Kathleen Turner

Take a bunch of cute babies and a once-lofty star like Kathleen Turner, and what do you get? One of the worst movies ever made."Baby Geniuses" is a unique form of torture in which even the babies aren't that cute. Out of the computer-animated mouths of these babes come crude and stupid remarks. (The Mercedes ad with the kid singing Johnny Cash-style in the back of the SUV did animation a lot better.)In the whole movie, in fact, there's a whole lotta dubbin' goin' on. Perhaps someone had second thoughts about the flat, expository dialogue and tried to improve it, but even third or fourth thoughts wouldn't have helped this soiled diaper of a script.

The "naked" in "Naked of New York" is the nakedness of power. Here's a callow, unformed, infernally precious movie that has a cast far better than it deserves -- Kathleen Turner, Timothy Dalton, Eric Stoltz, Mary-Louise Parker, even, for crying out loud, William Styron. What is going on? Could it be . . . SATAN?Actually, no: it's the powerful producer-director Martin Scorsese, serving as executive producer to Dan Algrant's meek little autobiographical tale about a wannabe playwright struggling for attention in Manhattan.

The camera in "V. I. Warshawski" is obsessed with Kathleen Turner's legs, right from the opening credits when it's poking up her skirt. And those legs -- which are not what they used to be -- are still the best thing about this miserable movie.This is sad because it was a much-anticipated film. V. I. -- the initials stand for Victoria Iphigenia -- Warshawski is the heroine of Sara Paretsky's crime novels, which run an intriguing feminist turn on hard-boiled detective fiction, while remaining true to the spirit of the genre.

While "Toy Story 2" and "Princess Mononoke" show audiences that animated features can be just as fluid and expressive as their live-action counterparts, there are live-action movies that seem determined to be as two-dimensional as possible.Enter "End of Days," as idiotic, ugly and ridiculous a case in point as can be imagined.Arnold Schwarzenegger (just what computer animation program created him?) plays a burned-out security guard who foils a plot by Satan (Gabriel Byrne, changing accents more often than Kathleen Turner)

Set this "House" afire! "House of Cards" is an irritatingly precious disease-of-the-week number, slightly inflated from the TV-scale of its ambitions by the presence of slumming movie stars and over-elaborate production.The title structure expresses the movie's reality: It's whimsical, vivid, wondrously constructed, fragile and utterly phony. But worse, it's metaphorical drivel.The House of Cards, which looks as if it were designed by Hieronymus Bosch and M. C. Escher and constructed out of tungsten-plated cards and industrial strength Krazy Glue by the graduating class at the Yale School of Architecture, is meant to represent the disease that afflicts young Sally Matthews, that wondrous magic state known so affectionately as "autism."

When you get right down to it, the Academy Awards show, from a fashion-watch point of view, was a bore.Cher left her feathered and sequined G-string at home. Kim Basinger didn't wear a one-shouldered cupcake wonder, Demi Moore wore a stunning lace gown instead of bicycle shorts and Barbra Streisand's derriere stayed under cover.Still, there was hope when Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon took the stage as presenters. The duo should have traded shoes. Ms. Davis looked like a cancan-dancing Amazon in a frothy white confection.

In acting school, they work from a theory that traces a character arc along an axis running from motive to behavior. You begin a performance by understanding why your character does what she does. From that insight, you begin to acquire a vocabulary of gesture and nuance that gradually becomes a pattern of action, bringing the person to palpitating, specific life.Works great for Lady Macbeth. Dynamite on Ophelia. Gangbusters on Eliza Doolittle, Maggie the Cat or even Scarlett O'Hara.But . . . Serial Mom?

As grown-ups watch Martin Short snuffle, snort and grimace in the opening moments of "A Simple Wish," they are likely to compose a fervent wish of their own: Please, oh please, get me through this movie!The kids may warm to Short's genial turn as a hapless fairy godmother. Their parents will find him ceaselessly irritating, like someone in the next lunch booth who sneezes through the entire meal. Short is capable of hysterical caricature. With luck, one day he'll find the right movie vehicle.

GUILTY BY SUSPICIONWarner Home Video$92.99Producer Irwin Winkler here turns to what is obviously a story near and dear to his heart -- the Hollywood Communist witch hunts in the '40s and '50s. His passions, though, don't guarantee a winner, and "Guilty By Suspicion" ends up being an earnest, by-the-numbers telling of a fairly familiar story.Fortunately, this hero is played by Robert De Niro, so strong acting is assured. He plays David Merrill, a director in Hollywood during the years that the House Un-American Activities Committee engaged in their digging to find "Communists" and their ilk.Called to testify, Merrill faces the ultimate nightmarish dilemma: If he names his friends who are left-leaning, the committee will go easy on him. Merrill struggles throughout the film to find the courage to do the right thing, while the film struggles to keep us interested.

The world premiere of John Waters' new film, "Serial Mom" at the Senator Theatre Tuesday evening was a star-studded happening. Besides John, celebrities included Kathleen Turner and her husband, Jay Weiss; Sam Waterston; Ricki Lake and her husband of less than two weeks, Rob Sussman; Mink Stole; Traci Lords, the daughter-in-law of Pat Moran, John's longtime right-hand person; Traci's husband, Brook Yeaton; Patricia Hearst and her husband, Bernard Shaw; Matthew...