Space Jam is so obviously a work of the marketing/demographic-hunting mentality that it's rather surprising to

Space Jam is so obviously a work of the marketing/demographic-hunting mentality that it's rather surprising to find that the brazen creature gathers a certain charm as it rolls along. Michael Jordan is slightly less good at acting than Sir John Gielgud is at hurling a pill through a hoop, but he has a diffident warmth which makes him an acceptable screen presence; and though some of the Looney Tunes regulars are terribly underused (that exceptional talent Daffy Duck, one of the finest comedians ever to grace the Warner Brothers roster, stays pretty much on the sidelines), they do manage a few genuinely funny moments. Bugs is also given some new love interest, in the shapely form of Lola Bunny; at least one viewer found her rather provocative.After the verve, humour and invention of last year's Small Faces, Gillies Mackinnon's new film Trojan Eddie (15) seems almost wilfully glum. One of its more brutal episodes shows a poor sap being beaten up in a vast expanse of shiny mud, and there aren't many scenes which don't wallow in the emotional mire. Its title character (called "Trojan" because he talks himself hoarse?), played with dismaying authenticity by Stephen Rea, is the sort of depressive small- time con-man for whom the adjective "hangdog" and the noun "loser" were coined. Eddie is a minor auctioneer in rural Ireland, who works for the leader of the local travellers' community (Richard Harris) - a nasty, albeit slightly pathetic piece of work who has recently taken it into his head to marry a much younger woman (Aislin McGuckin), herself a traveller. The lady promptly runs off with the dowry money before the wedding stout has gone flat, and Trojan Eddie's life rapidly grows less enviable than ever.

Based on a script by the playwright Billy Roche, the film often feels more distinguished than involving; sombrely shot, passionately acted, but too much like a digressive anecdote which arrives at the wrong punchline.Cinema details: Going Out, page 14.. The First play in Sir Peter Hall's season of six "Classics" at the Old Vic, Waste, was written more than 70 years ago. The second play on which Sir Peter has conferred classic status is a mere 18 years old. Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill clearly deals with big themes: colonialism, sexual oppression, and the link between the two. But after sitting, grimly, through Tom Cairns's well-acted revival, the question remains: in what way is this schematic piece a classic? It opens in 1879, in an unspecified part of Africa. Here, under a flapping Union Jack, a colonial administrator, Clive (Tim McInnerny, in minor John Cleese mode) tries to protect his household from the threat of the "natives" and their own lively sexual impulses. Churchill's innovation, which would be effective in a sketch but grows tiresome across a full- length play, was to swap male with female, black with white, and adult with child A fluttery Dominic West plays Clive's wife, Betty.

A wide- eyed Janine Duvitski plays Clive's young son, Edward. A pale, cadaverous Stephen Noonan plays the rebellious black servant, Joshua. Churchill also moves the action forward 100 years in the second act (though the characters age only 25 years). So each actor plays someone else and the sexual politics are radically different. It might sound playful and interesting, but despite engaging performances - especially from Marion Bailey, who brings much needed depth to three roles - the characters remain as ciphers.It's obvious why. Cloud Nine, which was premiered by Joint Stock in 1979, arose (in a very late-Seventies way) out of workshops, group research and discussions, impros, games, role reversals, people sharing experiences, reading books and talking "to other people". Then Churchill went away and wrote it.Cloud Nine looks as if it was devised by a committee. Something needs to be said, and here are scenes devised to say it.

If only a subject as complex and morally fraught as the Empire were reducible to these rehearsal-room building blocks.Relationships come over as absurdly forced. If you had been sent the dramatis personae, along with instructions about the socio-political points that need to be made, you could work out yourself who needs to have sex with whom. At no moment - and this must matter for a classic - do you sense that the characters make the discoveries for themselves. No doubt the attack on pompous Victorian colonial patriarchs is absolutely justified. But in the way it treats people that it isn't interested in, Cloud Nine is not without its own brand of condescension.That thoroughly modern celebrity, Oscar Wilde, suits our current taste for victims: he is as famous for his downfall as he was for his talent. The two sides of Wilde's fame are well interwoven in The Importance of Being Oscar, subtitled, in a way that catches the grandiloquent manner of the presentation, "The Wit, Triumph and Tragedy of Oscar Wilde".