Mr. Fioriti opened Sandro’s, his first New York restaurant, in the 80’s. Then he disappeared for nearly a decade before resurfacing first at his eponymously named trattoria in Chelsea five years ago, and later at Serafina on the Upper East Side. He cooked in his restaurants as if he were serving dinner to friends in his own home, and his expansive personality and simple but wonderful food led to a following of fans that was akin to a cult. He introduced New Yorkers to the best fried artichokes they’d ever eaten, to spaghetti with lemon sauce and chicken livers in balsamic vinegar. When Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in restaurants, Mr. Fioriti, a cigar aficionado, impishly put tobacco in his gnocchi, steak sauce and even the panna cotta.

Now, at Table XII, some of the old buoyancy seems to have gone. My experiences here were erratic, beginning with the service. One night, we were charmed by a Brazilian waiter who had only been there a couple of weeks; another night, we had to put up with one of the rudest waiters I’ve encountered in a long time. By the end of dinner, when he tossed the bill down on the table and walked away without a word, I could cheerfully have run after him and stuffed it down his throat.

He seemed annoyed from the start, when I asked if there was a more interesting white wine available by the glass than the two offered on the list. He became even more irritated when, after listening to a dizzying recitation of over a dozen specials, I asked him to repeat the main courses. He sighed and pursed his lips and reeled them off staccato as if addressing an obtuse child: “Sole! … Branzino! … ”

He was reading from a printed list. Why not print it out for the customers and put it inside the menu?

The food is hit-or-miss, too. Things start well with the arrival of good breads, charcuterie and cheese. Some dishes, such as the spaghetti al limone and the grilled veal paillard—served with great spinach and creamy mashed potatoes—were every bit as wonderful and immediate as they were when I tasted them several years ago. The branzino, however, was perfectly nice but not stellar.

I should have known better than to order strawberry risotto sprinkled with petals of flowers, but I was curious. It was jarringly sweet, crunchy and strange. I left it after a few mouthfuls, and the waiter swept the plate away without comment. A Sandro “signature,” tagliolini with melon and anchovies, was equally bizarre. The pasta itself—perfectly cooked silken strips—was irreproachable. It was swamped by the cantaloupe, though, and the bare hint of anchovy wasn’t enough to temper the excessive sweetness. A few mouthfuls were enough.

“It reminds me of a story about Samuel Johnson, when he was listening to someone playing a composition on the violin,” my companion said after a taste. “When a friend explained that it was a very difficult piece to play, Johnson replied, ‘I wish it were impossible.’”

An overpowering smell of strong, sweet perfume (Jungle Gardenia?) pervaded the corner of the room where we sat. The culprit was a woman who could have been anywhere from 40 to 80 years old, her entire face frozen solid and devoid of any expression at all. Mercifully, she and her three elderly male friends soon left. Taking their place were a man and his tanned blond companion, whose amazing breast augmentation was bursting over a tiny white tank top.

“That man across the way looks like Gene Hackman playing the role of a retired Mafia hit man,” my companion said. “Have you noticed there’s not a single man here not wearing black?” He was right. “Of course, it’s black-on-black, not the black of the downtown artists of the 1980’s.”

As we tasted each dish, we began to wonder if Sandro had taken the night off. Zucchini flowers were buried inside a leathery, greasy batter. They came with artichokes, also deep-fried, that were nothing like the ones he made at his Chelsea trattoria. My companion had ordered a Milanese—a pounded veal chop topped with arugula, tomato and sliced onion. It was good, but it lacked personality. “It’s like decent hotel food—you don’t discern the presence of the chef’s hand,” my friend said. I tried the Chilean sea bass. It was soft and watery, but served with delicious chunks of stewed eggplant. For dessert, we had a pleasant lemon sponge cake and panna cotta drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

My companion, who used to live in Italy, had become increasingly cross as the meal progressed. “Sandro probably doesn’t feel he needs to be here because the ‘foodies’ have gone to their summers in Tuscany,” he said. “They’re over there discovering the region’s specialties: the awful, unsalted Tuscan bread and the local pecorino—day-old pecorino, month-old pecorino, three-month-old pecorino, pecorino that’s been left on the counter for a week …” His voice trailed off. Sandro had made his entrance.

The chef came into the dining room like the genial host of a country taverna, striding from table to table, a Falstaffian figure in a white T-shirt and bright orange-pink pants held up with suspenders. I felt sorry that the food wasn’t better, and as he made his rounds, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Fioriti should spend more time at the stove. His dishes seem to demand his own personal touch; otherwise, they tend to disappoint. What would Dr. Johnson have to say if he went to a concert and the trickiest passages were played by an understudy?

In New Orleans, a lunatic goes on a shooting spree, gunning down an entire office of innocent people. Two years later, the widow of one of the victims sues a big gun manufacturer called Vicksburg Firearms for providing the murder weapons that wiped out her husband (Dylan McDermott, in a brief prologue cameo) and all of his officemates. Enter the controversy, the complications and the stars. The prosecuting attorney is Dustin Hoffman, a shameless cracker-barrel showoff who mewls his way through a Tennessee Williams drawl that would embarrass both Boss Finlay and Big Daddy, and resorts to corny tricks like spilling mustard on his tie so the jury will think he's down-home as a buttermilk biscuit. The defense attorney is Bruce Davison, but he's just a puppet in a faded ice-cream suit from studio wardrobe whose strings are pulled by the despicable gun lobby. The real adversary that Hoffman has to beat to win the case for his client and set a precedent for gun control is Gene Hackman, as an evil cutthroat trial "manipulator" hired by the gun company to rig the jury and throw the case.

Cut to an unemployed part-time student (John Cusack) who gets a jury-duty summons. Like almost everybody else on the planet, he would rather amputate his big toe than perform his so-called "civic duty" locked in a jury box watching his career, job and life go down the drain for as long as it takes to reach a verdict. (Why are so many innocent people sent to prison for crimes they didn't commit? Because hungry, exhausted, sequestered juries tired of cold coffee, stale sandwiches and no sleep will vote for any easy verdict just to go home.) Despite his humorous attempts to get off (sex-change surgery does seem a bit radical), Cusack lands on the jury of the gun-control trial and becomes known as "Juror No. 9." (This is totally absurd, but more about that later.) Before anyone can sympathize with this witty, traumatized fish out of water, his behavior turns odd and the screen is overwhelmed by red herrings. As you can well imagine, it also begins to stink.

Outside the court, Hackman controls the trial from a high-tech war room, sending hidden mikes and cameras into the fray while his team of eggheads analyze, hound, stalk, shadow and videotape the jurors, rooting out their weaknesses for blackmail purposes. Inside the jury room, Cusack does some manipulating himself, while his girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz) makes phone calls demanding $10 million from both Hackman and Hoffman, promising she can sway the jury either way. The movie makes a hair-raising point that serving on a jury is worse than going to the dentist for a root canal.

Hackman's thugs break into the jurors' homes, investigate their medical records, unseal their criminal records and ransack their computers, driving one woman to attempt suicide and threatening to expose another juror who has AIDS. When all else fails, they burn down their apartments. One by one, the members of this cockeyed jury find their lives in torment and their futures bleak unless they vote the right way. But which way is that? Hoffman pleads for American justice, the defense-team rats plead Second Amendment rights to carry firearms for self-protection, and the Cusack-Weisz team representing greedy financial gain without moral conscience plays both sides against each other to see who will give in and come up with the extortion money. The elements for a gripping and controversial entertainment are present, but the script grows more ridiculous with the introduction of each new issue, eschewing depth and perspective for flashy style and confusing platitudes. Finally, when Cusack and Weisz reveal their true motives in bringing down Hackman, the happy-ending corn is almost comical.

But none of this matters, really, because of one disastrous mistake from which the movie never recovers. The Cusack character has moved to New Orleans from another part of the country. He hasn't been in town six months. He has no voter's record, he owns no property, he has a string of aliases, he lives under an assumed name. In reality, there is no way a man like that could ever possibly receive a jury-duty notice in the mail. And even if all systems failed and the New Orleans justice system was run by criminals and morons, he would still have no control over which trial or which jury, if any, he would end up serving on. The term "poetic license," even for the sake of Hollywood escapism, doesn't even begin to cover it. It took four screenwriters to dream up this much fakery. What they got paid was probably more than the annual salary of a Supreme Court judge.

In the John Grisham novel from which this nonsense is derived, the Goliath on trial was the tobacco industry. Those were the days when Presidential candidate Bob Dole was sounding off about how he believed that rumors about cancer-risking nicotine addiction were exaggerated by left-wing Democrats. Big Tobacco has since had its day in court and lost big time. The movie had to move on to less dated, equally well-organized and financed but more hated 21st-century demons. Pedophile priests would have made a hotter topic for a lawsuit, but they don't have a union. So guns it is, plus enough distractions and New Orleans scenery to stretch the labored plot into a two-hour movie-a chase scene here, a pointless interlude in a voodoo shop there, some vicious violence between Ms. Weisz and the villains, and more shenanigans in the jury room than even the most gullible audience could ever deem possible. (Just get on a jury where they guzzle bourbon under the table and blow cigarette smoke in the faces of allergy sufferers, and watch what happens.) By the time director Gary Fleder gets around to the much-anticipated confrontation between Hoffman and Hackman in the men's room, it's an hour and a half too late.

I saw this movie the same week I received another frustrating, maddeningly intrusive summons for jury duty myself-for the week after Christmas, yet. Stripped of any feelings of patriotic duty and fearing for my life after seeing Runaway Jury , I am seriously thinking about leaving the country.

Tune in Radio

Radio is one of those well-made, well-meaning true stories about courage and overcoming adversity that (1) makes me feel good about the human race, and then (2) makes me worry about whether anyone will ever see it. The year is 1976; the place is Anderson, S.C. Jimmy Carter is running for President and other things are happening, too. We hear about them from a variety of radios wheeled through the shady streets of town in the supermarket shopping cart of a harmless, good-hearted, often ridiculed and deeply misunderstood town character named James Robert Kennedy. The warm, decent and sometimes heartbreaking ways his qualities are explored by Cuba Gooding Jr. make for one of the year's most captivating performances.

One rare source of pleasure in the otherwise wrenching life of this mentally challenged lost child is his occasional pause at the high-school football field to watch the local team practice. One day on his rounds, some bullies tape him to the plumbing pipes in one of the school's maintenance sheds, where he is rescued, frightened and in shock, by the football coach, Harold Jones (Ed Harris). Coach Jones extends a hand in friendship to the fellow he nicknames "Radio" because of his passion for all radios, large and small. Coach Jones gives Radio a job helping out on the playing field, then encourages him to attend classes with the other kids. The football team promptly adopts him as a mascot, but so much intimacy between a respected coach and the "town retard" does not sit well with some of the more affluent and bigoted citizens at the local barber shop, and even causes a few hurtful misunderstandings with the coach's resentful teenage daughter, Sarah (Mary Helen Jones), and baffled but supportive wife, Linda (a small but important supporting performance by Debra Winger). When Radio's loving, long-suffering mother dies and leaves him homeless, the coach becomes his surrogate father and adviser, which leads to many problems at home and school. But as Mike Tollin's solid direction and Mike Rich's honest, no-frills screenplay build to the ultimate rehabilitation of Radio and the realization that people who look, sound and seem "different" can still make valuable contributions to our society, the film has an undeniable emotional impact.

At the end of the movie, we meet the real Radio, now in his 50's-a happy, functioning and popular coach at the same South Carolina high school where he was once abused, and a cherished and vital member of his community. At the screening I attended, people were sobbing and applauding at the same time. This is good. But will it fly? Without the kind of noisy, numbing action today's audiences crave, I'll be curious to see how a film as sensitive and caring will do at the box office. Certainly it's a feather in the cap of Cuba Gooding Jr. Walking sideways, flashing a broken-toothed grin and struggling to make words out of grunts and plosives, some cynics will call his a trick performance from the trunk where Sean Penn and Dustin Hoffman keep their old ticks and stutters, but I was reminded more of Mickey Rooney in the unforgettable film Bill , with Dennis Quaid. With his goofy sweetness, docile uncertainty and indestructible determination to succeed, I found Mr. Gooding as unique and inspiring as Radio himself.

Meg's Career Turn

Brutally savaged at this year's Toronto International Film Festival for any number of justifiable reasons, Jane Campion's In the Cut , a lurid descent into sex and violence with Meg Ryan ditching her clean-cut Doris Day image for full-frontal nudity, has finally arrived on a screen near you. It is nasty, gruesome, pointlessly kinky and gratuitously awful. But although I wrote about it from Toronto at some length, a few extra comments seem warranted. At 41, with a string of recent flops and her fans reluctant to accept her in anything more serious than When Harry Met Sally , Ms. Ryan's lust for a right-angle career turn is understandable. But the role of a conflicted, emotionally dead, sexually repressed teacher in one of New York's sleaziest neighborhoods who goes on an erotic safari with a crude cop (Mark Ruffalo) investigating a wave of serial killings-well, it's not my idea of a positive move. Some of the sex scenes in director Campion's initial cut were so graphic they had to be cut from the current release print (maybe that explains the title, since nothing else does). What's left leaves no body part to the imagination; for women who have been protesting double standards for years, Mr. Ruffalo shows off his family kumquats, too. In interviews, Ms. Ryan reveals that the director bathed the closed set in exotic incense to enhance the mood for the fornication scenes, while Mr. Ruffalo gamely admits the result thrilled his wife and did wonders for their love life. But Ms. Ryan's ugly brown wig, brown contact lenses and total absence of makeup only make her look haggard, and Jennifer Jason Leigh is criminally wasted in the role of her sluttish half-sister, who seems to live (for no explicit reason) above a brothel, a strip joint or some other similar house of sleaze, and whose severed head ends up (for an equally inexplicable reason) in a plastic bag. Ms. Ryan's character is an educated gal, but she'll go to bed with anybody. When she sees the same three-of-spades tattoo on Mr. Ruffalo's character's wrist that she spotted on the faceless serial killer, she suspects she's being roto-tilled in the sheets by the killer, but the terror turns her on. The list of suspects grows while the plot's plausibility diminishes. The sound track plays "Que Sera, Sera." Everybody is soaked with carnal sweat. The camera goes out of focus. Bloody organs fall out of a laundromat on the rinse cycle. It all ends up in a lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge. I predict her fans will avoid this disaster in legions, but who knows? In the Cut may prove, once and for all, if everyone still wants to have what Meg Ryan is having.

Gwyneth Paltrow

is rumored to have made $10 million for her

role in the Farrelly

Brothers' new obesity farce, Shallow Hal .

I certainly hope so. It really is the only acceptable explanation for the

appearance of a patrician Oscar winner of her stature in such a sophomoric

piece of trash. For Shakespeare in Love ,

she probably got carfare. For 10 big ones, a girl can be forgiven almost

anything; for 10 big ones, there is no such thing as deplorable.

Too bad the same thing cannot be said for Shallow Hal . Writers-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly

are the envelope-pushing amateurs whose stomach-turning junk films, such as Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary , are to the

cinematic experience what four pounds of tainted pork are to the alimentary

canal. This time they examine the tired axiom "Beauty is in the eye of the

beholder." In the opening scene, a man dying in an intensive-care unit leaves

his porcine 9-year-old son Hal with parting words of sage advice: "Don't settle

in life for average poontang-hot tail is what it's

all about." The little porker grows up to be a fat gnat head, played by

somebody named Jack Black, who exhibits all the charm of a recycled Goodyear

tire. Hal is so shallow, he devotes his life to

hitting on girls because of the size of their bodacious ta-tas.

To alter his misguided libido, a self-help guru in size-16 shoes hypnotizes him

in a stalled elevator. From that moment on, Hal encounters the world's most

grotesquely hideous women and sees only beauty.

Enter Gwyneth

Paltrow, who plays Rosemary, the humongous daughter

of Hal's boss, played-for no reason-like a thug with a Scottish Highlands

accent by veteran movie mobster Joe Viterelli. When

Hal is with Rosemary, Ms. Paltrow's the golden-haired

babe we all know and love. When everyone else sees her, she's a 300-pound

female rhino. Even Hal's best friend (Jason Alexander), a fat cretin who sprays

fertilizer on his head to make it look like he has more hair, thinks he's

dating her to win over the boss, adding that all the women Hal is suddenly

attracting are dogs. "Who says they're ugly?" "Bausch and

Lomb."

This is a one-joke movie

dragged out for two painful hours, interrupted occasionally by Mr. Alexander,

who urges people to enter the bathroom to inspect the contents of the toilet

bowl. Then the humor turns from nasty to ghoulish when the guru removes the

hex, and Hal sees the women of his masturbatory fantasies for what they really

are and goes schizo. Not only is Rosemary a clunking

blob of varicose-veined ectoplasm, but the beautiful children in the pediatric

ward where Rosemary works turn out to be deformed burn victims, and the

athletic hunk Hal is jealous of turns out to have a head full of psoriasis that

covers his shoulders with skin scabs. In time, the shallow guy realizes beauty

really is only skin-deep, but it's too late for messages or morals. The humor

has already leaked like slow flatulence from a movie that was, from the

beginning, desperately in need of a bottle of Beano.

The sight of glam-goddess Gwyneth

wolfing down cheeseburgers and chocolate malts has a mildly humorous effect,

but once she's slathered in latex prosthetics, the sight of all that

pulchritude is oddly, disingenuously unfunny. I didn't crack a smile at the

burn victims, or the poor creature with the deformed spine who

crawls around on his hands and knees, either. And while this movie pretends to

lift the veil on the superficial values of horny men in society who make fun of

homely females, its attitudes toward the afflicted and disenfranchised are

offensively cruel. Everything about it is superficial, including Mr.

Alexander's coming to grips with an extended vestigial bone at the bottom of

his own spine, which he learns to wag proudly like a puppy dog's tail.

The Farrellys, who peddle bad taste on a massive scale to appeal to the basest instincts

of a brainless teenage audience that laughs uproariously at laxatives, and

semen for hair gel, call this their "most emotional film" to date. This is the

most genuine laugh connected with Shallow

Hal . It is shallow to the core, and crammed with 29 vomit-inducing rock

songs strung together for a soundtrack CD to prove it.

The Score Times

Two

Another Oscar winner goes slumming in Heist . This time it's Gene Hackman, in a

movie with a one-word title that pretty much says it all. This one comes on the

heels of The Score , with practically

the same identical plot. It's the old cliché about the crafty veteran thief who

gets betrayed by the ambitious, greedy, smartass

younger thief in one last heist before retirement. This time Mr. Hackman plays the older thief that Robert De Niro played in The

Score ; the brilliant Sam Rockwell takes on the role Edward Norton had in

the earlier film; and toadstool-sized Danny DeVito is

the crooked fence Marlon Brando

played in the style of Truman Capote. The

only difference is that Heist

has two heists for the price of one, neither of them plausible or convincing,

and the preposterous, self-conscious dialogue is written by the dumbfoundingly overrated David Mamet.

But even with lines like "She could talk her way out of a suntan," a heist is a

heist is a heist.

Mr. Hackman, who dresses up a lot of

bad movies these days, plays the crook who wants to retire after one final job

to his fishing boat in the tropics-a role that was so old it was hairy even

when Humphrey Bogart played it in film after film in the 1940's. After the

tiresome jewel heist, filmed in detail but still incoherent, the slimy little

fence (Mr. DeVito) cheats Mr. Hackman

out of his half of the precious gems-unless he pulls off one more job. The

second robbery involves stealing a fortune in gold from a cargo plane on the

tarmac in broad daylight. This one is foiled by the fence's cocky, oversexed

nephew (well played by the versatile Mr. Rockwell), who makes off with the gold

and the old guy's hard-boiled wife (Rebecca Pidgeon).

Relax. Even in the big shootout, Mr. Hackman has a

backup plan. Like The Score , the

point of a contrived underworld potboiler like Heist is simple: You can't teach an old dog new

tricks, because old dogs already know every trick in the book.

It doesn't take long before you forget all about the dynamics and

start listening to the dialogue. David Mamet is not

half the director he and his investors think he is, but as a writer he can

always be relied upon for fast, funny and completely pointless dialogue-which

means words that are in love with themselves, and lines that exist for no other

purpose than to be quoted. Since the whole movie is about repartee, here are

some examples:

"He's so cool that when he goes to bed, sheep count him !"

"Nobody lives forever." "Frank Sinatra

gave it a shot."

"Ain't

you a piece of work?" "Yeah, I came all the way from China in a matchbox."

"He's quiet as an ant pissing on cotton."

"How long has he been with that girl?" "How long is a Chinaman's

neck?"

Typical Mamet-speak.

Tough and talky and fueled by testosterone, but hardly

original and ultimately pointless. I want more, but in hard times, this

is what passes for filmmaking.

Travolta's Back As Good Guy

John Travolta's rumpled-collie

sincerity carries a lot of weight in the believable, slickly made but

less-than-gripping thriller, Domestic

Disturbance . The story line is simplicity itself, the trajectory

straightforward, and the realistic direction by the always reliable Harold

Becker ( Malice, City Hall ) serves the

material carefully. But where is the suspense?

Divorced nice guy Frank

Morrison (Mr. Travolta), who builds old-fashioned

wooden boats on the coast of Maryland, becomes alarmed when his already troubled

12-year-old son Danny (terrific newcomer Matthew O'Leary) tells him he's

witnessed a murder committed by his new stepfather, Rick (Vince Vaughn). Rick

is a rich, nattily dressed newcomer in town whose philanthropic heroics have

quickly established him as a pillar of the community. Now Frank's ex-wife is

his new bride, with another baby on the way. But at the garden wedding, Rick

comes nervously unhinged when an old buddy named Ray shows up to unbalance the

domestic bliss. Ray is even creepier than he looks, which is no small feat

since he's played by Steve Buscemi, a punchy actor

from the James Woods sleazoid school who specializes in douche bags. Sure enough, he's an

old fellow inmate from Rick's secret days in prison who has arrived to

blackmail him. Rick murders Ray and burns his corpse in the oven of a brick

factory, and Danny is the accidental witness.

Nobody believes the kid except his dad, and Mr. Travolta finds himself in his most sympathetic role since Phenomenon . After disastrous turns in Battlefield Earth and Swordfish , it's reassuring to see him

play a father who has never failed his son, trapped in a world that is falling

apart while he tries to defend him against an entire town. Vince Vaughn is

equally fine as the handsome Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year who hides

deadly secrets behind a baby-faced grin. Production values are first-rate and

attention never waivers. But there is never any doubt as to how this obvious

domestic disturbance will turn out. The time passes entertainingly-and

considering the alternatives, you could waste your money in worse ways. But

like filling Chinese takeout, you may not remember much about it the morning

after.

In this context, Under Suspicion emerges as a double vehicle for two aging character actors in roles originated by Lino Ventura and Michel Serrault. (Mr. Serrault is best known in America as the effeminate partner of the more butch Ugo Tognazzi in the 1978 La Cage Aux Folles .) As might be expected, Mr. Freeman plays the crafty detective (the Ventura role), while Mr. Hackman plays the guilt-ridden tax lawyer (the Serrault part). The problem with what amounts to a two-character confrontation is its essential theatricality. The action takes place over the course of one night, as Captain Victor Benezet (Mr. Freeman) attempts to verify the alibi of Henry Hearst (Mr. Hackman), a prominent tax lawyer, during the time of the rape and murder of two 13-year-old girls. From all accounts, Under Suspicion is faithful to the double-twist plot of the original, though the locale has been shifted from a small French provincial police station to that of a Caribbean island very much like Puerto Rico during the colorful festival of San Sebastian.

Benezet and Hearst are both members of the island's social elite, and when the captain asks Henry to "drop by" the police station before attending the Hurricane Relief Banquet at the hotel across the street, Henry has no idea that he is going to be grilled all night by Benezet and his fierce subordinate, Detective Felix Owens (Thomas Jane). Both are convinced that Henry is guilty of the two rape-murders, but to prove it they have to pry into Henry's troubled marriage with the much younger and beautiful Chantal (Monica Bellucci).

The trick of the movie is to use the interrogation as an excuse for the humiliating exposure of every quirk in Henry's sex life, and there are quirks aplenty. In the end, Henry frankly confesses his addiction to young girls, with their smooth flesh and their gift of perpetual laughter. When Chantal is interrogated, she reveals that she was Henry's mistress from age 11, but when she discovered Henry in a slightly compromising position with her nymphet-like niece, she locked her bedroom door to him and has kept it locked. After Henry denies that he knew the two victims at all, the police discover a stash of pictures he has taken of them, and the noose tightens around his neck. In the meantime, Henry has scored some points against the captain for his pathetic political ambitions and his shattered domestic life.

Yet it is Henry who is the most ravaged, particularly in the shockingly metaphorical loss of his hairpiece in an unruly struggle with Detective Owens. From that point on, Henry discards this last shred of his vanity (and Mr. Hackman reveals the ultimate erosion of his hairline at the age of 70), though he insists that he is only 57 when the captain suggests that he is 67. It seems a bit of old Hollywood to suggest that the marriage of Henry and Chantal is at all unnatural.

In any event, Mr. Hackman and Mr. Freeman have taken charge of their own careers with admirable audacity, and the result is not at all uninteresting. At the same time, I don't remember Garde à vue ever coming out in New York, but I'm sure it did, and I hope it won't disappear into the limbo of English-language remakes.

School Reform in France, a Poet-Teacher's Story

Bertrand Tavernier's It All Starts Today ( Ça Commence Aujourd'hui ), from a screenplay by Dominique Sampiero, Tiffany Tavernier and Mr. Tavernier, simply glows as the kind of exhilaratingly humanist entertainment that what is left of Hollywood never even considers making anymore. The hero of this new French film is a miner's son named Daniel Lefevre (Philippe Torreton), who is the director of an under-funded kindergarten in Hernaing, near Valenciennes, in the north of France. Far from the tourist's path, this once-prosperous region is now afflicted with high unemployment and all its attendant ills.

Lest the reader suffering from compassion fatigue be frightened away by the very subject of the film, let me hasten to add that Mr. Tavernier's lyrical camera movements, sweeping back and forth against a landscape of little children for whom life literally and poetically starts anew each day, are nothing short of sublime. But it is never easy for Daniel and his dedicated and resourceful staff to get through each day, with its endless crises arising from budget-driven deficiencies and shortages.

Like Mr. Sampiero, one of the screenwriters, Daniel is a poet who teaches kindergarten. The film is festooned with poetry, thus giving it an added dimension beyond the nakedly naturalistic. There are no easy villains in the narrative. Even an abusive stepparent is seen as being overwhelmed by forces he cannot control. Yet Daniel has to report the situation to the authorities, and another neglectful mother loses custody of her child.

One evening, Daniel is confronted with a more complicated parental issue when a mother (Betty Teboulle) arrives late to pick up her daughter, Laetitia. When she bends over to kiss her child, she collapses, dead drunk, in the school yard. Overcome with shame, she flees, leaving Laetitia and her baby brother behind. Daniel phones the child welfare service, only to have them hang up on him when he declines their advice to dump the children with the police. Daniel personally assumes the responsibility of taking the children home, thus crossing the Rubicon of school regulations and becoming radicalized in the process. Daniel's only ally in the child welfare service is the articulate and outspoken Samia (Nadia Kaci), a case worker and pediatric nurse who shares Daniel's exasperation with red tape. She also shares Daniel's hot temper, and this causes an explosion at their first meeting, after which they calm down and learn to appreciate each other's commitment to change and improvement.

Daniel's actions, however, pit the educational establishment against him and cost him any chance of professional advancement. In the midst of all his travails, the school is vandalized by unemployed juvenile delinquents, and Daniel's precious camcorder is stolen along with an assortment of electronic devices. The police are of little help, except for breaking a window to help the school collect on the insurance. Daniel later discovers that the young felons were assisted in their crime with a key provided by his disgruntled stepson.

Mr. Tavernier comes steadily closer to facile caricature the higher up he goes on the political ladder of responsibility. But a confrontation between the Mayor (Gérard Giroudon) and Daniel pits one member of the Comédie Française against another, and for once the rhetoric is even-handed enough to give both sides a fair hearing. This only makes the situation more depressing, since it is really no one's fault that a whole region has lost its tax base at the same time that more expenditures are required for the social sector. All Daniel knows is that his little charges are hungry, and there is no money to even give them school lunches when many of them come to school without having gotten a decent breakfast at home.

Daniel comes close to the breaking point when a despairing mother commits suicide after he has brusquely dismissed her complaints on a day when everything at the school seemed to be going wrong. Aside from his own guilt, Daniel has to endure a smug inspection of his classroom methods by the worst kind of pedantic bureaucrat. Taking all the blame on his shoulders, as always, Daniel decides he must quit to save his own sanity.

With all these provocations, Daniel does not, of course, quit. Suddenly the tide begins going in the right direction. His stepson becomes reconciled to him as a father after he is told that his "real" father, whom he has been idealizing, insisted that his mother abort him. Daniel's sculptress girlfriend, Valeria (Maria Pitarresi), also contributes her artistic expertise to the school by guiding the children into a massive and colorful reshaping of their environment. But it is not simply a few positive incidents that keep Daniel in the educational harness. Like all good teachers, he has fallen in love with his students, and he realizes, even if his society does not, that he is engaged in the most awesome activity there is. Each day a child is in kindergarten is a down payment on the future of our civilization. Mr. Tavernier and Mr. Torreton have collaborated on a brilliant portrait of a teacher, one that never dissolves into the gooey sentimentality usually prescribed for the genre. In the faces of the real children of the region, Mr. Tavernier has found a stream of images to redeem us all.

Kim Basinger never struck me as an easy pushover willing to do anything just to keep her career afloat. But here she is in Bless the Child , a turgid, pretentious religious thriller that is anything but thrilling. Why would an actress who finally proved to the doubters she could act (and won an Oscar doing it) lower her standards now? Was L.A. Confidential just a fluke? As career moves go, Bless the Child is a 10-pound coffin nail. In a summer notable for trash dumping, Bless the Child is practically an infomercial for enforced recycling.

The plot outline is so absurd that just remembering it induces pain, but here goes: Ms. Basinger, lovely as ever but looking extremely bewildered, plays Maggie, a New York nurse whose screwy younger sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) shows up full of heroin and hostility with a six-day-old baby daughter named Cody, whom she abandons for Maggie to raise. Maggie doesn't know it, but Cody is the reincarnation of Jesus, who has returned to Earth to fight the evils of Satan. Six years later, Cody is making the Tupperware spin and bringing dead birds back to life while a gang of killers is on the prowl, ridding New York of all children born on Easter Sunday under the star of Bethlehem. Are you still with me on this? Pay attention. This requires concentration.

Jenna makes an unexpected reappearance, still strung out on drugs and married to the Devil's chief disciple, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), the freaky head of a New Age satanic cult called the New Dawn Foundation, whose orders are to convert the Jesus girl to the Dark Side before Easter Sunday. A number of unexpected angels show up to deliver Casablanca lilies and miraculously open the doors to the Brooklyn-bound F train, but it's up to Ms. Basinger to save the child from the rampaging devil worshippers before Satan tattoos a pitchfork into her flesh. It's a risky business. First, Ms. Basinger gets a concussion, then wakes up drugged with her car on fire, hanging from a bridge. Anybody else would wisely move to Kansas, or St. Bart's. But Auntie Kim is tough (and stupid). She goes to church.

Enter the rest of the cast, all lucky enough to be resigned to walk-ons. First there is Christina Ricci, who is on the screen for all of three minutes (I timed it) as an escapee from the devil cult who gets beheaded in the subway. Then there is Jimmy Smits, a failed Catholic who investigates occult murders for the F.B.I. He can't even find his way through the fog. "Where's our backup?" he barks on a country road. "They were right behind us," says the head-scratching state trooper, staring into pea soup. The movie may be preposterous, but you gotta admit it's funny. Finally, there is a defrocked priest in a wheelchair (Ian Holm) who opines: "Today, the concept of evil is politically incorrect." They all end up in Vermont.

But why go on? By the time everything bursts into flames and the angels battle the demons in divinely inspired combat, the noise from Hell is benign next to the sound of an audience in hysterics. Even for veterans of such schlocky soufflés as Stigmata , The Devil's Own and The Omen , this is cheesy clabber. The direction, by Roger Corman alumnus Chuck ( A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors ) Russell, is unspeakably corny, and the script, by Tom Rickman and the husband-and-wife team of Clifford and Ellen Green, is mind-boggling. Among the many lines that kept the audience roaring: The Satan freak perches the six-year-old Jesus girl on the roof ledge to jump, and the child says, "After you."

I mean, can't Kim Basinger read? As beautiful and talented as she is, she can't bring this dead turkey to life. Bless the Child is asinine, and so is everybody in it.

Hackman's Hail Mary

Another perfect performance full of wit and irony by Gene Hackman lifts The Replacements above the level of the average formulaic football flick. On the eve of the playoffs, the Washington Sentinels go on strike, creating a crisis for the team's owner (Jack Warden) and fans alike. Mr. Hackman, a legendary coach beyond his prime, rushes to the rescue, with only one week to recruit a "replacement" team of non-union scabs to finish the season. The new team is a motley crew of screw-ups and misfits that includes a deaf mute who can't hear the plays, a drunken Welsh barfly, a sumo wrestler, a Whitman's Sampler of assorted black criminals and one bloodthirsty white cop. The cheerleaders are X-rated strippers, bimbos and lap dancers.

The NFL is not amused when they break every rule in football: mooning the press, smoking on the playing field, beating up the opposing teams, and firing bullets through the windshields of striking sprinters and halfbacks in the stadium parking lot, while famed sportscasters Pat Summerall and John Madden are forced to call the unconventional plays in a whole new way. But by the time the strike is over, Mr. Hackman has turned a wild bunch of renegades into a winning team with an abundance of heart, and elevated a has-been fishing-boat bum (Keanu Reeves) to the status of an $8 million quarterback. In the end, the replacements have proven to be better athletes than the overpaid gridiron stars they replaced, and although they must return to their old jobs and lives, they will never be the same.

It's a classic theme-ordinary slobs with a common goal who get a second chance at the brass ring through loyalty and bonding, learning new values along the way. The characters are so well drawn and their relationships so funny and touching that you probably won't notice Keanu Reeves' dramatic limitations. He's billed as the star, but he's just another team player. Brightly directed by Howard ( Grumpier Old Men ) Deutch and crisply photographed by the great cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, The Replacements offers much to enjoy, even if you're not a follower of the NFL. I'm willing to bet it will even appeal to the oddball date who thinks pigskin is a Judith Lieber handbag.

John Waters at His Worst

Calling Cecil B. DeMented the worst thing John Waters has ever done is saying quite a mouthful. The Baltimore filmmaker has dedicated his life to grossing out sane people everywhere, but I cannot deceive you. With this hopeless disaster, the maker of such epic swill as Mondo Trasho has lost even his basest and most putrid instincts for tackiness as entertainment. Despite a budget big enough to send the opening credits flying off the marquee of a shopping-mall multiplex and the star presence of Melanie Griffith, this violent, filthy sendup of Hollywood commercialism is so witless and over the top it almost makes me nostalgic for Divine crawling through pig shit.

The hastily scrawled synopsis that passes for a plot involves an insane guerrilla filmmaker called Cecil B. DeMented (moronically played by hapless Stephen Dorff) and his criminal cult of movie-buff followers called the Sprocket Holes, who kidnap a brainless movie star visiting Baltimore on a promotional tour. Ms. Griffith plays Honey Whitlock, a star of blatantly excessive incompetence who is also a vicious, temperamental and foul-mouthed slut. When the kamikaze gang of teenage cinema terrorists drag their hostage back to their hideout in an abandoned art-deco movie palace and force her to act in their underground film, she fights back like a cross between Jayne Mansfield and Marjorie Main. But when the gang starts destroying malls showing Patch Adams : The Director's Cut , firing bullets through cinema books on the films of David Lean, and performing ritualistic chants to the memory of Andy Warhol, Honey likes the taste of anarchy, becomes a willing soldier in the war against popular, commercial and mainstream values, and turns into Patty Hearst (who also makes an "inside joke" guest appearance, along with Waters regulars Mink Stole and Ricki Lake). Protesting the filming of a $65 million sequel to Forrest Gump entitled Gump Again , the revolutionaries turn Baltimore into a battleground that looks like ice cream parlor vomit.

Mr. Waters is clearly staging a one-man broadside against the Maryland Film Commission's attempts to turn his native Baltimore into the "Hollywood of the East," but he expands his battleground to mock family sitcoms, G-ratings, video games, expensive remakes, pull-quote ads, 35mm cameras, Hollywood studios and the William Morris Agency, creating an even worse Cinema Hell of his own in the process. Even from a hack like John Waters, this childish idea might work in black and white, with a 300-pound drag queen like Divine, but with a big budget and no talent to back it up, Cecil B. DeMented turns out to be the worst example of the kind of hermetically sealed, air-conditioned cinema Mr. Waters seems to hate.

You can't use Melanie Griffith the same way you used Divine. She's a bad actress playacting a bad actress who doesn't know the difference. Parody becomes reality when she's on the screen. As her deranged captor, Mr. Dorff is described in the press poop as a charismatic combo of Charles Manson, Andy Warhol and Otto Preminger. It's enough to barf. Add hypodermic needles, homosexual couplings of every description, and a fiery finale in a drive-in (where everyone in Baltimore seems to die in a blast of gore), and the generally rotten taste of Cecil B. DeMented makes the Farrelly Brothers look like the Warner Brothers.