HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (Woody Allen, 1986) (Magdalen Auditorium, 7:30pm Monday 29th Jan)

Allen's previous three films (Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose,The Purple Rose of Cairo) were thin, clever sketches fleshed out with characteristic one-liners. Here he returns to the territory he knows best, Manhattan. Of the three sisters (this is very much Chekhov landscape), the youngest (Hershey) lives with a spiritual mentor (Von Sydow), an intellectual recluse who rails against the iniquities of modern culture. The middle one (Wiest) is a frantic urban neurotic, forever borrowing money to pursue her latest career whim. And the eldest (Farrow) is apparently the most stable, a successful actress and mother presiding over a warm family circle. All is not well, however; Farrow's husband (Caine) is pursuing an affair with the youngest sister; sibling rivalry is rife. Wandering in and out of this extended dissection of family love life is Allen himself, playing his familiar nebbish hypochondriac; when a medical crisis brings him uncomfortably close to death, he samples all the different religions, before turning to the Marx Brothers' films as evidence that life is to be enjoyed. It is an articulate, literate film, full of humanity and perception about its sometimes less-than-loveable characters, which nonetheless comes down on the side of the best things in life: the primacy of love and feeling, qualified hope, and the fragility of it all. It also returns to much of the humour from his 'early, funny' films; Allen seems finally to have found the ability to please not just everyone, but also himself.

(TimeOut)

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson, 2001) (Magdalen Auditorium, 9:20pm Monday 29th Jan)

Wittier, a lot more enjoyable and infinitely richer than the year's major Oscar contenders, this is clearly a blood brother to Anderson's Rushmore. The Tenenbaums are New York high society gone to seed. Scandalous Royal (Hackman) separated from wife Etheline (Huston) two decades ago, and after that kept his distance as his once prodigious offspring slumped. Business whizz Chas (Stiller) has become a paranoid neurotic; Richie (Wilson) is a tennis star whose career was sacrificed to love; adopted daughter Margot (Paltrow) is a closed book of a playwright. Financially embarrassed and claiming a dying man's last rights, Royal returns to put his house in order. The milieu is reminiscent of Preston Sturges' screwball fancies from the early 1940s - albeit scored to '70s rock. Anderson's unusually pronounced literary influences include Salinger, Edith Wharton and the New Yorker magazine, and the film sometimes resembles a cartoon from that august publication's glory days: an elegantly composed caricature given the finishing touch with an immaculately turned one-liner. It exists in a bubble - Anderson's New York doesn't exist and never did - but the rarefied atmosphere is a bit of a blind; what sneaks up on you is how, in his deliciously roundabout way, Anderson wears irony on his sleeve to camouflage a deeper sincerity. At its heart, this is a comedy of unrequited love, melancholy and disappointment. One to savour.

(TimeOut)