It is years now since Elizabeth Taylor made a proper movie. Yet we know she’s there, still: her face blooms for perfume promotions, and she’s always likely to be standing up for AIDS victims or Michael Jackson. Are we meant to think she has the same sincerity for all three? Or is she resting? That would be sad -- for at one time, she seemed uncommonly engaged, in movies and scandal alike.

Though her love life and the soap opera of her health seem to have been with us as long as the H-bomb, Liz was younger than, say, Audrey Hepburn or Rock Hudson. When they made "Giant" (56, George Stevens), she was actually a year younger than James Dean. Brought up at a time when sexuality on the screen was still creatively suppressed by censorship, her private life was paraded by the press as that of a love goddess. That now looks like the last flare of classic star charisma, the last time the public could read any imagined voluptuousness into a decorous, sulky princess of "House & Garden." Image and reality clashed like cymbals in "Cleopatra" (63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). But though the chaos of that film’s making included Liz dangerously ill and Liz exchanging a fourth husband (Eddie Fisher) for a fifth (Richard Burton), her Queen of the Nile emerged a plump, complacent clotheshorse.

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That stretch of line was winding and longer than usual, and sometimes in the rush hour my packed train came to an absolute halt. I felt panic inside me, no matter that I was in my 20s, strong, not inclined to the irrational and, as I thought, happy. I had to leave London, and one way or another I ended up in America.

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Made 24 years ago, "Fingers" is still the best thing writer-director James Toback has ever done, and one of the most startling debuts in American film. Long before people had the idea of making movies from graphic novels, "Fingers" is like the screen treatment of a comic book that might have been written by Sigmund Freud and illustrated by Lucian Freud. It is pulp raised to the level of the rarest brie cheese, which is to say that it hovers over the boundary between gourmandise and pure nausea. It is a great film, made by a brilliant young man who was taking "movie" then as if it were the most dangerous drug in the pharmacy.

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Not that the promos are unpromising, by any means. Dennis Haysbert would seem to be president by now (and wearing a deep pink shirt, which is promising), and Jack may be the one person in the security apparatus whom this president will trust. Moreover, the flashes of our hectic future indicate the kind of world disaster (are we talking biological agents?) for which every daily paper prepares us. There are shots of people wrapped up in plastic suiting, a haunting image to be sure, but not good for dialogue.

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No, it's not Huppert's blood, I'm sure; and Erika is what you might call a bloodless creation -- though not necessarily "anemic." The blood is just red, there in the bath, or poured in by some out-of-sight props person so that it may be discovered eventually, as evidence of self-inflicted damage.

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So this is the first of two reflections on "The Piano Teacher" -- coming to your private place soon.

Erika Kohut lives in Vienna but speaks French -- like all the film's characters. In one synopsis of the film, I saw that Erika was said to be "pushing 40." But since Erika is, in every shot as far as I could see, Isabelle Huppert, then I'm bound to conclude that Erika is 45, which was Huppert's age when the film was released. And it's not just that she is Isabelle Huppert -- she also looks like Huppert. By which I mean to say that Erika has graciously yielded to the stardom and what you might call the severe, or the austere, or the harsh, or the numb beauty of Isabelle Huppert. We can leave that decision for the moment, I think, but it is clearly important that Erika is a movie star.

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Don't misunderstand me. I see Kate Hudson as a lovely, decent, wholesome young thing, a credit to her upbringing and all the solid sense talked at the Goldie-Kurt Russell dinner table. But just think of those feathers! While Kate Hudson is handing out a white feather with all the demure, depressed, constipated disapproval of a Victorian miss who wants her idiot officer husband honorable, if anyone had ever offered the young Goldie a feather she'd have used it to tickle Dick Martin to the point of delirious orgasm. I mean, that Goldie was a wild thing.

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To understand that story, you have to get a grasp on the relationship that existed between the playwright, Tennessee Williams, and his director, Elia Kazan -- before either of them was anywhere near as famous as "Streetcar" would make them. Williams was shy, stricken, poetic, not terribly ambitious, not a very effective career-maker, who had fashioned a play that explored American sexuality more deeply than he perhaps understood. He was also as openly gay as the 1940s permitted. In so many ways, Kazan was his exact opposite: brutally candid, murderously ambitious, aggressive and manipulative, and very heterosexual. And Kazan was a new kind of director in that he felt a passionate need to express himself in his productions -- the plays he directed had to be ones in which he found himself.

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None of the above: Morvern Callar is a young woman who lives and works as a supermarket shelf-stacker in some dismal Scottish town. She's also the leading character in the new film by Lynne Ramsay ("Ratcatcher"), which, strangely, was not chosen for the New York Film Festival, but which I want to recommend.

Ms. Callar seems to wake up one morning to find her lover dead. We never learn why he's killed himself, and Morvern isn't unduly involved in that matter. It's odd, too, that the young man has no friends or relatives who call in, wondering what's become of him or the novel he was writing. But the novel is there on his word processor, the very place where a farewell note to Morvern urges her to send the book to publishers. She does so -- but only after deleting his and putting her own name on the title page.

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There is an odd way in which "Auto-Focus" is akin to aversion therapy. Though something larger than just sex, I think, is being undermined. It's likability.

This is the story of Bob Crane, a rather mild, smooth, empty actor and a very likable guy -- or so he wanted us to believe. I'll go further: I think he was desperate to believe it himself. The story is set in the '60s, at which time Crane has just come off a modest success in the "Donna Reed Show," playing -- what else? A very likable guy. Bob is happily married in "Auto-Focus" in the way people in "The Donna Reed Show" or its intervening commercials were happily together. By which I mean to say that no stone is ever allowed to disturb the bland surface of their life.

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In "Lovely & Amazing" there are four women: a mother (Brenda Blethyn) who is having liposuction; her two daughters, Keener and Emily Mortimer; and her black adopted daughter, a child still. Keener is unhappily married with a child and no job. Mortimer has a boyfriend and a very uncertain career as an actress. The very nice suggestion in "Lovely & Amazing" is the several vague yet primal ways in which the older daughters feel like sisters -- not least the sense of some shared impediment in their souls so that they do not quite feel beautiful or sexy. And this is simply adjacent to the way their mother (in her 50s) needs liposuction and a doctor to flirt with.

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She came from a landowning family in Northern Ireland, and she looked a little like the queen. Or she did then, in the '60s and '70s, when I knew her. I can't quite guess what she looked like last week, for I hadn't seen her in 25 years. She was old-fashioned in a very appealing way: She had exquisite, gentle manners; she was a model of kindness to others; she was always asking after your interests and concerns; and she was not much there herself. Alone in this intense family, she did not cause scenes or leave her wild problems to be stepped around. She had a husband, two sons, dogs always and a large comfortable house in a good part of south London. They were managing very nicely, it seemed. The thing called the '60s, it seemed to me, had had not the least effect on her strong walls: Her ideas, her attitudes, her sense of service came from an earlier age and had not been altered an atom.

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Lucian became a British citizen in 1939, and he has been a reclusive figure in the London art world ever since the end of the Second World War. Now, as he turns 80, he is the subject of an immense and very moving retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London.

That's right -- go to London, allow yourself a couple of days at the Tate, take your time, survey the several rooms and the path of his life first before you begin to wrestle with his intimidating pictures. And don't be overawed or unduly guided by the fact that he is a Freud. Not at first anyway. For this Freud may be the greatest living painter -- and he is, quite plainly, one of the visionaries of the body, of flesh, of the mind behind it, and how we need both to see the body yet disregard it.

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Now, this is not simple partiality leaping to the actress's defense. I admire her well enough, though I'd have to admit that there have been too many occasions when I regarded her as a bit of a pain in the neck. Still, it is Jennifer Jason Leigh playing Tom Hanks' wife, and Ms. Jason Leigh is, if not quite a star, then what you'd have to call a female lead. When you discover that she's in the picture, you take it for granted -- as she may well have done herself in signing on -- that she's going to have something to do, to say, to register.

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"Minority Report" is a long film -- far too long for its own good -- yet it never begins to offer a plain, practical explanation of how pre-cogs work. That doesn't matter: The notion that, suspended in liquid, with heightened sensitivities, they can somehow perceive flashes or shots of what will happen is satisfactory sci-fi. They can do it because they can pick up intuitively on the intense, dark desires of people like us. That's a workable concept, and it becomes much more in the image and haunted Auschwitz presence of Samantha Morton as Agatha, the most acute (and vulnerable) of the floating seers. Morton leaps across plausibility with the same ease Cruise has (and this, in turn, manages to establish how uneasy Cruise -- cocksure or nothing -- felt in "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Vanilla Sky").

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But I wonder, still, whether with its heralded DVD release, "Blue Velvet" will still send some of us in search of the Valium. Not that anything you might expect to find in a "re-release" will actually be there. There is talk of scenes that were cut or omitted from the original, but apparently they amount to nothing more than sketchy reports and vaguely suggestive stills. The footage itself is lost. As other recent events have made clear, this is a culture that cannot keep clerical control of its outrages.

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I know, that name is not quite allowed in this country because it is supposed to be kept under lock and key for that other game -- not a bad game, even if it compels men to be too large and replaces the real adventures of the mind with the huddles, the jargon and the militaristic submersion of identity in "planning."

So American football is a fine thing. Still, America could do itself good all over the world by saying, Well, yes, after all, we all know what football is, football is the game made by Stanley Matthews, Ferenc Puskas, Pele, Maradona and Zidane, football is the world's passion and festival, one of the greatest forms of play ever invented (and a turn-on). Therefore, "our" "football" needs a new name -- let's call it "gridiron" or "attack" or whatever you like. "Soccer" is such a stupid name. How many of the children playing all over the U.S. today actually know why it is called "soccer"? How many readers of this piece know? (For the answer, see below.) Give us back the real meaning of "football."

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