Final Cut

Final Cut (18) Fair play to Jude Law and his mates (Sadie Frost, Ray Winstone et al) if they want to make a home-movie murder-play on their days off from legitimate film-making. Poor show if they subsequently expect punters to pay good money to watch it.

Still, here it comes - predominantly played out in Law and Frost's palatial pad and viewing like a Hello! magazine shoot with the added spice of cocaine, murder and swearing.

Law plays dead, Winstone plays up his thuggish screen image and Sadie remarks that she can't find her knickers. The whole thing is captured in an off-the-cuff guerrilla style.

If you wanted to be big and clever about it, you could possibly argue that Final Cut is an audience-teasing satire on the cult of personality. Take a more clear-sighted view and you'd conclude that the whole farrago is little more than an ego-trip; an arrogant and complacent parlour game that presumes that the average cinemagoer is as fascinated by Jude and Sadie as they themselves so clearly are.

If cocaine is God's way of saying you've got too much money, films like this are his way of warning its perpetrators that they've grown too famous, too cloistered, too gallopingly self-absorbed. They should get out more.

Xan Brooks Big Daddy (12) Adam Sandler can do little wrong at the box office these days - even in Britain, where we've no idea who he is.

Big Daddy is another one of his shamelessly dumb, lazily made, emotionally manipulative comedies, which bring forth laughter, tears and exasperation in unequal measure. Here, Sandler is Sonny Koufax, ditched by his girlfriend for opting out of adult life. Sonny, although preternaturally capable of just about anything he turns his hand to, prefers to loaf.

When his flatmate's five-year-old love-child appears on Sonny's doorstep and is ruthlessly ignored by dad (one of the movie's several unfeasibly callous moments), man-child Sandler adopts the little tyke in order to impress the ex.

You hardly need me to add that the pair bond and that Sonny learns about himself - which is what counts in a movie that cares more about the deliberate waster than the orphaned tot.

Sandler opts for the hands-off, super-liberal mode of parenting beloved of those without kids to disillusion them. It can be fun to watch him and Frankenstein - he lets the nipper choose a name - interact, and it's touching when the law separates them. That's the credible part; elsewhere the comedy is dislocated from truth, as when, to cheer up his lachrymose charge, Sonny throws himself in front of a passing car.

It's also gratuitously small-minded, as in its patronising of vagrants (Steve Buscemi in an unlikely cameo), gays and the silver- haired. At the last, the film lacks the confidence to be serious, totally undermining with a cheap gag the only significant emotional point it seeks - however cheesily - to make.

The postscript, which sees Sonny 'cured' of his alternative lifestyle and which explicitly equates maturity with a proper job, having children and wearing a tie, only worsens the already sour taste in the mouth.

Brian Logan The Third Man (PG) Ranked only this week as the best British film ever made in a poll carried out by the BFI, The Third Man originated in producer Alexander Korda's desire to make a comedy set in contemporary Vienna.

While screenwriter Graham Greene and director Carol Reed might have turned this vague idea into something far darker, it's hard to imagine this 1949 classic taking place anywhere else than Vienna.

A city of fallen splendour - once a seat of empire, now blitzed beyond recognition - Reed's Vienna is a cavernous, shadowy place, brilliantly shot by Robert Krasker with tilted angles as if its buildings are half-sinking into the sewers.

It's the perfect location, then, for Greene's murky, melancholic tale of black-marketeering and Cold War machinations (which, as a former spy himself, he could write about with some authority).

Joseph Cotton brings a bewildered charm to the part of Holly Martins, the hack writer who finds himself in the middle of all this intrigue; Alida Valli is the girl he falls in love with; and, of course, Orson Welles turns up just when you least expect it and effortlessly provides us with one of cinema's most mesmerising 10 minutes.

If you haven't seen The Third Man, you're in for a rare treat. And if you have, you won't need convincing to see it again.

Running at the Glasgow Film Theatre from October 1-7

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