The Cable Guy. Editor's note: Our regular reviewer would like to state that she is not a Jim Carrey fan; and in fact believes he's a sort of brain-damaged version of all that is sinister and annoying about Jerry Lewis. In deference to her professional integrity, we'd like to make clear the opinions contained here (and in the Dragonheart clip, while we're at it) belong to another reviewer. Jim Carrey plunges into the dark side in this purely cynical comedy about psychopaths and free cable. Matthew Broderick co-stars as the victimized straight man, reeling and lonely after his girlfriend kicks him out. The silliness of Carrey's trademark antics are offset by his black humor about a lonely boy (nation?) that grew up with TV as his only friend. The attention to detail and sheer volume of TV-show references make this a downright eerie journey through latchkey America and a burgeoning psychosis lurking behind so many strangers in anonymous coveralls. Under Ben Stiller's direction, The Cable Guy is a perfect example of Freud's theory that laughter is a latent expression of fear.

Carried Away. Dennis Hopper, Amy Irving and Amy Locane star in this uncomfortable, small town love story directed by Bruno Barreto. Joseph Svendon (Hopper) is a 47-year-old bachelor who succumbs to the temptations of a 17-year-old vixen from the Big City (Locane). The lurid premise of a vibrant young beauty seducing her bored, befuddled, middle-aged school teacher is truly disturbing: The young girl is portrayed alternately as an adoring innocent and a nympho she-devil who preys on a decent, lonely old man trying to negotiate the skids of caring for his dying mother and a budding mid-life crisis. If you can squirm through those scenes, the life-long romance between Svendon and fellow school teacher Rosealee Hensen (Irving) has some truly tender moments. In spite of its dream-on male fantasy quotient, Carried Away seems more of a real-life love story than the rest of the Hollywood romance pabulum we've seen this year. With its nostalgic feel and any-town setting (it's filmed entirely in Texas, but you'd never guess) it's an odd, incongruent little movie you'll either love or hate.

Casino. A film that lodges midway between The Age of Innocence and Taxi Driver on the Scorsese scale. DeNiro, Joe Pesci and a bunch of jowly Italian guys have returned from Good Fellas to screw, bash and plug one another again as the director continues his romance with the Mafia mystique. DeNiro plays a Casino chief who has everything: money, prestige and a fox (Sharon Stone), which in Scorsese's world means he has everything to lose. Set over more than a decade and thick with narration, Casino is an uncannily alienating movie. It's hard to sympathize with any of the characters and it's so long that sometimes you just want it to be over. Still, no one has as much style as Scorsese; the camera lurches and rolls through this film like the entire town of Vegas is a sinking ship. Totally violent, but where else can you watch silver-haired old men beating each other to a pulp?

CASPER. That friendly little dead kid from the comic-book '50s has been resurrected for the computer-generated '90s. His movie, which unlike last summer's The Flintstones, has the quick pacing and good cheer necessary to get audiences past a typically slim, gadget-ridden storyline. Actors Bill Pullman (likable as always) and especially Christina Ricci (who has become eye-catchingly lovely since her days in The Addams Family) are responsible; playing an afterlife researcher and his lonely daughter, they provide the movie with just enough soul to get by. Casper doesn't do too bad in that department, either. Also starring Cathy Moriarty and Eric Idle.

Celluloid Closet. This terrific documentary traces both the overt and covert portrayal of lesbians and gays in the movies from the freedom of silent era, to the middle of the century (when same-sex relationships in the movies usually ended in death), to today, when a gay character actually has a chance of surviving! This movie is full of wonderful clips and intriguing, behind-the-scenes glimpses from actors and screenwriters. Learn all about the secret love-plot embedded in Ben Hur from Gore Vidal; hear about the obsessive lesbian yearning of the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca from Susie Bright. Best of all, hear Susan Sarandon talk about the triumph and trials of bedding Catherine Deneuve.

Celtic Pride. We should know by now that any movie including any past or present member of the Saturday Night Live cast will be a grave mistake, and Celtic Pride is no exception. This relentlessly unfunny comedy is the story of two pathetic buddies (Dan Ackroyd and Daniel Stern) who are so obsessed with "their" team, the Boston Celtics, that they bumble into a plan to kidnap the star player of the opposing team. Damon Wayans' good looks and smooth, comedic charm don't even matter here; the whole film is such a sad document of immature men doing stupid things for hazy reasons that nothing can save it.

Cemetery Man. A computer search for this movie turned it up under the keywords horror/death/zombie, and that just about says it all. Part spoof on B-movies and part homage, Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man (or Dellamorte Dellamore) follows the adventures of a graveyard caretaker who must deal with some sort of virus which has bitten the dead and turned his yard into a lot full of aquamarine zombies. The nature of love, death and killing are all amply explored as Rupert Everett casually blows away the undead and tries to understand. A highly-tuned sense of satire, not only of B horror movies but of previous satires of B horror movies (Coffin Joe comes to mind), gives this flick an edgy sense of gory fun. Dubbed into English.

Chungking Express. This delightful, bittersweet love story from Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai is innovative and stylish from start to finish. Two loosely affiliated stories about love connections in the big city blend detective-story intrigue with fantasy romance. Filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, who is widely known in Hong Kong, has a sly, offbeat sense of how stories should be put together, and the structure of this film is as surprising and fresh as the love lives of the characters. Good performances by handsome young actors make the whole thing even more appealing.

CIRCLE OF FRIENDS. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl wins boy back. Nothing new here, right? Absolutely. But for simple romantic pleasure, you can't beat this film's bright green Irish setting and the winning performance of Minnie Driver in the female lead. Driver's character may not have a Barbie Doll physique, but her intelligent, sensitive personality leaves no question why the best-looking guy on campus (Chris O'Donnell) falls for her. This is a cute, lightweight, and amiably sexual movie with a lot of heart to make up for its lack of originality.

City Of Lost Children. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the dynamic duo who dreamed up the award-winning Delicatessen four years ago, delve into a retro-future fantasy world that is such a visual and narrative feast, you won't even mind the subtitles. Their cinematic Cirque de Soliel is a surreal journey through a dark, dank harbor town populated by genetic mutants, a cult of Cyclops kidnappers and a scrappy band of street-wise orphans. It harkens back to traditional (un-Disneyfied) fairy tales: untamed flights of fancy that are equal parts funny and fearsome. Miette (a haunting nine-year-old femme fatale) and One (a simple-minded circus giant) band together to save One's adopted brother from the clutches of Krank, a horrible scientist who's slowly dying because he lacks one vital function: the ability to dream. From his laboratory on a remote, mist-shrouded rig, Krank invades the dreams of his stolen children in a desperate attempt to make them his own...until One and Miette penetrate Krank's sinister fortress and challenge him on a level playing field--within the world of a little boy's dream.

CITY HALL. Does Al Pacino ever rest? This tale of political intrigue has him playing the mayor of New York, a principled and moral manipulator, if you can picture that. John Cusack plays Kevin Calhoun, the mayor's right-hand man who gets sucked into a murder investigation. It's a man's world out there--there are hardly any women in this movie except Bridget Fonda, who rushes through her small role like she can't wait to get out of there. The main appeal of this movie is the excellent acting by Cusack and Danny Aiello, as well as a refreshingly restrained performance by Pacino, but the story never rises above mediocre. After this movie one guy leaving the theater started yelling, "That was terrible! Now I know why I don't go to movies anymore: They suck!" I wouldn't say it was that bad, but I don't think it's worth $7 to sit in the fetid air of a multiplex and inhale mediocrity.

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. This Tom Clancy adaptation is the most ambitious yet, shuffling dozens of characters and sub-plots within a complicated story about an Executive-Branch-ordered mini-war against a Columbian drug lord. Philip Noyce's direction is crisp and swift, but for what? For a two-and-a-half hour sermon on the ethical use of covert military operations? Who needs that? Clancy and the screenwriters blow the opportunity to provide a larger understanding of the whole drug-war issue, and what they have left is little more than a pleaser for Clancy's fans. Harrison Ford gives one of his least interesting action-movie performances as uncorruptible CIA agent Jack Ryan.

CLERKS. This black-and-white, low-low-budget movie documents a day in the life of an unassertive convenience-mart employee and his obnoxiously irreverent buddy from the video joint next door. Though thoroughly crude, the cartoonish entourage of Slacker-inspired storegoing misfits are frequently funny, and the picture has the charm of something made exactly as the filmmakers wanted it, with all idiosyncrasies intact.

Clockers. Spike Lee's adaptation of Richard Price's intricate novel follows a young park-bench drug dealer (Mekhi Phifer) who may or may not have been the gunman in a murder. In spite of his overemphasis on style, Lee successfully juggles a number of characters whose lives affect each others' like chess pieces in a microcosmic Brooklyn neighborhood, including the wire-pulling dealer who runs the show (Delroy Lindo) and a friendly homicide cop played (very engagingly) by Harvey Keitel. Because the story is more a societal character study than a mystery, don't expect the oomph of Do the Right Thing; the film deals in texture and dialogue, not bright action. And while it's a cut above most other movies in drug-related black cinema, unfortunately the content doesn't reach much deeper.

Clueless. This is the movie you'll hate to love, full of innocent, likeable characters with completely unbelievable lives. Far from an offshoot of one of those Fox TV programs, this latest effort by Amy Heckerling (who also delivered Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is an original, engaging portrait of Beverly Hills high school life in the '90s, which remains sincere however fantastic the lives of her characters become. Clueless is top of the line, "kids rule" cinema.

Cold Comfort Farm. John Schlesinger makes a wonderful comeback with Cold Comfort Farm, a zippy comedy with a very sly, British sense of humor. Tons of witty dialogue and clever asides pepper this story of a plucky gal who decides, after the death of her parents, to go live with the most "interesting" family members she can find in order to scavenge fuel for her writing career. The distant relatives she locates are closer to insane than interesting--a weird, gothic clan of vaguely inbred farmers who don't even observe the custom of afternoon tea. The plucky Flora Poste tries her 1930's modern-girl best to turn her relatives' shame-filled, squalid lives into something out of the society section. Ah--but will she succeed?

CONGO. After being spoiled by Jurassic Park, you can't help but feel that something's missing from this summer's Michael Crichton thriller. Where are the moral issues? Where are the scientific tangents? Where are the dinosaurs? Following a handful of differently motivated explorers into the heart of an African jungle, this Frank Marshall-directed spectacle feels hollow every misstep of the way. Marshall transparently uses the plot as a chassis for a series of action set-ups, and the characters as vehicles for one-liners. There's no wonderment to fill in the gaps. Amy, the gorilla who talks via computerized bodygear, has more heart than anyone else in the picture.

Courage Under Fire. Meg Ryan and Denzel Washington star in this Roshomon-style tale of a fighter pilot being investigated to see if she deserves the Medal of Honor for her performance in Operation Desert Storm. Not only is the pilot a girl, but the stories of her surviving squad-mates don't match very well and Washington must work overtime to try to sort the mess out. What's more, the investigator has some skeletons to clean out of his own closet before he can bask in the hard, clear light of The Truth. The structure of this movie is interesting, but the content is sort of revolting. Washington is consumed with remorse for killing some of his men with friendly fire, but feels nothing but lasting jingoistic triumph over blowing away scads of faceless Iraqis, whom he also refers to as "fuckers." If the thought of the strongest army in the world crushing a much weaker force in order to protect its economic interests strikes you as heroic, buy a ticket and have your patriotic chain yanked.

The Craft. Three sexy but unpopular girls form a coven and begin casting spells on their classmates in this supernatural update of the classic teen formula movie. The first half is generally above par for this genre and touches on some of the strange obsessiveness of teen life that other movies of this kind often skip. A zippy script and above-decent acting, especially by Fairuza Balk, make The Craft engaging initially; but by the end, any sort of nuance in the plot has been boiled down to good vs. evil. One thing this movie can teach us: Witches all wear flowing, Stevie Nicks clothes and cake on the eyeliner.

CRIMSON TIDE. Tony Scott, director of Top Gun, once again glorifies a division of the armed forces with commercial editing rhythms, overpowering sound effects and monotonously slick cinematography. This time the action takes place aboard a nuclear submarine, which may or may not have orders to launch the first strike of World War III. Though mutiny and torpedo battles are involved, the movie's only real meat comes from the verbal sparring between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, two stereotypically diametrical officers who argue endlessly over a trumped-up ethical question about whether to follow orders or follow your heart. Even without a periscope, you can see the finish coming from miles away.

Crossing Guard. Sean Penn's second venture as a filmmaker is an uneven, family drama fraught with gratuitous tension. Jack Nicholson and Angelica Houston play a divorced couple whose daughter has been killed by a drunk driver. Nicholson is a rageaholic overwhelmed by his dark side, and when the drunk who killed his child gets out of jail, he decides his mission in life is to murder him. There are some good performances here (especially David Morse as the reformed drunk driver), but a contrived script and constant emotional intensity sap all the believability out of it. And, like a lot of filmmakers who try to deal with large themes, Penn flirts with pretentiousness.

Crumb. The unusual life of comic-book artist Robert Crumb gets dissected in this rewarding documentary by Crumb's friend, Terry Zwigoff. Without passing judgment or drawing conclusions, the movie takes an in-depth look into Crumb's dysfunctional childhood family and contrasts it with the dark, psychologically unnerving stories in his cartoons. The details that emerge are painful, sad, and often funny; Crumb turns out to be the sort of character whose idiosyncratic life and work connect in several dimensions, many of them hidden, all of them fascinating.