Get Shorty. After a long, banal summer, Get Shorty hits like a bracing blast of cool fall air, reminding us why we love movies so much. Get Shorty (from Elmore Leonard's 1991 best-seller) follows the trail of Chili Palmer (John Travolta in a great performance), a collector for a Miami loan shark who heads for L.A. in search of a skip and lands smack dab in the middle of the movie biz. He falls in with movie producer/ schlockmeister Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) and Zimm's big star Karen Flores (Rene Russo), who is also the ex-love interest of Hollywood's biggest star, Martin Weir (Danny DeVito). Chili hits Zimm up with an idea for a movie. Zimm likes the idea, but first wants to buy a hot script so he can offer it up to Weir. Zimm is also dodging drug dealers, who have given him money as a ticket into the film business and who are, in turn, ducking their angry Colombian suppliers. Chili dances through this jungle, impressing the phonies and winning the girl as he goes. And when the impatient loan shark hits town to find out what's taking Chili so long, it all comes to a wild (and wildly satisfying) conclusion.

HEAVENLY CREATURES. Peter Jackson, the writer-director responsible for the sweetest zombie movie ever made, Dead Alive, chose as his next film this campy docudrama. Set in 1954 New Zealand, the picture follows the fantasy-world descent of two adolescent girls who so lost touch with reality that they irrationally decided to kill one girl's mother. Jackson directs with playful gusto, but no coherent point of view to match; he seems perfectly happy to marvel at this pair of youthful psychotics and leave it at that. All in all, the movie could use a little more Jane Campion and a little less Terry Gilliam.

HIGHER LEARNING. John Singleton's third feature is a well-intentioned look at a diverse handful of young people during their formative political years at a large university. Singleton's choice of subjects--a black athlete overcoming his resentment of the system, a rape victim considering lesbianism, and an insecure white boy's descent into racism--hardly adds up to a full-bodied representation of campus experience; but he gets the little details right, and the power of his wholeheartedness often wins out. The unfortunate exception is the movie's climax, a needlessly violent burst of trauma that looks and feels recycled from Boyz N the Hood.

HOOP DREAMS. This thorough documentary spends five years following the lives of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two ghetto-raised basketball hopefuls who struggle to get through the grueling processes of high-school competition and college recruitment. Their dream, to make it to the NBA, is constantly at odds with knee injuries, low grades, financial problems and family disharmony. The filmmakers' dogged commitment to observing these complications makes the picture a fascinating document of the ways real lives can be consumed by sports, with results both positive and negative.

HOUSEGUEST. Comedian Sinbad stars as an urban misfit who pretends to be the long-lost pal of an affluent white family in order to escape a bloodthirsty loan shark. He moves in with the family, headed by a gullible dad (Phil Hartman), and the film's one joke is that Sinbad doesn't have a clue about the man he's impersonating. Sinbad's jokes aren't funny, Randall Miller's hyperkinetic direction leaves you dizzy, and repeated references to the virtues of McDonald's make the picture come across as a long, excruciating commercial.

How to Make an American Quilt. Winona Ryder gets seven lessons in love when she spends a summer listening to the romantic histories of all the women in her grandmother's quilting bee. We're talking flashback-o-rama, with the majority of the stories taking bittersweet turns in which the women's husbands either leave them, cheat on them or die. This uninspiring "quilt" of mini-narratives is somehow supposed to help Ryder choose between a hunky Don Juan type (Jonathon Schaech) and a regular-guy carpenter (Dermot Mulroney). Though the appearance of so many fine actresses has its benefits, the movie's lessons about life are mere bromides, and they're made all the sappier by Ryder's talentless presence and weak narration. (Why does Ryder always choose scripts that require her to narrate?) American Quilt features Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Samantha Mathis and Alfre Woodard.

THE HUNTED. Christopher Lambert, who has made a career out of playing a nerd with a sword, stars as a microchip dealer in Japan who unwittingly becomes involved in a personal feud between two modern-day samurais. The movie's potential appeal as a campy thriller is sliced away by Lambert's bland personality, and the director's, too. Joan Chen briefly stirs interest as a mysterious woman in a red dress; unfortunately she gets her head cut off.

IMMORTAL BELOVED. While Beethoven (Gary Oldman) decomposes, his faithful assistant attempts to discover the mysteries behind his late master's will, which left his entire estate to "my Immortal Beloved." A series of Gothic, overblown flashbacks ensue, each tabloidizing the life of the deaf composer while rarely touching on the powers of his music. The only saving grace is a prolonged childhood scene set to the Ninth Symphony--but then again anything looks good when set to the Ninth Symphony. Starring Isabella Rossellini and Valeria Golino.

In The Mouth Of Madness. John Carpenter's latest creepfest is a wonderfully playful mind-bender chock full of paranoid fears about mass hysteria and the death of reality. Working from a screenplay by Michael De Luca, the movie gives horror a good name, holding back on blood-'n'-guts in favor of weird, imaginative imagery where white haired beings on bicyles flash through the night, shadows creep up in the cells of insane asylums and figures in paintings turn their heads. Every scene gooses you with a surprise, every dream contains a twist, and Sam Neill, as the skeptical protagonist, makes the journey fun.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. Anne Rice's tale of depressed, codependent vampires who stay depressed and codependent for hundreds of years doesn't exactly get the blood movin'. Directed by The Crying Game's Neil Jordan, with lots of lush sets, cinematography and special effects, the film is a feast for the eyes but malnutrition for the cranium. Brad Pitt does a respectable job with his dark-spirited role, and Tom Cruise--who, not surprisingly, plays a cocky vampire--avoids being too annoying. But without a plot, what have you got? Vampire therapy for the terminally pretentious.

I.Q. Walter Matthau stars as Albert Einstein, a sort of Cyrano de Relativity who conspires to change Tim Robbins from auto mechanic to quantum mechanic in order to provoke the affections of Einstein's niece (Meg Ryan), a talented mathematician who has trouble solving equations of the heart. As likable as the leads are, the featherweight script doesn't give them much to work with; about the funniest thing anyone can think to do with Einstein is make him say "Yahoo!" And hasn't Ryan played a few absent-minded cuties too many? But everything's relative, so if you think the idea of being set up by a frizzy-haired professor sounds romantic, this could be your slice of pi.