The Critics: Cinema: All the President's women

Primary Colors (15)

Funny Games (18)

The Exorcist (18)

Razor Blade Smile (18)

East Side Story (U)

I Want you (18)

Still Crazy (15)

Heard the one about the skirt-chasing president and his smart lawyer wife? Of course you have. Which is why you should have seen Mike Nichol's just-released (but far from new) movie months ago. Unfortunately, as Primary Colors gathered dust in the vaults of Universal Pictures, events overtook it: Monicagate got swinging, Kenneth Starr sniffed at that frowzy cocktail dress and Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog produced a sly audit on the moral bankruptcy of the White House. I'm sure Nichol began the project feeling he was being prescient, fresh and tough - but now that everyone and his cat has a detailed opinion about Bill Clinton's ethical turpitude, Primary Colors has the gamey smell of something rescued from the scrag bin. That's the negative spin, anyway. A more positive briefing on the movie might claim that its tardy release has allowed it to evolve into something more that a one-shot satire. Frankly, you can put me down as an undecided.

Based on Joe Klein's roman-a-clef, Primary Colors details the skirmishes and scandals during the election campaign for the 1992 Democratic presidential candidate. As the ambitious Governor Jack Stanton, John Travolta's impersonation of Bill Clinton is a fine use of his agreeably Muppety acting style. And the actor has selflessly stepped up his doughnut intake to become a perfect physical match for the president: Travolta's jowls are so bulked up that they look like two great slabs of grey lard topped by a pair of tiny, twinkly eyes. All that ballast around the chin makes him particularly adept at mimicking one of Clinton's most distinctive tics - that habit he has of gathering up the bottom of his face like an unruly crinoline before he issues some mock-thoughtful sentiment. It's a big, cheeky star turn, done as if he's in a different film from the other actors - especially his co-stars Emma Thompson (who plays Jack's wife Susan with admirable subtlety) and Adrian Lester (as a political innocent struggling with the couple's chilling pragmatism).

But what point does Nichol's film make? I drew two contrary conclusions from the triumph with which he eventually rewards the Stantons. One, that we should recognise that the political process eats souls like the film's dumpy anti-hero gobbles fried chicken, and that Jack and Susan are no longer human by the time we see them waltzing around the Oval office. Two, that they are all too human, and the film argues that we should loosen up about our leaders' failings and let them get on with running the country and seducing interns. But Primary Colors is fiercely equivocal about the moral issues it raises.

Which means that it's either a grown-up film that doesn't pretend to have all the answers, or it's sitting on the fence. Whatever the case, Nichol's take on the Clinton effect is gentle enough for it to be read as a strange kind of flattery. When John Travolta next pops round to lobby Bill Clinton on behalf of the Scientologists, he won't get the door slammed in his face.

Fresh and nasty from Austria, Michael Haneke's Funny Games is a counterblast to Kevin Williamson's ironic rebranding of the stalk'n'slash genre: it sets up a jolly family in an idyllic lakeside house, and then sends in two polite boys, Peter (a Billy Bunterish Frank Giering) and Paul (a willowy Arno Frisch) to borrow some eggs. Naturally, these visitors turn out to be a pair of motiveless psychopaths who have already butchered the neighbours. Instead of supplying the requisite round of queasy, giggly thrills, Funny Games refuses to play nicely. Instead, it shows you - in unbearably plausible detail - what it would really be like to be at the mercy of the larky sadists who populate most horror thrillers. The father of the house has his broken leg stamped on; the mother is made to strip at gunpoint; their little boy gets his head blown off with a shotgun. The worst acts of violence take place off-camera - rather than going truffling in the entrails like most horror directors, Haneke stays in the kitchen and watches one of his boy-villains make a cheese sandwich, as the sound of some hideous altercation is heard from the next room. A remarkable film, and no fun at all.

Twenty-five years after it made the world puke into its popcorn, The Exorcist has been summoned back into cinemas. William Friedkin's much- mythologised horror film is an uneven and illogical piece of work, but it has the edgy sobriety of the best of Seventies film-making, and an enthusiastic sense of the perverse. Frustratingly, there is a noticeable disjunction between Friedkin's explicit imagery and William Peter Blatty's more understated script. So when Father Karras (Jason Miller) arrives to determine whether little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is possessed by Satan, he seems curiously unswayed by her putrefying face, glowing yellow eyes and the torrents of viscous green sick that burst out of her. I had never seen the film before this week, and what struck me was that it is actually a story about medicine; its attitude to psychiatry and surgery is much more interesting than its attitude to God and the Devil. Its biggest shocks are not in those famous scenes in which Blair bashes a crucifix into her vagina and snarls things like "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!" Instead, Friedkin generates his strongest sense of Gothic menace with modern medical technology: he unnerves his audience with huge rotating brain-scanners and gruesome spinal taps. Much more frightening than the stuffed Satanic idol that is eventually revealed as the villain.

Horror completists may also want to be alerted to the release of Razor Blade Smile, a cheerfully crummy British vampire flick with am-dram standard performances and a semi-literate script - one character is described as "anally retentative", another displays "dogged determinism". But fans of Hammer's lesbian vampire films of the 1960s will be delighted to know that Ingrid Pitt's successors still have a naff taste in underwear.

Nothing in Razor Blade Smile terrifies like the sight of Bill Nighy strutting his stuff as an ageing glam rocker in Brian Gibson's Still Crazy, a likeable British comedy about a knackered Seventies rock band trying to make a comeback in the 1990s. (Velvet Slagheap, anyone?) It's simple-minded, feel-good stuff, which argues that even a gang of fractious middle-aged men with back problems and terrible haircuts (Timothy Spall, Billy Connolly, Jimmy Nail, Stephen Rea) can learn to settle their differences and make beautiful rock. At least I think that was the idea - though it was supposed to develop from discord to harmony, their music sounded as bad to me at the end of the film as it did at the beginning.

This week's other British release is Michael Winterbottom's I Want You, a stylish thriller chiefly notable for its atmospheric cinematography by Kieslowski's collaborator Slawomir Idziak, who looks like he's used a dirty Lucozade bottle for a lens. Though this studied moodiness lends its plot of murder in a comfortless seaside town a refreshingly unBritish feel, I couldn't spot anything original beneath its technical gloss.

East Side Story - Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn's history of socialist musicals - is covered comprehensively by Robin Buss's article on page 2. But I'd just like to add my kopeck's worth and salute it as absolutely essential viewing: a gripping piece of cinematic archaeology that allows you to be intoxicated by the chorused optimism of tractor drivers and coal-press operators, and moved by the quiet tragedy of the ageing singer who boasts "They used to call me the Elvis of the East." And if any cinema manager decides to programme a season of these all-singing, all-dancing, social realist treats, he should immediately receive the Order of Lenin.