Rushes

MEN DON'T LEAVE

Dad's a swell guy. He has an easy rapport with his two sons that their tense mom (Jessica Lange) can't match. If he has a flaw, it's that he dies 15 minutes into a movie that is as tender and strained as his newly widowed wife. Men Don't Leave, written by Barbara Benedek and director Paul Brickman, gets promising when Lange lurches toward psychotic withdrawal from this grave new world, even as her kids accommodate themselves to it quickly. But a TV-movie moral awaits at the end, as comforting and predictable as a public-service commercial. For the real goods on women without men, and on the hold the dead have over the living, skip Men Don't Leave and catch up with its thrilling, high-fantasy counterpart, Always, still playing at a theater near you.

EVERYBODY WINS

In his time, Karel Reisz directed Morgan!, The Loves of Isadora and The French Lieutenant's Woman. In his day, Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman. What, then, are they doing in a small Connecticut town, mixing up with hookers and private eyes? Don't ask them. Don't ask anyone who has seen the result of their collaboration, Everybody Wins. At times it promises to be a study in miscarried justice -- an innocent youth imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. At other times it seems to be about all-encompassing municipal corruption. There are moments between the detective (Nick Nolte) and the flaky strumpet (Debra Winger) when it edges toward, of all things, screwball comedy. But it never settles for long on any style or viewpoint, and it arrives at no dramatic conclusion. In other words, it is a lot like ordinary life, which accounts for its occasional charms. But it is never much like a movie, which accounts for its failure to sustain the viewer's attention.

INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) has so many wives and children by his various marriages that he doesn't know what to do. Except steal to support them. And, for relaxation, lure other men's wives into extramarital affairs. He may be + the most thoroughly corrupt (and corrupting) cop in an overcrowded movie field. His response to a departmental investigation is to threaten to seduce the wife of head detective Raymond Avila (Andy Garcia) if Avila doesn't quash the case. No question about it, Internal Affairs is a nasty, sometimes brutal, piece of work. But Gere is hypnotic, writer Henry Bean's construction is entertainingly intricate, and director Mike Figgis knows how to turn on a subtle, authentic erotic heat.