The wounded wit of Mrs Dorothy Parker

Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (15) Dir: Alan Rudolph (US)

Nell (12) Dir: Michael Apted (US)

Wagons East (PG) Dir: Peter Markle (US)

I Love a Man in Uniform (18) Dir: David Wellington (Can)

S F W (18) Dir: Jefery Levy (US)

The Silences of the Palace (no cert) Dir: Moufida Tlatli (Tun / Fr)

Alan Rudolph's dreamy biopic Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle buys into the self-pity, morbidity and pathos of Dorothy Parker's writing and life, rather than her robustness, comic verve and bracing good sense; it also seems to buy into the modern, therapised view that wounding wit is the first resort of the wounded. There's more than a hint of perversity about this approach - as there would be in a life of Alexander Pope that focused solely on his malformed back - and though the film can be elegantly absorbing, it's hardly the barrel of laughs you might have expected, let alone a spirited celebration of the fine art of crap-cutting. Here, those (excessively) famous Round Table barbs sound less like Wildean sallies than neurotic tics, and even a run-on appearance by Harpo Marx (Jean-Michael Henry) doesn't add much levity to the proceedings.

Alternating between hazy, brown-toned colour for the 1920s and hazy, occasionally ravishing black-and-white for Mrs Parker's Hollywood stint, and poems-to-camera (all the gloomier hits, such as "A Well-Worn Story"), the film concentrates on her years of precocious fame as the sharpest tongue among the Algonquin coterie - Charles MacArthur (Matthew Broderick), George S Kaufman (David Thornton), Harold Ross (Sam Robards) and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) - the last being, Rudoph suggests, the only man who did not earn her contempt and the only man she could never have; hence Pagliacci's tears.

Jennifer Jason Leigh has already won an award for her portrayal of Mrs Parker, and it's not hard to see why; in the past five years or so, she's developed into one of the most resourceful and protean young stars in America. When you recall Mrs P's quip about the actress who ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, Leigh's studied underplaying here looks like a triumph of nerve as well as talent. Though Rudolph begins on a loving close-up, and continues to dote on her face throughout, she's more self-effacing than self-displaying: the sense of her lines, for example, is often buried deep within a raspy, petulant croon. (In fact, festival audiences found so much of her speech unintelligible that Rudolph has had to re-loop her performance into a less faithful but more audible version.)

Though she scorned Hollywood and her highly paid work there, Dorothy Parker was a more generous critic than folk memory recalls: words like "flawless" and "superlative" pop up all over her theatre notices, especially when there was a Barrymore on stage. Would she have liked Rudolph's movie? Some of it would surely have made her wince, not least the silly scene in which partygoers struggle to think up a name for Ross's new magazine aimed at New Yorkers, and she might well have bridled at the way it reserves all mention of her political activism until the last couple of minutes. It's a fair bet, though, that she'd have warmed to its paradoxically nostalgic evocation of the Round Table as a milieu that preferred honesty to compassion and cruel wit to hearts on sleeves.

Enter Michael Apted's Nell, a film with so much cardiac matter on its cuffs that it might more properly have been titled Little Nell. Jodie Foster is the main character, a young woman who has been raised in isolation by her hermit mother and appears to speak a language of her own. When the mother dies and her condition is discovered, two medics - he (Liam Neeson) all humanist concern, she (Natasha Richardson) all uptight professionalism - take on the case. There is real interest in the language-quest that follows, but the film keeps swerving away to the developing romance between the docs and other such multiplex-tickling stuff. A shame.

Peter Markle's genially goony Wagons East trades heavily in jokes about flatulence, homosexuality, drunkenness and falling over; in short, it offers an ideal night out for anyone who's spent the past two decades pining for a remake of Blazing Saddles. Led by James Harlow (John Candy, who died shortly before the end of production), a train of disgruntled quitters head back to the fleshpots of St Louis. They face not only desert, hostile Sioux and the incompetence of their trail boss, but the machinations of a railway baron who is terrified that their flight from the West will ruin him. One or two of the jokes do connect and Candy is, as in much of his work, a presence as sweet as his name. Wagons East isn't a disgraceful epitaph, but he merited a lot better.

I Love a Man in Uniform is something of a one-idea picture; fortunately, the idea is strong enough to sustain for its 97 minutes. Henry Adler (Tom McCamus), a tight-wrapped bank clerk, manages to land a bit-part playing a uniformed policeman in a TV series. Henry's a method actor, and there's madness in his method. He takes his uniform home, acquires an illegal gun, and graduates to some bloody police action of his own.

This might well be the premise for a TV movie, but it's arrestingly directed and written by David Wellington, who, at a guess, has been studying Taxi Driver closely. Henry is not just a solitary, sexually blank fantasist like Travis Bickle, he also shares Travis's ambition to wipe the scum off the streets, and indulges in his brand of self-goading rehearsals for violence. It's a promising debut for Wellington; it also boasts a soundtrack by The Tragically Hip.

S F W stands for So Flaming What (or expletives to that effect), a motto that helps turn young Cliff Spab (Stephen Dorff) into a Diogenes for the Beavis and Butthead generation. Cliff's a suburban dim-bulb who, after surviving a terrorist hostage crisis which has been televised throughout the world, becomes a cult hero. Finding his celebrity hard to endure, he goes on the run and meets uninteresting adventures. The director, Jefery Levy, is reported to have studied semiotics, which may explain a thing or two; Oliver Stone would probably admire the thing as a searching critique of media power. B F D.

Told mostly in extended flashbacks to the 1950s, Moufida Tlatli's gently feminist The Silences of the Palace evokes a childhood spent in the servant's quarters of Tunisia's last royal family. The heroine is Alia (gracefully played by Hend Sabri as the child and Ghalia Lacroix as the adult), the illegitimate daughter of a much-abused skivvy, for whom music becomes by turns a means of escape, a vehicle of rebellion and a profession. It's honourable, but a little torpid - better on the textures of feudal life than storytelling.

n See facing page for details

Kevin Jackson