THE movie menu is refreshingly varied tonight, with a choice of a harrowing Vietnam atrocity story in Casualties of War, undemanding fun with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters, and - best of all - Francois Truffaut's endearing Hitchcockian mystery Vivement Dimanche! (aka Finally Sunday! and Confidentially Yours).
SHOT in atmospheric black and white, Vivement Dimanche (11.45pm, Original Running Time 111 mins) is based on American Charles Williams' novel The Long Saturday Night, but set in the south of France. Jean-Louis Trintignant (A Man and a Woman) plays an estate agent wanted for murder who goes into hiding while his long-suffering secretary (Fanny Ardant of The Woman Next Door) sets out to find the real killer.
Deft mix of sentiment and dark humour, even as the corpses are piling up, makes for delightful light entertainment.
IT'S not often that Brian de Palma, director of movies like Scarface and Body Double, ventures into areas of moral debate, and if the worthy, but ultimately boring Casualties of War (World 9.30pm, ORT 113 mins) is anything to go by, it's a good job.
Based on a real incident, the film focuses on a American patrol in Vietnam and it's animalistic treatment of a kidnapped Vietnamese girl. Sean Penn is typecast as the nasty Sgt Meserve, whose idea it is to take the girl along to service the men, and so is Michael J. Fox playing the one nice guy.
And that's the film's main problem, the characters are too black and white, the moral debate too neatly resolved. There are occasions when it comes to life - witness Lt Reilly (Ving Rames) talking about what justice means to a black man from America's deep south - but the desperately corny ending is ludicrous.
FLAKY comedy Ghostbusters (Pearl 9.30pm, ORT 107 mins) must have been on TV at least a kazillion times before, so thank goodness it's such an immensely likeable comedy.