Love Story

Nothing wrong with the syrupy romance Here on Earth that a megadose of insulin couldn't fix. Throw in a year's supply of bran muffins, too, to counteract the schmaltz. A teenage romance in the vein of Love Story, Here on Earth stars Leelee Sobieski as a wisecracking townie who catches the eye of Chris Klein, a smug preppie at a nearby private school. This unmans Josh Hartnett, her stalwart townie beau. No sooner do Samantha (Sobieski) and Kelley (Klein) lock eyes than Jasper (Hartnett)

Planet Earth is a dump. Literally. In the 28th century, the human race has fled to space, and apart from a few cockroaches, there are no life forms to speak of, just empty metropolises, abandoned ultra-malls and mountains of debris festering in the toxic haze of a long-ago environmental meltdown. What's a lonely robot to do? Well, in WALLE, the little rusted box with the binocular face and tank treads for feet falls in love, that's what. An adventurous shift away from the anthropomorphic madcappery of Pixar's recent animated features, WALLE, directed by Finding Nemo and Ratatouille veteran Andrew Stanton, is part love story, part eco-cautionary tale, and, for its first half, pretty much devoid of human dialogue.

Years ago, when "Shadowlands" star Anthony Hopkins was still making ventriloquist horror movies, I doubt anyone thought he'd become one of the most honored and revered stars of his day. Anthony Hopkins owns the '90s. The Oscar man. He won for "The Silence of the Lambs," was nominated again for "Howards End," and will likely be nominated for his roles this year in "Remains of the Day" and "Shadowlands. " Either one would do, since he plays more or less the same character - an uptight British guy who doesn't get any action until well into middle age. Based on the life of British author/educator C.S. Lewis, it casts Hopkins as the brilliant but repressed Lewis, a man who has gray hair and tenure at Oxford before he discovers the joys of romantic and sexual love.

'I always wanted to be in the movies," says Aileen Wuornos, the hard-bitten, homeless soul who turns tricks on Florida roadways, and who, in real life, was convicted of and executed for the murders of men who paid to have sex with her. Well, Wuornos has her movie: In Monster, director Patty Jenkins' "based on a true story" drama, the hooker-turned-killer is portrayed with jumpy and fierce conviction by a virtually unidentifiable Charlize Theron....

As love stories go, this isn't exactly "Romeo and Juliet" or "Casablanca. " Not even Rocky and, yo, Adrian. But, then, this is the 1990s so we must make do. Mike, 33, has an MBA and is a certified public accountant. He has a cool city condo, drives a '57 Thunderbird, plays golf at a suburban club and travels the country on business. And as he frankly says about himself, "I'm a good-looking, strapping, 6-4 young guy. " Despite these many qualities, he had a problem with the opposite sex. "Three years ago, I had a job that kept me zipping around the country so much I didn't really have time to meet women.

What can you say about a 52-year-old photographer who spends a week with a farmer's wife, falls deeply in love and never sees her again? That his tale will hit the best sellers list for 42 weeks straight. That critics will shake their heads at the popularity of a book they trashed. And that readers will ignore reviews to devour a clumsily told story packed with sure-fire fantasies. The book is a little novel called The Bridges of Madison County. Over the past nine months, it has sold 1.5 million copies.

Likely to be nominated for multiple Oscars on Thursday, Silver Linings Playbook offers an affectionate, true portrait of Philadelphia and the suburbs. It's arguably the best film ever made about our region. Silver Linings captures that affecting mix of grit and polish with tremendous warmth, the working-class roots and exceptional pride that are a hallmark of many neighborhoods where homes, no matter how cramped or nouveau grand, are tended like mansions. That specific sense of community extends throughout parts of the city and traverses both sides of the Delaware.

It's hard not to feel empowered by Nathalie Baye. She's the French Rene Russo, a fortysomething actress who just gets bolder and sexier by the minute. But French movies being what they are, Baye plays a babe in "Venus Beauty Institute" who defies logic because love has hold of her. After too many amorous defeats, Baye's Angele resorts to spontaneous diversions with cads and bounders. So when the real deal shows up, naturally she's not interested. Written and directed by Tonie Marshall, the movie is enjoyable but the slight story leaves something to be desired.

"'Meet cute," shorthand for the convention by which two appealing characters are thrown together, would seem as essential to movie love stories as air to balloon. Yet Bounce, writer-director Don Roos' ricochet romance, throws the fetching Ben Affleck at the fine Gwyneth Paltrow with a twist that is the opposite of "meet cute. " He plays a high-flying ad exec who gives his airplane seat to a struggling writer eager to get back to the wife and kids in L.A. The plane crashes. To expiate his guilt, the exec contrives to meet the widow (Paltrow)

Adapted from an H. E. Bates short story called "The Little Farm," director Colin Nutley's Under the Sun is an odd but oddly compelling tale about a lonely middle-aged farmer and the beautiful blonde who responds to his ad for a housemaid. Recalling the Dogme 95 film Mifune in its basic premise and setting (woman responds to ad for maid at rundown farm) but certainly not in its style or tack, this pastoral romance is, in fact, a coming-of-age story. At 40, the solitary Olof (Rolf Lassgard)