SC: Remember when they used to make good romantic comedies? When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, Tootsie, etc. Now we get abominable drivel like You've Got Mail and Picture Perfect. Thank goodness for Julia Roberts. When she finds the right role, she can wrap even the most bitter of cynics around her finger. But in general, Julia gets offered good roles, so the results should be consistent, right? The problem, of course, is that Julia Roberts is nothing without her hair (her hair speaks for her--pay attention, this is subtle). Why did Mary Reilly, Michael Collins, I Love Trouble, etc. etc. flop? Because she couldn't model different hairstyles. Notting Hill avoids such a deadly trap. Not only does she get to smile (and sometimes even to be funny!), she has a different hairstyle in every scene. A more profound observation is the interesting choice to let the actors keep their "public" personas--Julia, of course, is the most famous actress in the world and Hugh Grant the bumbling idiot we've come to love. The twist, of course, is that both actors add new dimensions to their characters, making the story just unpredictable enough to trap its audience. It's a reverse-Cinderella story that is surprisingly timely--if sadly unrealistic. But like the best fairy tales, it gets us rooting for the foppish hero. And a couple of the scenes ("whoopsiedasie") are Julia classics. And even I--a relentless cynic--fell for that amazing ending. Without words, without Celine Dion yammering in the background, without heavy-handed fade-outs, we get a magically ironic ending to the fairy tale.

BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

DK: I have a sneaking suspicion that the hype around The Blair Witch Project this summer was as much generated by guilt as by respect for the picture. Perhaps this was inevitable for a summer in which we all suddenly realized we were making George Lucas even wealthier by going to see yet another Star Wars movie. Had The Blair Witch Project not actually existed, it, or something very much like it (eight-millimeter footage and all), would probably have been created by our collective unconscious. That's not to say The Blair Witch Project is a bad movie. In terms of premise alone, it's probably one of the most original features of the decade. But an Alfred Hitchcock film this is not. Its tireless commitment to the most bleak form of realism, while admirable in this age of special effects-laden horror films, gives it the emotional depth of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. The fear of the movie's characters is raw and brutal, but the fear of the audience members is dulled by the absence of any emotional involvement in the film. Perhaps if writers/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez had instructed their dazed and confused trio to put down the cameras for a moment and just talk, we would have had some emotional stake in the film. As the movie stands, though, its forte is style and not substance. Unfortunately, true horror is born of more than just jerky camera work.

SC: To quote Chris Rock, "Where did all the money go?" For $60,000, Blair Witch still seems like a ripoff. It's a gimmick of low quality wrapped in marvelous packaging. Without a doubt, the best production you'll see all year is the marketing magic of Artisan Entertainment, the small studio that suddenly isn't so small anymore. (I also think that Dramamine could have made a fortune by handing out samples at movie theatres to solve the rampant nausea.) But the movie itself was trifling --even though that wickedly clever little ending almost redeems the whole exercise (I like the word "exercise" to describe Blair Witch; it gives it that whole unpolished film-school-final-project kind of feel). The most important lesson of Blair Witch, of course, is not that hundreds of millions can be made by making unnecessary noises in the woods and filming them with a low-tech camera, but rather that audiences are looking for a genuine scare. (And no, The Haunting didn't quite deliver the goods.) But true horror comes from a blend of realistic awareness and the fantastic. And Blair Witch was so bogged down in the nuts and bolts of being realistic that it forgot to scare us in the process. Let's pray that for their next movie, the filmmakers spend their money wisely.

RUNAWAY BRIDE

DK: Genre, some say, is nothing but a set of expectations, and the great works are those which transcend those expectations. Runaway Bride, unfortunately, is a genre piece that does its transcending in all the wrong places. It begins, intriguingly enough, as a modern day fairy tale. In any good fairy tale, evil is summarized and allegorized by a single villain, but Runaway Bride splits evil in two and then sets its male and female halves at one another's throats. Julia Roberts as Maggie Carpenter is everything a man can fear in a woman: pretty and sweet but a heartbreaker of the first order. Richard Gere plays her male alter ego the cynical, emotionally distant, and self-assured journalist Ike Graham. Had director Gary Marshall simply let these two archetypes battle it out on the farm fields of Maryland, all might have been well. But inevitably, Maggie and Ike leave their fairy tale roots behind and fall in love, at which point any energy the movie had to begin with is lost. There is a painful lack of chemistry between Roberts and Gere as lovers, though they spar well as antagonists. They look bored with one another. And why shouldn't they be? They know how the movie is going to end. We all do. Perhaps that vaguely sorry look in their eyes is a longing for the movie that could have been.

SC: Here's a Hollywood rule of thumb--when you have more than two screenwriters, the movie will either be a) incoherent b) choppy or c) spotty. Sometimes, in particularly lame cases, the movie will be incoherent, choppy and spotty. Like Runaway Bride. Not only wasn't it as good as Pretty Woman, it rivaled The Haunting for the I-want-my-money-back award of the summer. Even five screenwriters couldn't come up with a decent joke--the only good gag was so contrived that a FedEx truck had to appear out of nowhere for the damn thing to work. And poor Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. In Pretty Woman, they both clicked so perfectly--man meets hooker, man falls in love with hooker, hooker becomes princess. In Runaway Bride, it's more like schmuck meets ditz, shmuck falls for ditz, ditz remains confused. And come on, that scene in the bride shop where Gere tries to recapture and one-up the giddiness of Roberts' revenge on the mean clerk in Pretty Woman? Lame-O. Further proof that you can't capture lightning in a bottle twice. (Please don't make I Love Trouble II with Nick Nolte, Julia. We beg you.)

THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR

DK: Maybe Pierce Brosnan just looks good in a tux. Or maybe he has that aloof air we like to think all people with significant bank accounts carry like a badge. Whatever the reason, he's getting a little too comfortable playing the man with the big bucks, and The Thomas Crown Affair is a case in point. The story of a Wall Street mogul turned art thief and the insurance investigator who loves him, Thomas Crown depends on the chemistry between Brosnan and Rene Russo, his investigator/lover. The scenes of high adventure and art thievery that overwhelmed the movies trailer is largely confined to the first half-hour of the film. The rest rides on stolen glances and whispered phrases. At least on Brosnan's part, those glances and phrases all seem a bit tedious to him as an actor, not to mention those of us in the audience. Rather than showing any true interest in Russo's character, Brosnan imports a sort of James Bond indifference to everything around him, as though money could chase even the last inkling of real feeling out of a person. Russo does her best to convey the emotional excitement that this movie needs, and she does a good job of it so long as Brosnan isn't around. But Brosnan's boredom is infectious, and by the end of the film both principals seem thoroughly weary of one another. Maybe that's the way wealthy people love. If so, it doesn't make for great cinema.