Ever After Directed by Andy Tennant Starring Drew Barrymore, Anjelica Huston and Dougray Scott A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow "Lolita" debuts on cable; an Emmy nominated "Simpsons" Y E S T E R D A Y The Negotiator Reviewed by Charles Taylor This cop flick may be big and noisy, but it plods along too slowly to be called an action movie (07/30/98) Hollywood squared By Tim Cavanaugh Pithemovie.com puts Hollywood's uninspired Web sites to shame (07/30/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor Love hurts: the exquisite agony of Bertrand Blier's romantic dramas (07/28/98) American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Kevin Spacey's je ne sais quoi (07/27/98) Saving Private Ryan Reviewed by Gary Kamiya Steven Spielberg brings hell to a theater near you (07/24/98) The Mask of Zorro Reviewed by Charles Taylor A glorious, rousing adventure starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones (07/22/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "The Moon's Our Home": Silvery art deco romantic comedy (07/21/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | After almost 20 years in the public eye, Drew Barrymore has finally gotten to play a princess, and it's about time. Part of what's so satisfying about "Ever After," the smart and lushly romantic new version of "Cinderella" in which she stars, is that it revels in what other movies have only intermittently acknowledged: Barrymore's power to enchant. Barrymore has the sort of charm that can make you cockeyed with happiness. In "Everyone Says I Love You," Tim Roth, playing a paroled bank robber, offers her this "dem, dese and dose" bouquet: "To me, you smell like what I think heaven must smell like." And earlier this year "The Wedding Singer" summed up what a treasure she is in one image: Adam Sandler, having finally worked up his nerve, heads over to Barrymore's house to tell her he's in love with her. There he sees the girl of his dreams standing in the soft glow of her second-story window, radiant in a storybook-perfect white wedding gown. The effect couldn't be much more stunning if that suburban colonial were a castle bower. Either way, she's right out of a fairy tale. "Ever After," Barrymore's first real starring role, is a chance for her to dominate a picture from beginning to end. She does it sweetly, almost modestly, but with the charisma and presence of a born movie star. It's almost an anticlimax when the prince arrives to sweep her off her feet; she's swept the audience off their feet long before that. Casting Barrymore as Cinderella is an inspired idea, and a tribute to director Andy Tennant's ability to see through the public's perception of Barrymore to her essence as a performer. Since she first appeared in "E.T.," that perception has changed from child star to too-much-too-soon Hollywood casualty to B-movie staple. She's kept working and growing. But no matter how good she's been, she's been saddled with the unfortunate tendency of audiences (and critics) to equate actors with the caliber of the movies they appear in. After the sexpot-rock 'n' roll-rebel roles Barrymore played in the likes of "Poison Ivy," "Guncrazy" and "Bad Girls," it was a done deal that she'd be typed as just another trashy starlet. The reason Christina Ricci hasn't suffered that perception -- though she's played the same sort of roles -- is that she chooses movies with an arty veneer. Ricci doesn't rise above the forced, calculated outrageousness of "The Opposite of Sex" or the execrable "personal" filmmaking of "Buffalo '66" (which I confess to fleeing after 40 minutes), but the art-house crowd can sit through them without feeling like they're slumming. Barrymore has had to wait until "Ever After" for a movie worthy of her, but she's consistently outclassed almost every picture she's been in. She's a delight every moment she's on screen in the entertaining female buddy picture "Boys on the Side." She gets to do some loosey-goosey comedy in her very first scene. Sick of being knocked around by her drug-dealer boyfriend, Barrymore cold-cocks the s.o.b. with a baseball bat. He comes to, only to find himself duct-taped to a chair while Barrymore performs a teasing little cooch dance just out of his reach. When that's done, she plunks herself down in the guy's lap and snaps a Polaroid -- he's enraged and squirming; she's right next to him with a big, open-mouthed smile. And she's frighteningly, wrenchingly effective in the teenage-lovers-on-the-lam picture "Mad Love." Barrymore sidesteps both the movie's clichéd presentation of mental illness as a metaphor for being misunderstood and the hysterics that actors playing crazy people usually can't resist. She conveys encroaching madness as a series of small distractions that gradually overtake her. The expressions that glide over her face as she sits in a restaurant moving her head from side to side are the visual equivalent of a radio dial scanning across the wavelength, picking up every station within its radar. Americans have a tendency to praise the sort of high-hatted acting we think of as enriching or improving. (Maybe because we're taught to think of our own native style -- in everyday speech or behavior, or in the arts -- as lacking somehow, or as being impolite or crude.) What we enjoy is another matter. (If it weren't, Olivia de Havilland -- not Vivien Leigh -- would be the heroine of "Gone with the Wind.") American moviegoers have always fallen for performers who are breezy, casual, sassy. Drew Barrymore's funky, friendly brand of sexiness is in a great American tradition of actresses who, like the young Jane Fonda of "Barefoot in the Park" and "Barbarella," are sexiest when they're funny. Barrymore is more sunny than sultry, less a bad girl than a naughty one. N E X T_P A G E _| A vulnerable beauty