Ralph Fiennes

"Onegin" is an elegantly wrought, deeply felt film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1831 novel in verse, which in turn inspired Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera. The very model of a literary adaptation to the screen, it stars a perfectly cast Ralph Fiennes and marks a remarkably assured feature directorial debut for Fiennes' sister, Martha, and also a splendid opportunity for their brother Magnus, who composed the film's spare yet evocative score. As a period piece the film is breathtaking in its beauty and authenticity, its production design a work of symbolically decayed grandeur.

NEW YORK -- Long before she started working on an unfamiliar new computer that gave her migraine headaches and long before she learned she had cancer, Jini Fiennes conceived of her sixth and most ambitious novel, "Blood Ties," a cyclical tale of wounded generations and the redeeming power of love.Writing again after years of struggle alongside her husband to raise seven children on little money in England and Ireland, she finished the book in 1989 and then absorbed rejection after rejection from publishers.

From a baby's harrowing ride down the River Nile to a parting of the Red Sea that would make even Cecil B. DeMille smile, DreamWorks' "The Prince of Egypt" is that rarest of film creatures: a biblical epic that does both its subject and its medium proud.That its medium is animation makes the feat even more impressive. Seven decades of talking critters and lovers who live happily ever after has made animation largely a kids' domain. True, adults helped make "Snow White" and her successors classics, but it's the non-threatening nature of animated films that has made them staples, films that generations of parents and even the youngest children could enjoy together.

A few things you might consider doing instead of seeing "The Avengers": Walking the dog.Turning the compost.Re-grouting the bathtub.Starting your 1999 taxes.Buying a dog.Starting a compost heap.By now, the pop-culture literati (meaning people with nothing of substance or meaning to worry about) know that the entertainment media is in high feather over Warner Brothers' decision not to screen "The Avengers" for critics before it opened Friday.The studio gives us far too much credit. The American movie-going public is famously immune to the rants and raves of reviewers, making up their own minds by sallying forth intrepidly regardless of critical opprobrium.

Director Gillian Armstrong has waited 10 years to get her version of "Oscar & Lucinda" on the screen. It seems an odd choice, because her work, such as "Little Women," has shown a marvelous empathy for its characters.In the novel "Oscar & Lucinda," author Peter Carey takes a decided pleasure in dragging his two protagonists through a series of spiritual and physical tortures so baroque that the whole enterprise begins to take on the looniness of a Monty Python sketch.Oscar (Ralph Fiennes)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"-- Jane Austen Yes, yes, of course we all watched the Academy Awards last night to see who won what.But, admit it: Long after we've forgotten who won the Oscar for Sound Effects Editing or Animated Short Film, we will remember who wore what on Hollywood's Big Night Out.The Bad. The Beautiful. The Glitzy. The Gaudy. The Sexy. The Tacky.And, of course, everybody's favorite: The Just Plain Wacko.It really was, wasn't it, an absolutely fabu night.

What fun to find Vanity Fair refraining from its usual star worship. The gusher runs dry for Ralph Fiennes, the pale British actor who played such a convincing Nazi sadist in "Schindler's List." During his two-hour interview in the November issue, Mr. Fiennes is a model of chilly reserve: "Not that one expected a teddy bear," writes Leslie Bennetts. "Maybe an infinitesimal bit of charm, perhaps -- would that be too much to ask?" Indeed, Mr. Fiennes declines eye contact with the reporter, who is left to theorize about the murky depths lurking beneath the 32-year-old actor's "aristocratic exterior," depths that have electrified his performances -- in "Hamlet" onstage, in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show," in the futuristic "Strange Days."

Stephen Spielberg's "Schindler's List," an epic story of evil and redemption set against one of the darkest events in history, received 12 nominations, including Best Picture, for the 66th Annual Academy Awards yesterday in Los Angeles.Other Best Picture nominees were Jim Sheridan's "In the Name of the Father," James Ivory's "The Remains of the Day," both of which received eight nominations, Jane Campion's "The Piano" and, most unexpectedly, "The Fugitive," directed by journeyman Andrew Davis.