The Quick and the Dead.

really matters. What makes the movie so interesting is the small incidents, the exchanges of banter containing the odd occasional sting of lancinating truth, and the leisurely yet madcap way in which these three keep getting closer to one another - indeed, become family. Only Robin has a real mother, in San Diego, but one from whom she is totally estranged. Now each woman has two sisters as they start forging new lives for themselves. And everything could be lovely if Holly did not confess to her policeman lover, if Jane weren't so hopelessly in love with the straight Robin, and if AIDS did not act up in Robin just as she was coming fully alive.

The astounding thing is that this so correctly perceived story of feminine bonding, evoked in such telling and persuasive detail, was written by a man (Don Roos) and directed by a man (Herbert Ross). Throughout, Robin contributes an idealism that becomes more realistic, Jane a wisecracking skepticism that turns loving and protective of Robin, and Holly a savvy intuition underneath her oversexed ditsiness. But I must stress that nothing that is done or said here is conventional or predictable: the humor, the sadness, the everyday extraordinariness of it are always surprising.

It is, I repeat, all in the details. Details of travel on carefully caught highways, details of teasing or helping one another, details of contacts with passing or persisting strangers. Above all, the pointed or poignant dialogue, often unforcedly witty, and sometimes quite plain, unadorned, and touching. Boys on the Side has a remarkable self-assurance about it, whether dealing in light-hearted badinage or encroaching devastation.

Part of that firmness comes from the solid performances. Whoopi Goldberg, whom I have always cordially disliked, displays here a gift for ironic understatement - a charged look, a corrosive inflection - that works with cool, suggestive incisiveness. Drew Barrymore creates a character out of more familiar material through an earnest naturalness with which she accosts other people's and her own absurdities. And Mary-Louise Parker reaffirms her status as one of our most fetching and affecting actresses: she acts with every part of her body, has oddly evocative resonances in her voice along with a delightful rubato in her delivery, and two huge eyes that seem to revolve worlds inside them.

Praise must also go to Donald E. Thorin for moody cinematography that puts both barroom darkness and outdoor brightness striking uses, and features marvelous helicopter shots of the open road; to Ken Adam's customary skill in production design, deployed here in humbler locales, very different from the usual epic and exotic ones; and to David Newman's skillful blend of mostly found music. Even the supporting performances - Anita Gillette's doting mother, Dennis Boutsikaris's slimily slick DA, and Matthew McConaughey's sweetly obtuse Tucson cop - are outstanding.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is an item as phony as filmmaking gets, The Quick and the Dead, co-produced by and starring Sharon Stone. It is a Western written by Simon Moore, an Englishman whose knowledge of the American West is based exclusively on movies, and mostly spaghetti Westerns at that, as witness the cameo appearance of Woody Strode, one of Sergio Leone's favorites. If ever a movie smelled of shameless elucubration, of being sucked out of anywhere from one to ten thumbs, this is it.

Consider only the two basic conceits. First: the mysterious gunslinger, the stranger of few but stinging words - the Gregory Peck or Alan Ladd role - is played here by Sharon Stone. We are to believe that this sexy chiquita, who is really a tough hombre, can ride and swagger through the Old West as inconspicuous in her artfully designed clothes, artfully designed makeup, and artfully designed persona as if she were Walter Brennan or Ernest Borgnine. No one pays much attention to her, no one makes a pass at her; even the chief villain - called John Herod (!) and played by everybody's favorite supervarmint, Gene Hackman - who invites her to an intimate dinner with seduction contemplated, treats her with courtesy and deference, though by now she is not wearing her cowboy togs, but some drop-dead Lola Montez outfit of the kind she must carry around as a saddlebag-stuffer.

Second: The Game. This Tombstonelike town indulges in a yearly jamboree: the most trigger-happy denizens and visitors are paired off on the barroom blackboard as for a tennis tournament, except that this is a series shootouts in the town's only street. In the first few rounds you need merely incapacitate your opponent; starting with the quarterfinals, you are shoot him (or, in Miss Stone's case, her) dead. This is the kind of blood sport the town's evil boss, John Herod, promotes and participates in, and all that in an underpopulated West where on could ill afford more than the customary shootouts. But English cineasts - perhaps in unconscious response to overpopulated London slums - do come up with ideas of this kind: think of Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.

Sam Raimi, who directed, is full quaint tricks himself. Some are as hoary as jangling-spurred boots be striding the dirt street in ominous closeup; some ludicrously newfangled such as shooting (with the camera) the victor in one such duel through the hole he has shot (with a gun) in the head of his victim. We need that kind of cleverness like a hole in the head. There are also various deliberated fudged elements: does Ellen (Sharon Stone) actually spend a night with the Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio, the smarmiest young actor in Hollywood, who could easily pass for Miss Stone's stand-in)? And is this champion gunslinger, junior division, really the bastard son of John Herod, who does him dirt? (One hint: remember Herod in the Bible and the slaughter of the innocents.)

The grossness of the movie is somewhat mitigated by its laughableness, as when Miss Stone parades around her sleazy hotel room in a mid-thigh-length shift. She is not called upon to do much acting, but the way she narrows her eyes to a slit and hisses out a sarcasm redounds to her credit. Hackman just keeps smiling and killing with equal aplomb; his heroic adversary is Russell Crowe (an actor from down under), as a former fellow bandit turned preacher and man of peace, with a properly hangdog look until he reaches for a handgun again, this time in a righteous cause.

Cliches flit through the film: the evil brothel-keeper Eugene Dred (!), and the golden-hearted whore in love with the Kid, also the good old doctor who . . . but enough. Both this movie and Boys on the Side were shot around Tucson, and both contain flashbacks to a heroine's childhood memories. Otherwise, they are worlds apart.