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The Sixth Sense (18)

SNEAKING up in the Blair Witch's slipstream, The Sixth Sense this summer became the first movie since Titanic to spend five consecutive weeks at the top of the US box office chart.

Unlike Blair Witch, it hit top spot without hype. One's expectation thus raised, the film's laughably expository opening moments serve as a useful reminder: this is still Hollywood, with all the dodgy dialogue and over-insistent production that entails.

But Sixth Sense is undoubtedly a cut above. It features Bruce Willis as child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, scarred by his failure with one patient, years before, who returned as a grown-up to shoot him.

Now he's attached to young Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment who turns in an excellent performance. Cole "sees dead people" - the movie's cue to startle us daft with a rogue's gallery of the half- dead, pestering the put-upon tot, urgent to communicate.

Crowe would like to help, but the boy's case flummoxes him, and he's distracted by his deteriorating relationship with his wife (Olivia Williams). An effective Toni Collette makes up the main cast as Cole's mum.

It's a satisfyingly chilling experience, pitched coolly by writer- director M Night Shyamalan. It's never hysterical, and seeks to provoke as well as frighten. The film's weak points are triumphantly subverted by its closing twist. Seriously good stuff.

Brian Logan Tichborne Claimant (PG)

THERE is more than a hint of old Ealing classic Kind Hearts And Coronets about David Yates' highly impressive The Tichborne Claimant. Set in the late 19th century, it starts from the premise that "the oldest and most profitable firm in the British isles" is the aristocracy.

Claimant Robert Pugh tries to convince the Tichborne family that he is their long-lost relative, presumed lost at sea. He may be an uncouth, hard-drinking sponger, but he has been coached by the Tichbornes' Afro-English butler Bogle (John Kani) to behave like the perfect English gentleman. Bogle's motives are straightforward: if the claimant inherits, Bogle is to get 50% of the wealth.

The Tichborne Claimant contains all the usual late Victorian stereotypes - gouty, bewhiskered aristocrats and workers who rally to the claimant's cause. Action ranges from leafy country houses to the dankest confines of Pentonville jail, from where Bogle relates the story of how he may have been responsible for the "greatest fraud in British history".

At times the satire seems heavy-handed, but iy is lifted by Joe Frazer's sardonic dialogue and by some rum character turns from Stephen Fry, John Gielgud and Charles Gray.

Geoffrey MacNabb The Out of Towners (PG)

BEFORE everyone gets too carried away by Steve Martin's bright Bowfinger, a swift reality check. The Out-of-Towners is your more typical Martin movie. It's not bad, just a little low-aiming and eminently dispensable. When the closing credits roll, it simply fades away.

A synthetic overhaul of Neil Simon's Sixties original, Martin and Goldie Hawn play two Ohio innocents at large in New York. The plot- hook is a job interview; the content a carousel of nutty incidents (some funny, some not).

So Martin's ad exec goes to war on an unruly vending machine, gets himself mugged by an Andrew Lloyd Webber impersonator, suffers an acid-trip in a yellow cab and unwittingly has sex in front of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

When matters turn slack (and they do), director Sam Weisman tosses in John Cleese to reprise his Basil Fawlty schtick as a curmudgeonly hotel-owner. Throughout it all, this flyweight affair strives for the kind of breathless, tearaway zest of vintage screwball farce. Trouble is it's just too in thrall to the dictates of the Hollywood formula to move and breathe freely.

Xan Brooks Ratcatcher (18)

THE most out-there scene in Ratcatcher shows a white mouse tied to a helium-filled red balloon floating upwards from a Govan tenement to the moon. Those walking through the latte-soaked streets of central Glasgow on their way to see Lynne Ramsay's debut feature will find the celluloid city she has created represents an equally alien landscape.

Set during the refuse workers' strikes of the 1970s, Ratcatcher reveals Glasgow as an unrecognisable city beseiged by its own stink. Black bin bags smother back courts, while bruised clouds pile up in the sky and muck clogs the canal.

James (William Eadie) is a 12-year-old, haunted by the guilt of his part in the accidental drowning of a friend. He hangs around the tenements, daydreaming of a life in the city's greenfield suburbs and finding a kind of redemption through his relationship with an older girl (Leanne Mullen).

Ratcatcher is visually superb but lacks the kind of narrative drive that really grips. If Ramsay can bring her talents to bear on her forthcoming adaptation of Alan Warner's thrilling Morvern Callar then perhaps we'll have the kind of Scottish film that sets the pulse racing.

Peter Ross

Copyright 1999
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