1 / DEEP IMPACT

LONDON

1 / SLIDING DOORS

TRUMAN CAPOTE by George Plimpton, Picador pounds 20

FORGET the Oscar nominations! It's the Cries & Whispers Film Awards that count (not to be confused with last week's CRIES & WHISPERS music awards). And here are the winners!

Boogie Nights, on general release

1 The Wings of the Dove

A film about the American pornography industry is not the first place you'd look to find a celebration of conformity and family life, but it's there at the heart of Boogie Nights, the second feature from the 26-year-old writer/ director Paul Thomas Anderson. The porn industry has traditionally been depicted as a place of ugliness and corruption, in films such as Inserts and Hardcore, but Anderson gives it a homeliness that owes much to nostalgia for a time before Aids (the story unfolds in Los Angeles between 1977 and 1984). The characters in Boogie Nights, just like the Addams Family or the junky clan of Drugstore Cowboy, have their own equivalent of the weekend barbecue - though admittedly, few families would consider ejaculation a suitable subject for the tea table.

Myth: Have you seen Mark Wahlberg in his previous incarnation as the Calvin Klein underwear model? This "Hello Girls" vision certainly fuelled vivid imagination - but could a 13-inch number fit in those pants? No. In reality, Mark's role as an appendage-advantaged porn star in Boogie Nights, included a prosthetic, erm, John Thomas.

In the Seventies he ruled Hollywood, in the Eighties he fell into B-movie, chatshow hell, and now, finally, Burt Reynolds is back, as the slimy porn merchant in the hit disco nostalgia fest `Boogie Nights'. Nick Hasted charts his recovery.

With the release of 'Boogie Nights', 27-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson is being hailed as 'the new Tarantino'. What's more, his tale of late- 1970s hustlerdom is even better than it's hyped

`Boogie Nights', a dark comedy about the rise, fall and partial rise again of a male porn star, is out next week. Laurence O'Toole looks at a film that features Mark Wahlberg - aka Marky Mark, white rapper and Calvin Klein underwear model. Is thi s the first of a new genre of Hollywood art porn films? With a title like Boogie Nights, you know you're in for a vintage disco soundtrack and some dodgy dancing gear to match. Though the director, Paul Thomas Anderson is too young to have lived the disco lifestyle, he lays on a feast of period kitsch: bubble perms, Saturday Night Fever line- dance sequences, gaudily-patterned polyester shirts. Kitsch is also how he characterises Seventies cinematic porn, captive to bad taste, loud emotions and sensual excess.

Julianne Moore understands the illusory nature of stardom as well as most. In the bound-to-shock `Boogie Nights' she plays a porn star - as illusory an occupation as you can find on the seedier fringes of Hollywood. She talks to Nick Hasted about fame and fear.

Since the attempts to censor david Cronenberg's Crash any film which attempts to tackle sex and violence feels threatened with a ban. Chris Darke examines offerings at the London Film Festival whose controversy might outweigh their worth.