Kissing Jessica Stein<br></br>Before You Go<br></br>Dancing at the Blue Iguana<br></br>Killing Me Softly<br></br>The Musketeer<br></br>Hardball<br></br> Beginner's Luck<br></br>Cabaret

It's just a good, old-fashioned, New York story of girl meets girl

If any number of films and TV programmes inform us that New York is attacked by alien monsters on a daily basis, there are just as many which would have us believe that Manhattan's most common activity is dating. From Play It Again, Sam to Sex and the City, New Yorkers appear to do almost nothing except chat with potential partners in cocktail bars about the potential partners they chatted with in cocktail bars the night before.

Kissing Jessica Stein (15) fits snugly in this tradition. The character of Stein herself is what you'd get if you morphed together the three women in Friends, and then grafted on Diane Keaton's Annie Hall speech patterns and a hat last worn by Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. She also has the obligatory succession of dead-end dates, set to the obligatory lightly swinging jazz soundtrack. The novelty is that, for Stein, Mr Right is so elusive that Ms Right starts to seem like a better quarry. Never having strayed from the straight and narrow before, she answers a personal ad from a woman.

Actually, this isn't a wildly innovative premise – Sex and the City has been there and done that – but the comedy is developed with delightful, lively charm. Jessica is a prudish Jewish perfectionist, so she approaches same-sex romance as hesitantly and methodically as if she were learning a foreign language. She breaks off from her first lesbian kiss to ask, "Is this with tongues?" and she sees the main boon of dating a woman as being able to swap make-up tips with her.

The film doesn't shy away from the topic's turbulent issues and emotions, but at bottom, Kissing Jessica Stein is a very good sitcom episode. Although it has a full complement of scene-stealing supporting characters, it was written by its stars, Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen, as an off-Broadway two-hander when they were jobbing actors. They come across so adorably that from now on they shouldn't be short of work. They should do pretty well for dates, too.

Before You Go (15) is another film adapted from a play, and it's the work of someone with quite a track record in that arena: Lewis Gilbert, the esteemed director of Alfie, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. His latest film, though, is too true to its roots. It began life as The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, and apart from the lush fields and clifftop views of its Isle of Man setting, it makes few concessions to the fact that it's not being performed on stage. A lot of scenes could be shuffled into almost any order without affecting our understanding of the film.

Three sisters – Julie Walters, Joanne Whalley and Victoria Hamilton – (if you can believe they were born within a few years of each other) gather in their childhood home for their mother's funeral.

They're joined by a husband (Tom Wilkinson) and a boyfriend (John Hannah), and nothing happens beyond some drunken bickering and many a Victoria Wood-style bathetic provincial punchline about allotments and nut roasts.

The rest of this week's films are worse. Two are by highly acclaimed directors, and yet have nothing to offer except the sight of some naked women. Dancing at the Blue Iguana (18) is an ensemble piece set at a low-rent Hollywood strip club. It was directed by Michael Radford, maker of Il Postino, but it's boring drivel, probably as a result of being "based on an improvisational workshop". The actors have come up with some reasonable characters and a few funny lines, but no plots; the film is as short of material and structure as the women's working clothes.

Killing Me Softly (18) falls into the so-bad-it's-almost-good category. Directed by Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), it's a thriller about a woman (Heather Graham) who suspects her smouldering, mountaineer husband (Joseph Fiennes) of being a murderer. At least, I assume from the camerawork and the music that it's a thriller. The most menacing thing on the screen is Graham's knitted, woollen wedding dress.

The Musketeer (PG) is a B-movie that mixes The Three Musketeers with Western stagecoach action and Far Eastern martial arts stunts. Tim Roth plays the most pantomime villain-ish of all his pantomime villains, but the other characters are instantly forgettable.

Hardball (12) is a load of balls with Keanu Reeves as a drunken gambler who learns to love himself by coaching a kiddies' baseball team. It pays lip service to the message that it's not the winning that counts but the taking part, and then it shows us Reeves's team triumphing in game after game.

Beginner's Luck (nc) is a studenty, no-budget self-indulgence which, for the sake of everyone involved, shouldn't have been granted even the minor release it's getting.

On a brighter note, Cabaret (nc) is back. The film won eight Oscars in 1972, although most of those must have been for the shabbily decadent scenes in the Kit Kat Klub. When the story emerges blinking into the streets of Berlin, it gets scrappy, betraying its extensive genealogy.

Never mind films based on plays – Cabaret is the film of the musical of the play of the book.

n.barber@independent.co.uk