Sabrina.

There was no compelling need to remake Sabrina, the 1954 Billy Wilder movie with Audrey Hepburn. I am far from a Sabrina or Hepburn fanatic, but I do believe in leaving well enough alone, and this was a powerful case of well enough. The new screenplay by Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel adds a few up-to-date touches to the Wilder/Samuel Taylor/Ernest Lehman version: mostly, we get color, Paris, and a lot of fashion-photography sequences. But all this is only window dressing, amiably directed by Sydney Pollack, and with songs by John Williams and Alan and Marilyn Bergman inferior to Frederick Hollander's score for the original.

Harrison Ford may be an improvement over Humphrey Bogart in an unsuitable role, and John Wood, as Sabrina's chauffeur father, is easily the equal of John Williams (the other one). But Greg Kennear is a sorry substitute for William Holden, and Julia Ormond is a mediocre actress with a run-of-the-mill face who bamboozled Hollywood with her British accent. She is better than in her previous films, but that isn't much, and a whole lot less than Audrey Hepburn. The film does, however, have one strong suit in the dazzling cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno, absent from our screens for far too long.

It is proof -- if such were needed -- of the sad state of film reviewing that a pretentious piece of junk such as Wild Bill can be hailed with (un)critical hosannas. Walter Hill is a sometimes effective action director, but he usually strives for something beyond -- symbolic, philosophical -- that does him in. Wild Bill Hickok's story is told here with all sorts of artsy-fartsy flashbacks, loopy camera angles, switches from color to monochrome, disorienting fragmentation, cryptic ellipses, revisionist plot twists, and similar hocus-pocus. Jeff Bridges is a strong enough actor to keep his chin above these muddy waters; everyone else goes under, even the ever-delightful Diane Lane. And then there is Ellen Barkin, whose Calamity Jane is worse than calamitous -- catastrophic.

Even more portentously imbecile is The Crossing Guard, illiterately written and inanely directed by Sean Penn, a first-rate actor but lousy writer-director. Seldom has trash been this portentous and ponderous (the picture deserves the PP award), and the 15 minutes cut from it since its original release make it even more opaque. Jack Nicholson acts his valiant heart out, and David Morse gives a nicely restrained performance, but all is wasted on this existentially posturing piece of stultifying shallowness.

Yet another asinine film is Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, directed by Gary Fleder from an insufferably cutesy script by Scott Rosenberg. The movie will be remembered as the first in which coprophagy plays a part, as practiced (though not on screen) by Treat Williams, who deserves better. Christopher Walken plays a sinister gang boss whose body and limbs are dead, and only his head on a breathing tube is still viciously alive. If Walken won't stop playing these wacko roles, his genuine talent will have to go on the tube or, worse, down the tubes. The delicious Gabrielle Anwar is manhandled by script, direction, and camera.

It is regrettable that Christopher Hampton's moderately interesting play Total Eclipse should have been totaled by the vastly overrated director Agnieszka Holland. It would have helped not to cast the insipidly self-indulgent Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and the abysmal David Thewlis as Verlaine. Romane Bohringer is touching as Verlaine's abused wife, and Hampton himself does well in the small part of a sardonic judge. There is interesting location photography and an enterprising though overinsistent score. But the film is all false notes, rather like DiCaprio's pronunciation of Verlaine as Vurr-layne.

To move Richard III into the 1930s, and turn it into the Hitler story situated in some Nazified England, must have struck Ian McKellen as a supersmart idea. On the stage, it almost worked; on the screen, it starts out catchily enough, but after a while invention flags, and, especially in the battle and single-combat scenes, the dissociation of sensibility becomes too great. McKellen is as remarkable as a loathsome Richard as Olivier was as a charming one, and there is solid supporting work from John Wood (Edward IV), Kristin Scott Thomas (Lady Anne), and Nigel Hawthorne (Clarence). But the worthy Jim Broadbent is totally miscast as Buckingham (his best lines, moreover, cut), Annette Bening is not up to Queen Elizabeth, and Robert Downey Jr. is ludicrous as Rivers. Beefing up the part of Tyrell was a strategic error -- he now duplicates, and thus detracts from, Richard -- but Adrian Dunbar isn't bad in his anachronistic way. There is striking poster-art cinematography by Peter Biziou, and Richard Loncraine's direction has its moments.

Georgia is a monstrosity. It seems that Barbara Turner has two daughters: the successful actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, and her sister who is apparently emulous, envious, and ungifted. So she has written a movie in which Jennifer, fictionalized into Georgia, a beloved pop singer with a happy family, is played by Mare Winningham. The other sister, here named Sadie, is played by Miss Leigh as an absolute horror, almost more obnoxious in her quietly wheedling moments than in her arrogantly presumptuous ones. Sadie takes drugs, makes life precarious for everyone around her, and, trying to imitate her sister, ends up rejected and painfully ridiculous. And more destructive than ever.

There is something odious about this kind of wretched cottage industry on full self-display. Miss Winningham acts and sings very well; Miss Leigh (as in several recent performances) conveys open sores not through makeup, but with actual open sores. Her acting merits three straitjackets.