THE SANTA CLAUSE. At first, this Tim Allen holiday star vehicle appears to be going nowhere fast, with Allen making sarcastic anti-Christmas wisecracks to a son too cutesy to make a good comic foil. But after Allen causes the death of Santa (yes, this actually happens) and is forced to become him, the movie picks up some charm. Allen doesn't relate well to the movie camera when he's playing a character similar to himself, but covered in furry white facial hair and cloaked in a roly-poly Santa belly, he manages to elevate the movie's shrewd patchwork plot to something fun enough to sit through.

The Scarlet Letter. When the opening credits state the film is "freely adapted" from the novel, they aren't kidding. The filmmakers have taken an American literature classic and turned it into a plainly idiotic bodice-ripper that pits small-town intolerance against Hester Prynne's fiercely independent feminist sexuality. This is the second film of the year in which a woman's love is signaled by a little bird that leads the way (the other is How to Make an American Quilt). The bird leads Prynne (Demi Moore, as superficial as ever) into the arms of Gary Oldman, a minister who swims naked so as to expose his buttocks to God and anybody else who might be watching. You can bet that when the time comes for nooses to be tied around the lovers' necks, a bunch of Indians will pop out to save the day. Maybe this movie's creators should be forced to wear a big letter "A" around Hollywood--for the sin of asinine adaptation.

Senior Trip. The words "National Lampoon" on any film are a bad sign, and this movie seems designed to prove it. Working from an anachronistic, chaos-driven formula that stereotypes all teens as idiotic partiers and all adults as buffoons, the movie shoots only for the lowest gags, and actually makes Animal House (which at least had a few characters you could care about) seem sophisticated by comparison. A cast of has-beens and soon-to-be-has-beens star, including Matt Frewer (Max Headroom), Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong), and Kevin McDonald (of Kids in the Hall).

Seven. David Fincher, the mind behind Alien 3, has visual ingenuity to spare:This gruesome thriller, overflowing with pitch-black shadows, dank rain and artfully detailed corpses (each representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins), generates an unforgettably macabre atmosphere. But thematically, the movie stumbles over itself, trying desperately to shape a mechanical and brutally exploitative puzzle-piece plot into a story with deep philosophical ramifications. Led by a tremendously effective cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey, watching the film is like being led into a magnificent, sepulchral library only to find stacks of National Enquirers.

SHALLOW GRAVE. When three roommates discover their mysterious new tenant has died and left a suitcase full of money, they decide to bury the body and stash the dough until later. But they slowly begin to lose their cool, and the triangle's corners come undone. This dark, tense thriller makes up with visual sense what it lacks in common sense, painting its scenes with suffocatingly deep hues of red, blue, green and yellow while the characters' personalities are gradually drained of colors of their own.

Showgirls. With this heavily hyped NC-17 travesty, Robocop-director Paul Verhoeven has created a new type of robo-erotica where robocharacters have robosex in the roboscummiest areas of that robocity they call Las Vegas. Roboscreenwriter Joe Eszterhas fills his inane, behind-the-scenes roboexposé with gobs of crude robosub-plots and robodialogue, creating plenty of excuses for roboactress Elizabeth Berkely and others to bare their robobreasts and robopelvises with increasing regularity. If you're a robot, you'll no doubt be turned on. (All others stay away.)

SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT. From the screenwriter who gave us Thelma & Louise comes this insightful yet directionless tale of a Southern wife (Julia Roberts) who has to re-think her life when she learns her husband (Dennis Quaid) has been having several affairs. Crisp direction by Lasse Hallestrom, warmly vibrant cinematography and a handful of fun performances (by Kyra Sedgwick, Robert Duvall and Gene Rowlands) keep the film enjoyable long after the story has lost sight of a point. And Roberts is surprisingly good--after years of limited performances in dumb roles, she really seems to be blossoming.

THE SPECIALIST. Stone. Stallone. Stupid. They've got their James Bond-ish John Barry soundtrack, their unremarkable (and illogical) twisting plot, their cool sunglasses, their nifty gadgets, their slick commercial-style editing, and they even take their clothes off for a sex scene that looks like an Obsession magazine ad. But in a word, they suck. James Woods, as the uptight bad guy, steals the entire movie--and he doesn't even have to remove a stitch of clothing.

SPECIES. Get ready for Jurassic Park meets Alien. When an experiment with a human-extraterrestrial hybrid goes awry, the government assembles a four-man team consisting of a biologist, social scientist, empath and assassin to find the escaped E.T. Species starts off in the right vein, creating a character both humanistic enough for the audience to relate to and inhuman enough to keep you on the edge of your seat. Despite an anti-climactic, typical Hollywood ending, a half-way decent story and chilling special effects mask most of Species' flaws.

STARGATE. In this good-natured science-fiction adventure, James Spader plays a nerdy linguist enlisted to decipher Egyptian runes that will unlock the secrets to an extra-dimensional space portal. The device leads Spader and a military crew headed by Kurt Russell to a planet far, far away, where they find pyramids, multiple moons and an all-too-friendly primitive culture. They also find dog-headed bad guys with lasers, and an evil alien played by the androgynous Jaye Davidson (who couldn't have asked for a cooler role following The Crying Game). As sci-fi yarns go, this is kid stuff--laughable but likable, best seen on a Saturday afternoon.

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS. It's a mixed blessing having the cast of the Next Generation TV show take over the helm of the enterprising Star Trek movie series. Surely it was time for the first cast to move on, but the new crew brings with them the baggage of recent TV familiarity (instead of the camp nostalgia of the originals). None of the characters are as charismatic as their predecessors, and they don't really spruce up their acts for the big screen; you feel like you've paid $7 to see something you could have watched on TV. William Shatner's brief appearance livens up the proceedings, but the slopped-together script, a strained excuse to create a sci-fi metaphor arguing against drugs and escapism, doesn't make his presence pay off. No doubt fans won't mind--for some, just hearing Captain Picard say "Make it so!" in THX sound or seeing Data have emotions is probably worth admission--but the rest of the moviegoing population would be better off staying here on Earth.

Strange Days. Given the scarcity of original screenplays coming out of the Big Studio establishment, Strange Days deserves due credit. Katherine Bigelow's first noteworthy attempt since Near Dark blows away all other attempts at cyber-cinema we've seen thus far. If you're expecting a lot of high-priced special effects, you'll be disappointed. But creative use of point-of-view camera work and a dark, documentary-style vision of the year 2000--with humvies rolling down Sunset Boulevard and soundbites from the evening news bringing us up to speed on the violence and mayhem in Los Angeles at the end of the millennium--draw us into a believable future in which cop-turned-cyberdrug dealer Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) and straight-laced friend Mace (Angela Bassett) fight for survival in a world gone mad with paranoia, deception and murder. Despite some snags in the fabric of believability, Strange Days is entertaining up until the last minute--which is a good 60 seconds of unforgivable drivel.

STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE. In this unlikely tale of friendship, two men--one communist, one counterrevolutionary, one straight, one gay, one chocolate-chowing, one strawberry-slurping--work past hidden agendas and emerge with a rare love and appreciation for each other. With elements of both Kiss of the Spider Woman and Threesome, this is one of the best, most balanced gays-and-straights pictures around, thanks to beautiful, three-dimensional performances by Vladimir Cruz and Jorge Perugorria.

THE SUM OF US. In this Australian odd-couple comedy, a widower and his adult gay son struggle to coexist peaceably in the same house. The twist is that they get along fine; it's everyone else who can't handle their relationship. Though talky and dramatically limp, the performances are good-natured, and the film's example of harmony between homo- and heterosexuals is far more effective than that seen in other pictures (like Philadelphia).

TALES FROM THE HOOD. Here's a breath of fresh air: a black film that addresses racial issues via a format other than realism. Using a macabre Night Gallery-esque framing device, we're presented with four horror vignettes--each with a bone to pick about racism, gang violence and so on. It's a splendid idea, well-executed by director Rusty Cundieff (Fear Of A Black Hat), and nicely acted by a cast that includes Clarence Williams III and David Allen Grier. Too bad the ideas don't go anywhere beyond cut-and-paste revenge fantasies. The best vignettes include a story about a David Duke-like politician who is stalked by rabid black voodoo dolls, and a Clockwork Orange-style tale in which an irrepressible gangbanger is forced to watch rapid-fire images of blacks shooting blacks intercut with historical photographs of slave lynchings.

TANK GIRL. Lori Petty stars as the title character, an irreverent, punky, loner heroine who is every bit as tough as she is fashion-conscious. She's so defiant that when villain Malcolm McDowell tries to subdue her by putting her in a straitjacket and locking her up in a freezer, she asks, "How am I supposed to play with myself in here?" But with the exception of a scene involving Ice-T as a kangaroo man, Petty's innuendo-filled one-liners are about all the picture has going for it. Otherwise, most of director Rachel Talalay's attempts at cult comic-book whimsy are crushed by the overall sloppiness of the production. Movies are supposed to be carefully constructed, like architecture; this one feels like it was pushed together with a bulldozer.

To Die For. Gus Van Sant, ailing after making a movie with too loose a storyline (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), tries to make up for it with this small-minded, easy-to-analyze portrait of a media whore. Taking cues from Network, The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and that line in Madonna: Truth or Dare when Warren Beatty criticizes Madonna's obsessive exhibitionism, Buck Henry's bleak script may be an accurate vision of a growing societal sickness; but it's not a very new or interesting one. And Van Sant's decision to turn Nicole Kidman's ice queen into a ditzy caricature lessens the picture's impact. What effectiveness the film does have comes from the solidly sympathetic performances of Illeana Douglas, as the sister of the murdered Matt Dillon, and especially teen-actor Joaquin Phoenix.

TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE NEWMAR Riding on the coattails (or flowing gown, as it were) of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, this Americanized transvestite road movie proves that a little drag queen goes a long way and a lot of drag queen is just a drag. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo deliver a few sassy one-liners, but the script otherwise doesn't give them much to do besides talk their way through a handful of insipid moral lessons in an all-too-phony small town, and their lack of character-acting ability overrides their camp appeal. Stockard Channing co-stars as a moody, contemplative housewife; somebody forgot to tell her she was in a comedy.

TOMMY BOY. Just what we needed: another road-trip buddy movie in which the two main characters, finding themselves in the lane of on-coming traffic, turn to each other and scream. And yet, it would be unfair not to mention that for all the film's idiocy, Saturday Night Live underdogs Chris Farley and David Spade almost make this hackneyed odd-couple story seem fresh (especially Farley, with his good-natured overweight exuberance). The movie has oddly effective subtextual casting, too: cinematic outcasts Bo Derek and Rob Lowe play the baddies, and SNL veteran Dan Aykroyd lends support as a big-mouthed bigwig.

UNDER SIEGE 2. There's no denying that Steven Seagal is the dorkiest action star around. He only has a few expressions he can handle, so his movie's scripts always do all the work for him, writing in his sensitive side and crafting dozens of characters to admire his all-American killing prowess. That's fine. Once you have accepted Seagal for the buffoon he is, his latest film, Under Siege 2, becomes altogether watchable. Here is an action movie that works hard--really hard--to keep the audience happy, piling on cat-and-mouse chases, impossible stunts and bizarre fighting moves with uncontrolled gusto. Eric Bogosian is brilliantly cast as the baddie, who takes over a train on his way to taking over the world. And in banal Die Hard fashion, Seagal just happens to be on board to pick off the henchman--each of whose deaths are rendered in loving detail by the filmmakers. Seagal may not be the ideal American patriot, but his latest movie has a very American appeal: more bang for your buck.

Unstrung Heroes. Diane Keaton directed this quirky nostalgic tale about a young boy whose troubles dealing with the death of his mother (Andi Macdowell) are exacerbated by the cold, scientific mentality of his father (John Turturro). Ironically, the boy finds emotional release by staying with his two crazy uncles, played by Maury Chaykin and Michael Richards (a.k.a. Seinfeld's Kramer). The result is a low-key, subtly magical-realist film with a welcome European flavor. The film works very well in its modest terms, though viewers should be warned that the picture is as much a weepie as it is a comedy.

The Usual Suspects. An interesting first film from director Bryan Singer, this combination caper film/mystery overburdens itself with plot while letting its ensemble cast of charismatic career criminals--Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, and Benicio Del Toro--go to waste after a potent start. As mysteries go, this one's payoff feels inadequate, but the movie is notable for the amount of energy it puts into its ongoing exposition of details. And thanks to a couple of strong key perfomances, the film's central idea stays with you: that of a huge, fearsome mind intelligent enough to manipulate all the other characters with precision and octopus-like simultaneity.