New Films

CITIZEN KANE (U, 119 mins)

Director: Orson Welles

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten

The umpteenth re-issue of Welles's classic tells us little new. Expressionistic visuals are still sumptuous, its meditation on the nature of power as pertinent now as in 1941 (Citizen Murdoch, anyone?). Even the much-vaunted "Rosebud" mystery is now worn with familiarity. So here it is again: predictably a masterpiece.

Limited release

CRUSH PROOF (18, 91 mins)

Director: Paul Tickell

Starring: Darren Healy, Jeff O'Toole

Paul Tickell's coarse-grained picaresque tale has Darren Healy's tearaway out of jail and tangling with the ghosts of his past (angry ex, lesbian mum) on his dingy Dublin estate. Undeniably, Crush Proof travels to places few other films have visited, rustling up a vivid insight into Ireland's impoverished "pony kid" culture. The trouble is that without a sharp enough script, Tickell has trouble navigating a way back out again.

Limited release

THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN (12, 107 mins)

Director: Ulu Grosbard

Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams

Michelle Pfeiffer's mother-of-three mislays her son at a high-school reunion. Nine years later, she spies him again when he shows up asking to mow her lawn. But is it really him? The Deep End of the Ocean sets up its women's-mag dilemma with surprising restraint, if little emotional plausibility.

Countrywide

HUMAN TRAFFIC (18, 95 mins)

Director: Justin Kerrigan

Starring: John Simm, Shaun Parkes

One wild weekend with the Human Traffic crew; a likeable quintet of Cardiff clubbers wrestling (oh so genially) with problem parents, jealous boyfriends, impotence and the hidden codes of the Star Wars pictures. Less a movie than a kind of fanzine set to sound and movement, Justin Kerrigan's ingratiating debut deals out an indiscriminate mix of the great and the god-awful, the genuinely hip and the wincingly embarrassing. A stringent re-edit would have ironed out the kinks, but it might have siphoned off some of the charm along with it.

Countrywide

JEAN DE FLORETTE (PG, 121 mins)

Director: Claude Berri

Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil

See The Independent Recommends, right.

Limited release

VIGO - A PASSION FOR LIFE (15, 103 mins)

Director: Julien Temple

Starring: James Frain, Romane Bohringer

As film legends go, director Jean (L'Atalante) Vigo certainly offers rich biopic material; a driven, anarchistic visionary of fledgling French cinema who was dead before his 30th birthday. Sadly, Julien Temple's ham- fisted portrait bungles its big potential in a morass of expository dialogue, episodic plotting and camp theatricality.

Limited release

VIRUS (18, 99 mins)

Director: John Bruno

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin

Debut director John Bruno once served as a special-effects expert on The Abyss. It shows: Virus is a deep-sea chiller in which an imperilled salvage crew battles with an outer-space threat aboard a crippled research ship. Its characters are two-dimensional cannon fodder, and its plot is as schematic as a colour- by-numbers kit. The noisy, nonsensical Virus boasts state-of-the-art special effects and below-par human ones. In Hollywood, it seems, you can't have one without the other.

Countrywide

WITHOUT LIMITS (12, 118 mins)

Director: Robert Towne

Starring: Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland

Robert Towne's care-worn biopic of the late, near-great American runner Steve Prefontaine (who failed spectacularly at the 1972 Olympics) maintains a steady pace without ever quite working up to a sprint. Billy Crudup contributes an engaging lead turn as the raw young athlete whipped into shape by Donald Sutherland's intense track coach, yet Towne's screenplay lacks the edge, scope and ambiguities he once showed on classics such as Chinatown.

Countrywide