastic documentary, which he scripted, directed and co produced. It elaborately intercuts scenes from the play, with Pacino in the title role, with a wealth of footage showing us the lengthy process of discussion and rehearsal, which lasted more than three years, interrupted by other projects. Three editors and four directors of photography, headed by Robert Leacock, ensure it is a fluid, lively, well crafted piece of film, as well as an opportunity for Pacino to establish his credentials as a director.

Pacino is always centre stage here, playing the clown with the camera crew, hamming it up absurdly as Richard, but mostly looking extremely perplexed and befuddled by the play's text, plot, context and history. "It's very confusing and I don't know why we're even doing this at all . . ." At times it's hard to tell whether he really is as flummoxed as he appears, or is exaggerating for the sake of his popularising mission. Either way, there are moments of embarrassing naivete, with things improving considerably as the earnestly pedagogical, Sesame Streettone of the New York street scenes gives way to an episodic reconstruction, in period costume, of Shakespeare's play.

To help them become immersed in the period, Pacino leads his cast and crew to Stratford ("I had an epiphany. Did you have an epiphany?") and to the newly reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, enlisting the expertise of Oxford historians and textual scholars, who look curiously fossilised in the midst of all this nervy, New York energy. He also talks to Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave, but not the most obvious person: Antony Sher. Throughout these consultations, Pacino's theme is the sense of intimidation felt by American actors when approaching Shakespeare, but unfortunately the snippets of interviews are so truncated by all the jumpy cross cutting that the speakers contributions become almost meaningless.

One person the cast definitely should have heeded was the theatre director, Peter Brook, who spoke about cinema's elimination of the need for actors to raise their voices and declaim the verse. Pacino roars his way through the role of Richard, as does most of the rest of the cast (with the exception of Kevin Conway and a demure Winona Ryder), using volume and histrionics to convey passion or intensity. While these actors talk a lot in rehearsal about emotions and empathy and responding from the heart, it's hard not to wish they would use their brains sometimes too.

As vanity projects go, however, this is a very good humoured and light hearted one, which is much less about giving an interesting interpretation of Richard III or adding anything to our understanding of the play than about the group's obvious enjoyment of their own endeavour, and the enthusiasm that Shakespeare can still inspire, even in unlikely quarters - in other words, that Shakespeare can be fun. Got that in the back row?

"Extreme Measures" (15s)

Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

Poor Hugh Grant must have thought it would be a sensible idea to further his somewhat stalled Hollywood career by expanding his range to include action movies. Unfortunately, whatever other talents he may have, Grant is simply not action man material, as he proves definitively in this otherwise routine medical conspiracy thriller.

Grant, an ambitious young doctor at a New York hospital, realises something strange has happened to a homeless man who died in the Emergency Room. Trying to pursue the ease, he finds himself first being blocked by the hospital bureaucracy, then being blackmailed, and finally being shot at. Determined to discover what's going on, he finds himself up against respected senior doctor Gene Haekman, who (naturally) is not all he seems.

Anyone who's seen Coma, or one of the countless TV movies on the same theme, will know from the first five minutes exactly how everything is going to turn out, and director Michael Apted is experienced enough to keep most of the cogs oiled. But amidst all the car chases, shoot outs and fistfights, Grant seems utterly bewildered, as if he'd wandered in from the drawing room of a Merchant Ivory film. His familiar mannerisms, usually mildly irritating, are quite bizarre here, and that self deprecating foppishness makes him seem more like a comic aside to the action than a credible, square jawed battler for truth.

Having tried romantic comedies and action adventures, it may be time for this particularly implausible hero to return to the country houses and garden parties from whence he sprang.

"Quadrophenia"

IUC Members Only

"What passes for a successful musical at the end of the 1970s is typified by this violent, screaming and wholly unattractive amalgam of noise, violence, sex and profanity" - Quadrophenia isn't quite as good as the notoriously crusty Leslie Halliwell's assessment might lead you to believe, but it's remarkable that such a fractured artefact - a depiction of early 1960s pop culture reflected through the prism of a rather awful prog rock opera on to a film suffused with the post punk aesthetic of 1979 - should stand the test of time so well.

Phil Daniels is Jimmy, a committed Mod who participates enthusiastically in the battles against the Rockers in Brighton during the summer of 1964. But, as his life crumbles around him, Jimmy finds his fiercely held identity collapsing into mental disorder.

Franc Roddani's film is helped by the fact that, the wheels of fashion having turned around again. Modism is fairly hip in the mid 1990s. Traces of Quadrnphenia's pill popping characters can be seen in the hip, skinny, don't give a damn anti heroes of Trainspotting, for example. Roddam also manages to keep The Who's dreadful dirges to a minimum until the last 10 minutes (when they become intolerable), but there's a lot of good stuff before that in this perceptive portrait of an era.

For some reason, British cinema has hardly ever managed to engage wholeheartedly with the youth sub cultures which have given the country much of its energy over the last four decades but Quadrophenia, in a welcome rerelease, is one of the exceptions.

"Acts of Love" (18s)

Virgin, Dublin.

If naked, blonde, 17 year old girls (Amy Locane) on horseback or the chance to see Dennis Hopper take a break from his repertoire of psychopaths and also take his clothes off interest you, this might appeal. It's a pity Bruno Barreto's film veers so far in the direction of titillating soft porn, because there's the basis of a solid, character driven drama here, which gets completely lost through miscasting (Hopper), excessive melodrama, a convenient resolution, and all those golden lit sex scenes, at least half of which seem gratuitous.

The arrival of the sexually adventurous, emotionally unstable Katherine (Locane) to Joseph Swendon's classroom is the stuff of menopausal fantasy, disrupting the tired patterns of his life in rural Texas in the 1960s, where he works as an unqualified high school teacher, living on a farm with his elderly, ill mother. For years he has been conducting a stagnant affair with his childhood sweetheart (Amy Irving), another teacher and the widow of his best friend. Soon he's rolling in the hay (literally) with Katherine and putting in jeopardy everything he holds dear - especially his blood pressure.

Irving, as a stoical, reserved woman who is wounded and puzzled by Joseph's behaviour, and Hal Halbrook as his doctor and confidante, give strong, convincing performances, and the interiors and landscapes of the mid west are evocatively designed (by Peter Paul Raubertas) and shot (by Declan Quinn). Otherwise, this is strictly straight to video stuff.