CINEMA: It's all in the worst possible taste

Kevin Smith isn't renowned for his good taste. His debut film, Clerks, featured a scene in which an old man suffered a fatal coronary while masturbating in the toilet of a 24-hour convenience store. His second, Mallrats, contained what I will decorously describe as the Chocolate Pretzels Incident. In his latest, Chasing Amy (18), his characters swap stories about injuries sustained during cunnilingus; one gains the cryptic high-school nickname "fingercuffs" for having sex with multiple partners; another is the author of a comic-book entitled White-Hating Coon. Smith's film is often mortifyingly filthy, but it's also a disarming, generous and affectionate romantic comedy.

Its plot features the sort of love story that Simon Bates would never have allowed on "Our Tune". Holden (Ben Affleck) is a naive middle-class boy from the New Jersey suburbs. He falls desperately in love with Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), a sassy, experienced urbanite. The consequences are problematic for both - Holden is shocked to find that he has developed a sophisticated friendship with a woman, and also sees that this will displace his relationship with his best mate and creative partner, Banky (an irrepressibly crude Jason Lee). And, as she's a lesbian, Alyssa is yet more troubled by Holden's proposal, particularly as she finds herself reciprocating his feelings. Meanwhile, Banky's antagonism towards Alyssa suggests that his interest in Holden is more than just platonic. And before the audience know where they are, Kevin Smith has reinvented the comic romance. Or perhaps he's moved it closer to its Shakespearean roots - there's certainly an echo of Twelfth Night in its barrage of muddled sexual impulses. Otherwise, it's refreshingly difficult to detect its influences: an originality that neatly exposes the emptiness of trite exercises like One Fine Day or A Life Less Ordinary.

It's a big, brave idea to suggest that love is more powerful than sexuality. Smith knows he's on potentially iffy territory as he constructs a narrative that suggests a straight man can - however temporarily - persuade a lesbian to fall in love with him. But he handles his characters with a compassionate delicacy. (A cameo from Guinevere Turner, diva of low-budget lesbian cinema, also gives the film a certain queer cachet.) And for all the foul-mouthed raconteuring, there is an endearing teeny innocence about the romance which blooms between Smith's protagonists, a chaste affair that makes Gregory's Girl look like Last Tango in Paris. It's this restraint that facilitates Smith's best scene, Holden's declaration of love: an impassioned, perfectly phased paean without a trace of the Hallmark schmaltz that usually infects such speeches. Romance isn't dead: it's alive and well in New Jersey, and knows all the muckiest jokes.

It's shocking that a film like Chasing Amy - in which one of the heroes shows a child his collection of bestial pornography - could actually be more PC than one about a woman who achieves success within an all-male professional institution. But Ridley Scott's GI Jane (15) proves it can be done. Scott's customary subject is women triumphing against adversity - male sexual violence (Thelma and Louise) or a salivating crustaceoid monster (Alien). But GI Jane is different. Rather than taking on the opposition, Demi Moore's Lieutenant Jordan O'Neill wants to subsume herself in its unthinking viciousness. Her aim is simply to achieve an equality of brutality with a group of men who, outside a military context, would probably be considered sociopaths. Like the pigs in Animal Farm, she reinvents herself in the image of her oppressors, shaving her head and yelling "suck my dick!" And we're supposed to applaud.

Her induction course with the US Navy Seals is co-ordinated by the sadistic Master Chief (Viggo Mortensen, who in his tiny shorts, moustache and baseball cap, looks like some sort of Afrikaner fetish queen). His training programme concludes with a jungle scenario in which the violence visited upon candidates by their instructors breaks every rule of the Geneva Convention. This is Heart of Darkness with a miserable twist - O'Neill gets to confront her Kurtz, but instead of being horrified by his degradation, she signs up for the job and the pension scheme.

Scott's direction is emphatic about both the inhuman cruelty of this training process and Moore's right to endure it. But he refuses to consider why any sane person would want to join this band of gunners and garotters in the first place. The film offers its audience a crass, mean-minded, cartoonish version of reality that's woefully incurious about its own characters: these performing Seals have no more personality than do the sort you see at the circus. There is little comradeship or emotion evident, and we don't learn why any of these people have volunteered, other than "to blow shit up". Finally, as O'Neill, the Master Chief and their team are plucked from training for a covert mission on Libyan soil, GI Jane emerges as the story of a woman who exchanges one intolerance for another: she manages to negotiate US military misogyny in order to embrace its anti-Islamic chauvinism. This spurious attempt to co-opt feminism makes for a muddle-headed, anti-human 125 minutes in the cinema. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, except perhaps, that it provides Demi Moore with a role completely suited to her humourless acting style.

If GI Jane's protagonists are featureless blanks, then the theatrical family assembled by Henry Jaglom in Last Summer in the Hamptons (15) seems almost surfeited with detail. This is partly due to Jaglom and Victoria Foyt's intelligent, ceaselessly talkative script, and partly because they have requisitioned great chunks of their actors' biographies in its assembly. The matriarchal Helena, for instance, is a grand old Swedish actor who once starred in Hollywood opposite Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan. She's played by the late Viveca Lindfors, a grand old Swedish actor who, well, you know the rest. We even see her watching TV reruns of her back catalogue, recounting memories that are presumably her own.

Jaglom sends up theatrical pretensions and insecurities with a cruel relish: playwright Jake (played by Jon Robin Baitz) dodges actors' excessive compliments and career-minded sexual favours; New York director Eli (Ron Rifkin) clips his nasal hair with neurotic diligence; movie-star Oona ( co-screenwriter Foyt) is so nervy that she has to do animal improvisations before meeting new people (we see her flapping about on her bedroom floor as a baby seal - a civilian one this time). But to prevent these observations on the relationships between acting and sincerity from becoming too unkind, Jaglom bathes his film in nostalgia - this is the family's final summer in their Long Island home, and a production of The Cherry Orchard is being staged in the garden. There are dozens of allusions to Chekhov throughout the plot and dialogue, and Jaglom's rough, unfussy direction owes something to Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. It's an attractive and deceptively modest work from a director who knows what actors and acting are for. And, like a good production of Chekhov, it lends its bourgeois self-absorption a compelling intensity and warmth.

Incognito (15) stars Speed II's Jason Patric as a forger of old masters. The idea of Patric knowing his arts from his elbow is quite difficult to take seriously, so to see him scowling in a beret and explaining the meaning of chiaroscuro feels just as odd as it would be to watch Sister Wendy doing breast-stroke though the ballast-tank of a cruise liner. He walks into fusty little shops, saying "I need badger-hair brushes," without a flicker of irony. He makes wise pronouncements about paintings: "Like an autobiography, they tell a wordless story." (And there was me thinking autobiographies had words in them.) It's a masterpiece of unintentional hilarity, and immeasurably more diverting than this week's supposedly genuine comic article, Trial and Error (12). Jonathan Lynn's ho-hum effort offers Jeff Daniels doing his drunk act, and some clumsy physical business from Seinfeld's Michael Richards. I found it excruciating, but it might entertain its target audience, the very easily amused.

Lastly, Full Contact (18) is the outlandish jamboree of sex and sadism you'd expect from Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, and the operatic crudeness of its images is neatly harmonised with the crass weirdness of its dialogue. Libidinous villainess (Bonnie Fu): "Check and see if there's a hole in my panties." Upstanding hero (Chow Yun Fat): "No, but I can see a vomiting crab." No answers on a postcard, please.

Cinema details: Going Out, page 8.