John Turturro

Love, betrayal, death and hats dance in fanciful tandem in "Illuminata," John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.Indeed, "Illuminata" is about so many things, and expresses so many ideas in its giddy, rapid-fire way, that it's difficult to relegate it to any genre. Filled with slapstick physical comedy and ribald asides, it is certainly a comedy, but it is also suffused with such tenderness and intelligence that it qualifies as the most serious drama.

Don't let the name fool you. The Baltimore Jewish Film Festival, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, will appeal to filmgoers of any religious affiliation."

Franz Kafka, that great journalist of alienation, did not write Tom DiCillo's "Box of Moonlight," but DiCillo cites Kafka as an inspiration. "Box of Moonlight" captures that Kafkaesque spirit better than any movie since "Barton Fink" (1992), the Coen brothers' epic encounter with writer's block. "Moonlight" is a thrill-ride designed for the intellect.Coincidentally, the star of "Barton Fink," John Turturro, plays the lead in "Box of Moonlight," too. He's more of an ordinary guy here -- an arrogant businessman, instead of "Fink's" playwright -- but mundane weirdness stalks him at every turn.

Here a Turturro, there a Turturro, everywhere, it seems, there's a Turturro.They might not be the Barrymores. Or even the Baldwins.And yet, as one producer puts it, it's as if the Turturro family is "eating up Hollywood."To date, actor-director John Turturro ("Quiz Show" and "Barton Fink") has been the most successful and best-known member of the Turturro troupe. But the TV Turturros are coming up fast.John's brother Nicholas, who plays Det. James Martinez on ABC's "NYPD Blue," has been raising his profile on prime-time's top cop show this year and as one of the stars of the feature film "Federal Hill."

"Unstrung Heroes" is a kind of message in a bottle from the pre-Prozac world. It shows a loving family unstrung by debilitating mental disease, which it chooses to interpret as mere eccentricity, and then undone by a severe health crises.Derived from a memoir by former Baltimorean Franz Lidz, the story recalls the early '60s, when Franz's mother developed a terminal case of cancer and the family seemed to disintegrate under the strain.Lidz, then called Steven, went to stay with his two strange uncles almost to escape the agony of his mother's death.

The monsters are back. Yes, for your fall movie-going, genuine scary monsters of the sort that so rarely make it to the screen anymore.We have very scary professional hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the intensely awaited "Pulp Fiction." We have the big guy himself, in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," with Robert De Niro throwing the long shadow as he clomps around in cement boots. We have that blood-sucking freak Lestat, the vampire himself, as personified by Tom Cruise, and won't that be a fright?

Surely only John Turturro the director would photograph John Turturro the actor sitting on the toilet with his pants down, smoking. And only the same director would photograph the same actor pulling on his truss and saying, "This damned hernia is killing me."Clearly in "Mac" we are in a world far from Hollywood. We're in the Queens of the early '50s, where a generation of men returning from the war set about a new task: the building of America. These guys were workers and "Mac" is quite a rare thing, a celebration of the American work ethic.

Whoever had the bright idea of making a modern-day Marx Brothers movie should have kept this in mind: The Marx Brothers were funny.Once you get past its title, "Brain Donors" is anything but funny. Impudent and manic, yes, in the best Marxian tradition.But it is desperate in its scattered shots at any lame thing for a possible laugh, where the Marxes were always cool and -- for the most part -- surreally inspired when it came to stringing nonsense together.The film's nominal plot could have been subtitled "A Night at the Ballet."

IF YOU thought ''GoodFellas'' was violent, wait until you see ''Miller's Crossing.'' When it comes to bloodshed, this one has the Martin Scorsese film beat a mile.That, however, is about the only area in which the new film beats the Scorsese film. Its trouble is that it isn't able to settle on any particular mood. It wants to be brutal and is. It also wants to be funny and is not.''GoodFellas'' is funny, in part, but the humor is the natural sort. The humor in ''Miller's Crossing'' is self-conscious, contrived and never that successful.

The mob films continue. The latest is ''State of Grace,'' in which the Irish-Americans are the hoods.The film is based on the lives of the Westies, an Irish gang that operated a few years back and, for a time, terrified the West Side of New York.They don't so much terrify as befuddle in the film. The movie, done in very naturalistic style by director Phil Joanou, is more muddled than entertaining. Usually, the basics of a mob plot are enough to carry it along, compensate for bad sound and dense dialogue, but not here.

Considering how repetitive it is, You Don't Mess With the Zohan is intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way. It's basically a one-note, one-rhythm ethnic comedy: a series of riffs on Israeli machismo and Middle Eastern tensions scored to Mediterranean disco. At 113 minutes, the movie bloats, and the humor wears thin, but it's still one of Adam Sandler's sturdier vehicles. That's consumer guidance for Sandler fans - not high praise. He plays the title character, an Israeli commando who fantasizes about being a hairdresser and fulfills his dream when he fakes his own death and flies to New York.

Hot enough for you? The answer, in this case, appears to be yes. ESPN debuted its miniseries The Bronx is Burning last night at 10 (and will replay the first episode tomorrow night at 10, followed by seven episodes each Tuesday night at 10 starting next week), and Yankees lovers and haters alike shouldn't miss it. Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson have indelible public images for every baseball fan, but the actors playing the respective roles - John Turturro, Oliver Platt and Daniel Sunjata - have nailed them.

Among the most memorable of a new generation of actors to emerge in the 1980s, John Turturro is probably best loved by frequent viewers of Coen brothers comedies and Spike Lee's films, which always seem to conjure up the native New Yorker in the unlikeliest ways (as the voice of the serial killer's dog in Summer of Sam, as a mob kingpin in the recent She Hate Me). But lately, the actor has had other things on his mind. Last year, Turturro, 48, took a break to helm the musical Romance and Cigarettes (his third as a director)

Spike Lee's She Hate Me contains the seeds of a half-dozen good, thought-provoking movies, in genres ranging from sexual spoof and political satire to corporate drama and morality play. That's the good news. The bad news is that She Hate Me is a scattershot mess, a film that seems to have no idea where it's going and offers little compelling reason for audiences to try to figure it out. It's as though Lee, frustrated by today's political and cultural climate, sees this as his one shot at grabbing his audience's attention and shaking some sense into them.

Fate is a cruel mistress. But maybe not as cruel as we've been led to believe. That may not be a real popular concept in this age of self-centered fatalism and bumper stickers that explain, "Stuff Happens." But it's the idea behind Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, writer-director Jill Sprecher's circular drama in which a cross-section of world-weary New Yorkers avoid optimism at all costs, only to discover it can't be dismissed so easily. This fleetingly autobiographical film -- the character played by Clea DuVall has things happen to her, including some serious injuries and a chance encounter with a smiling man, that Sprecher lifted from her own life story -- threatens to be too ponderously self-conscious and jaded.

Before the lights went down for the coming attractions, a trivia blurb on the screen reported that the most filmed character in movie history is Dracula, which at the moment seems inaccurate. At the moment, it seems to be Howard Cosell. The feature film was Ali, with Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and Jon Voight as half of a Cosellathon that will be playing in theaters and television tomorrow night. The other half is John Turturro in Monday Night Mayhem, a TV movie (TNT, 9 p.m.) dramatizing the perpetual ego-wrangling behind the scenes during Cosell's time on ABC's Monday Night Football.

There's nothing wrong with "O Brother, Where Art Thou" that a little less effort wouldn't have cured. This latest from the producing-directing-writing duo of the Coen Brothers continues in the same vein they've been mining since 1984's "Blood Simple": tales of dim people caught up in desperate straits without a clue how to get out of them. And while it displays its share of quirky charm, off-kilter characters and outlandish situations, this is really the first film where you can feel the Coens straining to keep up with themselves.

Love, betrayal, death and hats dance in fanciful tandem in "Illuminata," John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.Indeed, "Illuminata" is about so many things, and expresses so many ideas in its giddy, rapid-fire way, that it's difficult to relegate it to any genre. Filled with slapstick physical comedy and ribald asides, it is certainly a comedy, but it is also suffused with such tenderness and intelligence that it qualifies as the most serious drama.

Don't let the name fool you. The Baltimore Jewish Film Festival, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, will appeal to filmgoers of any religious affiliation."

Franz Kafka, that great journalist of alienation, did not write Tom DiCillo's "Box of Moonlight," but DiCillo cites Kafka as an inspiration. "Box of Moonlight" captures that Kafkaesque spirit better than any movie since "Barton Fink" (1992), the Coen brothers' epic encounter with writer's block. "Moonlight" is a thrill-ride designed for the intellect.Coincidentally, the star of "Barton Fink," John Turturro, plays the lead in "Box of Moonlight," too. He's more of an ordinary guy here -- an arrogant businessman, instead of "Fink's" playwright -- but mundane weirdness stalks him at every turn.