Latest video: Masterly pieces

By EWAN MCDONALD

After hearing from video stores that punters wanted new titles to watch at this time of year, major companies decided to bypass the traditional three-week silly season and continue to release movies. As the queues at most main street and holiday resort stores will have shown, the customers got it right. And in the most recent batch on the shelves, there are treats from three great American directors.

It's hard to compare the offerings from Robert Altman (MASH, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts), John Sayles (Matewan, Lonestar, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish) and Steven Spielberg (who needs no introductions) - they're so different. Let's start with the most popular, Altman's Cookie's Fortune, a comedy about death and murder that doesn't have a real villain.

Like most of Altman's movies, parallel stories connect a lot of people, this time the lovable characters of the small town of Holly Springs, Missouri. A black man named Willis (Charles S. Dutton) wanders out of a bar, seems to break into a home, and studies the guns displayed in a cabinet. A rich and elderly white widow, Cookie (Patricia Neal), comes downstairs and finds him, and then we discover they're best friends. Soon after her niece, Camille Dixon (Glenn Close), discovers Cookie's dead body and arranges the scene to make it look like a break-in and a murder.

Camille's friends and neighbours include Cora (Julianne Moore), her dim sister; Emma (Liv Tyler), Cora's daughter; and the folks down at the police station, Lester (Ned Beatty), Jason the dumb deputy (Chris O'Donnell) and Wanda the smart deputy (Niecy Nash). Some have roles in the town's Easter play, Salome "by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon."

Willis is arrested because his fingerprints are on the guns although everyone in town knows he'd just cleaned them. Emma believes he's innocent, and demonstrates her confidence by moving into his cell. The door is kept open, which is convenient for her and Jason, since they're in love and sneak off behind the Coke machine whenever they can.

Camille and Cora are beside themselves: they like Willis and are horrified he's under arrest, but to free him would involve incriminating themselves.

From a master film-maker and an outstanding crew, an excellent movie that focuses well on the small screen.

* And now for some things that are completely different: Men With Guns and The Last Days.

Sayles wrote, directed and edited his movie, in Spanish with English subtitles, the story of a doctor in an unnamed Central American country who goes into the rainforest to visit the medical students he trained some years earlier. They were supposed to fan out among the Indian villages: the doctor believes many of them have been killed.

The doctor (Federico Luppi) has lived comfortably in the capital with a nice practice and his country's reality has passed him by. As he moves into the countryside, he gathers four companions: an army deserter, now a thief, steals from him then joins him; a former priest; a boy who knows the area and a woman who has not spoken since she was raped.

They hear about a village named "the Circle of Heaven," which is so high on a mountain and so deep in the trees that the helicopters cannot find it, where people live free. Occasionally their journey is interrupted by two American tourists (Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody), who are looking for "antiques" and haven't a clue what's happening around them.

A moving story in which the maverick artist Sayles achieves his aim of showing society "in collapse because power has been concentrated in the hands of small men made big with guns."

The Last Days, which won the Oscar for best documentary last year, is not strictly a Spielberg film but it is fair to say that without his encouragement and input it would not have been made. Which would have been a tragedy for this and future generations.

Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is recording memories of what is now called the Holocaust from those who lived through it. The eventual goal is 50,000 taped interviews. The Last Days features five survivors, and others, telling their harrowing stories. It focuses on the last year of the war, when Hitler, defeated, revealed the depth of his racial hatred by diverting men and supplies to the task of exterminating Hungary's Jews.

* Still outside the mainstream is The Dreamlife of Angels (French, English subtitles). Isa (Elodie Bouchez) is a tough little backpacker scratching a living who takes a job as a seamstress in a sweatshop. There she meets Marie (Natacha Regnier); the two become friends, flat together, dreaming of true romance. One day Marie finds a way to break out of the dreary circle; to do it she must abandon her only friend.

As the leading American critic Roger Ebert put, "the movie understands what few American movies admit: not everyone can afford the luxury of following their hearts ... I can't easily imagine Isa and Marie in Los Angeles, nor can I imagine an American indie director making this film, which contains no guy-talk in diners, no topless clubs, no drug dealers in bathrobes, no cigars. This year's Critics Week at Cannes has just announced that it was unable to find a single American film it admired enough to programme. The Dreamlife of Angels shared the best actress award between Bouchez and Regnier last year in the Cannes main competition. There you have it."

* Now for some routine Hollywood fodder. In Pushing Tin John Cusack plays Nick Falzone, hotshot air traffic controller, happily married to Connie (Cate Blanchett). Russell Bell (Billy Bob Thornton) arrives at the frenetic Long Island base serving 70,000 flights a day in and out of New York's three major airports. A motorbike-riding cowboy from out west, he's married to 20-year-old Mary (Angelina Jolie).

Screenwriters Glen and Les Charles, creators of the hit TV series Cheers, and director Mike Newell Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral decide that an air traffic control centre is not an exciting enough place for a movie, so Nick meets Mary, weeping in the supermarket over a trolley full of vodka, and invites her to a nearby restaurant. After predictable consequences, the movie goes all soft and sentimental. No, there isn't a plane crash. Not quite.

* The Corruptor is a Hong Kong action movie transplanted to New York's Chinatown. Chow Yun-Fat, who has made almost 70 films and followed Jackie Chan into the American market in 1998 with Replacement Killers, plays Nick Chen, a tough cop in an all-Asian station house in Chinatown. A white cop named Danny (Mark Wahlberg) is assigned to the precinct and greeted with much suspicion. Will Nick and Danny be friends by the end of the movie? What do you think?

* Also out: Sharon Stone's Gloria, Storm Trooper; Street Corner Justice, Prague Duet, Goodbye Lover, Artemesia, The Patriot, The Thirteenth Floor, Whatever, Major League 3: Back to the Minors.