Cinema: War-torn love mark II stands up well to the comparison

Prudence compels me to reveal that one of the executive producers of Keith Gordon's Mother Night (15), Linda Reisman, is a good friend of mine; the creaking noise audible throughout the following paragraphs is the sound of a man bending over backwards to be impartial ... and probably failing, because it still seems to me a superbly acted, engrossing film that would have dominated the week's releases but for The English Patient. With which, by some whim of the gods of scheduling, it has much in common: a flashback structure, a WWII setting, a hero thought to be a traitor, and a love affair transcending national allegiances.

Not the least of its accomplishments is that it manages to make the loopy improbabilities it inherits from Kurt Vonnegut Jr's novel seem persuasive. Mother Night begins in a Haifa prison, in 1961, in black and white: Howard Campbell (Nick Nolte), stooped and slack-mouthed and lost, an ageing bear wearied with too much baiting, is being led to his cell to write a confession of his war crimes. Campbell is a sometime playwright, notorious for broadcasting Axis propaganda to his countrymen, like a Lord Haw-Haw or (hello again, Ezra!) a Pound. Yet all along, he claims, he was an American agent, whose tirades contained coded messages - a patriotic hero, in fact, though not entirely that, either, since all he really cared for was the "Nation of Two" he formed with his actress wife Helga (Sheryl Lee), believed killed while singing to the stormtroopers near the Russian Front.

After the war, Campbell's spy boss (John Goodman, witty in an uncredited role) spirits him back to New York. There he rots for years until he befriends a reclusive painter (Alan Arkin, quietly dazzling), is taken up by a ridiculous pack of Neo-Nazis, and is reunited with Helga, reports of whose death seem to have been exaggerated. as As during the war, though, all is not quite as it seems. Apart from Nolte, who underplays Campbell beautifully (it may be the best work this exceptional actor has done), the most impressive thing about the film is its director's fine control of tone. Gordon can spin a scene from comedy to pathos to horror in seconds. And though musical purists might consider the decision blasphemous, there is a rare, eerie solemnity to the sequences edited to Arvo Part's Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Delicious.

Reasons for Admiring my Critical Colleagues, Part One: the laughter which swept through the screening room when Shirley MacLaine succumbed to a near-lethal stroke in The Evening Star (15), Robert Harding's pointless, witless, remorseless, shameless and just generally -less sequel to Terms of Endearment. Reasons for Admiring, etc, Part Two: the number of whispers correctly guessing the big twist of Never Talk to Strangers (18) about 15 minutes into this tatty thriller, which has Rebecca De Mornay as a shrink who's being stalked, Antonio Banderas as her tattooed beau who may or may not be the stalker, and Peter Hall - correct, Sir Peter Hall - as director. Talk about motiveless crimes. KJ

All cinema details: Going Out, page 14