Imagine Sandra Bernhard's glare on Muhammad Ali's face. I don't know what boxer Diana, as played by Michelle Rodriguez, does to her opponents, but she frightens me. Girlfight, written and directed by Karyn Kusama, is a prizewinner from that hotbed of independent movie achievement, the Sundance Festival, and deservedly so. The story of a Brooklyn Latina high-school girl, glowering with pent-up and erupting rage, unfolds, laconic and sinewy, with astonishing confidence for a first feature. The background of life in Brooklyn's Projects are etched in without over-statement; but it seems natural that Diana, no less than the local males, should look to boxing to provide an outlet for rage and an escape from low self- esteem.

Boxing's politically correct "gender-blind programme" means that Diana can fight men. Inevitably she's drawn against the boy she's attracted to. Besides the personal commitment and the reluctance to hurt a woman, Adrian's doubts also reflect the local macho fear of the unthinkable: the possibility of defeat by a female. All of this might be novelettish but is stubbornly, grittily treated with an uncomfortable honesty that avoids easy solutions. The final shot of their embrace, a close-up on Diana's face, watchful, tentative, not without hope, has a cautious optimism. No promises, mind, but life might get better. Terrific performances from a largely unknown cast and a great one from the simmeringly volcanic Rodriguez.

If Kusama's film fights its weight, another feature debut, The Contender, struts its stuff in heavyweight company and, way out of its class, falls flat. Writer- director Rod Lurie, described as "a former critic and entertainment journalist", brings the gloss and shallowness one might fear to this portentous plod through another imbroglio of the familiar backstage American political mixture of smear-and-millionaire. The contender in question is a woman senator, the official choice for vice-president, played with unbending woodenness by Joan Allen, and opposed by an assortment of interests, some in her own party. Unremittingly liberal - though interestingly this includes advocating military strength besides gun-control, abortion choice and campaign reform - she is pitted against the Machiavellian chairman of the probing confirmation committee. She is even vegetarian while the conniving chairman Runyon (Gary Oldman, exceedingly self-conscious) is seen as a hearty steak man. If not exactly crying "Aroint thee, witch!" this rump-fed Runyon sensationally produces evidence of the senator as central figure in a gang-bang in her student days. She refuses to address the allegations as beneath her dignity, preferring to keep to political issues, thus showing an alarming navete regarding the priorities of western democracy.

One can forgive the film its glib and faintly sanctimonious tone but not its dullness, nor the fact that its characters never develop. The plot ultimately depends on two whopping contrivances, one of which is the senator's actual innocence. This presumably depicts her stoic silence as all the nobler, but cynics may see it as the film having its moral cake and eating it. Much-vaunted principles would really be tested had she been a naughty girl and still said "So what?" The final scene, as she jogs through Arlington National Cemetery to the soundtrack of a presidential paean to the American system, belongs to another, and more awful, film. Oh - and she still gets to be vice-president.

Jeff Bridges manages to make the prez into a quirkily human figure but a splendid cast - including Christian Slater as a political ditherer between left and right whose receding hairline and startled fawn eyes lend him a disconcerting resemblance to Tony Blair - can do nothing with their pasteboard.

John Le Carre's Tailor of Panama is not 1,000 miles, morally and geographically, from Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. For Greene's vacuum-cleaner salesman feeding duff gen to our intelligence, read a fantasist ex-con who learnt his trade not in Savile Row but prison, incurably fixated on tall tales. Add to a still-corrupt and politically volatile post-Noriega Panama a disgruntled British spy with an eye on the main chance, and you have a black comedy that finds director John Boorman at his best. There is a darkly hilarious plausibility to an American invasion (think of Grenada) and the depiction of HM's diplomatic corps and intelligence services as variously gullible, self-important and venal. Geoffrey Rush is spot-on as the fantasising tailor indulging in panicky colloquies with his ghostly Uncle Benny (Harold Pinter). Neither of Pierce Brosnan's accents as a tacky post-cold war Bond figure (mockney spy, would-be smoothie disguise) entirely works, but despite its faults, Boorman's film has heart and guts. It hymns the small heroisms that almost redeem human idiocy - love of family, loyalty to friends - and shows up The Contender as a slick piece of PR.

One longs for One Night at McCool's to be funnier than it is. Homicidal Liv Tyler, all contour-clinging clothes and Monroe breathiness, strangely evoking the distinguished German soprano who recently sang Boulevard Solitude at Covent Garden, wreaks havoc in the lives of clueless bartender (Matt Dillon), lecherous lawyer (Paul Reiser) and piningly romantic cop (John Goodman), not to mention a hitman with a hairpiece that Liberace might envy (Michael Douglas, revelling in his new character-actor range). Brackish, blackish comedy, likeable but slight.

The Hole takes Anglo-American pupils from a posh English co-ed public school, not one of them looking more than 28, and subjects them to a terrifying ordeal: adolescent crushes, unrequited love and a general attack of the hots. There's also the old wartime bunker where they get trapped and where horrors unfold, though who or what was responsible depends on whether you believe baby-faced Liz (Thora Birch from American Beauty, English accent not half bad) or brilliant egghead and sinisterly manipulative Telegraph-reader Martin (Daniel Brocklebank, a powerful young actor all round). Caught in the middle is the nice but unbelievably stupid police psychologist (Embeth Davitz). Gripping, after a slightly risible set-up; and one can only conjecture what the abbot and monks of Downside, the location for these pubertal hot flushes, think about it all.

Under the Sand explains why Charlotte Rampling is one of the British products adopted as a French national treasure, right up there with Marks and Spencer. Francois Ozon's study in grief and delusion charts college lecturer Marie's refusal to acknowledge that her husband has been drowned on holiday. She talks to him, buys him presents, embarrasses her friends by referring to him as if still alive. The ending is enigmatic, as Marie runs across the sands to a distant figure, though the director has said this is a mere illusion. Elegant, cryptic, 95 minutes of la Rampling. Which is fine by me.

Fine Acting with a capital A, Theatricality with a big T, make Boesman and Lena something of a trial. Athol Fugard's play has been flattened to accommodate Hollywood stars Danny Glover and Angela Bassett, with the awareness of apartheid-era South Africa's graded black, white and "coloured" similarly steamrollered, presumably to simplify it into a story of dispossessed blacks. John Berry, who died before the film came out, was a fugitive from McCarthyite Hollywood, spending most of his career in exile. Despite unsuitable film treatment, his last work gets over the tragedy of the disinherited in their own land, rootless yet inescapably bound. He would have proved most royally had he been put on.

Nigel Andrews is away