Keanu Reeves

News flash: New York lawyers, real estate developers and other top-feeders can be nasty characters. And they dress fabulously for funerals.This is just one of the many messages of "The Devil's Advocate," which folds Scripture, sex and soigne interior design into an overbaked morality tale for the 21st century. There might be other movies out there that started with a reasonably clever premise only to make a preposterous -- if good-looking -- hash of it, but "The Devil's Advocate" takes the prize for this season's most perverse outing by a franchise name.

Kidding soap opera is always a risky undertaking. It's difficult to parody an art form that wallows in self-parody. ''Tune in Tomorrow'' almost manages to overcome this hurdle. The opening 45 minutes are uneventful, but the second half of the film has an abundance of laughs.Peter Falk stars. He plays a soap writer who joins a radio station in 1951 New Orleans. Keanu Reeves is Martin, the young news writer at the station. Barbara Hershey is the 36-year-old woman who is twice divorced and is back home to find a third husband.

"A Walk in the Clouds" wants to take you back to the 1940s with all of its big, soft heart. And after two hours, that wish is granted: You feel you're in a theater 50 years ago, when this weepie would have been preceded by a newsreel, a cartoon, a B feature and maybe a soup tureen giveaway."Clouds" is as sweeping, shallow, romantic, corny, innocent and implausible as many postwar films -- not the immortals, but fluff such as "Duel in the Sun" and "Leave Her to Heaven."How you respond will depend on how deeply you enter the world Mexican writers and filmmakers call "magical realism."

''Point Break'' has its areas of excitement, but on too many occasions the movie just lies there -- even when it does, however, the film still manages to look and sound good.The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose last film, ''Blue Steel,'' was a silly mixture of reason and outrage. ''Point Break'' plays better than that, though there are a few times when you may wonder who wrote the script. There are also times when you may ask where the FBI agents in the film were trained.The new film stars Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze.

The Bacon Brothers need validation."We have something to prove," said Michael Bacon, 47.No, musician Michael, and his brother, actor Kevin Bacon, don't need witnesses to hide in a closet to verify carnal conquests, like Kevin's character Fenwick in "Diner," which was set in Baltimore.What they do need, at the peak of hot young-actor-cum-rock-star careers (Keanu Reeves, anyone?) is for people not to pre-suppose the "movie-star vanity trip.""You may not dig our music, but you can't say someone's packaging us, putting nice clothes on us and shooting a video," the 38-year-old actor said.

The Young Victoria . ( 3 STARS) Starring Emily Blunt as the 18-year-old queen of England circa 1837, this film is such a rich pastiche of first love, teen empowerment, fabulous fashion and fate that you almost wish a few brooding vampires had been thrown in for good measure, since that's the crowd that should fall head over heels for this movie. Which isn't to suggest that it's sophomoric. It is anything but. What filmmaker Jean-Marc Vall?e has done in this delicious historical romance is capture that hot blush of pure emotion that comes before kisses, sex, heartbreak and the rest can dilute it. Opening next Friday Edge of Darkness: (Warner Bros.

With everything this film has going for it - humor, intelligence and a splendid ensemble - Richard Linklater's nightmare drug movie, A Scanner Darkly, should be continually compelling. But it loses its fizz after a strong series of pops. Instead of a moviemaking vision, it merely has a look: an unsettling, changeable new form of animated live action. And, instead of a lucid, original take on wigged-out junkies and the government that spies on and manipulates them, it slavishly follows Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel of the same name.

Vanity Fair has joined the star-of-the-month club. Like Rolling Stone and other publications surrendering to the time-lapse 1990s, VF is now willing to lend its cover to ephemeral celebrities like Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. It no longer caters solely to the superstar set. For the September issue, Sandra Bullock is flashing her crocodile smile in the front window -- an appropriate reaction to being dubbed "Golden Girl" and "America's Sweetheart" after only three ordinary movies, "Speed," "While You Were Sleeping" and "The Net."

EVERY NOW AND THEN, you stumble across a story that is so wonderful you say to yourself: "If this story were made into a movie, Roger Ebert would deliberately expose himself to mutating radiation so he could grow additional thumbs and point them up." Today I want to tell you such a story. It was brought to my attention by alert reader C. Erik Enockson, and it has what Aristotle called the Four Essential Elements of Drama: (1) despair, (2) intrigue, (3) Canadians and (4) snorkeling. When you read this story, you're going to think I made it up. But I ask you: Have I ever lied to you?

Remember the Brat Pack, that very hot "Breakfast Club" of 1980s actors who made youth look like a Coors beer commercial?They were America's favorite image of growing up in the decade of greed. But don't fret if Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Ally Sheedy have slipped your mind. Like Duran Duran and Milli Vanilli, they were eminently forgettable. Their movies were soapy. Their dialogue was dippy. Their hair was perfect.Alas, the 1990s is serving up a scruffier, more notable set of young actors.