Here's to nerd power

APOLLO 13 Ron Howard (PG)

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Sam Raimi (15)

A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE Gillies Mackinnon (PG)

THE BAIT Bertrand Tavernier (18)

Apollo 13 has been commended by Newt Gingrich as an "amazingly wonderful movie"- which must make it automatically suspect in certain eyes. The story is this: three astronauts, led by Tom Hanks, have a blow- out as they are about to land on the moon, and it is only their own courage and the dedication and know-how of the boffins back in Houston that will save them.

For a film supposedly fascinated by problem solving, it's surprisingly hazy about the technical nuts and bolts of the rescue mission, even the simplest operation, in which the team cobbles together a carbon dioxide filter out of socks, tubing and, no doubt, a Fairy Liquid bottle and sticky- back plastic. But then Apollo 13 offers some big issues to compensate: it has heroics, it has triumphalism, it has, detractors say, a revisionist view of the Sixties where (Forrest Gump-like) teamwork, unity and national enterprise eclipse the social upheavals that scarred that decade.

But then it appears that Bill Clinton approves of it, too. It doesn't approach the subtleties of Philip Kaufman's far more interesting The Right Stuff, which played off its lone cowboy-pilot - Chuck Yeager - against the astronauts who, in Nasa's vast corporate machinery, sometimes felt like little more than "lab rabbits". But the film is veined with ironies (the mission as the last gasp of a space programme about to expire in cutbacks; the desperation of trumpeting it as Nasa's "most successful failure"), which a more sophisticated, or more cynical, director than Ron Howard might have thrust further to the fore.

There are some nicely observed moments of bitten-back male emotion: Gary Sinise as the fourth astronaut, making you feel the biggest disappointment of his life, when he learns he's been bumped from the mission; Hanks, quickly hiding his flicker of hurt when his wife announces she won't be at the launch; Ed Harris, as the control-room leader, at last allowing the tension to erupt in something close to tears when the splash-down is successful.

But these are stolid men with simple, no-nonsense names: Jim, Fred, Jack, Gene, Ken. And nothing in the film resembles what Wayne's World called the "Oscar clip" - the big, showboating scene that would secure Hanks the Academy hat trick. His character's a courtly individual, laconic even in adversity ("Houston, we have a problem"), with an old-fashioned formality that finds him, as his colleagues fly at each other's throats, addressing them as gentlemen.

The most thrilling scenes are not the tight close-ups of the spacemen hunched miserably in their dark module (for a space movie Apollo 13 is remarkably claustrophobic: you rarely see out of the window, and the only bit of them that goes out in space is their urine, cascading through the galaxy in a surreally beautiful golden shower). It's the restless, swooping crane and tracking shots in the control room where, thanks to anparade of lightly drawn bit players, the real decisions are made. Its stars are not the clean-cut, personable, boring action men in the space module, but the sweaty, overweight, chain-smoking, coffee-swilling, short-sleeved polyester shirt-wearing, pens-in-the-top-pocket guys beavering away anonymously at the controls to bring them home. Let's hear it, gentlemen, for nerd power.

After Army of Darkness and Darkman, Sam Raimi, the once-promising director of The Evil Dead, needs a good movie. The Quick and the Dead isn't that exactly, but it is a playful and moderately enjoyable homage to the spaghetti Western. Here, however, the lone gunslinger riding into town, dustcoat flapping in the wind, cigarillo in mouth, is a woman: Sharon Stone, out to avenge the death of her father.

The Quick and the Dead benefits from lively direction, all Sergio Leone- style massive close-ups and off-kilter camera angles, and from an uncommonly good cast - rather better, in fact, than the material deserves. Stone's character is a disappointment. She sports great designer gear and sleeps with her boots on, but is a washout as a tough, emasculating heroine - she spends much of the film moping about looking anxious and distraught. But the ever-wonderful Gene Hackman picks up the slack as the film's sadistic but tormented villain, and Leonardo DiCaprio is cocky, touching and vulnerable as his illegitimate son.

In A Simple Twist of Fate, Steve Martin becomes a miserly recluse after discovering that his wife's baby is not his own, but learns to love again when an orphaned girl toddles, one winter night, into his isolated country cabin. Cue long scenes of father-daughter bonding (this is yet another new Hollywood film about parenting where mothers are apparently superfluous) in which Martin, a master-carpenter, crafts cunning wooden toys and buys antiques for his little girl: his house is a regular museum of American folk art. It's a highly sentimental film, but also a sombre, rather downbeat one, and loosely based on George Eliot's Silas Marner. Hollywood's plundering of 19th-century classics continues shortly with Clueless, a comedy about dim-bulb Valley Girls drawn, if you please, from Jane Austen's Emma.

Bertrand Tavernier's The Bait is the latest in a long wave of films dealing with senseless juvenile delinquency. Based on a real case which shocked France, it's about a trio of youngsters who burgle, torture and murder rich men. Where many of the other movies (Fun, The Young Poisoner's Handbook, Butterfly Kiss) don't bother too much with the question of motivation, The Bait is disappointingly glib and banal - the blame is laid at the door of violent American films and vacuous TV shows, and the kids' obsessive consumerism: like the twisted hero of Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, they just can't stop dropping brand names. And there's also a slightly queasy mix of censoriousness and prurience in its portrayal of the nymph- like girl whose provocative sexual charms get the killers into their victims' apartments.

n On release from tomorrow