Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Alllrighty then! We all know a little bit of Jim Carrey goes a long way, so let's cut to the chase. If you think you'll hate Ace Ventura, you will. No need to test the theory. The unfathomable lot of you who don't know what to expect from this movie can count on reporting for jury duty real soon. For the rest of you, this is vintage Ace with all the trademark gags: Speaker of the Arse, Master of Mugs, the relentlessly goofy gumshoe that cracks so many jokes it's statistically impossible not to laugh at least once. Thankfully, this incarnation goes straight for the younger audience: They've nixed the "mature" subject matter and succumbed to unadulterated juvenile humor, one truly harrowing racoon rescue possibly excepted. Carrey is in his element in this unholy hybrid of Wild Kingdom, The Nutty Professor and Wayne's World. Let's not get too critical--it's not as if Carrey's the only Hollywood celebrity known for speaking out of his butt. At least when Carrey does it, it's intentional.

The Addiction. Yet another vampire flick, this one from Abel Ferrara, the man accountable for such whitesploitation classics as King of New York and Bad Lieutenant. The Addiction is a shockingly plotless outing through the halls of NYU, where graduate student vampires prey on one another and their faculty. Lili Taylor stars as a tortured Husserlian agonizing over both the locus of evil and which friend to suck on next. (Apparently, six units of philosophy are a prerequisite for initiation into the ranks of the undead.) Black and white photography, faces smeared with chocolate sauce, and a marvelously campy performance by Christopher Walken can't save this from becoming a completely pointless exercise in being and nothingness. Warning: this movie may be enjoyed by vampire-geeks and/or philosophy majors.

The American President. Here's a film that aims to prove the adage that behind every successful man is a woman, with an emphasis on the behind. This jauntily sexist vision of America serves up images of men with political power and women with sexual power as the President of the United States (Michael Douglas) braves the perils of dating. Annette Benning plays the smart, high-paid lobbyist who's reduced to blushes and stammers when the guy walks in the room. Benning is ebullient in the role, which makes it even more inexcusable that her character should have no life and no past. She's a beautiful, mature woman without friends, lovers or children--she's simply available. You can see the filmmakers struggling to paint an optimistic, politically liberal picture of what America can be, but they get all tripped up on gender and paint instead a politically conservative world where men make decisions and women wait in the wings, clutching bouquets of flowers. If you can crowd the sexism out of your consciousness, The American President has some funny moments, though much of the humor is of the I'm-the-Commander-in-Chief-and-you're-not variety. Not for the impressionable.

Angels And Insects. A semi-creepy tale of lust and romance between perpetually uptight Victorians. A poor naturalist is taken in by a wealthy benefactor and eventually marries his beautiful but distant daughter. At first all seems well, but a sense of corruption and decay is stalking the not-so-happy clan. Apparently Tolstoy was wrong about the variety among unhappy families--they all seem to be alike these days. (See Mary Reilly for bad-family-of-origin cross references.) There are fascinating shots of bugs throughout, serving a variety of metaphorical purposes, but mostly they just look cool. Based on the novella by A.S. Byatt, this is an intelligent, literate film that unfortunately relies on an "unexpected" and completely predictable "secret" for its energy.

Antonia's Line. This flick received this year's Academy Award for best foreign picture, and it has all the banal mediocrity and pre-fab pathos we've come to expect from the Academy. Antonia is an old, dying farm woman, and the plot is a Cliff Notes version of the highlights of her life, given to us swiftly but succinctly, presumably so we may experience sorrow when she dies. The film produces so many rapidly growing babies that it's hard to feel connected to any of the characters, and the plodding narration keeps us further at a distance. This is the kind of ground best covered in novels, and the filmmaker struggles without much success to make her very long story visually dynamic. The occasional jolt of magic realism just makes the whole project more derivative and embarrassing.

Assassins. Finally, finally, a Sylvester Stallone movie in which the actor utters not a single idiotic line. Sure, there are dumb moments aplenty in this tale of an assassin (Stallone) who decides to go straight when his "mark" (Julianne Moore) turns out to have more integrity than his unseen boss and the other assassin (Antonio Banderas) who's competing for the kill. Ably directed by Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), the movie reinvigorates Stallone's claim to stardom by restraining his worst impulses, and allows Banderas to balance things out by going wild.

Amateur. Hal Hartley's arid, deadpan style has its limitations. While the director's affectless approach heightened the psychological drama (and comic tension) of previous films like Trust, this tale of three porno-industry lost souls trying to find escape, identity and redemption is too structured to arouse either laughs or sympathy. Moving out of the complacent suburbia of his previous films into the grungy alleyways of downtown New York, Hartley needs a jolt of energy to match, but he never finds it--not even during a whimsical electroshock torture sequence.

Apollo 13. Ron Howard is a child of TV, so it's to be expected that his latest film, like all the others, always tells you how to react. That worked fine in Splash, Parenthood and The Paper, enjoyable films with regular outbursts of comedy. But Howard is at his worst when he takes things too seriously, and he treats the near-fatal Apollo 13 mission with unquestioning reverence: a historical symbol of American heroism. Rarely does he touch upon the terror of dying in space or the weird spectacle the mission became after the public learned of the impending doom. It's a detailed, technically superb movie with a monotonous point of view: that the astronauts suffered nobly. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon star.