Fair Game. It's the Beautiful versus the Ugly as Cindy Crawford gets chased by a band of renegade Russian agents with bad skin. Crawford plays a mini-skirted lawyer who is maybe-sort-of about to stumble upon a band of high-tech Russian bank robbers; the robbers, in turn, become inexplicably fixated on blowing her up. William Baldwin plays the good cop trying to protect the girl and kill two dozen bad guys all by himself. The entire plot seems to be an excuse to get Crawford in and out of wet T-shirts, which is certainly more engrossing than watching her "act." Baldwin, by the way, also shows us places his bathing suit normally covers. All this builds to an ending with a complexity that rivals almost any episode of Scooby Doo. Almost.

FAITHFUL. Chazz Palminteri and Cher star in this comedy about a hit man having a job-related mid-life crisis. Cher plays a housewife with a Rolls Royce and a fancy house--she has everything except the love of her husband (Ryan O'Neal), who has apparently sent a hit man to whack her on their twentieth anniversary so he can run off with his secretary. His plan gets complicated though when the wife and the hit man strike up a friendship. The screenplay, based on a play by Palminteri, doesn't have quite enough twists to carry the story off, and events never turn as complex as it seems they should. But Palminteri and Cher have a nice chemistry between them and the movie has a decent number of satisfying moments. I just wish the actors didn't keep saying the word "faithful" over and over, with an unsettling emphasis.

A Family Thing. It goes like this: A white man discovers he's actually the son of a black woman and that he has a brother (black) in the big city. He goes to the city to meet his brother. Against insurmountable odds (you know, race) they strike up a warm relationship. Because we're all just people inside! As dumb, implausible and potentially offensive as this plot sounds, it ends up being a kind of charming little tale of friendship between the two brothers, due mostly to the skill and warmth of Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones. I'm convinced Duvall is one of our most talented living film actors--early in this movie, before the plot chugs into absurdity, he's just amazing. It's a little exhausting though, the way Hollywood movies have reduced the questions of class and race in America to a simple plot device. Oh well, what did we expect?

Fargo. A wonderfully deadpan thriller/comedy about a couple of mediocre psychokillers being chased by a mediocre cop. Frances McDormand is terrific as Marge Gunderson, a patient, pregnant chief of police plodding along after Jerry Lundergaard (William H. Macy), a financially insolvent car dealer who has his wife kidnapped so that he can scam the ransom money for himself. Of course, the plan goes awry, and half the fun of this movie is watching the perky, have-a-nice-day citizens of the northern Midwest getting caught in the cogs of gruesome crime. Only the Coen brothers could pull off such a effortless blend of humor and gore.

FATHER OF THE BRIDE PART II. A squeaky-clean peek at the stress of fatherhood, with Steve Martin doing double-duty as the expectant father and the expectant grandfather. Something about Steve Martin is just so damn likable; even watching him run through idiotic gags barely worthy of a sitcom is mildly pleasant. Still, his performance here is awfully safe. In fact, everything about this movie reeks of safety and suburbia, from the family's nice middle-class house to the nice middle-class plot. Father of the Bride Part II is a remake of the 1951 film Father's Little Dividend, and retains traces of a stereotyped, 1950s' kind of birth anxiety. Remember when fathers fainted in the waiting room? Haven't we grown up just a little bit since then?

Feast of July. The cinematic equivalent of the alibi offered by the man on trial for necrophilia: "Your Honor, I didn't know she was dead; I just thought she was British." Well-acted but painfully sloooow, Feast of July tells the tale of a young woman (Embeth Davidtz) who is impregnated and abandoned by a smooth-talker at some unspecified time in the past in rural England. She travels by foot to another village in search of the man, suffering a miscarriage along the way. Once there, she's taken in by a kind family with three sons, all of whom fall for her in varying degrees. Pretty much through attrition, she settles on one before the smooth talker re-enters her life, leading to sudden tragedy. The Merchant Ivory-film isn't bad; there's just not much there. It's the absolute softest "R" rated movie of all time. No nudity, no bad language and just a very brief scene of violence.

FIRST KNIGHT. A round table, a love triangle, a square movie. Sean Connery plays King Arthur with his usual regal gravity, Richard Gere reinvents Sir Lancelot as a manic-depressive (but mostly manic) derring-doer, and Julia Ormond is Guinevere, the doe-eyed, perpetually confused object of their love. The film vacillates between blustery action sequences and moments of cheesy romantic tension, including a rather pornographic scene in which Gere channels rainwater into Guinevere's mouth via a big leaf.

Flirting With Disaster. David O. Russell, director of Spanking the Monkey, continues his investigation of the zany problem of instability in one's parents in Flirting With Disaster, the story of an adopted guy (Ben Stiller) who goes to look for his birth parents. He takes along his wife (Patricia Arquette) and a sexy adoption counselor (Tea Leone), who keeps matching him up with the wrong set of parents. This movie is funny but ultimately quite predictable, with a theme borrowed from the Wizard of Oz and a final ascension of family values. Comedy/insight/entertainment-wise, it's about at the level of Seinfeld, only longer. Check out the wickedly funny performance by Mary Tyler Moore.

Flower Of My Secret. Famed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar takes a stab at melodrama in his most earnest work to date. The film is dotted with delightful high points and disappointing lows as Leo, a middle-aged romance writer, negotiates the loss of the love of her husband. Almodovar is best known for his comedies, and sometimes it's hard to tell if this movie is satirical. The illogical script is also sometimes annoying, but when things are working in this movie, it has the quality of life being portrayed as it really is, instead of all chewed up and processed like in Hollywood movies.

FLUKE. A businessman (Matthew Modine) dies in a car accident, comes back to life as a cute dog, and remembers enough of his past to track down his wife (Nancy Travis) and son and try to love them again. This misguided children's movie has enough heartwarming doggy scenes to fill a dozen Disney flicks, but underneath all the fur lies a very adult story of karmic redemption that few kids are likely to appreciate. What starts off as a children's mystery gives way to a rather painful tale of lost human ideals, with oddly perverse scenes where the protagonist whimpers while watching his wife go to bed with his best friend. It's an unwittingly subversive little picture, curiously inappropriate but strangely effective.

FORGET PARIS. Director-actor Billy Crystal has created a new, rather bland concoction: Woody Allen Lite. In this all-too-formulaic tale of the ups and downs of a relationship, Crystal tries, with occasional success, to turn the banal disappointments of marriage into comic fodder. Co-starring with Debra Winger (who comes across as attractive but oddly unsympathetic), Crystal's livelier gags soon give way to masturbation jokes and mediocre, forced melodrama. It's sort of like When Harry Almost Divorced Sally. And oooh, somebody turn down that saccharine lite-jazz score.

FORREST GUMP. Tom Hanks jogs into Being There territory with this absorbing, innocent-eyed tour through recent American history. Hanks is endearing as the title character, a simpleton with a heart of gold whose integrity allows him to succeed through decades of adversity. The movie's affirmation of American underdog ideals is probably the key to its popularity, but it's more enjoyable as a cultural sight-and-sound show than as anything meaningful. Director Robert Zemeckis' fantastic integration of state-of-the-art special effects lends itself well to the movie's aura of magical realism, but upon post-movie reflection you may discover that you've succumbed to a cinematically-enhanced placebo effect.

FRENCH KISS. Meg Ryan's shtick as a naive, pouty, perky romantic lead has officially worn out its welcome. In what amounts to When Pierre Met Sally, Ryan and co-star Kevin Kline undergo a long friendship/courtship while Ryan sneaks around France plotting to win back her fiance (Timothy Hutton), who has fallen for a Parisian barbie-doll type. Kline rises to the occasion as an impotent, heavily accented jewel thief, but for once, Ryan's wide-eyed mannerisms fail her. Wet-duck-fuzz hair aside, Ryan is beginning to look like the Doris Day of the '90s. The slapstick script, which includes scenes of our heroine vomiting due to lactose intolerance and toppling backwards over a dessert cart, doesn't help.

French Twist. A zippy French sex farce about a husband, a wife and the wife's butch girlfriend that generously expands the notion of what it means to be a family. Loli (Victoria Abril) is married to Laurent (Alain Chabat), a handsome and charming philanderer. One day while he's out carousing with his mistress, Marijo (Josiane Balasko) has car trouble and stops by to use Loli's phone, and I think we all know what that means. The story occasionally leans too heavily on the apparently exotic fact that the wife is having an affair with a woman, but the story is so good-natured that it manages to overcome its fascination with its own "daringness."

The Frighteners. Peter Jackson's follow-up after the critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures is a surprisingly unambitious, B-style horror movie. Michael J. Fox stars as Frank Bannister, a "psychic investigator" who uses his genuine ability to commune with the dead to swindle the bereaved into using his services. Then a real, totally malevolent ghost shows up and begins knocking off townspeople left and right, and Bannister must finally use his powers for good. Part horror movie, part comedy, The Frighteners tries to play both ends against the middle and ends up not being consistently funny or consistently scary. The special effects are great though, and you can't beat that campy, seventies, B-movie feeling.

From Dusk Till Dawn. If you still can't get enough of vampires, this movie should help you reach your quota. George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino play bad-boy brothers who hijack a nice, upstanding minister (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to drive their big, American RV to Mexico. There, they go to a sleazy bar where, suddenly, everyone turns into vampires! Not quite camp, not quite a straight adventure movie, From Dusk Till Dawn inhabits a twilight region between the two where you don't know if the next twist of the plot is going to be funny or frightening. For those of us raised in front of TV sets, the buckets of blood and media references seem like a silly joke. Those less bewitched by the tube will probably be sickened.