A cinematic

diet of sex

and horrific violence? Why,

it must be Shakespeare

TWO of this week's releases rather neatly represent the highs and lows of movie-making in the first year of the 21st century. One is a stunningly successful experiment, aimed at a niche audience; the other is a gross-out comedy made for the mass market.

Tightly adapted from Shakespeare's earliest play, Titus Andronicus, Julie Taymor's Titus is a lurid tale of revenge. It contains (in no particular order) war, human sacrifice, infanticide, rape, torture, dismemberment, suicide, cannibalism, and, of course, pots and pots of vengeance. In other words, just your typical day in the un-Holy Roman Empire.

Taymor, who has never made a feature film before, directs with a maturity beyond her cinematic experience. Like an increasing number of new film-makers (Sam Mendes and Stephen Daldry to name but two) she comes from a theatrical background. She received a Tony award for her direction of the New York stage version of The Lion King. In 1994 she made an acclaimed production of Titus Andronicus off-Broadway and it is upon that which this new film is based.

Anthony Hopkins heads a predominately British cast as the eponymous Roman general who, having ordered the ritual sacrifice of one of his captives, sets off an ugly and violent chain of events the likes of which no Hollywood horror scriptwriter could, even in his wildest dreams, have imagined.

Jessica Lange is as sexy as ever playing Tamora, captured queen of the Goths and mother of the sacrifice victim; a woman to whom revenge is a dish best served piping hot. Determined to get her own back on her boy's killer, she marries newly-appointed Emperor Saturninus (Alan Cumming), a superbly decadent and limp-wristed rogue, and promptly proceeds to set Titus up for a fall.

Tragedy and black farce combine as Titus moves towards its gory, wonderfully over-the-top, conclusion. Lange is fabulous, Hopkins is mesmerising, and Angus Macfadyen (though somewhat chunkier these days) delivers a fine performance as Titus's loyal son.

But it is Taymor's direction, containing as it does some inspired imagery and remarkable setpieces, which really makes this film stand out. It's the Shakespeare of Baz Luhrmann rather than Kenneth Branagh. Her trick is to set the film in some imaginary time which is not quite ancient Rome and not quite fascist Italy in the 1930s, thereby making the story timeless. In this she is ably assisted by some stunning set designs (from Dante Ferretti) and breathtaking costumes (from Milena Canonero). A movie then which, though challenging, is absorbing and completely accessible.

And so from the almost sublime to the faintly ridiculous. Now, cast your mind back to the early eighties and the emergence of a young black American comic actor called Eddie Murphy. Brash, arrogant, and aggressive, he burst on to the screen in Walter Hill's 48 Hours. And, for a brief period, it looked as if he could do no wrong. Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, and Coming To America were all showpiece vehicles for Murphy's

extraordinary talents.

His contribution should not be underestimated. Before Murphy emerged you could count on the fingers of one hand (and still have a thumb to play with) the number of black actors in Hollywood. Woody Strode, Sidney Poitier, Richard Roundtree, and the former athlete Jim Brown are the only ones who spring to my mind. But Murphy's success helped to open the door for a new generation of black actors. Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman were (far more serious) contemporaries and you can follow a line from there all the way through to Lawrence Fishbourne, Samuel L Jackson, Will Smith, and Cuba Gooding Jnr.

On Murphy's downside, however, there is the fact that he was always portraying the black man as a jester and, thereby, perpetuating the folly of the racial stereotype.

As it turned out, by the late 1980s Murphy's bubble had burst. Perversely, his mistake was to take too much control over the product. Not content with simply acting, he started to write, direct, and produce his own movies. The result was a series of ill-judged projects which progressively reduced Murphy's box office potential and, therefore, his Hollywood clout.

Then in 1996 came an unexpected return to form with, of all things, The Nutty Professor, a re-make of the old Jerry Lewis comedy and a one-man Murphy success show. Now comes the sequel, Nutty Professor II - The Klumps. And what an undignified and disappointing mess it is (though it's not entirely the fault of Mr Murphy).

The plot, equal parts convoluted and muddled, involves the same character - jumbo-sized Professor Sherman Klump - inventing a revolutionary youth serum and falling for his beautiful collegiate colleague Professor Denise Gaines (Janet Jackson, looking frighteningly like her bizarre brother Michael or is it, perhaps, the other way round?).

Then, just when wedding bells are about to chime, an unwelcome guest arrives in the shape of Sherman's bad-guy alter-ego, Buddy Love, who sets out to steal the serum and ruin the big man's nuptials.

If you like schoolboy jokes about farting and naked old wizened women with droopy breasts then this one is for you (though so, too, is aversion therapy). Murphy, once again, plays the entire Klump clan and, thanks to the wonders of latex and theatrical make-up he's pretty convincing as all of them. Trouble is, for those of us unfamiliar with the yo-bro' jive talk of Murphy's black America, much of the script is utterly incoherent. So all that's left are the physical antics of the Klumps - and that, believe me, is not a pretty sight.

local timing of the autumn school holidays will determine exactly when Disney's mightily impressive new animation, Dinosaur, makes it to a screen near you. Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the West won't see it until next Friday; most of the rest of the country can see it from tomorrow.

It's a triumph of technology; a blend of live-action photography, special effects wizardry, and computer-animated characters. Nobody does this kind of thing better than Disney.

Directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton, Dinosaur features (the voices of) D B Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Julianna Margulies, and Dame Joan Plowright. Set 65 million years ago, it follows the adventures of an iguanodon called Aladar who is separated from his own species as a hatchling and raised by a family of lemurs. When a devastating meteor shower plunges their world into chaos, Aladar escapes and joins a group of migrating dinosaurs in their desperate search for a new nesting ground.

Paint and brushes are pretty much redundant at the Disney factory these days, replaced by digital technology and computers. Dinosaur required 70,000 CD-ROMs' worth of information, with 100 million individual files created by 250 computer processors. The production credits run to something like 500 names. A record, surely? The result is a visually stunning piece of work.

Sorted, directed by Alexander Jovy from a screenplay by Nick Villiers, is a thriller-cum-love story set amidst the London club scene. It stars Matthew Rhys as a lawyer caught up in a dangerous web of drugs, blackmail, and deceit. Co-stars include Tim Curry, Jason Donovan, and Big Breakfast failure Kelly Brook.

I can't pass critical judgment on Sorted. There was no press screening and while the distributers were kind enough to send me a review video copy, they sent me the wrong film.

With Goya In Bordeaux, a classy biopic of the eighteenth-century Spanish artist Francisco Jose de Goya Lucientes, director Carlos Saura paints a portrait of a turbulent career. From his deathbed, the 82-year-old Goya (Francisco Rabal) looks back upon the women and the works of art which shaped his life (and there were lots of both). Beautifully filmed (by Saura's regular cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), it's awfully nice to look at, though the nature of the subject will attract a very particular audience.

Finally this week, Water Drops On Burning Rocks, a French adaptation of a play written by (a teenage) Rainer

Werner Fassbinder. Directed by Francois Ozon and starring Bernard Giraudeau, it's a downbeat study of the mind-games played by a quartet of peculiarly sex-obsessed characters in 1970s Germany. Giraudeau plays Leopold, a middle-aged businessman who starts an affair with Zidi, a 19-year-old boy he picks up in the street. To complicate matters, Leopold has a transsexual ex-lover (played by the American actress Anna Thomson) and the boy a fiancee. An odd and difficult film, not to everyone's taste.