We Offer A Bird's-Eye View of the Big, the Bad and the Barest Movies of the Holidays

(3 of 4)

Well, the beavers are cute. And that about exhausts the felicities of the Disney version of C.S. Lewis' allegorical Christian fantasy about the siblings who find a realm of wonder and peril in the back of a strange armoire. The child actors are mostly grating; the pacing is a thing of lurches and languors; and Swinton, usually an actress of molten power, tamps herself down as the villainous White Witch, so that she seems less a malefic force of nature than a frosty schoolmarm. Director Adamson, fresh from the Shrek megahits, should stick to animation; his live-action work is not in the least lively.

Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (kids) and The Passion of the Christ (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun.

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Opens Dec. 14

Pete Perkins(Jones), a taciturn ranch hand, befriends an illegal Mexican worker named Melquiades Estrada (Cedillo). They have soulful exchanges and a certain amount of guy fun. After Estrada is shot to death and dumped into a grave by Mike, a sullen border-patrol cop (Pepper), Pete forces Mike to dig up Estrada and go on a very strange journey to Mexico to bury the body.

The Three Burials is one of the year's oddest movies--half brutally real, half curiously surreal, with just an unspoken touch of homoerotic passion. It's hard to tell whether Jones, working from a script by Guillermo Arriaga, intends this to be a black comedy or a sober study of a simple man gripped by emotions that he finds unexpected and inexplicable. The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS Starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins. Directed by Stephen Frears. Now playing

Mrs. Henderson (Dench), a cranky recent widow with too much time and money on her hands, spies the abandoned Windmill Theater and wonders if a flutter in show biz might cure her blahs. The manager she hires, Vivian Van Damm (Hoskins), is at least as flinty as she is, and he does not take kindly to her idea--that they exhibit naked women onstage. Thanks to a social connection with Britain's official censor, Henderson is allowed to put on her show. But the discreetly lighted showgirls are not permitted to move.

Mrs. Henderson Presents, written by Martin Sherman, is an utterly charming fiction based on fact. During World War II, the Windmill was for a time the only theater open in London and a beloved stopping place for lonely servicemen. Frears' film catches the conflict between the gentility and the raffishness of its operations, Dench and Hoskins bicker with an affectionate ferocity that helps defuse the story's inherent sentimentality, and the result is an admittedly minor, but authentic, holiday treat.

MATCH POINT Starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Opens Dec. 28