Cinema: It stands, but doesn't quite deliver

Plunkett and Macleane (15)

Jake Scott; 101 mins

Blast from the Past (12)

Hugh Wilson; 109 mins

Beyond Silence (12)

Caroline Link; 102 mins

You may have noticed the posters for Plunkett and Macleane - they are enormous and everywhere. Squashed against one side are its three stars, Jonny Lee Miller, Liv Tyler and Robert Carlyle. The extraterrestrially beautiful Miller isn't so much looking at the camera as offering himself to it, like someone with peace on the tip of his tongue. Tyler has her head bowed in her apologetic way, a girl used to others looking alarmed by her soul-frisking prettiness. Carlyle seems to be making up for his in-built harshness by making a silly face. On the opposite side is the line "They rob the rich ... and that's it." The poster does my job for you. It's a Polaroid of the entire movie, its stars, and the particular way each hauls us into their world.

The film is set in London in 1748. Plunkett (Carlyle) is a highwayman, and Macleane (Miller) a sea-captain who is down on his luck. The pair hook up, using Macleane's social connections to determine the precise whereabouts of the city's rich, whom they surprise late at night and rob as politely as possible. They soon gain notoriety as the "Gentlemen Highwaymen", attracting attention from the Lord Chief Justice's ward (Tyler) and the vile Thieftaker General (Ken Stott).

Director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) has little trouble in getting us to root for the lads, who click into an unusually casual rapport - Carlyle bossing without arrogance and Miller conceding and strutting, with red lipstick glossy and oddly congruous on that gentle mouth of his. Scott manages to catch the natural social comedy of the urbane 18th-century rich, with their manners and attitudes and scandalmongers. He has Alan Cumming as a bisexual fop, greeting the masked pair at gunpoint with the words, "How marvellous!" It's a great bit of casting, because Cumming can speak with such exquisite naughtiness that you half imagine him to break into some Congreve, particularly the line from The Way of the World; "Sir, there's such coupling at Pancras, that they stand behind one another, as 'twere in a country dance ..." In fact, Scott's film has a lot of the characteristics of Restoration drama - mistaken identities, disguises, slapstick, obsession with cupidity, exuberance, emotional greediness. Even the ball, at which the guests dance elegantly to techno, or the scenes featuring the London pub band the Tiger Lilies (the Pogues meet Edith Piaf) feel precisely of the moment, precisely right.

But Scott's film ultimately lacks the vicious subcultural snarl of Restoration drama, its indestructible raciness; the impressive social form of the early scenes is spoilt by a capitulation to sentimental victory. So, Plunkett and Macleane winds up to be precisely as its poster suggests. The rich are robbed, and the stars are slender and camera-grabbing. A warning: towards the close of the film, we are subjected to poseur- poet Murray Lachlan Young warbling one of his Chianti-deep ditties. This will leave you affronted.

Blast From the Past is only getting a small release, and has arrived in the UK with very little pre-publicity. This suggests shame on behalf of the distributors, but just why they should feel timid about such a strong comedy is a mystery. It opens during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Scientist Christopher Walken and his ordinary wife (Sissy Spacek) flee to their state-of-the-art subterranean fall-out shelter, convinced that there will be an imminent holocaust.

Mistaking the sound of a plane crashing above as the blast, they stay hidden for the next 35 years, raising and educating a son (Brendan Fraser) and waiting for the radiation to subside. When Walken finally emerges into modern down-town LA, he is amazed at what he sees - drunks and graffiti and shaggy perms. He hurries back to Spacek panicking about mutants. "There's something terribly wrong with the automobiles," he says, and takes to his bed. It's up to Fraser to forage for food, and if possible find a wife, having suffered from what Paul Durcan once called "woman-hunger" for some years.

Hugh Wilson's film is less bitter, more fluid and consistently smarter than the recent Fifties revisitation film Pleasantville. Although both films speak of neurosis and exposure and lost innocence, Blast from the Past is the more touching, especially when looking at the specifics of the mad worlds it inhabits upstairs and below. Walken, it turns out, loves his shelter, loves the patio that looks out upon nothing, loves feeling free of sulphurous social contact. Spacek does not, and Wilson soon has her graduating to cocktails, the archangels of the amateur alcoholic. So here she is, after seven Rob Roys, red-eyed inside a kingfisher-blue frock (not quite Sixties- stiff after more than 35 years of washing), like a breezy Mrs Robinson.

Fraser (he played the gardener in Gods and Monsters) is superb as the sweet hero, polite and lumbering, his pockets full of baseball cards, his interpretation of slang and insults absolutely literal. To Fraser, a "dickhead" really must be a walking penis capable of intelligent speech.

Beyond Silence is a German film made by Caroline Link, who was nominated for an Oscar. It opens well, with eight-year-old Lara (played by Tatjana Trieb, who is delightful) the hearing child of deaf parents, struggling at school thanks to a tiredness born from the care-taking of the family finances and politics. Encouraged by her musician aunt, she learns to play the clarinet, and we follow her determination to make the best of a medium that can only ever be described to her parents. Although overlong and sometimes flabby, it's a compassionate look at how much a child can be expected to cope, and at how desperate she becomes in her search for self-expression and some kind of meaningful communication.