Sex, Drugs, and Costner.

Steven Soderbergh, the not untalented but show-offy writer-director, has come up with Traffic, a film based on a BBC TV serial, transposed by him to Mexico, San Diego, Cincinnati, and points beyond. It concerns rival Mexican drug cartels battling each other for supremacy in exporting their unholy wares to our pristine shores. Robert Wakefield, a worthy Ohio judge newly appointed U.S. drug czar, has a bit of a handicap in his 16-year-old daughter Caroline, a druggie and mild orgiast, but really a good girl merely overreacting to paternal neglect in however noble a cause.

The movie careers frantically among four or more stories. There is Robert, the worried father (Michael Douglas, who knows how to worry in a resolute, manly way), his wife, Barbara (Amy Irving, looking drawn but still lovely), and the addicted Caroline (remarkably played by Erika Christensen). Then there are the two Mexican policemen, Javier and Manolo (the hip Benicio Del Toro and vulnerable Jacob Vargas), good actors playing would-be good guys hopelessly buffeted between drug lords-one of them a police chief-more powerful than the police.

Next, there are the two American DEA agents, the Hispanic Ray Castro (Luis Guzman) and the black Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle), guarding a key witness in the trial of Carlos Ayala, an Americanized Mexican drug king in San Diego. The witness is recalcitrant and assassins are after both him and his guards. And there are Carlos himself and his wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who either doesn't know his racket or pretends not to. He being jailed, she takes over his shady business with near- superhuman acumen, while also trying to get him out of jail and fending off the amorous advances of his sleazy lawyer (Dennis Quaid).

There is, furthermore, the rise and fall of the chief Mexican drug fighter, General Salazar, not to mention the tragedy of Ana, Manolo's anxious wife. And also the anguish of a youth from a good American family, Caroline's seducer and fellow junkie, whom Robert roughs up in a concerned fatherly way. And a Mexican killer who gets very thoroughly tortured by the police, but misbehaves again the moment he is free. All in all, two-and-a-half hours of nonstop action, made harder to follow by Soderbergh's fancy filmmaking. But what fun you can have afterward, trying to unravel what you saw.

The film is also a little longer than it needs to be, but it must be granted that it is more adult than most American movies. Best about it is that it perceives drug addiction and the crimes surrounding it as a problem of human nature, not confined to this or that underprivileged group, and that it sees no easy, or even arduous, solution. Although it concludes on a guardedly upbeat note, it offers no panacea, no feel- good ending. Traffic promises to be the most award-winning movie of the year, what with raves from most of my colleagues.

--Do you remember the Cuban missile crisis? You know, the time Kevin Costner saved the eastern U.S. from being bombed to smithereens by Castro and Khrushchev? It was a grim moment in history, and the movie 13 Days manages to whip up some excitement when Costner, as presidential sidekick Kenny O'Donnell, with some help from Jack and Bobby Kennedy, handles Cuba, the U.S.S.R., and our pesky generals and admirals, spoiling to rush us into atomic warfare.

Roger Donaldson is an able director with a good sense of rhythm, variety, and-although we are still here to guess the outcome-a decent measure of suspense. He has found actors most of whom resemble their characters, although Len Cariou as Dean Acheson seems too obviously made up, and Michael Fairman has none of Adlai Stevenson's charmingly quizzical glint, and looks merely feeble and rumpled. Bruce Greenwood is a reasonable facsimile of JFK, though taller and stiffer and surely more humorless; others, notably Steven Culp, who looks and acts Bobby to near-perfection, come off better. But looking right is about as much characterization as they are allowed to offer.

The most amusing performance-not entirely intentional-is Kevin Conway's Gen. Curtis LeMay. I doubt whether LeMay looked like such a snarling bulldog and emitted such goosebump-raising growls, but Conway is surely the ultimate in mad bombardiers, making George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove seem positively benign.

David Self's script brings in all kinds of cloak-and-dagger intrigue and secret negotiations that may or may not be true but certainly make history seem to imitate Hollywood movies. Jack, Bobby, and Costner-who coproduced the movie-compete in who can do a showier Boston accent, with Costner's easily the ooziest.

At predictable intervals we are treated to idyllic scenes of the O'Donnells' home life, which would make Norman Rockwell's mouth water. O'Donnell/Costner is the winner in domestic life as well as in politics; it is only as an actor that he falls short.

--I have my doubts about the greatness of Cormac McCarthy as a novelist, but whatever his All the Pretty Horses may be like, it must be better than what survives in Billy Bob Thornton's movie. Harvey Weinstein, the scissor-happy head of Miramax Films, apparently cut it from somewhere between three and four hours to the present choppy, unpersuasive 112 minutes. Ted Tally is a good writer, and I imagine that his uncut screenplay would have made more sense, but Thornton, even without Weinstein's ministrations, isn't that much of a director. Here he may have been out of his element, so that a longer Horses may not have been a horse of a different color.

This is a kind of mystical western novel that now emerges shorn of its mysticism, and just plain silly. I shall spare you the story (more mischief in Mexico), which here leaps about like a kangaroo and is chary of logic, but I will say that, as the star-crossed lovers, Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz generate less electricity than would make a frog's leg twitch. Among the supporting players, only Lucas Black, as a juvenile hothead of a cowboy, stands out. Barry Markowitz's grandiose cinematography dwarfs the puny characters crawling around in it, and Marty Stuart's presumably appropriate music appropriates way too much of the soundtrack.

Matt Damon has repeatedly declared what a great director Billy Bob was, and how he was able to make the actors feel free and relaxed. Which goes to show that a picnic for the actors may not profit the picture.

--The painter Jackson Pollock may well have been as uncouth as the movie Pollock paints him to be, and Ed Harris (whose directorial debut this is) plays him not so much warts and all as all warts. But the screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller, based on the book by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, merely drips data onto the screen, and never provides a coherent portrait of the man. Outstanding, however, are the cinematography of Lisa Rinzler and the performance of Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner, Pollock's long-suffering wife.

Artists' biographies are a tricky movie subject. The artist at work can be shown only in simplified or romanticized form, and his figure tends to get sentimentalized or mythicized. Pollock does passably by the former-dribbling paint all over a floor being more photogenic than just belaboring a canvas-but the grand failure of the film lies in its total lack of analysis of what made Pollock the monster portrayed. Still less does it interpret his influence on art history, or try to grapple with the question of the artist's moral responsibility. What emerges is a fictionalized documentary, a failure in both directions.