Hero.

* But old worlds, too, are being rediscovered. Take Hero, wherein the producer, Laura Ziskin, a USC filmschool graduate, supplied the idea to Alvin Sargent, a true and tested screenplay wizard, then had it further polished by David Webb Peoples, a new screenplay wizard, author of, among not many others, the script for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

Hero is another movie that need not detain us long, except to note how the old Frank Capra or Preston Sturges movies, taught in film schools, can be recycled in slightly refurbished form by the likes of Miss Ziskin and her cohort for Nineties use. Here we have a glitzy British (but Hollywood-oriented) director, Stephen Frears, a slick British composer, George Fenton, the British cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, and the British film editor Mick Audsley teaming up to bestow on us an archetypally American Capra or Sturges movie.

But there is a difference. A Capra film (Sturges is a more complex case), although starting from a preposterous premise, belabored its simple point with a dogged, naive faith in its story, its people. All right, we know now that Capra and his writers were not the sweet, humane simpletons they pretended to be, but they believed in what they were doing, could fool themselves into falling for their own legerdemain. But the Ziskin gang fabricates a story full of complicated reversals, double bottoms, and tricksy non-sequiturs until the whole thing, instead of merely proceeding from a basic fantasy, is awash in grandiose absurdity. All the same, one may enjoy Dustin Hoffman  and Andy Garcia going through their tricks, and Geena Davis trying to huff her way into being Jean Arthur. Aside from everything else, she is, unnervingly, too tall for Garcia. But then, this is a tall tale.