THE advantage of coming late to an argument - Lolita has already opened in London - is that one can refute some of the dafter things already said. Whatever else it may be, Adrian Lyne's film, against which a sustained campaign of vilification has been waged, is not, as has been claimed, one to which ''perverts and potential perverts will flock''. Vladimir Nabokov's novel, one of the great books of the century, deals with a paedophile, the scholarly Humbert Humbert, and his infatuation with a 12-year-old girl, Lolita, with whom, after her mother dies, he goes on a trip across middle America pursued by his rival for her affections, the sinister Clare Quilty.

Paedophilia is currently the subject of much hysteria. The film is not an apology for paedophile behaviour. Nor was the blackly comic novel, filmed in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick with James Mason as Humbert and Peter Sellers as Quilty. Kubrick's version aroused interest, but no great controversy. Times change and Lyne's film, getting a limited release here, may not be released in the US, where stomachs are even weaker. This is a sad state of affairs. Lyne and screenwriter Stephen Schiff have been remarkably faithful to the novel, although at times the film's tone falters, largely because it is very difficult to find the right image for what is acceptable in prose. Lolita eating a banana is a case in point.

Jeremy Irons, in one of his best screen performances, is a wonderfully tortured Humbert who knows he is doing wrong seducing his nymphet, here aged 14, but cannot help himself. Played with just the right degree of corrupted innocence by Dominique Swain, Lolita is ruined before our eyes, learning, as Humbert sed-uces her, the power she possesses to enslave.

Handsomely photo-graphed by Howard Atherton - the images of middle America in the immediate post-war years are strikingly beautiful - it goes over the top at the end when Quilty gets his comeuppance, but it remains one to see, to discuss, and to compare with Kubrick's version being shown on BBC television at the weekend. Serious film-goers will find it well worth their trouble. The rest can stay home and watch something unprurient like Blind Date, or go out to Deep Impact, the latest in a long line of end-of-the-world movies. Mimi Leder's film really should have been called Minimum Effect, because it fails the two tests any disaster movie must pass. One should care what happens to the characters, even though they are always drawn from stock, and when the special-effects climax comes it should be breathtaking. Here the characters are plastic, the effects tacky.

A comet is heading for earth. The cover-up is discovered accidentally by moustached television reporter, Tea Leoni. The President of the United States, Morgan Freeman, assures everyone that all that can be done is being done. A space mission is dispatched under the command of Robert Duvall, who once walked on the moon, to plant bombs on the comet and destroy it. Meanwhile, Ms Leoni's mother, Vanessa Redgrave, pines elegantly for her ex-husband, Maximillian Schell, wearing far too much mascara for comfort, who has traded her in for a younger model, and the boy who first spotted the comet on his telescope, Elijah Wood, a male Lolita if ever there was one, falls in love with his equally pre-pubescent girlfriend. Freeman explains that a million Americans chosen by lot will be housed in special caves dug in the limestone of Minnesota to ensure life goes on, but the rest must take their chance.

As for the rest of the world, that is not mentioned. Life as we know it is said to be threatened. Life as we know it is not on the screen in the first place. The White House survives.

Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh, loosely based on a Ruth Rendell novel, is

blackly comic, exciting, tuppence coloured (as are all his films), very sexy, and splendidly-acted. All that remains of Miss Rendell's book is the title and the basic idea of someone intruding into the lives of

others. The drop-dead gorgeous Victor (Liberto Rabal) accident-ally shoots a policeman, Javier Bardem, consigning him to a wheelchair. Bardem and his partner, Jose Sancho, have interrupted Victor in the flat of a girl he had sex with the night before, Francesca Neri, and, in the brouhaha, a shot

is fired. Six years later Victor, released from prison, insinuates himself into the lives of the now married Bardem and Neri, and has an affair with Sancho's battered wife, Angela Molina. Finding out what happens when Victor's iden-tity is discovered is a delight, and Almodovar even finds a new way of getting his male lead to strip to the buff. This time it involves a chip-pan fire! He also adds some telling criticism of the new Spain, where almost anything goes, and the repressive one over which

Franco reigned. Live Flesh is a hugely accomplished treat for his fans, and a splendid introduction for those unfamiliar with his work.

In The Man Who Knew Too

Little, Bill Murray, an American simpleton in London to visit his banker brother, ends up unawares in a plot by the British and Russian secret services to restart the cold war - he thinks he is taking part in a tourist-aimed live-theatre stunt in which people become characters in a play. Slight, but very funny, The Avengers and all those awful caper movies of 20-odd years ago are

sent up with gusto. Equally amusing is Wild Things, a tale of murder, mayhem, revenge, money, and sex set in the Florida Everglades, directed by John McNaughton.

The all-star cast includes Bill

Murray, and the labyrinthine plot is - well, labyrinthine.

Gummo is a weird, occasionally violent, frequently disgusting portrait of rural American white trash directed by Harmony Korine, who wrote Larry Clark's determinedly sensational Kids about underage, drug-taking, sexually-intercoursing New Yorkers. Although distasteful to watch, Gummo, a quasi-documentary with a largely amateur cast, rings sadly true to life as one does not wish anyone to have known it.