DANGEROUS MINDS. Michelle Pfeiffer stars in this mostly effective drama about an unorthodox inner-city high school teacher who wins the attention (and affection) of a classroom full of hard-to-reach minority students. The material, though clumsily constructed, has social relevance to spare, and the filmmakers' commitment to a bare-bones plot is honorable. The uneasy mix of realism and Hollywood slickness does create some embarrassing notes, but Pfeiffer's charm overrides most of the rough spots--with her soft-toned, tough-loving demeanor she's a perfect educational love object.

Dead Presidents. The Hughes brothers, the twin directing team behing the stark, unsettling Menace II Society, try for too much with their second effort. Starring Larenz Tate, the film starts in '60s coming-of-age territory, then turns into a Platoon-ish Vietnam movie, then a violent '70s-style bank-robbery-gone-wrong movie. It's a major waste of talent, and the idea that this taped-together series of Hollywood conventions represents "the black man's experience" is nothing short of ludicrous. Danny Elfman's unusual score is the most notable aspect of the picture.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. Adapted from Ariel Dorfman's play about the tension in a Latin American country that has just overcome a fascist government, this political thriller places a torture victim (Sigourney Weaver), her diplomat huband (Stuart Wilson) and a man whom she believes to be her torturer (Ben Kingsley) together in a secluded beach house. Weaver ties up Kingsley and attempts to coerce a confession out of him, but Wilson (and the audience) remains uncertain of his guilt. Roman Polanski directs this power-play with his trademark perverted eye, and the actors do their best with the material, but the casting is weak. Weaver's angry descriptions of victimhood sound off-key, and all speak with American, not Latino, accents.

DEMON KNIGHT. Will somebody please kill that Crypt Keeper thing? It's dorky and its jokes aren't funny. Fortunately, the latest Tales from the Crypt movie relegates the cackling corpse to a brief introduction, then gets on with the real business of trash. With multiple jokey dismemberments, exposed boobs galore and a hokey plot about an eternal demonic quest for God's Seventh Key (which is filled with Jesus Christ's magical morphin' blood), the movie easily rates six dumpster loads on the trashometer. You'd think it was personally designed for Joe Bob Briggs.

DESPERADO. Richard Rodriquez, in his $7 million sequel to the $7 thousand career-making actioner El Mariachi, has crafted a funny, enjoyably senseless tribute to the over-the-top violence of directors like John Woo. And he's found the most attractive of leads: Antonio Banderas stars as the dark, vengeful loner with a guitar case full of guns, and Salma Hayek plays the shapely love interest who stitches up his many wounds. Offering their comic services, independent film icons Steve Buscemi, Quentin Tarantino and the shifty-eyed Cheech Marin make valiant efforts, but Rodriguez makes one unfortunate mistake: He kills them off too soon, leaving the second half of his film without much personality. As a friend said, "Good gunplay, bad screenplay."

DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO. Quentin Tarantino fans, don't unite: this painfully unhip attempt at a hip Las Vegas farce doesn't use Tarantino, or any of its other cast members, to humorous effect. Working from what may be one of the worst screenplays ever given national distribution (written, interestingly enough, as part of a Sundance workshop), the filmmakers strive for a dusty tongue-in-cheek attitude reminiscent of Repo Man or Raising Arizona. But the movie takes itself so un-seriously that the lack of characters worth caring about renders the picture seriously boring. Tarantino's five-minute cameo in Sleep with Me contains more life, and laughs, than this entire movie.

Devil in a Blue Dress. No, Denzel Washington doesn't get into drag here--you're thinking Wesley Snipes in that Wong Foo thing. In this noirish period piece, Washington confidently stars in the kind of role Humphrey Bogart was known for 50 years ago: a small-timer who, finding himself enmeshed in a mysterious scandal, must negotiate with a series of colorful (and dangerous) characters in order to climb his way out. Director Carl Franklin does only a fair job forging the basic elements of intrigue and personality necessary to sustain this sort of picture; his film is more notable for re-imagining the genre from a black perspective, placing Washington in a world where he must overcome not only seedy characters, but racial boundaries as well.

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE. The third Die Hard film is as good as you could hope, given that most "three" films are usually only one-third as good as the original. But this one is at least half as good as Die Hard, thanks to loads of Speed-style chases and bombings in downtown New York City and director John McTiernan's deftness with cartoonish action. And while the European conspiracy-plotting and Bruce Willis' working-class hero routine are turning into shtick, Samuel Jackson has been effectively added to the mix as a reluctant, cynical buddy who is a welcome foil for Willis' tired one-liners.

DISCLOSURE. Audience harassment. Michael Crichton's screenplay is a teasing office drama that pretends to have something worthwhile to say about sexual harassment. But Crichton's goal, and that of slick director Barry Levinson, is simply to titillate us, first with a hot "No means no" sex scene and then, in the movie's second half, with a paranoid corporate conspiracy. Michael Douglas once again stars, unconvincingly, as a victimized everyman while Demi Moore leaps brazenly into a role obviously designed to make audiences shout "Get the bitch!" even louder than they did in Fatal Attraction. As if that weren't bad enough, the movie's climax is set in virtual reality, where an angelic Kurt Cobain look-alike helps Douglas find his way through the film's plot holes. At least nobody can say Michael Crichton's movies aren't interesting.

DOLORES CLAIBORNE. In what you might call a female version of Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption, Kathy Bates stars as a long-enduring widow who is suspected of having killed her husband many years ago. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays her edgy daughter who returns home when Bates is implicated in another death. The mystery that follows is less a mystery than the unearthing of a pain-filled domestic past. Directed in a pungent Gothic style by Taylor Hackford, the movie rises high above the exploitative nature of its material thanks to stunning imagery, emotionally stark sequences and Bates' solid performance.

DON JUAN DEMARCO. As best-lover-in-the-world performances go, Johnny Depp does surprisingly well in this frivolous ode to the pleasures of giving love. With his Spanish accent and confident, soothing manner, you almost believe he could make women melt at his touch. Marlon Brando, meanwhile, does not convey such charisma. Playing the psychiatrist who tries to understand Depp's fantasy, Brando appears to be walking through the movie to pick up a paycheck. Fat and lackluster, Brando does his best to make sure all his scenes (even with Faye Dunaway, who tries her best) fall embarrassingly flat.

DROP ZONE. If you expect this skydiving action movie to be the hard-driving alternative to the campy Terminal Velocity, you're in for a disappointment. Wesley Snipes and Gary Busey (as the villain) are still trapped in some sort of Flop Zone that seems based on a quest to recreate the cat-and-mouse tension of Die Hard without the benefit of well-constructed action sequences. Though packed with great stuntwork and stunning images of glow-in-the-dark skydivers leaping out of planes at night, director John Badham isn't up to the nitty-gritty task of building suspense, and his attempts to add humor only accentuate this failing.

Dumb and Dumber. Here's a movie to take all your most sophisticated friends to. Test it on them. Watch as they pretend not to enjoy the adolescent humor and blatant idiocy. Observe as they strain to force down their smiles during the mucous jokes. The movie will win. The key, of course, is Jim Carrey, who has very un-dumbly allowed himself to share the stage with a co-star: the ever-likable Jeff Daniels. The combination works--Carrey provides the pure mania, Daniels adds a soft edge. This is one of the finest movies in the Moron Road Movie genre, only a few notches below Crispin Glover's Rubin & Ed.

THE ENGLISHMAN WHO WENT UP A HILL BUT CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. Though blessed with the acting charms of Hugh Grant, Colm Meaney and Tara Fitzgerald, this tale of Welsh villagers who contrive to add 20 feet to a nearby hill so that mappers will label it a mountain is simply too thin to warrant feature film status. It's an inoffensive, cute little story that has very little in the way of surprises, laughs or insight.

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.

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.