Irreversible<br></br>The Banger Sisters<br></br>Love Liza<br></br>Real Women Have Curves<br></br>Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War

If you've heard of Irreversible (18), you're most likely to know it as The Film With The Rape In It. All the usual newspapers have ranted about it in all the usual ways, because Monica Bellucci's character, Alex, is seen to leave a party, take a shortcut through an underpass, and suffer a horrendous sexual assault. The camera doesn't flee the scene of the crime, so the audience has to watch the attack for nine horrifying minutes ­ either that or walk out, as many viewers did at Cannes last year.

You may also know Irreversible as The Film With The Murder In It. After Alex's rape, her boyfriend Marcus (Bellucci's real-life husband, Vincent Cassell) and another friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) track down the rapist and exact retribution. And you might have heard that we see the revenge before we see the rape. Like Memento ­ and, indeed, one episode of Seinfeld ­ Irreversible tells its story backwards, scene by scene, so that flashback is followed by flash-further-back followed by flash-further-back-still.

What hasn't been so well-publicised is that there are artistic reasons both for the violence and for the topsy-turvy structure. Having showed us the killing and then the rape, Gaspar Noé, the writer-director, shows us the preceding party, then the three friends on their way to the party, and then Alex and Marcus at home before they go out ­ and it's the horror of the former scenes that makes the latter ones seem almost surreal in their normality. Noé identifies how tragedy impels us to replay our memories, to zero in on the forks in the road, where life could have taken another route.

And he notes how, in retrospect, innocuous comments can take on a cruelly premonitory irony, while the most quotidian activity can seem precious with the knowledge that none like it can ever occur again. The film is a Memento-style memento mori. Alex and Marcus's initial/final happiness seems magical because we've seen the nightmare that comes after/before.

There's no doubt that some of it is nightmarish. The reprisal scene is over fairly quickly, but the rape is so harrowing it seems endless. Let's not forget, though, that if you go to The Duchess of Malfi at the National Theatre, you'll see some nasty scenes, too ­ and for once it's fair to compare a film with a play. The assault on Alex is shot from one angle, with no cuts and no music, so the viewer's position is far closer to that of a theatre-goer than of someone watching a conventional film. Instead of obsessing over how difficult Irreversible is to watch, we should consider how difficult it must have been to shoot. Noé asks his actors to stay in character for tracking shots that last several unbroken minutes each.

Vincent Cassell, in particular, is so limber in his body language and his moods that he deserves to win a cupboardful of awards.

What I can't defend is the homophobic representation of a gay club ­ called The Rectum, for goodness' sake ­ as a cacophonous, throbbing purgatory, where crowds of drugged-up troglodytes copulate beneath flickering red lightbulbs, and laugh at the sight of a gruesome beating. Bearing in mind that the club is where Marcus and Pierre go to find the perpetrator of a heterosexual rape, there's no justification for his lair to be a gay club at all, let alone one that would have the Gomorrah residents' association alerting Health and Safety. Irreversible's other distressing scenes, though, can be justified. My only real problem with them is that they've led Irreversible to be labelled The Film With The Rape In It. It's a great deal more than that.

The Banger Sisters (15) are Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon, two ex-groupies who screwed their way from one end of Sunset Boulevard to the other in the 1960s and 1970s. In the present day, Hawn is still a rock chick, but Sarandon is a mother hen, and a respected Arizona society hostess to boot.

She thinks she's put her past behind her until one day it knocks on her door, wearing leather trousers. A workable comedy set-up, then, but it's wrecked by irrelevant subplots and sloppy characterisation. As a vehicle for Hawn and Sarandon, it's an old banger.

Love Liza (15) is an indie film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and written by his big brother Gordy Hoffman. The acting half of the brotherhood is at its most doughy, ginger and adenoidal as a man knocked sideways by his wife's suicide. There's not a lot to the film, but it's not bad, and there's a charming bit in the middle about remote-controlled boats and planes. Real Women Have Curves (15) is a good-natured movie about a Mexican-American girl who wants to go to college against the wishes of her family. Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War (12A) stars Pauline Collins as a woman rebelling against the poor catering in her old folks' home. It's even more dated, staid and patronising than you might fear from that title. And it's more of a trial to watch than any of Irreversible.

n.barber@independent.co.uk