Sliding Doors (1998): review: 3.5/10

In London, a PR officer returns home early having been sacked for stealing vodka: the film then diverges into two parallel tales. In one she returns home to discover her partner, an aspiring writer, in bed with his ex, a bossy American woman; in the second, due to an accident, she comes home minutes later after the American has left, thus living a life of ignorance and misery as her partner continues his affair.

The film loses momentum after the first 30 minutes, becoming doleful, the comparasion of her alternate possible fortunes is less inspring than it might be. In the former, the heroine meets a flirtatious, gummy Scotsman who considers himself a great wit, but who, in truth, is a twerp and an obsequious bore. In the second, she continues to live unhappily with her boyfriend who has an unfortunate haircut.

The villain of the piece, the scribbler boyfriend, whose pusillanimity is the cause of our heroine's misery, is potentially the most amusing character in the film. She is a thick spinless drip who has little really to delight so it is a pity that his wickedness could not be more more exuberant, as this might have animated the film more: bad always so much more cinematic than good.

It's quite pleasurable seeing bits of London, though the film does little truly to exploit location, apart from some bridge and river shots. To me, London is a furtive city of crooked streets and secretive corners and the filmakers surely could have used this far more as metaphor for maritial deceit.

54 (1998): review: 5.5/10

A pretty young man, of low social origins, from New Jersey, seeks self advancement as a bartender in Studio 54, a fashionable New York discoteque in the late seventies.

The film attempts to combine a themes of juvenile ambition, friendship, and love with a biography of one of the disco's founders, Steve Rubell, and a history of the rise and fall of that disco.

Structurally the film holds: sadly, however, the dialogue and the ideas in the film are hackneyed: none of the characters seem possessed of an interior life of any interest, and their ambitions are banal.

I suspect also that the director lacked a clear moral position on the events depicted- it being quite unclear whether or not he wishes to celebrate hedonism, superficiality, tax evasion, drugtaking and licentious sex.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998): review: 2/10

A journalist and a lawyer drive to Las Vegas where they stay in a hotel which is hosting a police conference.

Other people's drug experiences are never interesting or funny: this film spends spends two hours hammering this point home.

Great Expectations (1998): review- 2/10

2/10 (one star for Gwyneth's bottom)

A Floridan painter, of low social origins, is romantically fixated by a snooty rich girl he met as a child.

He goes to New York to succeed as an artist, and where he tries to get her to have sex with him. Apart from being snooty she has no personality whatsoever but that doesn't bother him because she is good-looking in that insipid way that seems to entrance some people...

A contemporary US take on Dicken's novel, laboured in all scenes.

WARNING: some scenes in this film feature Francisco Clemente's paintings.

The Horse Whisperer (1998): review- 8/10

A girl she loses her leg and her friend is killed because of a riding accident. Her horse is also badly hurt.

The film tells the story of how the girl's mother takes her daughter and horse to be psychologically healed at a ranch in Montana.

The film is terribly wholesome, and occasionally twee, but it is so well acted and describes with such care the psychological changes in its characters that it deserves considerable praise.

It is also beautifully shot with a great soundtrack.

Pleasantvile (1998): review- 9/10

A boy and his sister are magically transported from the 1990s into a TV soap from 1958 where they question the orthodoxies of the time.

An intelligent film that challenges sweetly, with excellent acting and beautiful art direction.