Twister.

SOME movies are merely bad, others are downright stupid. Consider Mulholland Falls, where Nick Nolte looks dumb with greater concentration than you would think possible even for someone who comes by it naturally. It is a picture that makes scant sense from start to finish, and in which Melanie Griffith, as Nolte's neglected wife pining away in the Los Angeles of the Fifties, is shown reading A Farewell to Arms in a British edition that did not yet exist.

Or take Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, which begins pompously with a quotation from Henri Michaux ("It is preferable not to travel with a dead man," something we don't need a Belgian surrealist to tell us), and centers on a displaced accountant called William Blake, whom an Indian named Nobody mistakes for the long-dead poet. Blake and Nobody's trek to the Pacific features more non-sequiturs than a porcupine, or the real William Blake, had quills, vitiating the movie's promising beginning and amusing performances.

And now for a really huge, and hugely imbecile, film, Twister, written by the celebrated science-novelist-cum-scenarist Michael Crichton and his wife, Ann-Marie Martin. Here the science is tornado tracking, and an invention by the hero and his wife of a contraption that spouts sensors when deposited in a tornado's path. These will then provide information about twisters, and extend the warning time from 5 to 15 minutes, which seems like a meager gain, but with tornadoes as with today's movies, you take what you can get.

Bill and Jo were a happily married pair of meteorologists, but he quit to become a mere weatherman in New York, and intends to marry Melissa, an even merer therapist. With her in tow, he returns to tornado country in person to deliver the divorce papers, with which the mails apparently cannot be trusted. But neither can Jo, still in love with Bill, who keeps forgetting to sign one of the pages. So Bill and Melissa, in their cherry-red van, must trek after Jo and her team of tornado hunters in white vehicles. Trying to drive them off the road is a vicious rival team in black cars, sponsored by evil capitalists and led by the contemptible Jonas, who has cribbed Bill and Jo's idea and constructed his version of the great invention. Theirs is lovably called Dorothy (think Oz!) and spouts nice spherical sensors; his is a nameless Product X, with nasty, cube-shaped sensors.

The movie is deep. In a prologue, we see young Jo's father being blown away by an F-5, the hugest twister there is, providing a suitably Freudian explanation for her subsequent obsession. Bill's compulsion, although unexplained, is equally strong, and off he drags poor Melissa into the chase, very unnerving for her, especially as she keeps getting, in mid tornado in the back seat of a van, inconvenient panic calls from patients on her cellular phone. And it is on the threshold of an F-5 -- the film works its way up gradually on the F scale -- that Melissa decides to dump Bill. Their parting under a lowering sky and amid pandemonium is one of the most ludicrous scenes in movie history, and should be caught by connoisseurs of that kind of disaster.

Reviewers have commented on the sexiness of being tornado-buffeted and running for dear life side by side. Though platonic, the voluptuousness elicited verges on the pornographic. We, alas, after one or two twisters, have seen them all. It matters little whether what flies overhead is a cow, a tree, or a father; whether it is an exploding tank truck or a house complete with picket fence that plummets onto the highway, forcing Bill and Jo to drive through the obstacle like participants in a demolition derby. Luckily, those tornadoes, like the rest of us, have proper respect for movie stars, and spare every hair on Bill Paxton's and Helen Hunt's six-figure heads.

This may have something to do with the brooding rapture with which Jo and especially Bill gaze at the tornado-pregnant sky, fully forewarned much more than 15 minutes ahead. They can also predict every twist and turn of the twister: it is a mystical communion with nature, a sixth sense that sensors, whether globular or cubic, cannot begin to match. How different Bill and Jo are from the rest of their crew, brashly horsing around in between tornadoes, like grade-schoolers during recess.

Jan De Bont, who directed, did much better with Speed; Jack N. Green shot the various Fs sometimes as enormous, whirling white chanterelles, sometimes as monstrous coils of black barbed wire hurtling forward. The acting ranges from bearable to fatuous, the latter notably from Alan Ruck as the blubberiest blabbermouth in Jo's retinue.

The other smasheroo of the week (month? year?) is Mission: Impossible, a roller-coaster ride with Tom Cruise. I never watched the Sixties TV series, which may partly explain my malfunctioning, but I must confess to hardly understanding anything about this movie, not even the pre-credit sequence. I sat there like someone whose mind had been blown away by an F-5, an effect Brian DePalma's direction often has on me, but never before so thoroughly.

I can say only that, despite a dizzying display of technical effects, the movie left me incredulous, indifferent, and all but comatose. Tom Cruise's acting style, consisting largely of a half-opened mouth and glittering stare, poaches on the territories of sexy starlets of the Fifties and horror-film heroines of various decades. Cruise exudes enough energy to inflate a hot-air balloon, or at least a sizable paper bag. As his spy boss, Jon Voight looks and acts like an overage beach bum, which seems inappropriate, but what do I know about spy bosses? I do know, however, that this David Koepp - Robert Towne screenplay cheats horrendously, and that Emmanuelle Beart, so delightful in French films, comes across here as a dopey dropout from Hollywood High. But even the usually excellent Kristin Scott-Thomas and Vanessa Redgrave can do very little, and Henry Czerny, so smoothly sinister when given half a chance, here only acts by the numbers, from 1 to 3.

What a relief to turn from all this to The Horseman on the Roof, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who gave us Cyrano, and, sure enough, Gerard Depardieu pops up in a spirited cameo. The film is based on a 1951 novel by Jean Giono, a regional writer of ecumenical scope, and the author also of The Baker's Wife. His works are imbued with the love of his lovely native Provence. Here he tells of a young colonel in the Piedmontese cavalry, Angelo Pardi, who, like many other Carbonari (clandestine Republicans), fled to the south of France, pursued by the Austrian secret police. The time is the 1830s, cholera is sweeping through the land, and Angelo, entrusted with moneys collected to be taken back to Italy, must dodge not only the Austrians, but also French patrols quarantining all who try to leave Provence. And also the cholera itself, whose victims are dying in ghastly convulsions all around.

Fleeing from some villagers who foolishly perceive him as the poisoner of their wells with cholera, Angelo takes to the roof tops in the company of a spunky cat, until he drops through a skylight into the temporary home of Pauline, the young wife of the elderly Marquis de Theus, from whom she has become separated by the outbreak of the plague. Angelo gallantly postpones his return to Italy to act as Pauline's bodyguard as she searches for her husband through manifold perils. This has been aptly described as an equestrian road movie; it is also a magnificent swashbuckler, an ultraromantic but adult love story, and a brilliantly psychological, Stendhalian evocation of character in action.

There is Giono's love of the land captured with controlled lushness by the inspired camera of Thierry Arbogast (who also shot Ma Saison Preferee), and the growing love between the boyishly idealistic Angelo and the unhappily married but faithful Pauline. There are the depredations of the epidemic, and the meanness it brings out in some, nobility in others. There is intense passion without so much as one conventional kiss. There is the poetry of Giono's language, superbly translated to the screen by the gifted scenarists, who include the director himself. Quite a bit of it survives even in the subtitles.

For once, the well-publicized offscreen love affair of the principals, Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez, is critically relevant: their performances glow with the deepest and subtlest affection I may ever have encountered on screen. This is how strong-willed, tough-minded, idiosyncratic individuals undergo the purifying fire of love, to emerge fully human and ready for all the exigencies of life. Everyone, including the wonderful cat, acts to perfection; your role, dear reader, is to hasten to this unique adventure and have one of the sweetest times of your life.