It is the central performance that holds us. Cillian Murphy glows.

The present film-makers have retained the essences of the plot and characters but have moved the ambience toward the next stylistic era, romanticism.

All these mystical elements are so sententiously handled and bump into one another so clumsily that they make the film seem nutty. But because spirituality is the theme of Bee Season, we are obviously not meant to laugh at it. Well, I wish I could get Jehovah's reaction to the picture.

Bellochio, who began his career in 1965, has made some of the most trenchant Italian films on political themes, and Good Morning, Night is one more of them.

The daring achievement of Jarhead is that it is not a film about war, about combat: it is about being a soldier.

Even though no reasonably well-informed viewer will learn much factual information from the picture, it grips; it even torments, because it lets us move and breathe and shiver and resolve with two particular young men.

But the best of the story is that there isn't much--as such. A slice of living is put before us. Some things happen. That's all.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that an allegory is "an extended or continued metaphor." And to think that this definition was coined when a French film called Innocence was still very far in the future! But how aptly this film proves the point.

The picture has enough good feeling and chuckle to take it out of the parochial.

But the contrast between setting and story isn't all that bars North Country from fulfillment. The major trouble is Theron. She plays Josey as well as is needed, but she is simply too beautiful.

García wanted to paint a canvas of nine elements, rather than one large element; and, though only a few of the vignettes are related, the film leaves us with a sense of wholeness, not of stunt.

Jacques Richard has fashioned an adoring tribute to this wonderfully maniacal man.

Yet the McCarthy/Murrow conflict in the picture is not pressing enough--these days, anyway--to justify the considerable skill expended on it.

All four of the roles are written with pungency. There is even an implication that the two adults realize the triteness of the situation and that they--the characters, not Baumbach--want to speak from inner sources, not from a script. Baumbach pulls this off with some sting and wit.

A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.

This sort of investigation has been done so masterfully by Sam Peckinpah in "The Wild Bunch" and Oliver Stone in "Natural Born Killers" that, in a sternly utilitarian sense, we don't need Cronenberg. He is not, as far as I have seen, in their class. He proves it again in A History of Violence.

None of the actors completely satisfies.

To play for an audience of one that is only a few feet away is different in concentration and shade from playing in the theater, and Madden, though the script lags a bit, has nonetheless helped his actors to render what were once theater scenes as film sequences.

Schreiber's directing is ambitious, but it is nowhere near the originality and truth in his acting. Throughout the film we can feel him striving to control, to invent, to glisten.

A lively, long, intelligent documentary.

A bit scattery, but it simmers with Shicoff's intensity in lending his faith and being to the role.

The film, so far as it is betrayable, is betrayed by the casting of Jean. She is played by Jennifer Lopez, a sexy star who is out of key with the picture and is presumably on hand to supply the oomph that Redford no longer provides.

Extraordinary--vivid, stripped, intense.

But Anker's real success here is himself. He was obviously able to get these men and women to open up to him. And thus, quite obliquely, they remind us of a threat. As everyone knows, American symphony orchestras are in trouble. Attendance is dropping, and managements are trying various maneuvers, even stunts, to attract people.

One of the best elements in the adaptation is Caine's blending, like le Carré's, of the past and the present so that one can enrich the other. There are no stilted flashbacks: both past and present are treated as present, which gives the film a texture of depth.

The film is repetitious. Herzog has varied the original footage with some interviews that he conducted with a former Treadwell girlfriend and some other friends and observers. Still, an hour of it would have been more effective than the present feature length.

Maggie Cheung, who was in Assayas's Irma Vep, plays Emily with a semi-detached feeling--observing the role as much as portraying it. The chief pleasure in the picture is Nick Nolte's performance as the boy's paternal grandfather.

The five episodes in Broken Flowers are good enough to make us expect that the picture has a theme, but it hasn't.