NEW RELEASES / Hugo Davenport on Bullets over Woody remixes the old cocktail VEN devoted Woody E Allen reasonably fans suspect could the New York joker of thumbing the same old pack of thematice each cards film for has too long. seemed Of a shuffle with a dogdeck; the cut, the deal and play all a bit familiar - a touch of pastiche and a midlife crisis here, a and a collision of worlds there. Not that all his recent work has lacked entertainment value. A kinder Allen's method might be jazz, of which he is an enthusiastic off-screen practitioner: you know the riffs but there is usually some ingenious variation to refresh ear. So perhaps it's not unduly damning to say that Bullets over Broadway recalls Broadway Danny Rose in its Runyonesque cocktail of show-business eccentrics and gangsters. True, Allen stays behind the camera this time, directing and sharing the writer's credit with Douglas McGrath. The theme is that old chestnut, the integrity of the artist. Or rather, The Artist. It was the Surrealists who first drew subversive parallels between art and crime: in characteristic fauxnaïf style, Allen takes conceit literally by making the only real artist of the piece a mobster. All of which is little more than a pretext for a broad, farcical send-up of backstage rivalry, egomania and galloping neurosis among the pampered darlings of the Great White Way. Set in the Twenties, the picture charts the career of a writer, David Shayne (John Cusack), who trumpets lofty aims until he finds the only way to get his play staged and direct it is to cast a shrill mafioso's moll in a major role as, yes, a psychiatrist. Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly) is so hopeless that she pronounces hors-d'œuvres as something equine and cannot recall Hamlet's drift after "To be.. Her boyfriend is Nick Valenti, who bellows down the phone about extracting an enemy's vitals through his windpipe when the showgirl, producer (Jack Warden) and director meet for introductory drinks. The show receives a fillip as Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest, winner of this year's best supporting actress Oscar for the role after an identical success in Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters nine years ago) takes the lead. A posturing vamp, selfdescribed with false humility as "*a vain Broadway leg- BULLETS OVER BROADWAY (15 cert, 99 mins) general release BOYS ON THE SIDE (15 cert, 117 mins) general release end", she flatters David's pretensions and draws him into a romantic liaison, with a finger pressed to his lips and husky, urgent murmurs of: "Don't speak!" There is much bitching and intrigue, none of it very subtle. Our own Jim Broadbent is splendid as a rotund thespian who has an eating disorder so severe he hides a swiss roll in his script or chomps a chicken-leg in midseduction, and who is ejected into the street to meet his public in a high-tensile corset; Tracey Ullman is suitably abrasive as an actress doting on a chihuahua, Mr Woofles, that she claims to breast-feed. But the key character is Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), Olive's reluctant mobster minder. His testy observations, unwelcome at first, sharpen the play; eventually he resorts to his automatic in defence of artistic purity, bringing on a crisis for David and a pat happy ending though Rob Reiner, as the - tubby Lothario consoling the director's spurned girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker), adds a welcome flourish. Shot in old gold and sepia, opulent in design, adorned with atmospheric period music, balsa weight fun: Woody without splinters. Mary-Louise Parker; underused in Allen's film, pulls out the stops in Herbert Ross's Boys on the Side. The film is a self-consciously offcentre weepie concerning adventures of three women on the road. Whoopi Goldberg plays a lesbian singer, Drew Barrymore a pregnant wild-child fleeing a murder rap after bashing her violent drug boyhead; Parker is a prim estate agent, devoted to the Carpenters and suffering from Aids. At first glance, the trio presents a menu of fashionable female deviance of such inclusive political correctness, it almost hurts. To the credit of Don Roos's gentlypaced script, however, the film's view of relations between the sexes is far from separatist: it's more about frustration and trying to create a sense of family in a world where the old definitions have irretrievably unravelled. The picture is a bit of a shambles in narrative terms, but not without beguiling moments. Jane (Goldberg) falls for someone she cannot have and must settle for sisterly solidarity, while Robin (Parker), wooed in vain by a barman, faces the fact that her desire for husband and children will not be fulfilled. Barrymore delicious spark delinquent spontaneity to Holly, finding the man of her dreams Abe Lincoln (Matthew McConaughey), a cop of impeccable uprightness, in law as in bed. As the three party, quarrel and make up on a spacious Arizona ranch, Robin's estranged mother (Anita Gillette) joins the tribe for a quavering singalong of You Got It, which should irrigate all but the most drought-stricken tearducts. Girls' night out: Minnie Cost RELAND is fast becomI ing _location not just for a tax-friendly Hollywood moguls, but also a domain of quasi-mythical rural innocence among indigenous on both sides of film makers From Widow's Peak to The War of the Buttons, we have lately seen several sunny forays into the eccentric rivalries and minor scandals of village life. Pat O'Connor's Circle of Friends, adapted from a Maeve Binchy novel, looks like more of the same. Yet for all its delicacy of tone, there is a more robust thematic underpinning to the lyricism a pointed critique of the Catholic Church, which fostered so much ignorance and misery among young people through its blinkered approach to sexuality during the Fifties. The film traces the path to
