IT TAKES a unique kind of director to make you feel your head has been dunked in a used toilet for two hours.

Joe Carnahan achieves that and more with Smokin' Aces, a so-called gangster comedy that does the unthinkable - it makes Guy Ritchie's flicks look like the work of Federico Fellini.

It concerns Buddy 'Aces' Israel (Jeremy Piven), a coked-up Vegas entertainer turned state witness against Mafia boss Primo Sparazza (Joseph Ruskin). The contract is put out to have him clipped and a circus of nasties including bail bondsmen, neo-nazi homosexual assassins and a trio of black lesbian killers plan to nail him at his penthouse suite. Ray Liotta and a hirsute Ryan Reynolds are the FBI men trying to get to him first.

Smokin' Aces is the kind of film that can only come from middle-class, frustrated white men in their 30s - gratuitous, hyperviolent, misogynistic trash - having watched far too much Tarantino than is recommended. The film has not one character you can align to. It has a twist sign-posted in flashing neon. It explains why Ryan Reynolds grew that beard to hide his face.

Such is the churning of gangster cliché and so blinding is it in its puerile stupidity, you start to wonder is it some kind of outrageous satire. But then you see how the camera slowly slavers its tongue down the length of an enormous gun barrel. How it lingers just that one moment longer than it needs to on a bevy of scantily-clad prostitutes.

And you realise the director is actually getting off on this.

Paul Lynch

Into Great Silence (Philip Groening): Running time: 164 mins . . . .

"OH LORD you have seduced me, and I was seduced, " chant monks in the remote Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps near Grenoble. If you watch more than 30 minutes of Groening's extraordinary 164minute documentary about life in this strictest of all brotherhoods in the Roman Catholic Church you may well find yourself seduced by its next to total silence. Here, men live a life of prayer together following the same daily rituals as others before them have done over many centuries, cut off from the outside world and speaking as little as possible, knowing they will never leave. Groening waited 13 years for permission - never given before and unlikely to be given again - to film inside the monastery. The conditions imposed were that he should come alone, living in a cell as the monks did, for a total of four months taking in each of the four seasons, and that the film use no artificial light or music other than their own Gregorian chant, nor should the final film be accompanied by any commentary or interviews. The result is an exercise in pure cinema, in which natural sounds take on profound significance and the physicality of existence in an ambience of meditation and prayer dominates each day. Apart from the glimpse of a plane high in a blue sky, and the use of an electric razor, there is little to suggest anything has changed in the 900 years since the order was founded.

This is possibly the nearest any one can get to a sensation of timelessness other than by becoming a monk yourself. Given that "only in complete silence, one starts to hear, only when language resigns, one starts to see, " Into Great Silence is perhaps best experienced on DVD, alone in a room.

Ciaran Carty