William Russell has reservations about a movie with polish, but finds much to smile at in a surreal comedy

SET in Montreal, although the setting is an irrelevance, Alan Rudolph's Afterglow is a mannered comedy about four deeply unhappy people. Julie Christie got an Oscar nomination for her performance as Phyllis, one-time star of horror movies, now retired and living with her husband, Lucky (Nick Nolte), himself a one-time Hollywood player, now a handyman who services his female customers on the side. Christie is not the cinema's greatest actress, but she is a genuine star and can still, although the wrong side of 50 - that facelift is celebrated - light up the screen.

The marriage is unhappy, but the couple have found a way of living together in spite of some past tragedy about which they do not talk, but which clearly looms over everything they do. This modus vivendi is threatened when Lucky meets Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle), the neglected wife of a frigid businessman, Jeffrey Byron (Jonny Lee Miller). She wants children. He does not want sex, let alone children, and could be gay.

Phyllis, spying on her errant husband, meets Jeffrey in the bar where the lovers are having a tryst and they start a flirtation which she has no intention of consummating. Eventually the foursome meet and things take their course. Christie is gorgeous to watch, elegant, self-contained, and fragile. That poise is always on the verge of being shattered. It is a lovely performance, and she gets good support from Nolte in a role which could all too easily have been simply the standard randy middle-aged stud. He too is living on borrowed time.

The ladies he pleasures will soon have no time for this already sagging at the edges Lothario. Flynn Boyle, a mannered and sometimes irritating actress, makes Marianne, a passionate woman trapped in a loveless marriage, fairly sympathetic, but Lee Miller's cold fish wedded to work is pure cardboard. His infatuation with Phyllis is understandable, but why she should give this icy prat the time of day is not, even in terms of getting her own back on the cheating Lucky by having a fling of her own. Rudolph's polished, glittering film doesn't quite build up the required tension or engage our sympathies for, and interest in, the characters' predicaments, but when all else fails there is always Christie to watch, and that in itself is pleasure enough.

The production notes for Nowhere, directed by Gregg Araki, disclose that this, his first big-budget feature, is not only the concluding part of a trilogy, of which the other parts were The Doom Generation and Totally F****ed Up, but it ''marks the end of his film adolescence''. Sorry, Gregg baby, but you have a few years to go yet before that happy day. It is set in Los Angeles and deals with the lives, mostly the sex lives, of a group of young, beautiful people who are into partying, doing drugs, and messing about in cars while waiting for the end of the world. Dark Smith (James Duval) is looking for true love, his girlfriend Mel (Rachel True) has a lesbian lover, Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson), and his fellow student, Montgomery (Nathan Bexton), who has one green eye and one blue eye, thinks he might be in love with Dark, whom everyone wisely calls Dork. Montgomery gets abducted by an alien,

several people get killed, some unusual sexual practices are performed, and a TV evangelist (John Ritter) urges them all to think of Jesus, or, as the captions on the TV screen put it, Je$u$. It is mad, funny, surreal, and funky affair which is frequently rather good to look at.

Romantic comedy always suffers from the fact that, because we know from the start that lovers will get together at the end, once things start to go awfully wrong interest starts to wane, unless the plot is sufficiently inventive. Frank Coracci's The Wedding Singer slips into third gear about two thirds of the way through, which is a pity. But when it is in top gear - and it gets back there by the last stretch - it is very funny. Adam Sandler plays Robbie Hart, a musician and songwriter who performs at weddings, at one of which he meets pretty waitress Julia (Drew Barrymore, looking very pretty indeed, but given far too little to do beyond smile). His career goes down the plughole when Robbie is jilted at the altar by the awful Linda (Angela Featherstone), transforming him from Mister Nice Guy into Mister Embittered who has to earn a living singing at Bar Mitzvahs because weddings put him

into deep depression.

AFTER that the rest of the film is spent rescuing Julia, with whom he has fallen in love, from her engagement to Wall Street investment banker louse Glenn Gulya (Matthew Glave), although any sensible young woman would have spotted long before she does that changing one's name to Julia Gulya is not the wisest thing to do.

There is a very funny opening sequence at which Robbie saves the day when a wedding reception is spectacularly ruined by the very drunk best man (a barn-storming turn from Steve Buscemi), good work from Alexis Arquette as a very camp androgynous backing singer in Robbie's band who can be counted on to destroy the mood at any wedding with his warbling, and a mad finale involving Billy Idol of all people.

When the plot gets thin, the film has a tendency to have Sandler sing another song, but they are, by and large, pleasant on the ear and he has lots and lots of charm.

The production designer, Perry Blake, has done a splendid job creating a glorious 1985 tuppence-coloured world for

the weddings which punctuate the story.

CourtROOM dramas rarely fail, and Red Corner has the added interest of the fact the courtroom is not somewhere in the United States with James Earl Jones presiding, but in Beijing. Jack Moore (Richard Gere), in Beijing to set up a Chinese-American satellite venture, picks up a pretty model (Jessey Meng) and takes her back to his hotel room. In the morning she is dead and he is arrested and gets a female defender (Bail Ling), who does not believe he is innocent and puts in a plea of guilty in order to win leniency. It is, of course, a set-up.

No masterpiece, it stretches credulity occasionally, as such films do, but fulfils the essential demand of the thriller genre - it thrills. The surprise courtroom twist at the end is of Perry Mason quality.

In The Replacement Killers, one of those crash, bang, wallop affairs where the stunts are its raison d'etre, the Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-fat plays hitman John Lee who becomes involved with a femme fatale passport forger (Mira Sorvino) when he tries to extricate his family from the clutches of a Chinese mobster (Kenneth Tsang). John Woo produced so you know what to expect.

New releases

Afterglow (15) 115 mins. Directed by Alan Rudolph

GFT from tomorrow, Filmhouse from June 19

Nowhere (18) 85 mins. Directed by Gregg Araki

Filmhouse

The Wedding Singer (12) 97 mins. Directed by Frank Coraci

Red Corner (15) 120 mins. Directed by Jon Avnet

Replacement Killers (18) 87 mins. Directed by Antoine Fuqua

On general release from tomorrow

(Sunday is National Cinema Day when, at participating cinemas, tickets will be half price.

Treat yourselves.)