ADAPTED by Richard Price from his epic 1998 novel about racial tensions in a fictional New Jersey housing project, Freedomland in some ways is Spike Lee's Do The Right Thingmeets Clint Eastwood's Mystic River.

Unfortunately, Joe Roth, better known as a producer, is neither a Lee nor an Eastwood, more a latter-day Stanley Kramer genuinely attracted to burning social issues but inclined to over-produce in case audiences miss the message. In response, the cast overact. Simulated emotion steams off the screen like a damp squib. As in Do The Right Thing, the pot comes off the racial lid on a hot May night when Moore, a white 37-year-old single mother with a history of drug abuse and promiscuity, walks into a hospital, bloodied and hysterical, claiming that she was carjacked by a black man and that her four-year-old son was asleep in the back seat.

Local detective Samuel L Jackson is assigned to the case, but the black housing ghetto is quickly overrun by police from the neighbouring white community, led by Moore's brother, intent on vigilante justice. Jackson realises Moore is not telling everything and tries to coax the truth from her before the situation, stirred up by saturation media coverage, erupts in major riots. Freedomland has important things to say about bigotry, hysteria, family rifts and law and order but speaks too often in capital letters rather than through suggestion and implication, the true language of cinema.

Lemming (Dominik Moll) Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Andre Dussolier.

Running time: 129 mins.

LEMMING is everything Freedomland is not. It's all between the lines, a seemingly simple story of bourgeois French life in which innocuous things take on sinister implications. A hardworking inventor of high-tech household gadgets (Lucas) invites his philandering boss (Dussolier) and wife (Rampling) to dinner, much to the discomfort of his shy, young wife (Gainsbourg). Shortly before the guests arrive his wife finds a dead lemming in the kitchen drain. It doesn't help that the guests are in the middle of a vicious row, in which the young couple become their pawns. One little disaster leads to another with dark consequences for their marriage. Moll lets the situation take its course with an absurdist logic that culminates with Gainsbourg assuming the persona of Rampling or vice versa. Meanwhile the lemmings keep appearing all over the place.