The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 37

Screen 1 9 The Guardian Friday May 15 1998 Plus an excellent thriller from the maker of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, and Tim Roth takes a lie detector test Wild and wet There's something about the South that would make you doubt the word of a bishop. By setting Liar in Charleston, South Carolina, the writer-directors Jonas and Josh Pate ensure that an air of claustrophobia and corruption suffuses a film in which Tim Roth recycling the lethal petulance of his swordsman in Rob Roy plays Wayland, a rich boy accused of asphyxiating and chopping up a call-girl. Most of the film takes place in the room where Wayland is undergoing a polygraph test under the supervision of two detectives, Braxton (Chris Penn) and Kennesaw (Michael Rooker). In flashbacks, we see his relationship with the dead girl, Elizabeth (Renee Zellweger). But his skill at mind-games enables him to tease out the lies within the detectives' own lives, exposing Braxton's ruinous gambling debts and Kennesaw's entropic relationship with his wife (Rosanna Arquette).

The Pates, 28-year-old identical twins from North Carolina, working together on a feature film for the first time, can clearly construct a creepy mood, greatly assisted by Bill Butler's low-light but gorgeously textured photography. Less secure is their command of a labyrinthine plot, which ends with a pointlessly perverse coda. Bill Murray turns up again as the star of Jon Amiel's The Man Who Knew Too Little, in which the director borrows a bunch of Swinging London mannerisms to enliven Robert Farrar's story of a nerdish video salesman from Des Moines who arrives to visit his brother, a merchant banker, and gets dragged into an attempt to revive the cold war. Joanne Whalley plays a tart along for the ride, Alfred Molina is a comic Russian agent, and Richard Wilson is the traitor at the heart of the British Establishment, which provides an unmissable target for an hour and a half of unsophisticated satire. The vision of Morgan Freeman as the next President of the United States is virtually the only worthwhile idea to be found in Deep Impact, a brainless blockbuster in which the planet is threatened by a meteor the size of Everest and only American courage, ingenuity and pious philosophising stand in the way.

Mimi Leder, who got the DreamWorks studio off to a bad start with The Peacemaker, does no better here, despite Steven Spielberg's executive producer credit. Only Tea Leoni, in her first lead role as a TV reporter, emerges relatively unscathed. At the ICA, The Kingdom is a five-hour package of new episodes of Lars Von Trier's magnificently loony TV drama set in a Danish hospital where strange occurrences are the rule. "Twin Peaks meets Casualty" is the conventional capsule definition, but it's a whole lot weirder and funnier, and scarier than that. RW For half an hour or so, John McNaughton's Wild Things had me thinking fondly of The Flamingo Kid, one of the most charming small Hollywood movies of the eighties, in which Matt Dillon played a good-looking, ambitious and socially insecure attendant at a high-toned beach club on the Carolina coast.

This time, located further south in the Florida Everglades, the grown-up Dillon plays Sam, a high-school guidance counsellor who specialises in romancing the wives and daughters of the members of the local country club. When he's falsely accused of raping one of his pupils, prejudices of wealth and class come into play Denise Richards, whose blue-eyed blondeness recently won her the role of chief uber-babe in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, is Kelly, his accuser. Richards does pert-and-pouting to perfection, but (and I don't think I'm imagining this) with a useful sense of irony. Neve Campbell, the heroine of the Scream series, switches from girl next door to girl from across the tracks as the kohl-eyed, semicomatose Suzie, Kelly's partner. Ray (Kevin Bacon) and Gloria (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are the police officers assigned to the case, forcing Sam to enlist the aid of Ken (Bill Murray), a small-time lawyer who specialises in industrial-injury cases.

But, of course, nothing is as it seems. Murders are committed, others are faked, and by the end the only person left standing is the one who can keep track of the multiplying double-crosses. McNaughton, the director of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, uses Stephen Peters's script as an excuse lor an exercise in high camp. Blending the superheated emotions of Douglas Sirk with the soft-porn high-jinks of Russ Meyer, the result is steamy, ludicrous and very entertaining not least for a pair of self-satirising cameos by Robert Wagner, as a blazered country-club patriarch, and Theresa Russell, as Kelly's predatory widowed mom, and for the witty use of local colour. Angela Molina as Clara In Pedro Almod6var's Live Flesh, left, and Oenise Richards In John McNaughton's Wild Things OTHER REEEBSES.