The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 74

CRITICS 9 SUNDAY 10 JULY 1994 girls 'J 1,11 i in Philip French sees one of the FUNNIEST FILMS OF THE YEAR and one that makes lesbianism look like a terrible order of nuns This bald, predictable morality tale overstays its welcome, but working in his sinister-avuncular mode, Von Sydow enjoys himself hugely. His Devil has all the best jokes. Unwisely, the picture becomes increasingly serious, or rather, solemn and pyrotechnic -and had got on my Eastwick well before the end. A product of the self-styled New Queer Cinema, Rose Troche's Go Fish is a low-budget film by world is Charles Grodin, ill wmmm ihe feature debut of French writer-director Pierre Salvadori, Wild Target. provides the worst set of role models since the high days of the Borgias and is the funniest movie to have arrived in London this year.

No doubt ah ambitious Californian film-school graduate is at this moment transposing it from Paris to Chicago which would be very silly, as an almost identical story of a professional crook taking on a young apprentice was the basis of the dreary Burt Reynolds comedy Breaking In, directed by Bill Forsyth The plot is amusing enough. Victor (Jean Rochefort), a middle-aged hit man, spares the life of Antoine (Gutllaume the witness of an assassination, and makes him his pupil and heir apparent The pair then become involved in protecting Renee (Marie Trintignant), an attractive confidence I trickster they Ve been, hired to kill. But the strength of the movie resides in the charming performances, the witty observation, and the way we are drawn into the characters' world of inverted values. There are brief moments in the middle of the film when it sags a little, but the occasions when it seems to be getting sentimental turn out to be gentle mockeries of family values. Like the Charles Addams children, Victor has been reared by his hit-person parents in a home where the mobile in his nursery features such items as a revolver, a poison bottle and an assassin's bomb, and a reproduction of David's 'Death of Marat' hangs on the bathroom wall.

Ever seeking to extend himself professionally, he practises his Linguaphone English while executing hits all of which leads to his name being picked up by a victim's parrot to hilarious effect Regarded as one of France's finest exponents of both Chekhov and Pinter, Jean Rochefort is among the most polished comedians at work today, and his sad, sweet-natured, dignified Victor is a marvellous creation. His nearest equivalent in the English-speaking almei pera until 23 july box office brochure 071 359 4404 Registered charity Almeida St London "concrihutinRTVyjS the cutting edge JP dramatic and 3 Hollywood's most accomplished living practitioner of the deadpan, the slow burn and the double-take. They both bring understatement to farce and with the merest whisper of an effect can raise a gale of laughter. An added. bonus is the casting of the wonderful rande chanteuse Patachou, as handsome as ever at 75, in the role of Victor's ruthless mother.

Sadly, she doesn't sing, though she does get to silence a parrot Good comedies, as Wild Target demonstrates, operate logically from often crazy premises. Unfortunately Staggered, a British farce directed by its star Martin Clunes from a screenplay by Simon Braithwaite and Paul Alexander, neither takes place in the real world nor manages to create a plausible one of its own. Instead it relies on eccentricity and desperate improvisation. Clunes plays Neil, a toy-demonstrator in a London store who becomes the victim of a malevolent prank by his treacherous best friend. He's stranded naked on a Scottish island with three days to get back home for his wedding.

Neil is an unprepossessing chap with between his jug ears except an inane smile, and it isn't easy to become involved in his plight Still, this is an inoffensive and mildly amusing little picture. Tim Hunter's The Saint of Fort Washington is to all intents and purposes an urban, inter-racial re-working of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, set among the homeless of New York. In this case a black Vietnam veteran (Danny Glover), living rough in Manhattan, takes under his wing a penniless schizophrenic (Matt Dillon) who has been released into the community. They plan to save the money they earn washing car windscreens to rent a flat, buy an old van and make a living selling fruit and vegetables in the street From the start we know that their dream is doomed, and that the older man will end up clutching the corpse of the holy fool inapieta. Glover and Dillon are first-rate; and Frederick Elmes's photography is crisp and unaffected, but there Edinburgh International Festival, 31 Market Street, CSX i wrnNr- tA 'it'rW'Sii' lesbians, for lesbians and about lesbians, shot in a grainy, almost pointillist monochrome, frequendy out of focus and out of synch.

The acting is alternately tentative and overly assertive, and the hand-drawn tide credits are deliberately crude. Lesbianism is the sole concern of everyone involved: they go to see gay movies, and shop in gay bookstores; when one of them sleeps with a man, she is subjected to a nightmare trial before a jury of lesbians; a chorus of lesbians sit around discussing what they should call their vaginas (honey pot? bearded clam? girl's patch?) and wondering when and how two of the main characters, Max and Ely, will make it into bed. There are some amusing moments, but this oppressive film makes lesbianism seem like a breakaway branch of freemasonry or a terrible order of nuns. Made in Australia, Stuart Gordon's Fortress is a piece of bone-crunching nonsense set in a privately-run subterranean prison in a dystopian zero-growth America of the near future, where women are forbidden to have more than one child. The hero (Christopher Lambert) and his wife are serving 31 years' hard labour for concealing her second pregnancy.

Lambert, who looks distressingly like a cross between Ben Turpin and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is an unlikely, possibly undesirable, saviour of the world. Wild Target (87 minutes, 15) NFT, MGM Swiss Centre and Chelsea Staggered (100 minutes, 15) Warner West End, Plaza, MGM Trocadero and general release The Saint of Fort Washington (103 minutes, 15) MGM Haymarket, Tottenham Court Road and Fulham Road and general release Needful Things (120 minutes, 15) MGM Shaftesbury Avenue Go Fish (83 minutes, 18) Screen on the Green, Screen on Baker Street, MGM Chelsea, Clapham Picture House, Metro Fortress (100 minutes, 15) Odeon West End, Kensington and Swiss Cottage and general release Edinburgh International pJTg'pjyAL in The Greatest Story Ever Told, A marvellous creation: Jean Rochefort as Victor In 'Wild Target' is no political or social perspective, just a vague search for tragedy. It is too contrived and sentimental to tap deep feelings in an audience. Yet a couple of images stick in the mind the sea of human flotsam and jetsam strung out in the endless rows of beds in the Fort Washington shelter, a gigantic ex-armoury; and a visit to Potter's Field, the cemetery on Hart Island, off the Bronx, where New York's paupers are buried in mass graves. Thirty years ago Charlton Heston baptised Max Von Sydow as Christ and now here is Chuck's son, Fraser Heston, directing Von Sydow as Satan in Needful Things.

Posing as kindly Leland Gaunt, the Devil arrives in his black Sixties' Mercedes saloon (well he wouldn't be driving a Volvo estate, would he?) to stir up trouble in Stephen King's corner of Maine. He immediately opens a shop called Needful Things, a Faust-aid post disguised as an antique store, from which the innocent citizens of Casde Rock can acquire the objects that fulfil their dreams. In exchange, of course, they take on murderous little obligations. Miami City Ballet Merce Cunningham Dance Company Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault Mark Morris Dance Group lucinda chilos dance Company This year the Edinburgh Festival Is staging one of Its biggest and most exciting dance programmes ever, from classical to avant- garde, Tchaikovsky to Philip Glass. The first step is to call 031 225 5756 for full Edinburgh EHi iBW.

Registered Charity N0.SC004694. programme and ticket details..