Keaton

"Marvin's Room" sparkles with promise as it begins, $l especially when you see its diamond-studded cast: Meryl Streep. Diane Keaton. Leonardo DiCaprio. Hume Cronyn. Gwen Verdon. Robert De Niro!But Jerry Zaks' film loses its luster as it draws to its close. Like cut glass, it's ultimately fake and a little dull.Keaton and Streep play estranged sisters. Keaton is Bessie, the good girl who agreed to take care of her dad, Marvin (Cronyn), when he had a stroke. She ended up spending 20 years as his nurse and her aunt's (Verdon)

Director Joel Schumacher surveyed the expectant faces of reporters gathered around him and pledged to clear up all the rumors about why Michael Keaton left "Batman Forever.""The inside story?" Mr. Schumacher asked, then paused. "I had Tonya Harding break Michael's leg."Mr. Schumacher can be forgiven such kidding.When he signed on to direct the third "Batman" -- Tim Burton helmed the first two -- he knew he would come under scrutiny. But he had no idea how intense it would be, or how many casting crises would wrack his production.

Once again, the giant Hollywood star machine has labored mightily and coughed up a mouse - or at best, Warren Beatty in a polar bear suit. He's cute in the suit, like a baggy-pants version of the polar bears in the yuletide Coca-Cola commercials. He should have played the whole picture that way. For Beatty doesn't have a naturally engaging comic spirit. He didn't in those duds everyone has forgotten, like "The Fortune," or in the one no one will forget, "Ishtar," or even in his fading-from-memory hit, "Heaven Can Wait."

A Severn woman told Western District officers she was assaulted early Saturday by a man and a woman at the intersection of Reece Road and Pioneer Drive, county police said.Zanina Taylor, 24, said she was driving her 1994 Mazda west on Route 175 shortly after 2 a.m. when a man driving a teal green Grand Am swerved into her lane and almost hit her car, police said. She turned onto Reece Road and both cars pulled over at the intersection with Pioneer Drive, police said.Ms. Taylor and the man both got out of their cars and argued.

On December 26, 2005, DOROTHY LORAINE CRATE STOPPIELLO, loving mother of Neil Stoppiello, Irene Babish, Anna Marie Shearer and Dolores Stoppiello. Dear sister of Betty Maffucci, Ida Griffith, George R. "Dick" and Robert Crate. Cherished grandmother of many. Ms. stoppiello was preceded in death by her former husband Neil Stoppiello. Services and interment were held Thursday. In lieu of flowers memorials in Ms. Stoppiello's name may be directed to Wintergrowth-Howard Center, 5460 Ruth Keaton Way, Columbia, MD 21044.

Diane Kea ton Diane Keaton doesn't do double-takes. She does triples and quadruples of her own uncanny devising. If acting were figure-skating, her head-tilted, arms-akimbo, wry-smiled look of sweet befuddlement would have been named the Keaton - or the Annie Hall - decades ago. But Keaton never replays those mannerisms. She comes up with original, organic stuff movie after movie, year after year. Over the phone from her home in Los Angeles, she recalls how enjoyable it was playing a jailer's wife who falls for a prisoner - Mel Gibson!

"Jack Frost" is about a man who dies, then comes back to life as a snowman to teach his young son that life must go on, which must be one of the most morbidly bizarre plot synopses to float through Hollywood all year.So the fact that "Jack Frost" succeeds even momentarily comes as a huge surprise. Although the movie's maudlin theme and heartbreaking ending make it virtually un-recommendable to anyone other than 10- to 12-year-olds who need help grappling with mortality, "Jack Frost" isn't a total loss.

SEATTLE -- For all the scurrying, the meetings, frantic telephone calls and looking skyward, authorities still don't know how long it will take to make the Kingdome safe."

In "Speechless," you hear the titter-patter of little quips.It's a secret newspaper movie, one of those mock-'30s, wisecrack-dense jobs that yearns to have been written by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht (and settles for Robert King); the snippy lines and nanosecond-quick comebacks fly about like shrapnel on a nasty battlefield. The setting, however, while still in the media arena, has been dialed one notch over, and instead of reporters, the subjects are political speech writers in a hectic, tight New Mexico Senate campaign.