Branagh

London -- So you're a 10-year-old kid, starring in a $45 million movie playing on 1,700 screens in America. Your face is on posters and books. Producers are sending you scripts like you're Robert DeNiro.But you've got a problem.Your parents are sending you to camp up by the North Sea and you don't want to go.What do you do? Hey, you may be a movie star, but you're 10. You go to your room and pack your suitcase.Meet Hal Scardino, the kid next door who could be the child-actor of the summer.

Dead Again" makes some of the best movies of the past live again. While it couldn't be more derivative, it's so elegant and so witty that it leaves one open-mouthed in admiration. Kenneth Branagh, whose first feature was 1989's "Henry V" and whose second feature tis is, does not seem capable of doing wrong.Branagh and his equally precocious scriptwriter, Scott Frank -- both men are barely 30 -- set out to make a film that is as Hitchcockian as possible. As in such movies as "Vertigo," a detective investigates a crime whose solution may bring about his own death and/or that of the woman he loves.

"Much Ado About Nothing"Starring Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson and Denzel WashingtonDirected by Kenneth BranaghbTC Released by Samuel GoldwynRated PG.*** 1/25/8 Sun, sex and jokes? What could appeal more pruriently to the baser instincts of moviegoers than that recipe? And that's exactly what Kenneth Branagh serves up in great plummy gobs in his rollicking version of Shakespeare's proto-Hepburn/Tracy farce, "Much Ado About Nothing."The plot could have been hatched by a couple of hacks sitting in a Beverly Hills delicatessen over lox and bagels one morning 10 minutes before a pitch meeting with network brass.

Helena Bonham Carter knows she has an image problem. Since her first starring role as Jane Grey in the 1985 "Lady Jane," she has been pigeonholed as the queen of costume dramas.Between Merchant-Ivory films ("A Room With a View," "Howards End") and Shakespeare ("Twelfth Night," "Hamlet"), she has worn gowns from almost every period except the present.Because of these films, "There's this image of me as corseted and prim and irredeemably English -- all those things I don't think I am," she complains.

LOS ANGELES -- The bad news for the movie industry: Business continues to be sluggish at the nation's cinemas. Last weekend's generally weak grosses, which show "Hot Shots!" again in first place, confirm that no August film release has excited large numbers of viewers.The good news: Some newly released films may change all that.Kenneth Branagh's classy thriller "Dead Again," which received mostly fabulous reviews, placed fifth even though it opened in only 450 theaters. ("Hot Shots!" is playing on nearly 2,000 screens.

moviesA lively 'Dead'Kenneth Branagh directed and co-stars in "Dead Again," a satisfying send-up of the Hitchcock formula. Emma Thompson co-stars as a woman who doesn't know who she is but is having nightmares in which she is someone else -- a murder victim. Branagh plays the detective who works on the case, and Derek '' Jacobi is the antiques dealer who offers to help solve the mystery. Andy Garcia and a mystery superstar are also in the cast, to the advantage of all, beginning with the audience.

In Hollywood, married couples sell magazines. Their nuptials make the cover of People. Their divorces make the cover of National Enquirer.But do married couples sell movie tickets? Surprisingly, they often don't. The latest example is Warren Beatty's and Annette Bening's "Love Affair," which debuted the weekend of Oct. 21-23 with a surprisingly weak $5.4 million box-office take.Is it because we really didn't need another "Love Affair" -- TTC especially after its plot points were rehashed in last year's "Sleepless in Seattle"?

Emma Thompson has done two films with her husband, Kenneth Branagh, ''Henry V'' and ''Dead Again.'' She's also worked with him on the stage but doesn't think such collaborations -- away from home -- have any effect on their home life.''We met while we were working, so we take our professional relationship for granted,'' she said.''It's not a big deal. It isn't a question of taking your work home. It just doesn't happen that way with us," she said. "I don't think we're that kind of people.

What do actors, models, presidents, the pope, Elvis, Hollywood madams, plastic surgeons, ACLU lawyers, skinheads, teen-age obese acrobats, Joey Buttafuoco, Donald Trump, former CIA operatives, real estate agents, transvestites and Charles Manson have in common?They are all guaranteed their 15 minutes of fame in a post-Warhol world, and they all make an appearance in "Celebrity," Woody Allen's fitfully funny, elegantly rendered musing on American culture's curious relationship to fame."You can tell a lot about a society by whom it chooses to celebrate," one character says in this slight but often droll commentary on the voracious maw of post-modern media culture, which swallows everyone in its path regardless of merit or morals.

Kenneth Branagh is the comic wild card in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Each time the moviemakers flip him into a scene as blowhard wizard Gilderoy Lockhart, he rouses mirth with everything from his dippity-do hairstyle to his gleefully smug tone of voice. Lockhart turns his new position as the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry into an opportunity to promote his already best-selling books, including his new autobiography, Magical Me. And when Lockhart realizes that his students will include the celebrated Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe)