A RICH FILM FEAST

By RICHARD CORLISS; RICHARD SCHICKEL

At year's end it's as easy to gorge on new movies as on holiday dinner. Some 40 films are on view, many as solemn as a Christmas sermon; we consider 10 here. Three are docudramas about challenges to the legal system. Three are tales of senior citizens in decay or defiance. Another three are comic studies of dire events: serial killing, an alien invasion, going home to mother. And it wouldn't be Christmas without a film of some masterwork by a 19th century novelist; this year it's Henry James. Below, a few reasons to visit your local plex--and a few more to stay home with the Yule log and the eggnog.

A WONDERFUL LIFE THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT

He had a talent to arouse. While he was exciting his loyal readers with outhouse humor and photos of splay-legged models, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt incited the guardians of public pudency. City D.A.s, state attorneys general, Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell--all were so vexed by Flynt's verbal and pictorial provocations, they just had to sue him. One offended reader took a few rifle shots at the Great Satan of Columbus, Ohio, forever paralyzing some of Flynt's favorite body parts. The bumptious pornographer made friends with Jimmy Carter's evangelist sister, went nuts on painkillers and won a crucial First Amendment ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. All in all, a wonderful life.

The People vs. Larry Flynt, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski of Ed Wood fame, jogs from one incident to the next, amassing information and dispensing attitude but rarely creating real characters. That's supposed to be director Milos Forman's forte; here, though, nearly everyone is an enemy or a stooge.

Yet there's a volatile, tender symbiosis in the tandem of Flynt (Woody Harrelson) and his bisexual stripper drug-addict wife Althea (Courtney Love). They goad, torture and love each other, to the limit. Casting the Lady Cobain was not merely an art-imitates-death stunt; she's a real actress, rangy and sympathetic, with an instinct for just the right dose of excess. Love and Harrelson make The People vs. Larry Flynt a case well worth studying. --By Richard Corliss

A TIME TO HEAL GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI

Is a racist entitled to as fair a trial as a pornographer? The good people of Mississippi--all right, the bad white people--gave Byron De La Beckwith every benefit of the doubt in his 1964 trials for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Two hung juries and a quarter- century later, a Jackson prosecutor (Alec Baldwin, who's good in a tough role) reopens the case, goaded by Evers' widow Myrlie (Whoopi Goldberg). He has a chance: this time the gabby, unrepentant Beckwith (James Woods) is facing a jury that is largely black.

Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi, written by Lewis Colick, purrs along like a TV movie with a grander budget. And like those fact-based disease-of-the-week dramas (the virus here is racism), this one is defeated by its lack of suspense. The case's outcome isn't the only thing that's predictable; so are the prejudices and motives of nearly every character.

Like Mississippi Burning, Cry Freedom and other well-meaning movies about race, Ghosts of Mississippi is not really about the black civil rights struggle. It's about the white liberal's burden--the crusade, waged by some stalwart fellow with star quality, to purge his community of official racism and to help all those decent people of color in the supporting cast. And of course the black actors don't get to play anything so interesting as a villain. Goldberg has to fashion Myrlie into a plaster saint, smothered by reverence, while Woods, snorting some invisible snuff, can have fun and lock up an Oscar nomination. Ghosts of Mississippi argues fervently for racial equality in the New South; yet in its perpetuation of the caste system in Hollywood dramas, the film is anything but an affirmative action. --R.C.

BRAVERY IN BELFAST SOME MOTHER'S SON

The Irish troubles, as the English call the battle between Protestants and Catholics for control of Northern Ireland, are at heart a fratricidal family squabble. So maybe a few steely mothers can stanch the blood sport. Some Mother's Son, which Terry George directed from his and Jim Sheridan's script, documents the 1981 hunger strike led by IRA soldier Bobby Sands (John Lynch) and the attempt by mothers of Sands' jailed cohorts to keep their boys from dying. Despite her natural caution, Kathleen Quigley (Helen Mirren), an apolitical teacher, is persuaded, by an IRA sympathizer (Fionnula Flanagan) and by loyalty to her own son, to try bringing the two warring sides together.

The real Irish trouble is that hardly anyone outside Ireland cares about this endless insurrection. Filmgoers certainly aren't moved in great numbers, as the box-office torpor of Michael Collins indicates. Some Mother's Son is just as unlikely to stir the masses. It doesn't clarify the IRA's collective character: Are its members insurgents? Martyrs? Thugs? Assassins? Instead the movie piggybacks its own little story, about the growing respect of the two women, onto the dreadfully edifying drama of the Sands campaign, including his election to Parliament on his deathbed. There's a power in these scenes that the rest of the film--a glum First Moms' Club--can't touch. --R.C.

BRINGING UP ALBERT MOTHER

It is one of the newer American nightmares: an allegedly grown child who turns up on the parental doorstep asking for his old room back. Not to mention all the other emotional comfort zones of the past. Usually this occurs when either a career has stalled or a marriage has crashed and burned. But there's no either/or for John Henderson, played by the depressives' national treasure, Albert Brooks, who also directed Mother and co-wrote it with Monica Johnson. Blocked as a writer and devastated by divorce, Henderson goes home in part because he doesn't have a psychological leg left to stand on. In part this is because he has only one chair left to sit in, his ex having made off with most of their furniture as well as his grieving heart. But mostly it is because he needs to reconcile with someone. Mom, even if she doesn't much care for him, is the best available candidate.

She's also the best reason for seeing this movie, for she is played by Debbie Reynolds with that devastating blend of vagueness about life's little details and sharpness about her child's shortcomings that has driven generations of middle-class American kids half crazy. How is it that Call Waiting baffles these aging ladies while they retain their unerring touch for their offspring's hot buttons?

Brooks doesn't develop his story as richly as he might; some of its incidents are too predictable, and it remains more anecdote than full-scale narrative. But he is, as he was in Modern Romance and Lost in America, a smart, funny observer of our minor domestic anguishes. --By Richard Schickel

BLURRED VISION THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

The film opens with black-and-white shots of modern young women in the postures of liberation. An hour later there is a surrealist and, by Victorian standards, very racy peek into Isabel Archer's fantasy life. In every way, The Portrait of a Lady, director Jane Campion's version of the Henry James novel, provides steeply raked, hugely self-conscious angles on Isabel, who is often glimpsed in a murky bluish light. It's as if Campion were determined not to shoot a single frame that might be confused with a Merchant-Ivory production.

This is, perhaps, a commendable ambition. But it is also a mannered, distancing and irritating one. Campion's style is not helpful in involving us in one of James' most admired variations on his most basic theme: an innocent young American confused and seduced by wily European sophisticates. Neither is the near catatonic coolness with which Nicole Kidman plays a woman whose impulses toward self-definition are balanced (or unbalanced) by equally strong impulses toward self-destruction.

It's easy to see why Isabel would attract Campion (The Piano), who is drawn to women trying to assert themselves against the social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction. --R.S.

FAMILY THERAPY MARVIN'S ROOM

Old Marvin (Hume Cronyn), who sucks the ink off Yahtzee dice, hasn't uttered a coherent word in years. His sister Ruth (Gwen Verdon) is so devoted to soap operas that she dons a formal gown when her favorite characters wed. His daughter Lee (Meryl Streep), who smokes all the time, has no talent for raising kids. Just look at her son Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio), with his pathological fear of apologizing to people he's hurt. Fortunately, Lee's sister Bessie (Diane Keaton) is around. She has taken care of her dad for 20 years. But no good deed goes unpunished: Bessie has just heard she has leukemia.

Welcome to the sitcom from hell, redeemed into a lesson of togetherness. Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast. It's a tonic to see Keaton making sense of sanctity, DiCaprio refusing to sentimentalize a disturbed teenager. The impossible challenge goes to Streep; she's supposed to escort Lee on a forced march from belligerence into family harmony. "How can one sister be so good and the other so bad?" asks Aunt Ruth. The answer: careless writing. The movie is so unfair to Lee that one roots for her to stay stubborn and blinkered. But that won't happen. In its polished, feel-good way Marvin's Room celebrates the breaking of a woman's will, when will is just about all she has. --R.C.

MAJESTY IN MADNESS THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE

The trend in off-Broadway plays of 1991 is recapitulated in movies of late '96, as Jon Robin Baitz's The Substance of Fire races Marvin's Room to the plexes. Both are realistic dramas spiked with wit about families gathering around an old man as he slips toward death. Indeed, The Substance of Fire could be Marvin's Room from Marvin's point of view.

Isaac Geldhart (Ron Rifkin), the head of a family publishing house, loves the very bookness of books--their smell, new or old, and the texture of fine paper, on which is written witness to a century of atrocity. But the public may want a sexy novel more than The Architecture of the Holocaust. Anyway, that's the belief of Isaac's grown children (Tony Goldwyn, Sarah Jessica Parker, Timothy Hutton), who wrest control of the house from their father. Soon after, Isaac lapses into a madness that estranges him from the world as fully as from his family.

Daniel Sullivan, who directed both the stage and film versions, is not exactly a moviemaker, and Baitz has cushioned Isaac's fall with a final reconciliation. But Baitz has also expanded his play to give Isaac room to parade his obsessions. A familiar tragedy is made potent by the value of the gift withdrawn: Isaac, whose life is his mind, is losing it. Rifkin sees the majesty in Isaac's madness; he soars as he declines. In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy old men. --R.C.

A WINNING TICKET MY FELLOW AMERICANS

It's not easy being an ex-President: no more Air Force One, no more Hail to the Chief, only so many boring memoirs you can foist on the public, only so many celebrity golf tournaments you can play in. Russell P. Kramer (Jack Lemmon), a Republican, now has no one but himself on whom to practice fiscal responsibility: he steals the little shampoo bottles out of hotel rooms. Matt Douglas (James Garner), a Democrat, bravely carries on his party's tradition of sexual irresponsibility, but there's not much merriment in it. Mostly what these old rivals have going for them is mutual loathing.

It's the business of Peter Segal's My Fellow Americans to throw them together, under pressure (the current President--Dan Aykroyd--is trying to implicate them in a scandal), and let them bicker their way out of trouble. This involves the former leaders in an improbable outside-the-Beltway odyssey. But in its course, they get in close touch with the reality behind the social-policy abstractions they're used to--a homeless family, gay-pride marchers, Elvis impersonators--not to mention their own better natures. We in turn get in touch with two wily comic actors, deftly exchanging well-crafted and knowing (one of the screenwriters worked in the Carter White House) political humor. My Fellow Americans puts a very bright capper on this dismal political year. --R.S.

NAUGHTY, NOT NICE SCREAM

The holiday Wes Craven wants to be home for is Halloween. Even on Christmas he'll try to scare you. Here, the auteur of A Nightmare on Elm Street offers a Crueltide treat about a serial killer with an enshlocklopedic knowledge of scare-film tropes, from the Friday the 13th hockey mask to the Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer TV helmet. In one of the cute touches from Kevin Williamson's script, this psycho wears an Edvard Munch "Silent Scream" mask while taunting and then killing a frantic young woman (Drew Barrymore) alone in the dark. But that's just for practice. The next victim is a teenage virgin (pretty, plucky Neve Campbell, one of the preternaturally bedimpled kids on TV's Party of Five).

Craven began his career by imitating better directors (Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring was the source for his 1972 debut, Last House on the Left) and kept at it until he was mature enough to imitate himself. Scream, which has won some unaccountably indulgent reviews, is like his self-reverential Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994): an idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart. For viewers who are not scholars of the slasher genre, the latest Craven will seem one more exercise in voyeuristic sadism, an excuse for the torturing of teens in tight sweaters. And that's exactly what this Scream dream is. --R.C.

SPACED INVADERS MARS ATTACKS!

These Martians are imagined as a civilization of pre-moral, technologically advanced three-year-olds, the kind of mean widdle kids who cheerfully tell you that they come in peace just before they zap you with their ray guns. The earthlings, from the family in the White House to the gang in Las Vegas, to the dysfunctional bunch living in a trailer near a small Kansas town, are presented as entirely worthy of zapping; they are all either too dumb or too self-absorbed to warrant salvation. Indeed, the big, slowly dawning joke in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! is that, unlike Independence Day or any other high-tech disaster movie, most of its vast and starry cast--headed by Jack Nicholson, in dual roles--is not going to be present when the final credits roll.

This is curiously refreshing. So is the notion that a studio would lavish a huge budget on a movie whose basic business is consciously to satirize a genre that until recently tended to be low-rent and pretty much self-satirizing. Maybe this is an all too conspicuous waste of precious cinematic resources. But you have to admire everyone's chutzpah: the breadth of Burton's (and writer Jonathan Gems') movie references, which range from Kurosawa to Kubrick; and above all their refusal to offer us a single likable character. Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot. --R.S.