Amistad.

CHRISTMAS is the time we film critics dread the most: more movies are showered on us than flesh can bear or mind absorb, and this year it has been even worse than usual. I have space for only three of them, dealt with rather laconically, but holiday guidance must supersede belletristics.

Titanic, made jointly by two major studios, is at two hundred million plus the costliest movie ever, but you can see where just about every dollar went. Here is a drama the world never tires of, but whose numerous ramifications even a 194-minute film can't quite cope with. This one, written and directed by James Cameron, is exciting in all but its central story, which, artistically, is the real disaster. It is the brief and tragic tale of Leonardo DiCaprio, a young American painter from steerage, and Kate Winslet, a not-so-affluent girl from first class, sailing with her mercenary mother, Frances Fisher, and her callous but wealthy fiance, Billy Zane. (I am using the actors' real names to emphasize the story's hokiness.) Everything that happens to these people is utterly crass -- including Leonardo's secretly drawing Kate in the nude and Billy's trying to shoot the love thief as the boat is already sinking -- and not helped by Mr. Zane's and Miss Fisher's giving better performances than the leads.

Every cliche of young shipboard romance, visual and verbal, is proudly trotted out, along with a few far-fetched maneuvers. Thus Leonardo saves Kate from the unlikeliest of suicides, and deflowers her in a fancy motor car traveling across the ocean. Thus, too, Leonardo is unjustly accused of theft and handcuffed to a pole just as the catastrophe is about to occur; risking all, Kate saves him. And more such stuff. The crowning absurdity is the feel-good ending, with the entire cast lining the liner's grand staircase to cheer the young lovers as they embrace. Whether this is a statement about immortality or the wrap party being memorialized, it belongs in a long-overdue Museum of Cinematic Bathos.

There is a frame story involving the people trying to raise the Titanic (marvelous documentary footage) and a very old woman survivor of the disaster, who turns out to be -- guess who. Throughout, whatever pertains to the historical aspects of the ship's life and death is absolutely splendid, and direction, production design, and cinematography (Russell Carpenter) deserve highest praise. Titanic is never boring, only often naggingly annoying, down to the preposterous way one of the principals survives and the other dies.

Amistad has been termed by its director, Steven Spielberg, "an extraordinarily important film," and who would know better? It shows that one can follow a factual outline reasonably closely and still come up with poster art for the delectation of knee-jerk liberals. I do not mind bringing together Cinque, the leader of the rebellion aboard the slaver La Amistad in 1839, with the man who defended the rebel slaves before the Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams, even though history records no such meeting. Nor do I mind other reasonable liberties of historical fiction.

I do, however, object to vulgarization. Take Anthony Hopkins's Adams, as bad a performance by a major actor as you'll ever see. Hopkins offers an anthology of mannerisms: fussy little gestures, quirky pauses, exaggerated absentmindedness, fingering of irrelevant objects (mostly plants -- horticulture as monomania), aleatory vocal inflections, restless pacing about: a course in scene-stealing. And if what he produces is his idea of a Boston accent, Hopkins is full of beans.

Although the black performers were given careful instruction in Mende speech, what they say in authentic Mende is not translated for a very long time, and when it finally gets subtitled (screenplay by David Franzoni), you wonder whether you weren't better off before. My favorite bit is when Cinque gets a lesson in jail from one of his fellows, who learned English from reading the King James Bible in the standard monolingual edition -- a minor miracle. Thus exposed to the New Testament, Cinque is understandably an instant convert.

As Roger Baldwin, the pawky lawyer hired by the abolitionists, and as Secretary of State Forsyth, Matthew McConaughey and David Paymer give performances devoid of a trace of period sense: remove their wigs and we are smack-dab in Grishamland. Even such incomparable character actors as Nigel Hawthorne and Pete Postlethwaite (Martin Van Buren and District Attorney Saunders) cannot turn bare bones into living flesh. With the exception of Morgan Freeman, as a composite of several black abolitionists, the major Americans are played by Brits and one Swede, Stellan Skarsgard, who comes closest to credible Yankeedom.

The absurdity is all-pervasive. Take a sequence in which a number of slaves are chained to a pile of rocks and thrown overboard to be dragged to their deaths. Spielberg positions the camera for a final shot deep underwater, so that the drowners emitting bubbles come at us like a lineup of holiday divers in for some aquatic fun. In an earlier sequence, Cinque and one of his henchmen, after killing most of the Spanish crew, contend for the captaincy of the ship. In extreme closeup, they howl at each other in an untranslated outburst, head to head. The effect is to make them as unsympathetic as possible: you expect that, at any moment, an ear will be bitten off. For background music, John Williams provides an almost ceaseless chorus of holier-than-thou pseudospirituals.

Some actors manage to register: Djimon Hounsou as Cinque, Arliss Howard as Calhoun, and Jeremy Northam as a young Catholic judge struggling with his conscience. Others, though, are painfully obvious, not least Anna Paquin as the adolescent Isabella II of Spain, jumping up and down on her royal bed in Spanish. I also relished the bit when the blacks objected to their lawyer's use of the word should, a word nonexistent in Mende, where things either are or aren't. The film presents this as clear proof of moral superiority. I feel great sympathy for all the actors who, having to wear irons on neck, wrists, and ankles, chafed those parts raw. But the filmmakers' knees must have endured a no less liberal workout.

Although Clint Eastwood is a not untalented director, he has never really transcended the couple of genres in which he specializes. Thus he is out of his element in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, where he all but fumbles the Evil and falls flat with the Good. Though based on John Berendt's captivating nonfiction book, the movie (to continue the Titanic/Amistad motif) thoroughly misses the boat. No fault of Jack N. Green's camera, which does convey the blandishments of Savannah, including those of Mercer House, where Jim Williams, the antique dealer, restorer, and collector, made his stately but unconventional home.

But the story of how Jim was judicially exculpated for the fatal shooting of his irascible homosexual lover is thickly embedded in the life of Savannah. The movie, bringing in ancillary characters and events, undermines its own neatly fictional structure; disjointedness prevails. The excellent Kevin Spacey, as Jim, reined in by the director, is less fascinating than usual. Among the film's invented characters, John Cusack, as a Northern journalist with mouth constantly agape, is worst, followed closely by the director's daughter, Alison Eastwood, as Cusack's unconvincing love interest. Among the real-life ones, The Lady Chablis, a black transvestite playing him/herself, is by far the most unprepossessing. Playing Jim's shrewd, good-old-boy lawyer, Jack Thompson, an Australian, comes off best.