Uma Thurman

Uma Thurman needs to get this interview started as soon as possible so she can catch a flight home. Two hundred flights already have been canceled because of an East Coast snowstorm, and she's worried that she won't be able to get back to New York City to see her two children. But she is willing to answer a few questions before she leaves. Her new movie, Paycheck, the John Woo-directed thriller, opened a couple of weeks ago. She plays a biologist opposite Ben Affleck, a computer whiz whose memory is erased.

THE GOLDEN GLOBES didn't happen, for all intents and purposes - it was a news conference, for heaven's sake! But other events benefited from the lack of glitz at the Beverly Hilton. Over at the legendary Beverly Hills Hotel, the annual Diamond Information Center/InStyle luncheon attracted the likes of Sharon Stone in a skin-tight leopard print Cavalli cocktail dress and matching sky-high heels. This outfit did not say, "I'm just here to browse and have a bit of sushi, pay me no mind." Debra Messing was way over the top in a chic black satin party gown and a Stella McCartney bow-shaped diamond ring.

Filming that stretched over 155 days. Needing to become proficient at a whole host of martial arts. Keeping up with the whirling dervish that is Quentin Tarantino. Learning to drive a stick. Uma Thurman tries to make it sound like no big deal, but surely the filming of Kill Bill was no picnic for her - not when filming took twice as long as originally planned, the swordfighting techniques she had to master involved muscles she didn't even realize she had, and enough fake blood flowed during the shoot to fill a big-city reservoir.

G-Girl is faster than a speeding you-know-what. She can leap tall buildings in a, well, you remember. And she looks hot doing it. Uma Thurman hot. My Super Ex-Girlfriend (20th Century Fox) Starring Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson, Anna Faris, Rainn Wilson. Directed by Ivan Reit man. Rated PG-13. Time 90 minutes.

For its January issue, Vanity Fair bows to coolness and the "PF" crowd by putting smoking "Pulp Fiction" star Uma Thurman and her "disturbing beauty" on the cover. So what if the 25-year-old actress has remarkably little to say? Her comeback gig with John Travolta and last year's Oscar nomination poem by Dave Letterman ("Uma, Oprah, Oprah, Uma") have supplied her with enough cover cred for at least another year.Uma's the Queen of Quentinville, and Quentin Tarantino does still rule. Just ask Mr. Travolta, who pronounces in an interview in the year-end issue of Rolling Stone, "If there's a new feeling in Hollywood, it's because Quentin was the first person in a while to feel like we could treat an audience with intelligence.

G-Girl is faster than a speeding you-know-what. She can leap tall buildings in a, well, you remember. And she looks hot doing it. Uma Thurman hot. My Super Ex-Girlfriend (20th Century Fox) Starring Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson, Anna Faris, Rainn Wilson. Directed by Ivan Reit man. Rated PG-13. Time 90 minutes.

Therapists may take a dim view of Prime, a romantic comedy with Uma Thurman falling for a guy 15 years her junior that features some of the worst therapeutic advice ever to appear onscreen. Just about everyone else will be too busy chuckling to care. Thurman, luminous as ever, is Rafi Gardet, recently divorced and vulnerable; like every other beautiful, together woman in Hollywood, she has despaired of ever finding the right man, and figures it must be her fault. Then, against her better judgment, she starts falling for David Bloomberg (Bryan Greenberg)

Joining "A Room With a View" and "Enchanted April" in the sub-sub-genre of "Middle-class Brits on Vacation in Italy," "A Month By the Lake" offers some sedate but undeniable pleasures: The triumph of a shrewd, decent and practical woman, the thawing of a pompous prig, and the comeuppance of an American upstart. Throw in Lake Como's gorgeous scenery and you've got just the soothing thing for the people who instinctively know they must stay far, far away from "To Die For."It's 1937 and this time Miss Bentley has come to the lake alone.

HOLLYWOOD -- Gary Oldman ("Sid & Nancy") as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. His real-life wife, Uma Thurman ("Henry and June"), as Thomas' wife. The appeal of the $4.5 million "Dylan," to be produced by London's Harlech Films (a division of HTV International) and distributed by Miramax, was apparent. But a funny thing happened on the way to the screen.Nine days into the late-January shoot, Oldman collapsed on the set in Wales, said by doctors to be suffering from "nervous exhaustion." The production was shut down, in the words of a press release, "until such time as Oldman has regained his health and is available to re-start work."

Paycheck is one of those movies in which all the ingenuity went into the original idea and none into its execution. Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, one of sci-fi's most hallucinogenic geniuses, it details an old-fashioned double-cross set in a world where minds can be selectively erased. Ben Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a computer genius whose specialty is being hired by companies for top-secret (often illegal, even more often immoral) projects, then having his memory partially scrubbed clean so he remembers nothing about what he's just done.

WORLD Little progress on cease-fire Efforts by United Nations envoys to arrange a Middle East cease-fire made little progress yesterday, as Israel bombed new targets in Lebanon, Hezbollah fired more than 100 rockets into Israel, and the civilian death toll continued to climb. pg 1a MARYLAND Tough fight ahead for Schaefer? Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's comments about women and minorities could affect his re-election, a Sun poll shows. The poll indicates he would receive support of less than a third of voters in the primary with many voters undecided.

STAFF CRITICS GIVE YOU THE LOWDOWN ON TEN TOP MOVIES, POPCORN NOT INCLUDED! Capote What It's About: New Yorker writer Truman Capote researches the murder of a Kansas farm family and gets in over his head with one of the killers. Rated: R The scoop: Forty years from now, people will still be talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance the way we are still talking about In Cold Blood. Grade: A+ Chicken Little What It's About: A little chicken insists the sky is falling, and not even his own dad believes him. Rated: G The scoop: Believing traditonal animation is too passe, Disney jumps into the computer-animated fray with that hoariest of cartoon cliches, the cute animal pic. If it does nothing else, this wan effort makes Pixar's continued brilliance (from Toy Story to The Incredibles)

Therapists may take a dim view of Prime, a romantic comedy with Uma Thurman falling for a guy 15 years her junior that features some of the worst therapeutic advice ever to appear onscreen. Just about everyone else will be too busy chuckling to care. Thurman, luminous as ever, is Rafi Gardet, recently divorced and vulnerable; like every other beautiful, together woman in Hollywood, she has despaired of ever finding the right man, and figures it must be her fault. Then, against her better judgment, she starts falling for David Bloomberg (Bryan Greenberg)

Be Cool, an unawaited, years-too-late follow-up to the 1995 hit Get Shorty, proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles. John Travolta was cool in Get Shorty: He put his signature on the role of Elmore Leonard's Chili Palmer, an honorable, low-level gangster with invincible self-confidence and a soft spot for Hollywood fantasy. Travolta played him with a sparkle and finesse that got you rooting for him and grinning. Travolta made you believe that this shylock and debt collector was always smooth and collected.

Near the end of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Bill (David Carradine) compares the double life of his former girlfriend/assassin (Uma Thurman) with that of Superman. Superman's mythology, Bill contends, is different from other superheroes because unlike, say, Peter Parker, who fights crime as Spider-Man to protect his everyday life, Superman was born on another planet and uses his human identity to blend in, to hide from humanity. The bespectacled Clark Kent is Superman's critique of the human race as weak and cowardly, Bill says.

I was more than a little surprised to hear that the DVD of Kill Bill Vol. 1 would precede by only three days the release of the second half of Quentin Tarantino's tribute to every grind house movie he ever loved. But since Vol. 2 turns out as promised to be simply the second half of a single movie, the reasoning may be less odd than it seems. In fact, I might suggest watching the first installment before seeing Vol. 2 at the theater to get the full effect of what is now revealed to be a true B-movie epic.

David Duchovny is playing God?Unfortunately, no. That would be interesting, certainly more interesting than this hopeless hodgepodge of violent-movie cliches that so badly wants to be "Pulp Fiction," it's a wonder director Andy Wilson didn't have his first name legally changed to Quentin.Duchovny is Eugene Sands, an L.A. surgeon who enjoyed taking drugs more than prescribing them -- a predilection that leaves him defrocked and de-humanized.But after saving a dude's life one night with some impromptu barroom surgery, he catches the fancy of real bad guy Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton)

It only happens rarely, but when it happens it's wonderful. You're sitting in the theater and the usual banal litany of images sloshes across the screen -- strong men, beautiful women or maybe it's beautiful men and strong women, guns, cars, explosions-and suddenly someone says something that knocksyou out of your socks. And you think: That's writing!In "Mad Dog and Glory," all the way through you think: That's writing.The film is hard to describe. A kind of shaggy gangster tale, it's a whacked-out anti-melodramatic comedy that delights in confounding expectations.