William Russell is arrested by the sight of Sylvester Stallone acting, but thinks the makers of a PoW movie should be locked up

EVEN superstars can sometimes act. Sylvester Stallone, who has all too often gone through the muscle-bound motions, delivers a superb performance in Robert Mangold's CopLand, a story about corruption in the New York police force. He has done nothing better, and that includes his performance in Rocky. He should get one again for his role as Freddy Heflin, the thick-round-the-middle and thick-in-the-head, honest sheriff of Garrison, New Jersey, a suburb of New York colonised by the city's police force. Freddy, deaf in one ear after rescuing a drowning girl, is a stickit cop who hangs out with New York's finest in the local bar and longs to be one of them.

The strongly cast film - Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert de Niro co-star - directed with flair by Mangold, is reminiscent of Sidney Lumet, which is no criticism. A young policeman (Michael Rapaport) gets involved in a row with a pair of joyriders and shoots them as they are crossing Brooklyn bridge. But the men were unarmed, and he jumps off the bridge, his career in ruins. In reality he has been spirited away by his cop uncle (Keitel) to Garrison. The film deals with Freddy's crisis of conscience when he discovers the dead ''hero'' is there.

Janeane Garofalo, as Freddy's deputy, and Annabella Sciorra, as the girl he rescued, now unhappily married to a cop and with whom Freddy is in love, both make their mark, as does De Niro in a hideous wig as the man from Internal Affairs. Keitel, who can do this sort of role in his sleep, is splendidly nasty as a man in cahoots with the Mob, while Liotta makes a lot of his role as a policeman on the make whose greed leads to his girlfriend's death. They earn their billing, but it remain's Stallone's film.

Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road purports to be a true story about European women held in a prison camp in Sumatra for four years by the Japanese during the war. Two of them, a posh English lady, Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), and a douce little north country missionary, Margaret Drummond (Pauline Collins), set up a choir to help keep up morale. The acting is splendid, but Beresford's script lets them down.

It is a ragbag of cliches drawn from every movie ever made about women PoWs. The commandant is vaguely humane, his deputy is a sadist (signalled by casting an ugly actor), while the Japanese school teacher, who acts as interpreter, is played by a good-looking one. The women are stock characters - the slut who takes up the Japanese offer to become a whore in return for a good time, the woman who refuses to work, the snob, the lush, the feisty nun, the racially prejudiced one, the butch doctor, the one who gets tortured, and the beautiful young one who dies after seeing her husband, in the nearby men's camp, all bloodied after an escape attempt. Only lesbian love is missing.

Close does a decent Virginia McKenna as the noble conductor of the choir, Frances McDormand an equally good impersonation of Marlene Dietrich as the trouser-wearing Jewish doctor, Collins is very touching as the missionary, in real life called Margaret Dryburgh, author of the poem from which the film takes its title. Johanna Ter Steege makes her mark as a whisky-swigging nun who can fix broken-down lorries, while Jennifer Ehle suffers sweetly as the wife. But for all its efficiency, this maudlin, mawkish, and manipulative film is an insult to those whose stories it purports to tell.

The same is true of Robert Bierman's Keep The Aspidistra Flying, a travesty of George Orwell's grim novel. The script by Alan Plater is competent, although by starting with the would-be poet Gordon Comstock (Richard E Grant) working in the hated advertising agency he undercuts the story. Comstock's decision to leave that awful milieu to become a poet looks perverse, not an act of desperation and salvation. One is annoyed at the fool giving up a good job in such an attractive place for no obvious reason.

Bierman treats Orwell's material as a romantic comedy, but Grant's Comstock is so loathsome - a born whinger - one never cares whether he sinks or swims in the very phoney stews of Lambeth. The closing scene sums up what went wrong. In the novel Gordon and Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter, the best thing in the film) end up in a grotty flat in Paddington beginning their marriage on precious little. Here they are in a bijou Art Deco house in Metroland furnished with pieces destined for the Antiques Road Show.

The first of the big Christmas movies, The Borrowers, with John Goodman as a greedy lawyer seeking to take over the house in which dwell the little people who purloin all those objects ''human beans'' mislay, is pure delight. Funny and inventive, it does justice to Mary Norton's famous novels, and can stand comparison also with the delightful television adaptations. Jim Broadbent, Celia Imrie, Tom Felton, and Flora Newbigin have a whale of a time as the resident Borrowers, Goodman is hilarious as the avaricious legal eagle, and Hugh Lawrie and Ruby Wax appear to effect as a helpful policeman and an officious town hall lady. There is a stirring climax in a creamery, and good special effects. This is one for all the family.

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has been reissued in a spanking new print, good news for all who love this fable starring James Stewart as the would-be suicide shown what life would have been like in his home town had he never lived.

New releases

Copland (15) 125mins. Directed by James Mangold

Paradise Road (15) 121min. Directed by Bruce Beresford

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (12) 101mins. Directed by

Robert Bierman

The Borrowers (U) 101mins. Directed by Peter Hewitt

On general release

It's a Wonderful Life (U) 129mins. Directed by

Frank Capra

GFT and the Cameo, Tollcross

All films open tomorrow