Playing a bitch is a woman's best role; DOLORES CLAIBORNE Taylor Hackford (18) RED FIRECRACKER, GREEN FIRECRACKER He Ping (15)

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In another year thin on Hollywood roles a girl can really sink her teeth into, Dolores Claiborne can be celebrated for at least one sterling quality: it contains no less than three meaty female characters - even if they all have to share the same line: "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to." As a woman accused of murdering her rich employer, Kathy Bates has good reason to be a bitch: she has, after all, been worn to a frazzle caring for the autocratic old bag since her alcoholic husband died in suspicious circumstances some years before. As her estranged daughter, now a hard-bitten New York journalist, Jennifer Jason Leigh - playing yet another basket case - has her reasons, too. The film marks a further milestone in the rehabilitation of Stephen King, both as a serious writer and also - more unexpectedly - as a (sort of) male feminist.

Rather old-fashioned in its structure, it depends on long flashbacks to the family's dysfunctional past and to a total solar eclipse that provides a surreal backdrop to the film's deliciously overwrought climax. The director is Taylor Hackford, who has spent a stretch in the wilderness after one enormous hit, An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), and the film could mark a rehabilitation for him, too.

All the men get short shrift, from Eric Bogosian as Leigh's ruthless editor and Christopher Plummer as a tenacious, almost driven police detective with a dark past of his own (he has no wife, and a great, unexplained scar snaking across the bridge of his nose) to the magistrate who observes that attorneys hovered at his wives' (note the plural) side at his weddings.

Bates has the showcase role, uncannily convincing both as her radiant younger self and as Dolores grown old, coarse, reddened and heavy; a real small-town eccentric - when she blows a kiss, she bats it over to the recipient as though swatting a pesky fly. Having won an Oscar for Misery, another Stephen King adaptation, she could be in the running again unless a flock of major performances suddenly appears between now and December. But the real fun is to be had with Judy Parfitt, hard as nails and just a shade camp as Bitch No 3, the dictatorial old biddy who makes Bates's life a misery. To her fall many of the best lines: "All my money's tied up in cash,'' she tells her housekeeper, refusing to help her financially, before confiding, in a line worthy of the ripest old Forties melodrama: "An accident can be an unhappy woman's best friend."

It must be this week's UN World Conference, for yet more oppressed womanhood is on display in Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker, a Chinese melodrama set at the beginning of the century. In the absence of a male heir to carry on the family business, the 19-year-old Chun Zhi finds herself forcibly installed at the helm of a vast fireworks empire. Forbidden to marry, she is addressed as "master" and always wears men's clothes, until she claps eyes on a charismatic wandering artist who is decorating the factory for the New Year's festivities. Chun's henchmen, however, are violently opposed to their marriage.

According to the director, He Ping, a near-contemporary of better known Fifth Generation film-makers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, the film aims to suggest a broader historical context: the way the fireworks dynasty clung on blindly to archaic feudal traditions in the teeth of the modernisation sweeping the country. But these are no more than hints: unlike some of the vast Chinese epics of recent years, the film's immediate focus is very small, which makes it feel, at 111 minutes, a shade plodding and over-extended. There are compensations: apart from the lavish design and cinematography, I liked the scene in which the artist arrives to claim his lover's hand wrapped, Rambo-like, in chains of firecrackers which he then proceeds to ignite and twirl death-defyingly around his head, not to mention the bizarre, kamikaze fireworks contest that requires contestants to detonate rockets strapped to their groins.

n On release from Friday