She takes it with a "Thank you" and whispers that she wants to sit in the front row, she can spot friends there (the friends wave: "Dilys! Over here!"). I have to slow my pace to match hers, which gives me a chance to tell her I'm a fan. I'm thanked for that too, and granted a surprisingly girlish giggle."Have you seen Ossessione before?" she questions "No," I reply, feeling foolish about the fan confession "It's interesting," she says. "Unfinished, but interesting." I'm struck dumb.We've reached her row Dilys's friends take over She's breathless, but game: "That was nice of you... Part of this is to do with her appearance; Powell resembles a cross between Robert Donant in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness - shrivelled, wise and vaguely oriental - and the Queen Mother; there's an unexpected regal graciousness to her little nods to faces she recognises. The crowd parts the way the Red Sea divides in The Ten Commandments (a film Powell enjoyed for its vulgarity, not its sentiment) You feel the awe.

And here she is, impossibly thin, impossibly frail, hobbling into the screening room. My friend wanted to know why - right then Powell was considered a middle-class relic by the Young Turks of British film criticism, so Iexplained, rather embarrassed, that I'd just re-discovered her writing and was kicking myself for not having previously noticed her sterling qualities: her sharpness of mind; her refusal to yield to received opinion; her quietly elegant prose; the way she tempered even the harshest opinion with an understanding of themedium's demands. My friend muttered something sarcastic about "growing up", and maybe he had a point; to finally appreciate Powell you had to have matured a little Or a lot.So there I was. Even then her public appearances were rare and I'd asked a friend in the BFI press office to let me know when the doyenne of all British critics might next re-surface. In fact, the only reason I attended the screening was because I knew Dilys Powell would be there. It was at a preview for the BFI's re-release of Visconti's Ossessione back in 1986 that I first saw, spoke to and - I'll explain later - touched Dilys Powell. The heavy-duty supporting cast includes Judi Dench and Cherie Lunghi, while Ian McKellan - to whom falls the film's most bizarre and underdeveloped role - drifts in and out vaguely as a raffish gentleman-tramp.n All films open tomorrowSheila Johnston. The end credits reassure us that no bees or Native Americans were harmed in the making of the picture.In the British comedy Jack and Sarah, Richard E Grant, reeling from the death of his wife in childbirth, raises his infant daughter alone (a single father's life is relatively smooth when he lives in a huge terraced house in Holland Park) with the help of an amateur nanny (Samantha Mathis, the obligatory minor American star) and foreseeable results.It's an oddly structured film, which makes time to drool endlessly over its star baby (to no great surprise, we note that she is played in the later scenes by the director's daughter), but has found no space for most of the plot: many key expository scenes seem to have disappeared on the cutting-room floor, and the baby grows by about a year overnight.

At first I assumed this was a satire on the dafter excesses of Iron John (only in America would affluent, middle-class, white males seek self-insight by adopting the lifestyle of an oppressed minority), but in time the awful truth dawned that the program was for real Warning: the film also contains a mime artist. Hoping to shake Chase off, the brat convinces him to enrol in the YMCA's Indian Guide Program, a bizarre scheme intended to encourage father-son bonding by having them dress up as Indians, do rain dances, learn how to throw tomahawks and make reindeer out of clothes pegs. Everyone acts in that manic, twitchy, over-emphatic manner of bad US sitcoms, while Betty Thomas directs with speed and wit. And any film which gets a splendid - albeit very brief - gag out of the Monkees gets my vote.More single parents complete the week: in Man of the House, a jaw-droppingly awful comedy, Chevy Chase courts divorcee Farah Fawcett and disaster in his kamikaze bid for the affections of her noxious, resentful 12-year- old son. It's the same comic device in reverse as The Addams Family: the deviant, but superbly functional family which shows up the "normal" world (indeed, one feels that the Addamses and the Bradys would make excellent neighbours).The irony is writ a little emphatic (it doesn't, after all, take too much sophisticated post-modern insight to recognise the Seventies as a style dustbin), but it's a very good-humoured, unspiteful movie, and mounted with great energy. The film-makers have updated it to the Nineties, where the Bradys' little Astroturfed, orange-upholstered time-bubble shines on obliviously in a grey, riot-ravaged LA.

In The Brady Bunch Movie, for instance, Shelley Long's single mum and Gary Cole's single dad merge their broods to produce - hey presto - a domestic dream: six lovely acne-free kids, three boys (brunet), three girls (blonde), all as alike as Russian dolls and living in a happy-face, surrealistically wholesome moral universe.The Brady Bunch Movie is based on an American television sitcom of the early Seventies. They have divorce on the agenda, to be sure, and death and infidelity, but so often all they're yearning for is the perfect nuclear family. The direction, however, is very confident, and there are two wonderful central performances from Anthony La Paglia and, especially, the abrasive, intriguing Mimi Rogers, whose strange screen presence has rarely been given the roles it deserves.As American politicians (Bob Dole is the latest) continue their sabre- rattling, vote-catching onslaughts on Hollywood's "depravity", it's worth checking out what most popular, shopping-mall American movies are actually about. It's a first film and a mite ponderous - the scenes are punctuated by self-conscious captions quoting from the dialogue ("Are you gonna break my heart?"), which, frankly, isn't that extraordinary. Killer is more conventionally fatalistic, the story of a hit-man who falls for the mysterious and seductive woman he is sent to kill, while she, seriously ill, is desperate to die.