VIDEO CHOICE

EXISTENZ (15)

David Cronenberg's 12th film - his first original screenplay since Videodrome (1981) - at first seems uncharacteristically slight and oddly jokey. But this impeccably acted, beautifully designed film is in fact a playful, witty recapitulation of the director's obsessions. Absurdly rife with metaphors (mostly sexual) and overflowing with the most inventively disgusting slime in Cronenberg's career, this is ostensibly a cyberthriller, the film-maker's most literal foray yet into virtual reality. But the real subjects are techno-paranoia and body horror (and cinema itself). The film is set in a not-too-distant future where VR fans can download games into their bodies via an orifice inserted at the base of the spine. The protagonist, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is a celebrity game-designer who falls under a fatwa issued by a zealous "realist" movement and goes on the run with an understandably dazed bodyguard (Jude Law). The pair slip in and out of games, moving through successive levels of reality: it's more fun than The Matrix.

8MM (18)

Joel Schumacher's latest pretends to be about evil - its evil, why it exists, how it contaminates, deep stuff like that. In case you don' t pick up on this, someone says, more than once, "You dance with the devil, the devil changes you." When it' s not delivering knockout moral insights, this film operates mostly as a plodding, doggedly tawdry thriller. Nicolas Cage plays a private investigator hired to determine the authenticity of a snuff film. The assignment leads him to the LA sex netherworld (his tour guide is a porn-store clerk played by Joaquin Phoenix) and finally to the epicenter of Manhattan' s hardcore adult-film industry, where he must face down a leather-masked actor known only as "Machine". Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven), this is a nasty piece of work, and it's nasty in a particularly ostentatious way, disguising its hero's vigilante hysteria as a moral and existential crisis. With this mindlessly sordid low blow, Walker and Schumacher aren't staring into the void; they are the void.