Tonight's primetime movies could hardly be further apart on the spectrum of Hollywood movie genres. The first, The Age Of Innocence (World, 8.30pm), gave Martin Scorsese the chance to demonstrate that there is far more to his talents than gritty, brutal, contemporary drama.
This is a reverential adaptation of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer prize-winning novel about a love affair, set in the upper reaches of New York society, sometime in the 1870s. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Newland Archer, a slightly pompous, but charming young man who is quite prepared to do exactly what is expected of him and marry the right kind of girl, until he meets a woman who has spent her life defying convention.
He spends most of the film in a state of agonised indecision, torn between what he recognises as his one great passion for the unusual Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), and his dutiful affection for his fiancee May (Winona Ryder). His passion for Ellen is rivalled only by Scorsese's passion to recreate this rarefied world quite perfectly, from the gowns to the dinner parties, the chandeliers to the correspondence.
In The Usual Suspects (Pearl, 9.30pm) we are just as effectively hurled into another minutely reconstructed world, one of violent crime, secrets, and five frightened men. These five are all hardened criminals who have been pulled in for a heist, only to be released, as it turns out, to perform a debt to the most feared felon in the US, Keyser Sose.
Sose, who is never seen, only described by his icy spokesman, Peter Postlethwaite, and a terrified member of the gang, is invincible. He was prepared to shoot his own family to show how tough he was.
The story is all told in retrospect by 'Verbal' played with sweaty conviction by Kevin Spacey to a disbelieving policeman (Chazz Palminteri). Spacey got an Oscar for this, and quite rightly. He dominates the story despite good support from Gabriel Byrne, as a rotten-apple cop who has turned to crime.
