VANYA ON 42nd STREET. Actor-playwright Wallace Shawn and experimental theatre director Andre Gregory made a modest but indelible mark on the film world over a decade ago when they created the fine My Dinner with Andre, a picture based entirely on a conversation. The movie lived in your mind, and Vanya on 42nd Street, which consists of a handful of actors running through the Chekov play Uncle Vanya while dressed in only street clothes, is no different. Based on a long-standing Gregory tradition that has been bringing the same actors together year after year to perform the play, the film's focus is solely on the text and on the actors' ability to make it live. Shawn, a truly unique actor, plays the title role, and his excellent accompaniment includes Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine and George Gaynes.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. Based on the British 1960 chiller of the same name, this John Carpenter picture follows what happens when several women in a quaint northern town mysteriously and simultaneously become pregnant. Their offspring: eight white-haired geniuses with telepathic powers and a collective mean streak. Though the material needed to be better updated to justify a remake (as it stands, it looks like a cheesy episode of X-Files), Carpenter directs with his usual immense skill, and the campy selection of players--Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill--give surprisingly engaging performances.

VIRTUOSITY. Brett Leonard, creator of The Lawnmower Man, once again proves his skill at making slick, futuristic movies with loads of glittery computer animation and not much else. The movie spends its first half-hour setting up an impressively elaborate explanation for how an artificially intelligent virtual-reality program might find its way into the real world, then proceeds to squander the premise's possibilities on an all-too-familiar cop-versus-killer story. Denzel Washington gives a generic good guy performance, but Russell Crowe plays the narcissistic, baby faced villain with cackling glee--he looks like Bob's Big Boy with a new suit and a mean streak. Overviolent and unimaginative, add this to the long list of films that fail to find good cinematic uses for cyber-technology.

A WALK IN THE CLOUDS. From Alfonso Arau, director of Like Water For Chocolate, comes this pleasantly magical-realist W.W.II-era romance about a GI (Keanu Reeves) who pretends to be the husband of a lovely, troubled woman (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) to save her from the tradition-obsessed wrath of her father (Giancarlo Giannini), head of a family-run vineyard in Napa Valley. Arau's direction is smile-inducing and swift, and the actors are all charming, especially Anthony Quinn as an unflaggingly earnest, chocolate-chomping grandfather. But the movie's combination of love, family and good cheer is almost too perfect, too postcardy. Remarkably, what saves it is Reeves' laughably monotonous performance--just the weird element the picture needs to keep its innocence interesting.

THE WALKING DEAD. The "untold story" of the black experience in Vietnam is the subject of this trite, lifeless movie. As the four main characters trudge through jungle swamps and endure skirmishes with the Viet Cong, we trudge through flashbacks and endure a series of revelations reflecting the following sentiment: If it ain't Charlie in the fields, it's The Man giving commands, and if it ain't The Man giving commands, it's The Man back home; and if it ain't The Man back home, it's the woman back home.

WATERWORLD. "Was this your big vision?" the tattooed child asks at the end, and you might be thinking the same thing after watching $200 million in sets and special effects wash away in this ill-conceived spectacle. Good enough to sit through but not nearly good enough to justify its magnitude, the film stars Kevin Costner as a seafaring Mad Max type who eventually saves a scruffy girl (Tina Majorino) and a bland love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn) from a gang of cigar-chomping baddies led, all-too-familiarly, by Dennis Hopper. The sci-fi premise and watery atmosphere have potential, but the picture evaporates into a series of bloated, ineffective action set-pieces.

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING. This romantic comedy provides Sandra Bullock, last seen as the bus driver in Speed, the chance to capitalize on all her best (and most obvious) qualities: her boisterous laugh, her uncertain smile, her shy sex appeal. Bullock plays a lonely subway-booth clerk whose dreams of finding Mr. Right are realized after she pretends to be a comatose man's fiancee (so if you want to get technical about it, the film should really be titled While You Were Comatose). Bill Pullman, as the eventual suitor, is Bullock's appealing mirror image: they're the model of coupled cuteness. Unfortunately, this cuteness is infectious, turning into a disease that spreads over the whole movie until even the loathsome and tacky characters start acting cuddly. It's a bit much.