One of the rare contemporary films that really is about something, The Company You Keep mixes identity, action and politics to tell a gripping story about what happened to those 1970s antiwar protestors called the Weather Underground (labeled Weathermen by the press) who turned into radical terrorists by blowing up government buildings. They broke laws, endangered lives, fled from prosecution, went into hiding and reinvented themselves. And they are still around, wanted by the FBI, living normal lives under assumed names. News stories occasionally surface in which one of them is nailed in some secret small-town hideaway and brought to justice. But this is not only a story about 13 Weathermen who killed a security guard in a botched Michigan bank robbery 30 years ago. It is also about one member of the accused who wasn’t even present that day, a solid citizen who is forced to go underground again to prove his innocence. In a role tailored to fit his integrity and liberal conscience, Mr. Redford has never been better.

The story begins when a former Weatherman involved in the robbery (Susan Sarandon)—hiding out as a Vermont housewife but on her way at last to surrender to the FBI—gets recognized from a Most Wanted poster and arrested at a New York gas station while filling up her car. Mr. Redford plays another former radical now living as a respected Albany civil rights attorney and single father under the alias James Grant, who refuses to take her case and in doing so arouses the suspicions of ambitious, muckraking Albany reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf). Smelling a scoop in the competitive and endangered profession of dwindling newspapers, the aggressive rookie journalist persuades his editor (Stanley Tucci) to let him pursue his hunches, tracks down a college friend (Anna Kendrick) who works for the FBI and discovers that there is no record of lawyer Grant prior to 1979. Hell-bent on beating the authorities to the punch, Ben’s private sleuthing reveals Grant’s true identity to be Nick Sloan, a former colleague of the Vermont soccer mom who is also sought for the Michigan bank heist. Before Ben breaks the story wide open, the Grant/Sloan character leaves his 11-year-old daughter (played by three-octave-singing phenomenon Jackie Evancho, discovered on America’s Got Talent) with his brother (Chris Cooper) and goes on the run. His fact-finding mission to clear his name, with the ruthless reporter in hot pursuit, leads him across the U.S. searching for the whereabouts of the only person who can help him: an ex-girlfriend (Julie Christie) who disappeared years ago to the beaches of Big Sur with a new lover (Sam Elliott). Now his goal is to locate her, rekindle an old loyalty and convince her to give herself up in order to save him and ensure his daughter’s future. Mr. Redford’s quest through the detritus of his mysterious past—encountering a veteran cast of links along the way that includes Nick Nolte, Brendan Gleeson, Terrence Howard and Richard Jenkins—gives the film a compelling thrust of power and suspense. It will leave you breathless.

Adapted from the novel by Neil Gordon, the brilliant screenplay by Lem Dobbs illuminates the plight of the cub reporter in a new age of journalism, updates the latest tracking strategies of the FBI and, in one affecting prison interview between Mr. LaBeouf and Ms. Sarandon, offers some earnest insight into the validity of the noble but misdirected romantic idealism of the ’70s radicals. From archival footage of actual TV news coverage of the Weathermen’s attacks, to a dazzling display of perfect performances, to the complex emotional relationships that result in guilt by association, the disparate elements in The Company You Keep are robustly collated by the keen, well-crafted direction of a master filmmaker at the top of his form. It’s only April, but this is one of the best films of 2013.

rreed@observer.com

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Running Time 125 minutes

Written by Lem Dobbs (screenplay) and Neil Gordon (novel)

Directed by Robert Redford

Starring Robert Redford, Shia LeBeouf and Julie Christie

4/4 Stars

With the movie scene currently dominated by so much dismal trash like Couples Retreat, Zombieland and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it would be a treat to welcome an artistically viable valentine to the most dynamic city in the world with a huge star-studded cast. New York, I Love You is not it.

An eclectic group of 11 directors with varying degrees of talent play global leapfrog, skipping and jumping from Chinatown to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Coney Island to helm 11 overlapping stories about the Big Apple; it was completed in eight weeks. (A 12th, Scarlett Johansson, has been eliminated, for reasons never explained. Maybe her little vignette was too boring and empty to include, but it couldn’t be less satisfying or more inconsequential than some of the others included here.) This is the second in a continuing series of movies dedicated to the unifying theme of love in big cities from producer Emmanuel Benbihy (Paris, je t’aime). Next up at bat: Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem, in what you might seriously call a true definition of vay izmir. The New York rule: Each director had a deadline of two days to complete his segment. The result is every bit as truncated and zigzaggy as you might imagine. The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.

Horrible, streaky, dizzying camera work leads you across the bridge into the city by taxi while two passengers argue about how to get to Brooklyn. The driver throws them out of his cab. In Chinatown, actor-director Wen Jiang, who co-starred with Gong Li in Red Sorghum and is often called “the Robert De Niro of China,” tells  the tale of a scruffy slacker pickpocket (Hayden Christensen) who follows a girl into a cafe, returns her stolen cell phone and gets into an argument with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia), whose wallet he has previously pilfered. Next, India’s Mira Nair enters the diamond district to film an encounter between a Hasidic bride-to-be (Natalie Portman) and a Hindu diamond merchant (Irrfan Khan), whose cultural differences find a shared common ground as they talk about everything from food restrictions to her shaved head. On the Upper West Side, a British musician (Orlando Bloom) works intensely to finish a score for an animated film, staying in touch with the outside world through cell phone calls from the director’s assistant (Christina Ricci), who insists he read two novels by Dostoyevsky in order to understand the project. He’s confused by this strange request, but when she shows up at his dark, grungy apartment to help him with his creative task, he learns a whole new meaning of Russian literature. Directed by Japan’s Shunji Iwai, who knows how to make two minutes feel like War and Peace.

The best story in the film comes from Yvan Attal, the Israeli-born French director and husband of gruesome-looking actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. It focuses on a fast-talking Soho pickup artist (Ethan Hawke) who puts the make on a sexy married woman (Maggie Q), without knowing she’s a professional hooker. Mr. Hawke’s seduction techniques are both charming and hilarious, giving the lie to the theory that Manhattan hustlers, from Times Square to the meatpacking district, have all the answers before you can even ask the questions. Moving uptown to Central Park, on the day of his senior prom, a heartbroken, lovesick 17-year-old kid (Anton Yelchin) goes to a pharmacist (James Caan) to buy condoms. The old man proposes the boy do a good deed for humanity by taking his crippled daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom in her wheelchair. The dour mood shifts like a lightning strike after the dance, when they are forced to walk home through the park. The kid gets the romantic surprise of his life when the pitiful girl unexpectedly trains him in the nuances of handicapped sex. Little does he know she’s an actress, preparing for a role. In the most pretentious and incomprehensible vignette of all, written by Anthony Minghella, interrupted by his death and finished by Bollywood success Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), the great Julie Christie plays a retired opera singer who checks into a posh hotel on the Upper East Side and shares a glass of Champagne with a crippled bellhop who brings her violets (Shia LaBeouf). He throws himself out of the window to his death, but when she reports it to the hotel manager (John Hurt), the body has disappeared. Before the weirdness ends, the suggestion is apparent that everything has either happened in the woman’s past or been a figment of her imagination. Pure twaddle.

There’s more, in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pointless brushes with destiny. Two distraught lovers (Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper) speed toward one another across Manhattan, one by subway, the other on foot, as they try to figure out if their one-night stand might produce the same sparks the second time around. Cult director Allen Hughes and writer Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, collaborated on this one, which pants with energy and pace, if not content. Actress Natalie Portman returns, in the role of debut director, to frame the story of a black baby sitter who raises eyebrows as he escorts his charge, a pink and pretty all-American little girl, through Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Two housewives praise him for being a great male nanny, but when he returns the moppet to her mother at the end of the day, he turns out to be a ballet dancer—and the child’s real father.

And so it goes, with characters from one episode sometimes rubbing elbows with participants from another. The hooker who left Ethan Hawke on the curb in Soho drops off her lingerie in a Chinese laundry and is shocked when the next customer (Chris Cooper) speaks perfect Cantonese. On the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, Abe (Eli Wallach), an old man recovering from a broken hip, is doomed to endure the nagging of his annoying, mean-spirited wife of 63 years, Mitzie (Cloris Leachman). She’s the worst, but she’s all he’s got. The movie bounces back and forth between these characters like a game of table tennis. The vignettes are like a collection of New Yorker short stories, too often with little or no literary or cinematic trajectory, and almost always too fragmented to add up to anything substantial. There isn’t one that I would call involving enough to engage the emotions. The goal is to paint a colorful canvas of a sprawling metropolis with an ever-changing scenario thanks to a constantly fluctuating population. Unfortunately, it’s a portrait of “the city that never sleeps” that often needs a NoDoz. The very nature of New York’s vastness as a melting pot of contrasts makes it a natural for a movie like this, but it’s the movie’s downfall, too. So many stories to choose from, but hard to connect the dots.

The only thing New York, I Love You really proves is how difficult it is, in today’s culturally bankrupt film industry, for good actors to find jobs.

rreed@observer.com

We justify watching this show by pretending to be engaged in a sociological experiment: Why is it just so much more weird and squirmy when it’s the woman who has to choose from a bunch of dudes as opposed to some blockhead picking among a gaggle of silicone? We haven’t figured it out yet, but tonight should be interesting as bachelorette Jillian Harris takes her final three men to Hawaii— Reid, who we totally have a crush on and looks remarkably like Matt Perry; Kiptyn, who has a silly name and weird parents; and hunky Ed, who has the banged-up visage of Clive Owen but in a totally Midwestern way. Tonight, one of the gents has a little trouble in the bedroom, if you know what we mean (and we know you do!). Wow, ABC—you really are a bunch of evil geniuses. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: The English Patient

Remember just how intensely people felt about this movie?  If not, take a trip back to 1996 and the romance that is The English Patient. The 1996 film, directed by Anthony Minghella, stars Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as doomed passionate lovers, with Colin Firth as the cuckolded husband (can you imagine such a thing?), Williem Defoe as yet another slightly creepy guy and pretty Juliette Binoche who has an affair with … Sayid from Lost! (Naveen Andrews). [FLIXe, 2:05 a.m.]

Wednesday: Starter For 10

Here’s a fun little romantic comedy you probably haven’t seen: Starter For 10, set in 1985 Thatcher-heavy England, is about a young man (pre-Atonement James McAvoy) who goes to the University of Bristol and tries to get in and win the college quiz show “University Challenge.”  A love triangle develops, with Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s Rebecca Hall and blonde-to-watch Alice Eve. The best part about all of this is the movie’s soundtrack, which boasts tunes from the Cure, New Order, the Buzzcocks, The Smiths, and just about anything else moody and melancholy. Wheeee! [3:30 p.m. MOMAXe]

Thursday: Away From Her

Here’s the winner of the movie-that-made-us-cry-the-hardest-in-2007 award! Away From Her, directed by the young and totally awesome Sarah Polley, is based on the soul-crushing Alice Munro short story “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain,” about a couple who have been married for 44 years when one starts showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. It’s a totally grown-up movie that examines what fidelity, devotion and love look like from the end of the journey rather than the start, and both the luminous Julie Christie and gruff Gordon Pinsent couldn’t be better. [TMCe, 2 p.m.]

Friday: Lucas

Ah, Lucas. This 1986 film left a pretty strong impression on our young mind about how love looks (answer: Charlie Sheen in a football uniform). The film stars Corey Haim as the title character—a hopeless nerd in love with his pretty red-headed friend (Kerri Green, where is she these days, anyway?) who in turn loves the captain of the football team (honestly, the best Mr. Sheen has ever looked). Look out for Melrose Place’s Courtney Thorne-Smith as a bitchy senior, and a very young Winona Ryder making her film debut. Best of all, Jeremy Piven shows up and he has hair! [AMC, 10:30 a.m.]

AWAY FROM HER
 Running Time  110 minutes
 Written and  Directed by Sarah Polley
 Starring  Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent
 
The subject of aging, illness and letting go are not mainstream subjects for commercial films, but Away From Her, which marks the feature-film directing debut of popular Canadian actress Sarah Polley, is a devastatingly honest and understated new work that addresses all three issues with admirable maturity and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. Much of the praise must be reserved for the sublime Julie Christie, who has moved into middle age with subtle self-assurance and unretouched natural beauty, as a woman disappearing inside the unforgiving prison of Alzheimer’s disease, and Gordon Pinsent as the anguished husband who watches her slip away. Fiona and Grant are people who have loved each other, hated each other and learned to live with each other’s faults and virtues until they have established a 44-year marriage rooted in romance and solidarity. When all of that disintegrates like cigarette smoke, the husband is lost and hurt and confused about how they came to this defining detour in the road. It is to the everlasting credit of Ms. Polley that she draws the audience into their lives without being manipulative or sentimental. Her movie just states the facts, and the actors get under your skin, welcoming you to the material without handing you a hankie.  
  
Away From Her is based on an Alice Munro short story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” a terrific piece of writing so explicit and linear that too much tinkering and “opening up” for film would have ruined its delicacy. Most of the work was already done, and luckily for us all, Ms. Polley has respected it enough to let it speak for itself. That trust pays off. The film is not only the story of a great romance fading and a beautiful woman disintegrating, but also the tragedy of a caregiver watching the foundation of his world eroding. Ms. Christie shows the spark in Fiona’s eyes slowly dimming to gray. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, trying to remember what she’s looking for, putting away the saucepan in the freezer instead of the cupboard, she laughs off her slips. But as the gaps grow more frequent and her mind deteriorates, she fears saddling her husband with the burden of her declining health, eventually overruling Grant’s protests and making the quiet decision to enter a rest home. While one strand of the narrative follows Fiona’s peaceful transition from strong, independent wife to docile, childlike patient, a second thread follows Grant’s tortured resignation to the trauma of separation after four decades together and his determination to make as happy a homestretch for Fiona as possible. He feels guilty about all of the hurts, real and imagined, he might have caused in the past, and his own mental state is worsened by the cruel rules of Fiona’s new residence, which prohibit visits for a lengthy period of adjustment. One moving moment among many occurs after the first month-long orientation separation, when Grant watches through a palm and sees Fiona’s attentions drift to another patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Sitting devotedly at the side of her mute and wheelchair-bound new friend, Fiona sees Grant and doesn’t even seem to know him. Another occurs after Aubrey’s release plunges Fiona into a pit of depression, when Grant bravely (but vainly) tries to persuade Aubrey’s own frank, no-nonsense wife (Olympia Dukakis) to return him to the institution. There is great potential for a cascading tearjerker here, but the impeccable actors and Ms. Polley’s smartly adapted script keep it tightly bottled. The emotional force remains, as well as the underlying turbulence in Alice Munro’s keenly calibrated writing, and Ms. Polley also has a keen ear and eye for the little humiliations of Alzheimer clinics, their coldly detached administrators, and the glum ritual of family visitation. The luminous and vivid face of Julie Christie, losing focus as it gazes across vast distances, is both openly expressive and internally dark, her eyes registering the unknown landscape that is creeping up, taking over and melting her life away.  Never has the theme “Nothing lasts forever” been so truthfully wrenching. Dealing with the slippery slopes between memory and forgetting, guilt and freedom, Away From Her has even more to do with compassion, empathy and enduring love. It’s inescapably sad—a heartbreaking and memorable cinematic experience.
  

Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, from her own screenplay, based on the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro, plays out as a wondrously lyrical account of a married couple trying, after almost 50 years of a loving relationship, to come to grips with a death-like loss of contact. Julie Christie marvelously inhabits the ravaged consciousness of an Alzheimer’s victim named Fiona, who is drifting further and further away from herself, her memories and her lovingly patient husband, Grant (played with luminous lucidity by Gordon Pinsent). One of the most remarkable aspects of this exquisite film is the ability of Ms. Polley—a 28-year-old woman with a consistently brilliant ongoing acting career, here making her feature-film debut as director­—not only to understand the voluptuous recklessness of old age when there is very little more to lose, but to empathize with it so perceptively and so poetically.

This poignant drama unfolds against the wintry snowscape of Ontario, Canada, rendered with a mix of icy lucidity and enveloping mistiness by cinematographer Luc Montpellier. One of the most memorable images in the film is that of Fiona, in the midst of her cross-country skiing, throwing her skis and flinging herself, arms and legs extended, into the cradle of the soft snow, as if she wanted it to swallow her up whole so that her now-clouded identity could at last find peace in oblivion.

Ms. Christie and Mr. Pinsent are given strong support by Olympia Dukakis as Marian, the no-nonsense wife of another Alzheimer’s patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), with whom Fiona develops an intimately supportive relationship while they’re both institutionalized. Frustrated by Fiona’s total absorption in the mute, wheelchair-bound Aubrey, Grant enters Marian’s life in order to understand Aubrey better so that he can get a little closer to Fiona. Kristen Thomson and Wendy Crewson complete the small but superb ensemble as Kristy and Madeleine, two unafflicted women who serve as the sympathetic listeners that Grant desperately seeks for the unanswerable questions he poses.

Throughout the proceedings, which are jumbled into time fragments resembling the turmoil in Fiona’s mind, a painful loss is projected on the faces of the two protagonists as they cling to each other with a grim ferocity, as if to awaken dormant memories by sheer physical force. The feeling of need involved in these transactions is too one-sided for them to work—after all, he remembers and she doesn’t. Therein lies the poignancy of Away From Her, and it makes the many recent cinematic exercises in trick memory look ridiculously trifling and trivial. Indeed, Ms. Polley’s film, for all its depth of feeling, may be too close to the real thing to qualify as feel-good entertainment. Still, I have seen few films in recent years as emotionally engrossing and edifying. It is not to be missed by any moviegoer professing to be looking for something different.

Ms. Christie’s electrifying performance also gives me an opportunity to pay belated tribute in print to the sheer pleasure she has given me since she burst upon the screen in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963). She went on to have a moderately successful career, box-office-wise and Oscar-wise, though she may have come along one or two decades too soon for the full utilization of her curiously quixotic erotic talents. I still like her best in Richard Lester’s much-underrated Petulia (1968), in which, coupled with George C. Scott in the most brilliant performance of his career, she produced a portrayal of regretfully poignant sensuality rare in that period or any other. Her only other comparable opportunity came with Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). In homage to Ms. Christie, Mr. Scott and Mr. Lester, I book Petulia every year in my film-history class at Columbia and try to sell it to my students, but they resist it, as did the critics of the time. I’ll just have to keep trying.

The Spice-skag look–i.e., nipple-defining halters, pierced extremities, boob-tubes, bare midriffs and crotch-mangling, stretchy, boot-cut pants worn over tarty, strappy spikes or platforms–is as ubiquitous in London as it is in New York. And it's tired.

Now the good news: I am totally convinced that we are on the brink of a much-needed sartorial conservative backlash. English lads and lasses, regardless of their class, have been dressing like strippers and faking regional, proletariat accents for long enough. My prediction: a whole new craze for dressing and acting like a "toff" (a toffee-nosed git, i.e., upper-class person), and a renewed interest in the often-derided world of frumpy English sportswear.

Dowdy aristocrats and Sloane Rangers are looking fresh again. The Queen and Camilla Parker-Bowles, with their tweeds and manure-spattered rubbers, are in serious danger of becoming fashion outlaws and leaders.

The all-pervading tartiness of recent years has not only worn thin but no longer achieves its primary goal, i.e., to look sexy. At this point, a beautifully proportioned, chunky Arran sweater and a featureless, well-cut Donegal tweed skirt (think Julie Christie in Darling ) has far more erotic potential. Conservative dressing never precluded hanky-panky, as anyone who has read the transcription of the Charles-Camilla tampon repartee can attest.

Prince Charles seemed to find Camilla Parker-Bowles' frumpiness far more arousing than Diana's Euroglamour. The generous folds of Camilla's anoraks, head scarves and twinsets, so reminiscent of those worn by QE2, clearly provided him with salacious solace. Camilla's knitted stockings and wingtips, to this day, are the crotchless panties of Charles' sexual imagination. Any fool can see that.

Sordid hanky-panky aside, English clothes are about the only thing unique to London–otherwise the shops sell the same old crap that you can buy in New York.

Where to buy that classic drag:

Start by trying on a Cromwell trench at the original Burberry (18-22 Haymarket). It's a slimmed-down version of the classic raincoat, higher belt loops, very late 60's (very Julie Christie again, but this time it's Don't Look Now ). Wear it with a bias tweed skirt and fitted chocolate high-heeled knee boots. Dab on the new Burberry Touch fragrance (the men's is better than the women's).

Walk up to Trumper (20 Jermyn Street), leading purveyor of gentleman's accoutrements. Here I observed a distinguished geezer very matter-of-factly dropping off some nasty old toothbrushes to get them "rebristled."

Skip west to Turnbull & Asser (71-72 Jermyn Street): custom shirts in fabulously farty stripes and checks of your own selection (about $180).

Cross Piccadilly (watch out for the bus lane), walk through the Burlington Arcade to Savile Row, head straight for Hardy Amies at number 14, fall to your knees in a worshipful posture and start licking the front step in an adulatory fashion. For half a century, Sir Hardy, now in his 90's, devoted himself to the creation of the Queen's iconic look. La Maison Amies will knock together a classic tweed suit–they recommend tweeds that reflect the color and texture of the countryside–for about $4,500.

Anderson & Sheppard, across the street, will make you a custom suit for half that price, but my personal recommendation involves a half-hour cab ride to Timothy Everest (32 Elder Street, 171-377-5770) in Spitalfields. Savile Row alumni Timothy has a highly developed sense of the essential grooviness of conservative clothing, and he therefore makes the best suits in London. Timothy recommends a suit in a large black-and-white herringbone (think Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter ). He also reminds us that brushing a tweed suit, as opposed to relentlessly dry-cleaning it, will make it softer. Call for an appointment.

When shopping Portobello Road, drop into the Paul Smith townhouse (122 Kensington Park Road) and ascend immediately to the bespoke atelier–which just happens to look directly into pop star Robbie Williams' apartment–and ask for Christopher Tarling. Christopher and the team can make you a classic navy mohair worsted suit with a really fancy silk lining in hunting pink for a mere $1,800, approximately.

Girls on a budget: Scotch House (2 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge) will sell you tartan kilted skirts for $150, and just around the corner you can pick up well-priced pleated skirts and V-neck Shetland sweaters at the Harrods school uniform shop (on the fourth floor of Harrods).

English clothes can be sensational, but you do run the risk of looking like C.P. Bowles unless you've got du chien .

No, I'm not suggesting you buy yourself a corgy. Du chien is an elusive feminine quality, hard to define, but Judith Krantz, in her sensational novel Scruples , takes a good shot at it.

"When a woman has du chien she has something that is not chic nor elegance nor even glamour," she writes. "Chien is spicy, tart, amusing, pungent, tempting." But not tarty. "Catherine Deneuve has glamour, but Cher has chien"–or she did in 1978 when this must-read blockbuster exploded off the bookshelves.

Think of yourself as a 1960's French au pair who lost her suitcase on the way over to Angleterre: You cannot help but bring your innate chien to the selection of a classic, sensible new wardrobe. You wear slightly more Charlotte Ramplingesque liquid eyeliner than the other girls in your pony club. Try Anna Sui liquid eyeliner ($16 at Sephora).

London boasts buttloads of new hotels, all with hideously high room rates: Ian Schrager's the Sanderson (011-44-207-300-1400), the Saint Martins Lane (011-44-207-300-5000) and my hotel Bloomsbury (011 441 71 667 6000).

I stayed at the entertainingly over-designed Great Eastern (011-44-20-76-185-000) on Liverpool Street. This Conran-fest is within walking distance of Eat My Handbag, Bitch!, Timothy Everest and the home of Gilbert and George.

If you want something more farty-anglais, The Dukes Hotel on Saint James Place (011-44-171-491-4840) always delivers.

Time was you could vacation in England and even if the weather sucked you could still have a ball. All you had to do was barricade yourself in your hotel room and watch the telly, such was the magnificence and creativity of the programming.

Now there are only two shows worth watching: Da Ali G Show , a sketch show with a bit of Tom Green and a lot of Stuttering John thrown in, and Father Ted , a hilariously grotesque parody of priesthood. The rest is a load of cobblers. The intelligently frumpy element of British TV has been eroded by stupid shows with unspontaneous, ribald unhumor. The last vestiges of that nifty BBC sensibility are only to be found on the radio.

Therefore, take a car trip to Brighton for the day and listen to Radio 4 all the way. The back-to-back riveting discussion programs, radio plays and witty repartee render conversation unnecessary and make you loath to disembark on reaching your destination.

Take a quick twirl round the fabulous 18th- century Brighton Royal Pavilion–the decadent chinoise folly of the former Prince Regent. Eat lunch at Wheelers fish restaurant (16-17 Market Street), then take a quick bracing hike to the end of the pier–don't bother with the roller coaster, the trampolines are much more fun. Bounce until nauseated, then drive back to London with Radio 4 blaring all the way.

The best thing about being back in England was hearing the C-word thrown around with jolly Joycean abandon. "C–-" is so commonly used in the U.K. as to make it comparable to such innocuous American expressions as "dipshit" or "dickwad."

When I emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970's, my expletives were often met with astonished faces. It took me several years of living here to moderate the C-word out of my vocabulary, and I must confess to missing it terribly. Like every other normal English person, I most often used it to refer to myself, usually when I had done something silly or forgetful: e.g., "What a silly c–- I am, I left my umbrella in a taxi!"

I wasn't trying to be vile. Like many happy well-adjusted U.K. youngsters, I grew up on "c–-." Walking to school as a child one often heard truck drivers and construction workers happily calling each other "fucking c–-s." Male-to-male working-class use of the C-word is the most common, and was brilliantly parodied on a record called Derek and Clive by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a skit called "This Bloke Came Up to Me" (though unofficially known as "You Calling Me a Fucking C–-, You Fucking C–-?").

But it's important to understand that use of the C-word was not class-specific. Mrs. Crowther, my middle-class high school English teacher, missed no opportunity to highlight the c–-s and the shits and the farts which make Chaucer such a pleasure.

On this trip, I popped into a pub to use the bathroom and overheard a stand-up comedian saying, "Oh, the owner of this pub is a wonderful man–he's an Irish count, you know. Or at least I think that's what they called him."

Instead of traditional year-end salvation, the 1997 Hollywood Santa delivered thistles and burrs. In the explosion of new movies this holiday season, an amazing number of bombs have been dropped that are alarmingly bereft of charm, excitement and commercial appeal. Except for Titanic, Good Will Hunting and As Good as It Gets , there isn't much good will toward men. I've made my list, checked it twice and, frankly, I'm shocked.

Of all the bombs, The Postman is pure plutonium , the size of the one they dropped on Hiroshima. Until you see Kevin Costner as a futuristic Shakespearean actor, you only think you've seen bad. A futuristic cross between King Lear and Jesse James trying to deliver the mail in a post-apocalyptic Waterworld with sand dunes, he puts the ham back in Hamlet. For what they spent on ugly sandals, they could have financed a cure for cancer. The year is 2013, the place is the great salt flats of Utah, and wars and plagues have wiped out the world. (In only 16 years?) Such artifacts as a pack of Marlboros take on the symbolic importance of that tomato in Waterworld , and an old issue of Playboy can buy you your own uncontaminated sperm bank. Mr. Costner, who also unwisely produced and directed this flatulent fiasco, gets captured by a feudal army and enslaved in a desert mine where he is forced to eat donkey meat and watch endless reruns of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music . One day, while escaping a lion (in Utah?), he finds a deserted United States mail truck and spends the next three hours delivering old postcards to walled cities, reviving dreams of democracy, restoring hope to Planet Earth and inspiring little children to become mail carriers and sing "America the Beautiful." Before the villains track him down and spoil the fun, he's negotiating peace treaties, impregnating women and posing as a representative of the newly formed United States Government, simultaneously protecting the world from a fascist dictator named Bethlehem. It has to be seen to be believed, but that statement is not intended as a recommendation. All I can tell you is that the future landscape of America, in a postscript set in the year 2043, looks like a Troy Donahue-Sandra Dee movie, and nobody ever buys stamps. By the time somebody asks the question, "How much mail can a dead postman deliver?" the movie has taken on both the dialogue and the dimension of a light bulb joke. It seems to have been written by Abe Burrows, but the laughs are unintentional and the movie is obsolete before it even opens, thanks to e-mail.

Jackie Brown , clocking in at two and a half hours, is unthinkable, unwatchable and unfit for lepers , affirming my belief that if Hollywood has turned into a banquet of fools, Quentin Tarantino is surely at the head of the idiot table. Pam Grier, as the foxy felon in the title, plays a cocaine-smuggling, money-laundering 45-year-old airline stewardess who looks like 45 miles of bad tarmac. In this meandering bore, she outwits a Federal agent (Michael Keaton), a murderous gun-runner (Samuel L. Jackson) and his bimbo mistress (Bridget Fonda), a bail bondsman (Robert Forster) and a brain-dead petty crook (Robert De Niro) to steal a million dollars in a Vuitton bag. Looking like Lady Chablis, the ugly drag queen in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , Ms. Grier goes to impossible lengths to prove that stewardesses are an endangered species ready for a union strike. The point of the movie is simple: Sixteen thousand a year and health insurance benefits are not enough to keep an old broad in tequila sunrises. The point could have been made in 30 minutes, but Mr. Tarantino, who learned everything he knows from old videos, needs time for dialogue like "You come in here on a Saturday night, you must need nigger repellent." There's plenty of trashy talk, but no energy or movement, and fans of Pulp Fiction will be dismayed by the rambling incoherence of it all. Choppily edited, whole scenes make no sense at all. Poor Bridget Fonda has nothing to do but lie around smoking dope and watching TV, while Samuel L. Jackson is forced to say all the moronic stuff, like "My ass may be dumb, but I ain't no dumb ass." The blacks all talk like Amos and Andy on speed. Everyone else in Jackie Brown talks like he or she has been lobotomized.

For her splendid, wry and wrenching performance in Afterglow , Julie Christie won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress of 1997, but I wouldn't take any bets on how many people will see her. The movie is an ordeal. It's a tedious tale, slow as a New Year's Eve party in a mental ward, about two miserable married couples in Montreal. Lucky and Phyllis (Nick Nolte and the ageless Ms. Christie) have been heading for the rocks since their only daughter deserted them, over an argument, years ago. Lucky is an aging contractor who stays in business with the help of satisfied female clients. He does marvels with their plumbing. Phyllis is a B-movie actress who lives in the past, watching her old bombs on TV and enduring Lucky's affairs with no interest in reviving their loveless marriage. Across town, there's Jeffrey and Marianne (Jonny Lee Miller and Lara Flynn Boyle). He's a handsome, self-centered corporate whiz-kid with no interest in sex. She's frustrated and wants a baby. They all find in each other's spouses the elements missing in their own marriages. After what seems like an eternity of whining, Lucky impregnates Marianne, Jeffrey falls off a bridge, and everything ends up in fisticuffs in the bar of the Ritz Hotel while the ghastly Tom Waits growls and gargles his way through a song from West Side Story . The only memorable line in the film is "The hardest part is finding out too late that none of it lasts." Ms. Christie delivers it sadly, wisely and shatteringly. A great performance, in a dreary disappointment.

Kundun is the second movie in one year about the Dalai Lama when nobody even wanted to see one. Martin Scorsese's film is the one without Brad Pitt. In fact, all parts (except for a few Chinese generals) are played by nonprofessional Tibetans, while Tibet is played by Morocco. Mr. Scorsese manages to make an impossible project come alive as he chronicles 18 years in the life of the 14th Holy Leader, covering a lot of the same ground as Seven Years in Tibet , but with more cinematic brilliance. Taken from his humble village at the age of 2 and transported to the Holy City of Lhasa, the Dalai Lama sneaked forbidden treats, tested his parents to see how much he could get away with, was crazy about cars and cowboy movies, and learned about the outside world from reading Life magazines. One of the most charming scenes shows him writing a letter to President Harry Truman asking for help when his country was invaded by the Chinese Communist armies of Mao Zedong. The movie is an arduous risk, beautifully shot, but conveying more information about Buddhism than the average filmgoer is likely to care about. And the final hour, when Chairman Mao tries unsuccessfully to convince Kundun that religion is the poison opiate of the people, lacks momentum, and interest wanes. Still, Kundun is never less than human and opulent, the work of a real director with a vision, often as inspiring as it is inspired.

Better still, there is The Boxer , a movingly sober account of the Irish "troubles" today that shows people in Belfast trying to make peace instead of war. Daniel Day-Lewis is marvelous in the title role, playing a reformed Irish Republican Army terrorist who returns after 14 years in prison with a change of heart. Belfast is in a cease-fire mode, though the city is a ruin full of junkies, thieves and angry survivors who can't forget. Mr. Day-Lewis' character, who was once the most promising boxer in Ulster, finds self-respect coaching kids in a nonsectarian community center, revives his own career in the ring, rekindles hope among the younger generation and resurrects an old love affair with the girl he left behind (Emily Watson). The film is about regeneration and the value of dignity, and it is beautifully and sensitively acted, skillfully directed and written by Jim Sheridan, and stages a stirring reunion for the same creative team responsible for My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father . From the chrysalis of arrogant, pretentious, self-serving year-end movies that serve no purpose beyond keeping millions of moviegoers alienated, at least Kundun and The Boxer are films that stretch, involve and embrace us with artistry and substance. And a better, more fulfilling New Year to all.

Here, by popular demand, is my list of the 10 best films of 1997:

1. L.A. Confidential

2. Titanic

3. The Ice Storm

4. Good Will Hunting

5. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown

6. Bent

7. The Boxer

8. Alive and Kicking

9. As Good as It Gets

10. The Wings of the Dove