Heat. Somewhere inside this three-hour, overblown cops-and-robbers epic there's a good movie hiding, but Michael Mann, the guy who brought us Miami Vice, just couldn't keep it simple. The action portions of the movie are tense, exciting and often beautifully shot in desolate industrial landscapes as Robert DeNiro, playing a thief, tries to outwit Al Pacino as the cop. The personal-relationships parts of the movie, on the other hand, are boring and trite. The characters slink around shiny LA hotspots talking like they've been reading a lot of airport fiction and chasing it down with self-help books. Pacino is annoyingly over-the-top as Lieutenant Hanna, though the lousy script doesn't really make naturalistic acting a possibility here. DeNiro is better as the thief McCauley, engineering nifty Mission Impossible-style heists and turning in a performance eerily reminiscent of the one he gave earlier this year in Casino.

HEAVENLY CREATURES. Peter Jackson, the writer-director responsible for the sweetest zombie movie ever made, Dead Alive, chose as his next film this campy docudrama. Set in 1954 New Zealand, the picture follows the fantasy-world descent of two adolescent girls who so lost touch with reality that they irrationally decided to kill one girl's mother. Jackson directs with playful gusto, but no coherent point of view to match; he seems perfectly happy to marvel at this pair of youthful psychotics and leave it at that. All in all, the movie could use a little more Jane Campion and a little less Terry Gilliam.

Heaven's Prisoners. This long, sweaty look at cops and robbers in bayou country never really coalesces into much of a movie. There are lots of stylish shots and the atmosphere is so thick you could eat it with a fork, but beneath this is virtually nothing! Alec Baldwin plays a tough homicide detective who's trying to retire, but bad guys keep literally falling out of the sky and landing on top of him, and he just can't resist chasing them. Not only is he addicted to fighting crime, he's also battling, unsuccessfully, to stay on the wagon. A bevy of babes, both good and evil (including Teri Hatcher as a clothing-impaired villain), come to soothe and tempt him. The characters run around for two-and-a-half hours, then it's over.

HEAVY. A thoughtful, achingly sad film about an overweight pizza cook who falls in love with a teenage girl, played by supermodel Liv Tyler. Sparse dialogue, dull, cluttered sets and a pathologically shy hero help this movie live up to its name. Livening up the melancholy mood are great performances by Shelley Winters, Debbie Harry and Pruitt Taylor Vince, who is amazing as the pizza cook Victor.

HIGHER LEARNING. John Singleton's third feature is a well-intentioned look at a diverse handful of young people during their formative political years at a large university. Singleton's choice of subjects--a black athlete overcoming his resentment of the system, a rape victim considering lesbianism, and an insecure white boy's descent into racism--hardly adds up to a full-bodied representation of campus experience; but he gets the little details right, and the power of his wholeheartedness often wins out. The unfortunate exception is the movie's climax, a needlessly violent burst of trauma that looks and feels recycled from Boyz N the Hood.

Home For The Holidays. Jodie Foster proves herself once again with this delightful glimpse into the "every-home" holiday experience. All dysfunctions being equal, Home for the Holidays paints a single-family portrait with an eye for the universal: sibling rivalry, clownish overcompensation, overbearing mothers and unwelcome confessions wrought by advancing age. These are heavy labels for the light-hearted chapters of Home for the Holidays, cracked open story-fashion in a series of vignettes with warm and (literally) hysterical performances by Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Durning, Anne Bancroft and Cynthia Stevenson (a sort of alter-ego of her character Hope on the TV series Hope and Glory). Dermot Mulroney also stars, but is clearly "not part of the family": While the rest of the cast manages a truly familial chemistry, Mulroney as the friend-who-came-to-dinner remains a wooden outsider. All in all, Home For The Holidays offers a great way to nurse that post-prandial Thanksgiving hangover.

HOOP DREAMS. This thorough documentary spends five years following the lives of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two ghetto-raised basketball hopefuls who struggle to get through the grueling processes of high-school competition and college recruitment. Their dream, to make it to the NBA, is constantly at odds with knee injuries, low grades, financial problems and family disharmony. The filmmakers' dogged commitment to observing these complications makes the picture a fascinating document of the ways real lives can be consumed by sports, with results both positive and negative.

HORSEMAN ON THE ROOF (LE HUSSARD SUR LE TOIT). A beautiful-looking movie about two beautiful people clinging to each other in times of plague. Juliette Binoche is an elegant, married noblewoman; Olivier Martinez is a handsome Italian revolutionary. Together they canter across the lovely French countryside, trying to escape the ravages of Asiatic Cholera, which causes its victims to vomit on themselves, tremble violently, then expire. Not only must they escape the plague, they must escape the angry, fear-driven mobs of peasants who blame any stranger for the spread of pestilence. This seems to be another one of those movies where only beautiful people are truly wise, noble and good and everyone else is an ugly, ignorant lout. Nothing works very well in this movie, but nothing really fails either; despite all the death, it's light, pretty and insipid.

HOUSEGUEST. Comedian Sinbad stars as an urban misfit who pretends to be the long-lost pal of an affluent white family in order to escape a bloodthirsty loan shark. He moves in with the family, headed by a gullible dad (Phil Hartman), and the film's one joke is that Sinbad doesn't have a clue about the man he's impersonating. Sinbad's jokes aren't funny, Randall Miller's hyperkinetic direction leaves you dizzy, and repeated references to the virtues of McDonald's make the picture come across as a long, excruciating commercial.

How to Make an American Quilt. Winona Ryder gets seven lessons in love when she spends a summer listening to the romantic histories of all the women in her grandmother's quilting bee. We're talking flashback-o-rama, with the majority of the stories taking bittersweet turns in which the women's husbands either leave them, cheat on them or die. This uninspiring "quilt" of mini-narratives is somehow supposed to help Ryder choose between a hunky Don Juan type (Jonathon Schaech) and a regular-guy carpenter (Dermot Mulroney). Though the appearance of so many fine actresses has its benefits, the movie's lessons about life are mere bromides, and they're made all the sappier by Ryder's talentless presence and weak narration. (Why does Ryder always choose scripts that require her to narrate?) American Quilt features Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Samantha Mathis and Alfre Woodard.

THE HUNTED. Christopher Lambert, who has made a career out of playing a nerd with a sword, stars as a microchip dealer in Japan who unwittingly becomes involved in a personal feud between two modern-day samurais. The movie's potential appeal as a campy thriller is sliced away by Lambert's bland personality, and the director's, too. Joan Chen briefly stirs interest as a mysterious woman in a red dress; unfortunately she gets her head cut off.