Cut to frills of the chase

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

GFT from tomorrow, Filmhouse from June 5.

The General (15) 129 mins. Directed by John Boorman.

Dark City (15) 100 mins. Directed by Alex Proyas.

Wishmaster (18) 89 mins. Directed by Robert Kurtzman.

On general release from tomorrow.

REMAKE is a cinema term. Nobody ever talks about the remake of Hamlet, or even of The Real Inspector Hound, to go from the sublime to the farcical. In the cinema it tends to imply diminishing returns, in the theatre a new vision. The problem, of course, is that the cinema original usually survives in substance, so comparisons can be made, although Hollywood has been known to buy up and destroy continental originals it has subsequently debased. Live performances, on the other hand, live on only in memory, which is inevitably selective. Maybe Bernhardt, Duse, Terry, Richardson, Ashcroft, and Olivier were not all that good after all, or would not seem so today, while we can judge for ourselves when it comes to the likes of Davis, Crawford, Valentino, the sisters Gish, Gable, or Astaire.

Wisely, Agnieszka Holland has returned to the original novel for Washington Square. Henry James's story was turned into a celebrated play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, filmed in 1949 by William Wyler as The Heiress with Olivia de Havilland as Catherine Sloper, Ralph Richardson as her father, and Montgomery Clift, then at the height of his beauty, as the fortune hunter, Morris Townshend. De Havilland got an Academy Award, and the film is a deserved Hollywood classic, with one of those never-to-be-forgotten moments. Catherine, realising how she has been duped by Morris, resumes their relationship, invites him to call, and then sits inside, resigning herself to a life of sterile spinsterhood, while he bangs furiously on the locked door of her Washington Square mansion. Holland does not include it, because comparisons would have been odious and she has conceived the plot less in terms of a revenge

drama, more that of a woman surviving a man's treachery.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's Catherine is quite different from de Havilland's Catherine. She is a shy, plain, but ultimately strong young woman, cruelly abused, unwittingly by those who love her and deliberately by the man who professes to do so. Impetuous, foolish, socially awkward, and hesitant, Catherine discovers her strength at great cost to herself.

Albert Finney is a concerned father, who has blighted the life of the daughter he loves because she is not her mother, who died in childbirth, while Maggie Smith has a lovely time delivering one of her curlicues and frills performances as romantic Aunt Lavinia, who, half in love with Morris herself, turns a deliberate blind eye to his shortcomings.

Ben Chaplin, while good looking enough, is no substitute for Clift as the penniless man who wants a wife to live off, and is never venal enough beneath the surface charm. It has been handsomely photographed and Holland has conjured up a fascinating portrait of life among the well-heeled classes in New York towards the end of the last century.

John Boorman, who won the best-director prize last week at Cannes for The General, has had a few off years recently and this account of the life and times of the Irish criminal, Martin Cahill, played with strength and some wit by Brendan Gleason, is a return to form. Peter Mullan did not have a walkover last week for the best-actor prize for My Name is Joe, which makes his success all the sweeter. Cahill, who was assassinated by the IRA, was a robber, vicious to those in his gang whom he thought betrayed him - there is a crucifixion scene on a pool table which is as nasty as any - but he was not a killer. He became a legend, cheeking the Dublin constabulary, trotting round the streets, his anorak hood up, gifted with the gab.

Gleason has, according to those who knew Cahill, come up with a masterly impression of the man, half Robin Hood, half pixie, and Boorman, who wrote the script, has told his life succinctly and has taken an outsider, who is also an insider - he has lived in Ireland for the past 25 years - look at the pretensions of Irish society, one in which a crook can become a folk hero. Cahill's mistake was to sell the loot from one robbery - the theft of pictures from the Beit collection - to the Ulster Volunteer Force, something the IRA had failed to do. He embarrassed them and had to be put in his place. His murder was possible because the police surveillance, set up round the clock to stop his activities, mysteriously ended, allowing the assassins to get him and raising questions about collusion. The film has been shot in black and white to avoid the romanticism colour can lend to period tales, and

also the need colour imposes to make a statement. But it only half works, possibly because for all Seamus Deasy's skill, black and white photography is pretty well a lost art. Jon Voight plays the policeman whose mission it is to catch Cahill with authority.

Dark City is a handsomely shot science-fiction film set in a nameless city where it always seems to be midnight. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in his hotel room, naked, disoriented, and suffering from flash-backs, to receive a call from a Dr Schreber (Keifer Sutherland giving a weird and wonderful performance), who claims to be his psychiatrist. In no time Murdoch is on the run for his life, pursued by the Strangers (Richard O'Brien and Ian Richardson in long black macs camping it up something rotten), wanted by the police led by Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt, equally weird and wonderful) and bumping into a woman who claims to be his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) who may or may not be in league with the Stranger and may not be his wife. At midnight the city stops, changes shape, the inhabitants fall asleep, reawake, and the manhunt continues. It is the old tale about the aliens taking

over the human race - the sleeping city allows them to investigate our minds to find out where we hide our souls - but done with imagination, and Sewell makes an impressive hero, the set design is outstanding, and Proyas keeps his audience on the edge of their seats throughout.

Wishmaster opens in 1127 in Persia, where an evil Djinn is imprisoned in the inevitable bottle, and then moves to the present day. The bottle turns up in some auction room, gets broken, and the genie is released and sets off to find a young woman whom he believes has the power to release all the djinns in the world through the three wishes he must grant her. It is a knowing affair, one which sci-fi horror addicts will relish more than most of us who will not get the fact that characters are named after famous sci-fi writers. The usual splatter and schlock, it carries the Wes Craven seal of approval, although it is only a Craven production, not the work of the master himself.