Film: Where there's brass, there's pluck

And the band played on: Mark Herman's tale of life after the pit is stirring stuff; meanwhile, De Niro schmucks it up in 'The Fan'

The first image in Brassed Off (15) is of little white lights, bobbing jauntily across the top of the screen in approximate time with a cheerful brass-band. For viewers of a certain vintage, it will be reminiscent of the bouncing balls that used to skip along projected lyrics, leading the cinema audience in communal singalongs. But after a few seconds, the bobbing lights come into focus, and are revealed to be the lamps on a group of miners' hats, deep underground. It's a neat effect, and a fair hint of what is to come. Brassed Off often looks like a jolly, old-fashioned community entertainment, but it keeps giving way to harsher and less comforting tones.

Not many of the film's touches are so quiet. In fact, its unremitting efforts to jerk tears or tickle ribs can be as subtle as flying pickets. But the great difference between Brassed Off and damp-eyed comedies of a more conventional stripe is that it isn't in the business of simply giving audiences their quota of warm feelings for the evening. Instead, it uses all the standard resources of the Hollywood feelgood movie to confront one of the most feelbad of all our nation's pains - pit closures and the despairing afterlife of ruined industrial towns.

Mark Herman, who both directed and wrote Brassed Off, must have been brushed by the muse when he decided to portray a doomed Yorkshire mining community by focusing on one of the few institutions that can bring a nostalgic glow to the vitals of socialists and High Tories alike: a colliery brass band. (Hasn't Prof Roger Scruton written in their praise? If not, why not?) For one thing, it allows him to dig deep into the emotional seams of the music itself, thanks to the mighty lungs of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, who supply the hummable soundtrack and appear as playing extras. Viewers who do not experience at least a minor obstruction in their throats during their moonlight rendition of "Danny Boy" are urged to seek immediate medical attention.

Still more usefully, it gives Herman scope for some legitimate scenes of uplift in a plot otherwise mired in hopelessness. The year is 1992, and although the imaginary pit town of Grimley is on the brink of collapse, with the vast majority of miners ready to give in and take redundancy, at least one person has other things on his mind: Danny (Pete Postlethwaite), the local bandleader, a stiff-backed, music-crazed martinet who is trying to kick enough spirit back into his players to put them through to the finals of a national band contest. (He is also - come on, you were warned about brazen appeals to pathos - dying of pneumoconiosis.) The lads, including Danny's son Phil (Stephen Tompkinson) and a sullen young blade by the name of Andy (the mandatory Ewan McGregor), aren't too impressed, but hormones prevail where pep-talks flop. Enter Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), a pert, tight-skirted young lass with a flair for the flugel. Even the oldsters start to feel a bit horny, and before long Grimley Colliery band is off on its ragged route to the Albert Hall.

Setbacks you expect, setbacks you get. Danny shuffles closer and closer to death's door; Gloria, lewdly nicknamed "Gloria Stitts" (again, you were warned) takes up with Andy but proves to be an unwitting pawn of the wicked management; and Phil - a lovely performance by Tompkinson, pitched somewhere between Homer Simpson and Pagliacci - having tried and failed to keep the loan sharks away from his family by moonlighting as a clown for children's parties, succumbs to despair, casts a "scab" vote for redundancy and tries to kill himself. The spectacle of him hanging by his neck high above the pit works, thrashing around in full circus fig, is one of the rare stylistic flourishes in a film that's otherwise well on the penny-plain side.

For all its clanging moments, Brassed Off is robust, occasionally stirring stuff, and distinctive in a number of ways: in taking a bloody-minded community for its hero, like some of the spikier Ealing comedies; in its rather un-English willingness to show people a rattling good time; and in its power to sucker-punch unwary spectators into imaginative sympathy for men once stigmatised as an Enemy Within. Parts of it are as gruelling as, say, Ken Loach's Raining Stones, but it deserves to reach masses of viewers who would sooner go down the pit themselves than fork out to see a state-of-the-nation movie. And though it doesn't labour the point, one of its more subdued topics is the real, if limited redemptions offered by the practice of any art. Where there's brass, there's pluck.

Shadows of his previous roles hang over Robert De Niro in The Fan (18), from Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy, each one serving as a sour reminder of how much better he can be. In the film's early, Rupert Pupkin phase, De Niro's character Gil Renard is a washed-up schmuck who works as a knife salesman - repeat, knife salesman - and comforts himself by identifying with the career of Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), an overpaid baseball star. (He's not the only one doing the identifying: the film cross-cuts between them in scene after scene, yellow- highlighting their similarities.) In its latter, Travis Bickle phase, he applies his job skills in new areas. Tony Scott directs this unremarkable matter in his standard style, souping up some otherwise fairly flaccid scenes with rock music played, in the words of Spinal Tap, at 11. Nice to hear "Sympathy for the Devil" and other Stones' oldies, though.

The most nearly amusing scene in The Glimmer Man (18) shows our policeman hero, Steven Seagal, taking a lie-detector test: it contains two mild jokes, one deliberate, the other possibly not. Deliberate joke: the operator, trying to get a "lie" response, asks him if he has ever climbed Everest. "Yes," he replies, and the needle does not flicker. (We are to infer that it would have read the same if he had been asked about his pioneering work in biochemistry, his period as an astronaut, or winning the Mrs Joyful Prize for raffia work: he's an ubermensch's uber-mensch.) Inadvertent joke: the operator observes wonderingly that only someone with absolute control over their emotions can beat the polygraph. Or, one silently adds, someone who has proved consistently incapable of expressing any emotions more complex than those felt by a tree trunk.

John Gray's film is less a movie in its own right than an applied checklist of threadbare movie gimmicks, some just a few years old, some now entering their early thirties: (1) the odd-couple team of a black cop (Keenan Ivory Wayans) and a white cop (Steven Seagal) - the latter is (2) a 'Nam veteran - are assigned to track down (3) a serial killer with a (4) religious obsession. But behind this case there is (5) a conspiracy involving (6) the CIA (Brian Cox plays a role identical in every particular to the one we saw last week in Chain Reaction) and (7) the Russian Mafia. Fortunately, Seagal is (8) a martial- arts nut who spent time in Thailand learning (9) the Wisdom of the East. There are more (10) large-scale explosions than seem altogether called for in the circumstances. Proceed with caution.

Lurking somewhere beneath the messy surface of Anna Campion's debut Loaded (18) is a classic spooky-story premise: a group of people gather at a country house for a weekend, during which the gates of Hell will open. In this case, the guests are a group of school-leavers who plan to shoot an amateur horror movie; some of them are so supremely irritating that you pine for the arrival of the man with the mask and the chainsaw. He never comes. Instead, there is rambling psychodrama, LSD sampling, video-recorded confessions and unresolved hints of extra-sensory perception. Loaded has been on the shelves for quite a few months since its completion - it might have been more merciful to have left it there.

Both the subject matter and the circumstances of Cynthia Roberts's The Last Supper (no cert) compel sympathetic respect, which is just as well, since in every other respect it is close to unwatchable. Adapted from a stage play by Hillar Liitoja, and shot in a single cramped bedroom, it depicts the last 90-odd minutes in the life of a dancer, Chris (Ken McDougall), who wants to make his death into a work of art. McDougall is obviously in the final stages of dreadful illness himself, and we are told that he died of Aids just four days after the end of filming. It seems indecent to review a death; enough to say his courage was admirable.