"Quills" and "Wonder Boys" Directors salute writers, with delirious results. Philip Kaufman's "Quills" limns the Marquis de Sade as an irresistible object who meets an immovable force -- the moral guardians (and hypocrites) of Napoleon's France. Curtis Hanson's "Wonder Boys" pivots on a contemporary novelist who finds it difficult to keep his footing in the success-crazed culture of America. Kaufman's film is funny and fierce, Hanson's funny and melancholic. Both overflow with a love of words and of the actors who speak them -- Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix and Michael Caine in "Quills," and Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr. and Tobey Maguire in "Wonder Boys."

"Best in Show" and "Dr. T and the Women" Taken together, these feats of controlled chaos by a young master and an older one -- Christopher Guest did "Show," Robert Altman "Women" -- occasion the question, "Which is funnier: the canine condition or the human condition?" The answer is the canine, but only by a snout. Although Altman's tale of high-class Dallas females and the one man who truly loves them (a dedicated gynecologist, played by Richard Gere) has been accused of misogyny, it's no more anti-female than "Best in Show" is anti-dog. Altman reserves his most scathing barbs for the guys in their lives, just as Guest does for the pooch handlers.

"Chicken Run" Nick Park and Peter Lord subvert the slang meaning of "chicken" in this salute to the heroism of oppressed and rebellious poultry. Puppet-animation bliss.

"Judy Berlin" and "Croupier" Two more movies about writers -- well, the first is actually about a would-be director with a novelistic sensibility. (Both premiered in the limited-run, 17-city Shooting Gallery series.) Eric Mendelsohn's achingly beautiful "Judy Berlin" is about a young Long Island man and stymied filmmaker (Aaron Harnick) afflicted with nostalgia for the recent past and a former schoolmate (Edie Falco, of HBO's "The Sopranos") fixated on a dream of finding glory in Tinseltown. Mendelsohn's hero is at once alienated from suburbia and in love with it -- a paralyzing mind state. The late Madeline Kahn plays his addled mother, in a swan song at once tremulous and soaring. Mike Hodges' "Croupier," by contrast, renders alienation without an ounce of gentleness, pivoting on a control-freaky would-be novelist (the coolly charismatic Clive Owen) who reduces his life to a tell-all book about the gambling world: "I, Croupier, by Anonymous." "Croupier" is melodrama with a satiric serration and an Oedipal kick, and the most intriguing neo-noir since "The Usual Suspects." (For a great straight shot of the old noir, see the new prints of Jules Dassin's "Rififi.")

"Panic" and "Forever Mine" How about "The Sopranos" redefined? Writer-director Henry Bromell wrote his screenplay for "Panic" -- not a diamond in the rough, but a diamond about a rough -- at the same time that David Chase wrote his pilot for the HBO series. This film's setup resembles a WASP-y "Sopranos" purged of ethnic and operatic excess. William H. Macy is heartbreakingly brilliant as the hit-man son of a hit-man father (Donald Sutherland). Macy can no longer lie to his wife (Tracey Ullman) or uphold the family business. But when a shrink (John Ritter) and an erotically quivering young woman (Neve Campbell) let fresh oxygen into Macy's airtight box, the outcome is an emotional conflagration. Paul Schrader's "Forever Mine," like "Panic," has played nationally only on cable. It's an exquisite doomed romance that moves from Miami to Westchester and from the early '70s to the mid-'80s. It stars Joseph Fiennes and Gretchen Mol as a Hispanic Byronic lover and his warm blond love who confront their destiny amid a backdrop of contract killing and drug trading -- and equally deadly political corruption.

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