The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

This year we're making our predictions in order of the film and/or celebrity, not the award. That's because this time ... it's personal. No, seriously: between Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck being iced out of Best Director, the Weinstein Bros. not having a snowball's chance in hell of scoring a big win and the fact that we're practically giving an award to Anne Hathaway just to make her stop sing-crying, there's going to be a lot of sore losers tonight. But don't worry; we're using a time-tested formula for predicting the bitter ceremonies, including taking all of the guesses on Twitter and averaging them against Nate Silver's predictions. Then we throw those out the window and  get ourselves angry over Lincoln’s inevitable windfall of awards that should be going to that movie that had all those great New Yorker articles written about it and stars a 9-year-old who wasn't even an actress when she started the film, which is about 50 percent more method than Daniel Day-Lewis's decision to become an Italian cobbler every time he's taking a hiatus from Hollywood.

So enjoy, and don't forget to tune into our live chat on the Oscars, starting at 7 p.m.!

Hawkes and Hunt in The Sessions.

Sex and the disabled may still be a difficult topic to some, but at the movies it’s a hot-button theme whose time has come, with numerous examples of candor on film. The Sessions, a wonderful movie with splendid performances by John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, as well as a careful and sensitive screenplay and flawless direction by writer-director Ben Lewin, is the best movie about the pain, ecstasy and life-enriching courage of a handicapped person that I have seen since Jon Voight’s Oscar-winning work in Coming Home. Put aside all reservations. You will love this movie and go away from it informed, enlightened and positive about the sustaining power of the human experience.

This is the true story of Mark O’Brien, a Berkeley poet and journalist who was paralyzed by polio at the age of six and confined to a horizontal position in an iron lung for 32 years. The movie focuses on his terrified but determined decision, at age 38, to lose his virginity before he dies. (He passed in 1999.) As daunting as his struggle was, he was a man of renowned accomplishment: against all odds, he taught himself to write poems and books by typing one letter at a time with a device held between his teeth, and even graduated from college in his electric gurney, wearing a cap and gown. He was also a deeply devout Catholic, so when he takes the bold step of confiding in his priest his decision to explore his sexuality, Father Brendan (a droll William H. Macy), his friend and spiritual advisor, suggests hiring a sexual surrogate to help out. Instead of a prostitute or a dispassionate physical therapist, a miracle arrives in the intelligent, humane and generous mind and body of Cheryl Cohen Greene, a soccer mom psychologist with a house, husband, son and mortgage. Neither condemning nor condescending, she makes it her job to gingerly negotiate the dangerous detours between her client’s distorted body and his sharp mind, guiding him through his erogenous zones while 58 pounds of air pressure bear down on him every five seconds to keep him breathing. Spirited and fueled by patience and warm compassion, it’s an inspired journey that will leave you cheering.

As the woman who accepts her patient’s challenge to reach sexual fulfillment, Helen Hunt bares it all, in more ways than one. More than mere carnal adventures, her six therapy “sessions” bring out hidden resources in both coach and pupil that surprise them both. Radiant, articulate and sensual, she is tremendous—but in the role of the afflicted man emotionally entering manhood, Mr. Hawkes is sensational. People are already making Oscar predictions about his deeply moving performance as O’Brien, for good reason. Heartfelt and gentle, he offers an award-worthy turn from start to finish while lying prostrate, unable to move. But better than that, he does it expressively, without a shred of self-pity, remorse or bitterness. The role is a far cry from the creepy, backwoods drug dealer he played in Winter’s Bone, and he plays it magnificently. Both stars are directed by Mr. Lewin, who is himself disabled, with a no-nonsense lack of cynicism that is bracing. The full-frontal nudity while Cohen-Greene guides O’Brien through his fears and hangups has a frank and graphic candor that actually appears elegant. If you’re going to be stark naked, you might as well show some style. Sex without the jokes, titillation, shame and lacy lingerie allows you to make an emotional connection. By the time her mandate is realized, the movie delivers tears and smiles in equal measure.

The Sessions is fascinating, informative, engaging and heartbreaking stuff. Its easygoing, matter-of-fact tone makes it subtle and rewarding, not weird. Roses all around to all and sundry for one of the year’s most captivating films.

rreed@observer.com

THE SESSIONS

Running Time 95 minutes

Written and Directed by Ben Lewin

Starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt and William H. Macy

4/4

Marion Cotillard (Getty Images)

There’s another week left in the New York Film Festival—but we’re headed out of town! Last-gasp tumbleweeds like us aren’t going to be anywhere near Lincoln Center today. After our morning coffee (iced—we’re already waxing nostalgic for summer) at Golden Pear, we’ll be heading to the Hamptons International Film Festival, where today’s screenings include early Oscar front-runner Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone (she plays an amputee who has a transformative epiphany while Katy Perry’s “Firework” plays—we kid you not), Helen Hunt’s comeback role as a sex worker employed by an iron lung-bound paralytic in The Sessions and closing night film Not Fade Away, directed by The Sopranos capo di tutti David Chase. Sure, they’ll be in theaters by December—but any excuse to head out to the Hamptons this close to Columbus Day is good enough for us.

Various locations, tickets and information can be found at hamptonsfilmfest.org.

The Last Play at Shea traces the history of Shea Stadium (lovingly called a "dump" by former players and fans) from when it was a glint in Robert Moses' eye to the arrival of The Beatles to the Miracle Mets in 1969 to Bill Buckner in 1986 to even September 11. It's a powerful threadline for a stadium and franchise that always played also-ran to their more successful older brothers in the Bronx. And along the way, we're treated to the rise of Mr. Joel's career: From his humble beginnings on Long Island to his marriage to supermodel Christie Brinkley and beyond.

The best documentaries—for example, Joan Rivers — A Piece of Work—put their subjects under the microscope to see and inspect the warts. Mr. Crowder, though, too often treats Mr. Joel with kid gloves. Not that it needed to be some tabloid blotter, but there is barely a mention of his missteps and transgressions over the last decade. And since the last half of the film is almost solely about Mr. Joel, the narrative conflict is lost; by the time Paul McCartney shows up to surprise the audience during the concert—let it be known that Sir Paul can still give you goosebumps even now—the film has become something akin to a Time-Life infomercial. The Last Play at Shea is great fun, but too often the great documentary it could have been isn't on the screen.

Then She Found Me, directed and co-written by Helen Hunt, who also stars, is a funny and touching story about the way we create families both by blood and by choice. April Epner (Hunt) is 39 and her biological clock is sounding an alarm. When she gets dumped by her charming but adolescent husband (Matthew Broderick, who specializes in such things) as a marital mistake, one door closes, but another one bursts open. Enter Bette Midler, as a brash, overwhelming and thoroughly obnoxious talk show host named Bernice, who drops in out of the blue to declare herself April’s biological mother. The jaw-dropping cherry on top of the Sunday sundae: April is the result of a one-night stand Bernice had 40 years ago with Steve McQueen.

Both devastated and baffled, April finds an escape from her screwed-up life in the arms of Frank (Colin Firth, who steals the movie), a handsome, warm, understanding and conveniently single father whose wife deserted him and their children. Mothering a ready-made family and tackling a new relationship at the same time presents double jeopardy, but the emotional minefields really explode when April discovers she is pregnant herself! Events unfold with a quiet dramatic trajectory, interrupted by unnerving needle pricks of humor. Always there is the thread of moody, contemplative silences as affecting as two bare feet touching under a cafe table. What’s lacking in big emotional outbursts is compensated by Ms. Hunt’s desire to explore a woman’s most painful anxieties.

O.K., it’s not Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own or even Lucille Ball in Yours, Mine and Ours. But the Hunt-Firth team has a glowing chemistry; the human strain in his eyes and on his brow is unsentimental but on the verge of tears. Midler has her moments, too. Less fun since she turned from the Divine Miss M into the head of the local Hadassah, she’s still a force of nature capable of creating her own bombast, to the detriment of anybody who shares the screen. She’s a fine catalyst as the larger-than-life hurricane who forces April to question the neat, dull, cookie-cutter existence she’s ordered for herself, as if from a caterer. Debuts can be dicey, but as a director, Helen Hunt handles the reins sweetly, but with control and finesse. Actors directing themselves: Not always a good idea, but this time you go away impressed.

She's the truest of actresses in everything she does. But what Ms. Emond is up to here reminds us, quite simply, that she's the one . She was mesmerizing as the eccentric British lady during her tour de force in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul . Here she's unshowily conjuring up miracles out of thin air.

It's said that if a play offers the kindling, the actor will light the fire. But I'm not sure the perilously thin Life (x) 3 does even that for its quartet of leading actors. The marquee names, Helen Hunt and John Turturro, with Brent Spiner and Ms. Emond, have been given little to play with in the short, 90-minute evening that Ms. Reza has inflated with a pretentious touch of astrophysics to impress the punters.

Life (x) 3 is a repetitive playlet full of hot air about one night in the life of two bickering bourgeois couples in Paris who act out three different versions of the same evening for us. The Rashomon -like form isn't new to the theater; Alan Ayckbourne's been doing it for years; and J.B. Priestley did it in his "Time Plays" before him. But if even one version of Ms. Reza's disastrous dinner party had risen above sitcom mediocrity, the evening would amount to little more than the small compensation of a wobbly soufflé deflating before disappointed eyes.

And yet Ms. Emond's portrait of the beaten-down wife, Inez, is so convincing and right that it amounts to a model of great acting. She and Mr. Spiner's self-important prick of a husband, Hubert, are trapped, we learn, in a 20-year nightmare marriage. And how we gather this isn't just through Hubert's reflexive little snickers and humiliating put-downs, or the fragility of Inez's social world, in which an accidental run in her hose can have the impact of a train wreck. It's that Ms. Emond's perfectly shaded performance conveys her inner desperation by stealth.

Hers is the only performance that mutates and grows throughout the evening-and sometimes, most miraculously of all, by appearing to do nothing. By sitting there! Or so it seems. The best actors know how to listen, and Ms. Emond listens well to the nonsense going on around her. She doesn't play at being drunk, least of all does she slur her words. In fact, her chronically depressed, frightened alcoholic is scarcely seen drinking. One glass of Sancerre will do it, conveying the wounded essence of her. We know this disappointed woman, and we fear for her. We know she's not going to make it in life. Not that it prevents Ms. Emond from quietly getting the biggest laughs of the evening. "Yes, let's go, sweetheart," she says dryly in mid-argument to her bullying husband. "You can finish me off in the Audi." But only the supreme Ms. Emond could wring the tragic from the dramatist's token notion of cosmic mystery.

Ms. Reza's best play, Art -a 90-minute light comedy that she had the chutzpah to describe as a tragedy-was about the explosive issues raised among three middle-class friends when one of them buys an abstract painting. But the artistic debates themselves were about 30 years out of date, as if the dramatist had only just discovered modern art. Her more recent The Unexpected Man was essentially a paper-thin 80-minute trifle with literary pretentions that was a vehicle for two star actors who could have us rapt by reading a telephone directory (Alan Bates and Eileen Atkins). Now comes the 90-minute Life (x) 3 with its intimations of astrophysics.

"When we talk about the String Theory, the Theory of Everything, what do we mean?" Hubert, the goading astrophysicist, says at the start of Scene 3. "We mean a unifying theory of all the fundamental forces. However, even if you could conceive a theory which covered all the basic interactions, for one thing your theory would be far from comprehensive. As Poincaré said, you can examine each cell of an elephant, but that won't help you grasp its zoological reality, and you still wouldn't have eliminated the paradox of the cosmos! How can we grasp the world as it is ?"

How, indeed. Ms. Reza's answer is to have a faux intellectual debate in a conventional boulevard comedy. Do not concern yourself with smokescreen references to the mysterious astrophysical flatness of halos. They're the equivalent of name-dropping in the void. The bilious inconsequentiality of the evening isn't because of the vastness of the cosmos. It's small because it's small.

The play begins at the home of Sonia (Helen Hunt) and her loser husband, Henry (John Turturro), who are arguing about their 6-year-old child, who's crying in bed off-stage. The question is, will the obnoxious little brat get another hug and a chocolate from his despairing parents? Or, within three minutes, the theme of the play: Who will be humiliated? Who will be manipulated? Clue: The weak-willed Henry gives in to his whining child just as he bows obsequiously on his knees before his boss, the creep Hubert. Henry hasn't published anything in three years, and badly needs the support of Hubert to become something called research director. A paper he's about to submit on the flatness of galaxy halos has been pre-empted by a Mexican team. But we don't know that at the time.

When the battling Hubert and Inez turn up for dinner with Henry and Sonia on the wrong night in a stock sitcom device, everything goes predictably wrong. Question: Why don't they all just call it a night and go out to dinner?

Answer: If a halo isn't round any more, it's a modification of presumed reality. Anyway, Henry is shattered by news of the Mexican flat-halo team, and he'll have to check urgently on Astro PH whether a similar piece has been submitted to the AP-J. Meanwhile, the child keeps screaming for attention, Sonia clearly isn't happily married to spineless Henry, and I wouldn't be surprised if Hubert's got a shot with Sonia. The evening doesn't end well.

And that, more or less, is now repeated twice more with variations of little or no consequence in what Ms. Reza calls "the bell-tower of eternity." It's as if the dramatist has given us three drafts of the same unsatisfactory half-hour play. Helen Hunt is too one-note, I'm afraid, though it's an appealing note. But there's no sexual electricity between her somewhat cold Sonia and Brent Spiner's Hubert hiding behind those cruel glasses of his. The accomplished John Turturro's Henry is surprisingly hysterical throughout much of the evening. Directed by Matthew Warchus, elegantly designed by Mark Thompson, and translated by a superior dramatist, Christopher Hampton, Ms. Reza's inflated self-importance has become tiresome.

Curse of the Jade Scorpion made many people laugh during the screening I

attended, mostly from the ferocity of the insults exchanged between Mr. Allen's

C.W. Briggs, an insurance investigator circa 1940, and Helen Hunt's Betty Ann

Fitzgerald, the firm's bossy efficiency expert. As it happens, I didn't even

smile once, but I made a mental note that The

Curse marked a huge improvement over Mr. Allen's previous parody of old

movies, Small Time Crooks (2000).

Mr. Allen has chosen to

exploit some of the eccentricities of a 1940 movie-and of life in general in

1940-that might make today's young people titter: the Veronica Lake hairdo over

one eye, the overstuffed sweaters with outsized bras, the men sporting fedoras

even indoors, and the alleged craze for hypnotism acts on-screen and off.

Just out of curiosity, I

decided to look up the better movies of 1940. At the top of my list were three

comedies: Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner , Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday . Also that year, Preston

Sturges made his directorial debut with the hilarious The Great McGinty and followed that with the poignantly comic high

jinks of Christmas in July . On the

more serious side were Frank Borzage's anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm , Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Foreign

Correspondent , John Ford's The Grapes

of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home

and William Wyler's The Letter .

And I haven't even begun

to dip into the fun pictures and the sleepers. Still, I don't remember a single

movie in 1940 with hypnotism as a subject, and 1940 was a bit early for Ms.

Lake as a femme fatale. She didn't hit her stride until 1942 with Preston

Sturges' Sullivan's Travels , René

Clair's I Married a Witch , Frank

Tuttle's This Gun for Hire and Stuart

Heisler's The Glass Key . (Hollywood people really believed in the work ethic back

then.) Mr. Allen was not quite 5 years old, and I was not quite 12, but I never had the slightest idea that 1940 was such a banner

year for movies. Of course, nowadays, with videocassettes, Mr. Allen and the

rest of us can go back even beyond our childhoods for movie "memories."

But what Mr. Allen

provides in Curse is a deformed image

of the 40's, with only the popular music of the period restored in all its

glory, with an emphasis on the jazz greats-and it is, for the most part, not

even movie music. Yet this has been Mr. Allen's strong point all through the

years. This is to say that his ears are more perceptive than his eyes.

A more grievous omission from The Curse vis-à-vis the Hollywood comedies of 1940 and the years

before and after is the army of character actors who generated most of the

laughter despite the occasional virtuoso turns of a Cary Grant, a Charlie

Chaplin, a W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers. I laugh today just remembering

Akim Tamiroff in The Great McGinty ,

Franklin Pangborn in Christmas in July ,

Felix Bressart in The Shop Around the

Corner , and William Demarest in Sullivan's

Travels -and let us not forget the marvelous comic foils Ralph Bellamy

supplied to Cary Grant in His Girl Friday

and Margaret Dumont to Groucho Marx in just about everything.

This raises the question

of when Mr. Allen has ever written a funny line for anyone except himself and,

on a few occasions, Diane Keaton. In The

Curse , Dan Aykroyd and Wallace Shawn are accomplished farceurs who can read a funny line with the best of them, but Mr.

Aykroyd's Chris Magruder is a humorless adulterer, and Mr. Shawn's George Bond

is a cheery, but not particularly witty, nice guy. Charlize Theron's society

dame Laura Kensington has a few snappy comebacks, but her part literally goes

nowhere, while Elizabeth Berkley's office babe Jill barely registers on the

radar screen.

The villainous magician

Voltan of David Ogden Stiers is little more than a mellifluous voice enacting

his criminal activities with two suggestive, comically multisyllabic place-name

passwords. Mr. Allen's glazed expression under hypnosis is good for a few

chuckles, but Ms. Hunt is a bit too tense, both under hypnosis and out of it.

Perhaps she's aware of

the suspension of disbelief required to imagine a screen romance between a

65-year-old nebbish type and a thirtysomething looker, particularly in the

Darwinian atmosphere of movies in 1940. Mr. Allen was never a matinee idol,

even in his younger days, and yet for many years he was reportedly considered a

sex symbol, at least in Manhattan and its environs, where wit, talent-both directorial and musical-and a

sense of humor could compensate for his nerdy appearance. But this was in the

glory days of Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), when his canvas was completely

contemporary and there was a feeling-right or wrong-that the characters he

played were very close to his off-screen persona.

Lately, however, Mr.

Allen has assumed a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the old movie genres and

yet has tried to remain a lead player in fictions that traditionally demanded

much younger participants. For example, Woody, in the Keaton-Farrow periods,

was never made to feel that he was physically inadequate. As a certified

analysand and hypochondriac, he made enough jokes about his cowardly nature to

deflect any embarrassment that was not self-imposed. By contrast, in Curse Ms. Hunt's character itemizes Mr.

Allen's physical deficiencies with inventive analogies to the most odious

creatures in nature. The audience may laugh out of lazy sadism, but Mr. Allen

discovers ultimately that he can't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, and the kiss-kiss

ending falls flat.

Still, there is

something heroic about a comic artist who strains to make people laugh at

essentially the same persona with the same shtick for 35 years and 26 films,

while resisting the lure of Hollywood and the low-cost temptations of Toronto

and Montreal to remain the cosmopolitan Manhattanite par excellence-New York

Knicks and all. Indeed, to find the way to keep making movies year after year

without conspicuous compromises and concessions is a feat few filmmakers have

achieved in any country at any time. With all that is wrong and inadequate with

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion , it

demands our respect and admiration for having been made at all. Woody remains

our civic treasure, as he always has been.

Romance in Reverse

Brad Anderson's Happy Accidents , from his own

screenplay, unfolds as a cleverly resourceful mixture of romantic comedy and

sci-fi time travel, and until the end we are not sure which genre will prevail,

and on which genre's terms. Mr. Anderson has already made his mark in offbeat

independent filmmaking with The Darien

Gap (1995), Next Stop Wonderland

(1998) and Session 9 , which is also

currently playing.

Happy Accidents begins with intimations of backward movement in time and space before

introducing the two romantic leads, Marisa Tomei's Ruby Weaver and Vincent

D'Onofrio's Sam Deed. Cut to the midst of a breakup argument full of convulsive

close-ups that hammer home the faces of Ruby and Sam in extremis before we know their names or the stage of their

relationship.

Mr. Anderson then pulls

back to show Ruby with her circle of woman friends, each with well-preserved

memories of disasters with various men from Mars. Ruby regales her friends with

an account of her first strange meeting with Sam, and this strategy of indirect

storytelling is developed with many variations of overlapping sounds and

images. But it is always Ruby who is talking about the mysterious Sam, and

never, until the very end, Sam talking about Ruby.

The many jokes about the

dating game at first make Happy Accidents

look and sound like a clone of HBO's Sex

and the City . But gradually, Sam's apparently deranged fantasy of being a

time traveler from Dubuque, Iowa, in the year 2470, when global warming has

brought the Atlantic

Ocean to the shores of

the Mississippi, takes over. Ruby's psychotherapist (Holland

Taylor) warns her about the dangerous pathological symptoms Sam is exhibiting

and urges her to leave him. But Ruby has fallen in love, and the issue

eventually becomes one of life and death for both Ruby and Sam.

Mr. Anderson succeeds in

making his potentially far-fetched narrative plausible by the connections he

establishes between Ruby's ultra-sophisticated and self-innovative friends and Sam's seeming improvisations on his fanciful identity. The

adventurous performances of Ms. Tomei, Mr. D'Onofrio, Ms. Taylor and the rest

of the cast are persuasive enough to fill in the pieces of Mr. Anderson's

puzzle. Happy Accidents is just the

latest example of independent filmmaking filling in the vacuum left by the

mainstream bean counters in supplying intelligent adult entertainment.

Good Godard

Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) is being

revived locally, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it before. The

film, in which Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur engage in a

half-hearted caper plot that ends with tragic grotesqueness, celebrates the

Nouvelle Vague's joint love affair with Paris and Hollywood melodramas, particularly from the

black-and-white period. Mr. Godard himself was once considered an axiom of the

cinema by his most fervent admirers, because he took it upon himself to

proclaim where the cinema was going. The most magical moment in the film

involves his three leads in a stirring formation dance that was very au courant at the time. Such relaxed

filmmaking combined with artistic rigor is no longer feasible. But from advance

reports, Mr. Goddard is still in the hunt with his latest film. I can't wait to

see it.

With decent roles in acceptable scripts on the wane, more and more gifted actors are turning to directing their own movies. Bonnie Hunt and Edward Norton are the latest gamblers in these "winner take all" sweepstakes, with varying degrees of success.

Although the multi-talented Ms. Hunt (not to be confused with Helen Hunt) was the first woman to write, produce and star in her own television series, The Building , the movies have not treated her squarely, and she's been forced to make a specialty act out of playing wives, best friends and wisecracking older sisters in films as varied as Jerry Maguire and The Green Mile. The excellent Mr. Norton has thrilled critics and audiences alike in chameleon-like performances in movies both good (Primal Fear, The People vs. Larry Flynt ) and bad ( Fight Club ). Obviously they both feel something lacking in the way the movies have subjugated their talents, and are now turning to directing. Ms. Hunt's new movie, Return to Me , which she has directed, co-written (with her longtime writing partner Don Lake) and set in her native Chicago, is a joyous and surprisingly fresh slant on a theme that could otherwise smack of pure soap opera, while Mr. Norton's new movie, Keeping the Faith , explores a more serious theme, with results both flat and turgid. Hey, it's a leap. Nobody promised a rose garden.

Return to Me is a sweet, natural and unaffected movie about the way time and circumstance can bring people together and then push them apart. David Duchovny plays a successful architectural engineer whose life falls apart when his wife (Joely Richardson, looking more like her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, every day) dies in an automobile accident. One year later, still haunted by her memory, he's depressed. The dog is depressed. Not ready to start over, he reluctantly succumbs when his best friend (David Alan Grier) sets him up with a blind date at O'Reilly's, a colorful Irish-Italian restaurant that becomes an integral setting for most of the film. It's a great place, and we want to see more.

The blind date turns out to be a disaster, but Mr. Duchovny does meet Grace (Minnie Driver), a waitress who has come out of a life of sickly seclusion after a successful heart transplant and blossomed into a woman full of radiance and personality. Grace lives above the restaurant and is the darling of her Irish-Catholic grandfather Marty (Carroll O'Connor), her Italian uncle Angelo (Robert Loggia) and a coterie of card-playing cronies who cheerfully fight over the merits of ravioli versus corned beef and cabbage, Sinatra versus Crosby. (One Polish pal prefers Bobby Vinton.) Grace's best friend Megan (Bonnie Hunt), Megan's gruff, good-natured husband Joe (James Belushi) and their five kids are additional cheerleaders in her rarefied support group.

Into this weird and wacky world Mr. Duchovny's character finds himself irresistibly drawn, and a slow and touching romance eventually simmers to a boil, bringing him and Grace the first happiness they've known for some time. There's only one problem. Grace's transplanted heart belongs to the architect's dead wife, and when the truth comes out, the results are both comic and tragic for all.

There's no denying that Return to Me has a certain fairy-tale quality some cynics might find to be the romantic equivalent to all those mad-doctor brain-transplant flicks of yore. But I like the way Ms. Hunt keeps the comedy and tears balanced without resorting to bathos or sitcom one-liners. The characters seem molded from real clay, not silly putty. The writing has an appealing naturalism, with a feeling for the way people talk and interface. And she has directed with tenderness and intelligence; she seems to really care. I like the way she works with actors; no director has ever gotten more flavor or excitement out of a scene in a bowling alley.

The romantic world of the two leads is a gentle contrast to both the comic world of the matchmaking regulars at O'Reilly's and the connubial bickering of Megan and Joe, who provide a practical result of what romance can lead to. Ms. Hunt has given herself the best lines–and a good thing, too, since nobody could say them better–but Mr. Belushi matches her delivery with perfect comic timing. Minnie Driver is not my idea of a screen beauty, but she has a charm and an exuberance that make Grace much more than just another lonely woman in need of affection. David Duchovny has been stuck in The X-Files so long that nobody can remember if he can act or not. He projects a friendly magnetism that is strangely affecting.

The film gets a bit cloying when he follows Grace all the way to Rome and tracks her down by following a nun who is riding her red bicycle; but for the most part this is a well-written, sensibly directed and honest look at everyday people who find love and get their priorities straight in the most unusual circumstances. A refreshing, logical and very endearing film indeed.

As much as I admire Edward Norton, Keeping the Faith is a good idea gone bad about a priest (Norton), a rabbi (Ben Stiller) and a girl from their childhood (Jenna Elfman) who comes back into their lives to wreck their libidos. Instead of insight, the overwrought script by Stuart Blumberg drags in sight gags (Mr. Stiller, as Rabbi Jake, fainting at a bris), unspeakably self-conscious dialogue (Mr. Norton, as Father Brian, trying to teach his parishioners the scriptures by asking "Who can name the Seven Deadly Sins? C'mon, it was a very popular film with Brad Pitt!") and deadly scenes that drone on endlessly for no purpose (there's an entire sequence about how to buy a karaoke machine).

Trying to give an Old World God a New World spin, the rabbi and the priest knock themselves into a coma acting hip, while their followers just act like freaks from a rejected sitcom. Mr. Stiller is besieged by what he calls the "Kosher Nostra"–mothers in his synagogue who fax him their marriageable daughters' resumes–while Mr. Norton compares his celibacy vows with giving up smoking. Then their best friend Anna (Ms. Elfman, from the TV series Dharma & Greg ) comes to town and is no longer a cross between the boy and the babe she was in the sixth grade. Forget about masses and bar mitzvahs.

After Rabbi Jake takes her to bed, she says, "I haven't screamed that loud since the U.S. hockey team beat the Russians." Father Brian is so upset that Anna has slept with his best friend that he goes on a bender and wrecks the synagogue in the middle of Yom Kippur. After two hours of apologizing and whining and soul-searching for self-confidence in their chosen religions, the jerky rabbi and the hysterical priest conclude that Anna is "the kind of girl who puts God on speed dial and it turns out to be the Elvis Presley museum."

Rarely have I heard such long, drawn-out, boring babble from people unable to generate any sparks. Mr. Stiller is still stuck in the same groove that had him wearing semen hair gel, and Ms. Elfman is no movie star by any stretch of anyone's imagination, including her agent's. I found myself wishing for a fast-forward button. As a naÏve priest confronting temptation, Mr. Norton has unmistakable charisma, and I doubt if he could make even the most brutally derivative scene look hackneyed. But maybe he needs stronger direction than his own. He just fumbles from scene to scene, waiting for divinely inspired intervention that never arrives.

The film seesaws between strident religious jokes and torturous harangues about the problems of interfaith marriage, while everyone is left to their own devices, stealing scenes without supervision. Lazy and boring, the film forces the audience to endure an endless parade of dull conversations while crowds of extras gather around to eavesdrop. Look fast and you'll catch brief glimpses of a wasted supporting cast that includes Anne Bancroft, Eli Wallach, Milos Forman, Holland Taylor and Ron Rifkin. If they had been better utilized, the film might add up to more than a peripheral plea for tolerance of all religions through slapstick. I still have faith in Edward Norton, but Keeping the Faith is a difficult way to keep that faith alive and kicking.

Happy Birthday to Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim was 70 on March 22, but at the Museum of Television & Radio the birthday party will continue until June 25. This is a celebration you should make an effort to toast, because you won't see the rarities on view anywhere else.

In addition to his well-known works ( Sunday in the Park With George , Follies , Into the Woods ), you can see the composer-lyricist's only appearance as an actor, playing a tough song plugger in a 1974 telecast of the George S. Kaufman-Ring Lardner comedy June Moon , with Estelle Parsons, Jack Cassidy and Susan Sarandon in the cast. Evening Primrose, the only original Sondheim musical written for TV, will also be shown, with a short taped introduction by the show's star, the late Anthony Perkins. Out-of-circulation footage from Gypsy Rose Lee's San Francisco-based talk show features guest star Ethel Merman showing home movies of the rehearsals for Gypsy , and a recently discovered "lost" David Frost Show devoted to the Broadway production of Follies even shows Sondheim himself singing "Can That Boy Fox Trot," a song written for Yvonne DeCarlo and cut in the Boston tryouts. Admission is free (with a suggested donation), but telephone 621-6600 for the complete schedule.

I've been down on the Titanic with Barbara Stanwyck so many times, it's hard to imagine doing it again without her. Alas, the new, colossal and mega-expensive ($200 million is the official tab, but insiders inform me the cost is more accurate at $275 million and counting) Titanic could use a little more of the luster Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Thelma Ritter, Richard Basehart and Brian Aherne brought to Jean Negulesco's 1953 version. But as one of the deadliest years in movie history drags 1997 to a welcome end, this whopping extravaganza still lives up to its title. It is titanic in almost every way.

On a navy blue night in April 1912, the most glamorous luxury liner in the world struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic only five days into its maiden voyage and sank to the bottom of the sea at 2:20 A.M., claiming the lives of more than 1,500 people (estimates still vary). It was the most famous nautical tragedy of all time, and in 3 hours and 15 minutes (without intermission), you relive every harrowing, horrifying, panic-stricken minute of it. The controversy and fascination surrounding this epic disaster has inspired countless movies, books, television shows, documentaries and even a Broadway musical. But the story has never been told with quite the same lavish attention to detail as this gargantuan movie, brilliantly written and directed by James Cameron.

A new twist has been added: The film opens with an underwater research and recovery team led by Bill Paxton plunging 3,821 meters beneath the ocean in search of lost treasures. A pressurized launch shows us the first-class passenger lounge, the boat deck, hull interior and cabin contents as robot technology searches for artifacts. Then the actual tale of the unsinkable "ship of dreams" is recounted by a 104-year-old survivor (Gloria Stuart), and the real story begins. As a girl, she was an unhappy aristocrat engaged to a handsome, cruel and arrogant millionaire (Billy Zane) and was rescued from a suicide attempt by a third-class passenger who had won his ticket in a poker game. This upstairs-downstairs romance, as played by the ungainly Kate Winslet and the gooey-faced Leonardo DiCaprio, takes up most of the film's first two hours and runs out of steam fast (the fictional passenger stories were more interesting in the 1953 black-and-white version, in which the doomed lovers were played by Audrey Dalton and Robert Wagner). But never mind. Mr. Cameron uses the romance between Ms. Winslet's reckless socialite and Mr. DiCaprio's aspiring, penniless artist from Wisconsin as a bridge between class structures to introduce us to everyone else on board, from the immigrants on their way to a new world to such illustrious high-rollers as John Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus (founder of Macy's) and the unsinkable Molly Brown, not to mention such vital participants as Capt. E.J. Smith, on his retirement voyage, and Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner who greedily demanded more speed to get headline publicity for the ship.

It takes two hours before this sucker hits the iceberg, but the final third of the film is worth the wait. Mr. Cameron doesn't miss a trick. From stokers trapped in boiler rooms behind airtight doors, to women and children pushed into lifeboats, to the brave musicians trying to bolster the spirits of the hysterical passengers, you are slam-dunked into the heart of the ensuing chaos. Everything from the actual crystal and china to the exact position of the ship as it toppled forward and cracked in half, sending hundreds of screaming passengers sliding into the icy darkness of a watery grave, is re-created before your stricken eyes. The story is not comparable to Trans World Airlines Flight 800 because we actually know what happened in this tragedy, and Mr. Cameron has faithfully and accurately restaged it with so much awesome noise and confusion that it really looks like hundreds of lives were lost during the filming.

You get actual footage aboard the remains of the Titanic , a full-size reproduction of the actual ship the way it looked in 1912, and a real sense of what it was like to be a passenger on every deck. The final hours on the wreckage is like Dante's Inferno, with 1,000 extras crashing through flames and shattered glass into the paralyzing foam. You do not leave this titanic experience saying, "So what?" You stagger away from it dazed but knowing, by god, you have finally been to the movies.

Some critics took one look at the budget and condemned it before the first screening ("No movie this expensive can survive our wrath!"), but now that they've seen the cumulative result of years of back-breaking artistry, most of them are putting Titanic on their 10-best lists for 1997. I still miss Barbara Stanwyck (nobody screamed like Babs), but this Titanic is nevertheless totally exciting, a marvel of technology, yet poundingly human and heartbreakingly passionate, a high-water mark in screen entertainment that is positively overwhelming.

Good Brooks, Great Nicholson

Another gem in the year-end dross is James L. Brooks' wry romantic comedy As Good as It Gets , about a most unusual subject-New Yorkers who help each other in times of crisis! Jack Nicholson gives his juiciest and most heartfelt (i.e., understated) performance in years as Melvin Udall, a vicious, mean-spirited, offensive, arrogant, prejudiced curmudgeon who writes trash novels in his Greenwich Village apartment.

Melvin is a piece of work. Fussy, eccentric and antisocial, he's also churlishly homophobic, which makes life a nightmare for his neighbor across the hall, a gay artist named Simon Nye who has frosted hair and wears purple shirts open to the navel (a delightful change of pace for the charming, open-faced and eternally boyish Greg Kinnear). When Simon lands in the hospital after a mugging, Melvin ends up reluctantly taking care of his scruffy dog Verdell ("Set up, suckered in, pushed around," mutters Melvin under his breath), and the dog falls in love with its unlikely new master. The only person who is patient enough to put up with Melvin's wounding tirades is a waitress named Carol (Helen Hunt, making an effortless, star-making transition from TV to the big screen), who serves Melvin a daily artery-clogging breakfast of bacon, sausages and eggs at his neighborhood greasy spoon. To make a long story short (something the filmmakers have failed to do), three disparate New Yorkers with nothing in common are brought together through the plight of an ugly little dog, finding compassion they never knew they had. Melvin starts liking life when he finds a doctor for Carol's asthmatic son and ends up taking in the limp-wristed Simon as a roommate, and all three characters discover their power to love and be loved in the most unlikely places.

Like every film this holiday season, As Good as It Gets is too long, and for a comedy, it's maniacally slow. But the joy in Mr. Brooks' script has some of the same sweetness as his wonderful film Broadcast News in the unexpected ways people relate to each other through natural instincts. When the characters spout a funny or angry punch line, it feels real, even awkward, like it's the first thing out of their minds. It's the kind of movie that used to be created for sarcastic character actors like Clifton Webb and Monty Woolley. Mr. Nicholson's Melvin is so anally retentive, he even programs car music for road trips. Finding charm he never knew he had, he turns sexy in a clumsy, rude way, as unsure of himself as he is of others, but ready to give sex a try even at his victims' expense.

In a superb cast that also includes Shirley Knight and Cuba Gooding Jr., everyone shines. But it is really good old Jack-boy who steals the center spot from start to finish. He's played so many devils, it's nice to see him as a reluctant, suspicious saint, even with a tarnished halo. When Ms. Hunt nails him with the question "Have you any control over how creepy you allow yourself to get?" the look of genuine quizzical concern that raises his brows tells a thousand stories. With eyes like thimbles of rum, he's a grab bag of tics and needs and foolish grins-a walking stethoscope searching for a heartbeat. Living up to the title of this endearing, offbeat comedy, he is truly as good as it gets. Jack is like the proverbial little girl with the curl-when he's bad, he's either hammy or bored (but always interesting), and when he's good, there is nobody like him on the screen today.