Mary Mcdonnell

Finally, an awards show that can accommodate both "Dances with Wolves" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. " "Dances with Wolves" was voted Best Drama and "Ninja Turtles" Best Children's or Family Film by an estimated 1 million theatergoers polled to determine winners of the Movie Awards, which were to be presented last night at ceremonies broadcast on CBS. "Pretty Woman" captured Best Comedy honors, while "The Hunt for Red October" won...

The feather-light comedy Mumford is a quirkathon about a small-town psychologist who may be a fake but who is nonetheless more successful at his trade than the certified real deals. Where the other shrinks in town encourage their patients to vent, Mumford hears them out and empathizes in a way that may be less directive but is definitely more therapeutic. Instead of being left to stew in their own spleen, Mumford's patients move on to form healthy attachments. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this eccentric fairy tale with the feel of Our Town has a number of remarkable performances, chiefly those of Loren Dean in the title role and Jason Lee as Skip Skipperton, king of computers and skateboards.

Any good farmer knows that corn should be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Apparently, movie producers know this as well. "Independence Day" has arrived, and corn is flourishing in this cheerfully goofy sci-fi epic about an intergalactic army bent on destroying the human population of Earth. A throwback to the B-grade science-fiction thrillers of the 1950s, and the C-grade Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970s (think "The Poseidon Adventure"), "Independence Day" throws a bunch of sort-of-famous actors into the path of a catastrophe while we wait around to see who dies.

Someone must have broken into Lawrence Kasdan's Infiniti and taken his compact-disc player. That would explain why rampant poverty, crime and selfishness have finally made an impression on Kasdan ("The Big Chill"), moviedom's official spokesman for the concerns of affluent baby-boomers. Kasdan is the latest writer/director to turn his attention to the question "What's wrong with America?" - following John Singleton ("Boyz N the Hood")and John Sayles ("City of Hope"), both of whom he copies unsuccessfully in his foggy, interminable "Grand Canyon.

How old is Tiger Warsaw? So old that its star, Patrick Swayze, hadn't even mamboed Jennifer Grey off her itsy-bitsy little feet yet. That's right, this murky melodrama set in a tiny town in Western Pennsylvania had been shot - in some dark, undiscernible style - way back in 1986. Tiger Warsaw has been in the can since before Dirty Dancing became a humongous hit and a live tour and a TV show - and in the can it should have stayed. Not even the squealing throngs of Swayze-crazies who pop the Dirty Dancing cassette into their VCRs every weekend are going to find much in Tiger Warsaw.

"Blue Chips" made me realize that television has one big advantage over motion pictures, and that is the mute button. You're watching this movie - a straightforward piece of muckraking about corruption in bigtime college basketball - and suddenly you're looking right at announcer Dick Vitale. Aside from the obvious symbolism, this is disturbing. Because you're not just looking at him, and let me tell you that's no treat, but listening to him, and there's no way to turn him off. That's the thing about cameos - sometimes they take you right out of the picture.

A likable though entirely predictable caper movie, Sneakers feels like something from another era - a high-tech Topkapi, a computer-world To Catch a Thief. You've got your surfeit of stars - Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd. You've got your complex scam - an elaborate breaking-and-entering job. And you've got your handsome leading man - Robert Redford, trying to recoup from the box-office debacle that was Havana. You've also got a title that might keep 'em out of the theaters.

John Sayles made evocative use of the swampy waters of the Louisiana bayou in Passion Fish, but it was his adamant refusal to allow a drop of sentimentality into the movie that sets it apart. Sayles wrote and directed the picture in 1993, after Eight Men Out and City of Hope, two superb films about public issues. Passion Fish returned him to his roots - and to the kind of intimately scaled, observant story that forged his reputation. Passion Fish focuses on the relationship of a crippled soap opera actress and her African American nurse without turning into a soap opera itself.

THE CLOSER. 9 p.m. Monday, TNT. MAJOR CRIMES. 10:06 p.m. Monday, TNT. Moves to 9 p.m. Mondays on Aug. 20.   KYRA SEDGWICK closes out her seven-season run as one of TNT's biggest stars on Monday, and if all goes according to plan, fans of "The Closer" won't miss a step. At 10:06 p.m., Mary McDonnell, the show's star-in-waiting, takes over as head of TNT's new "Major Crimes," which is less a spinoff than a continuation of "The Closer. " Without, of course, the closer herself.

The director John Huston said that action is the language of film. I think writer/director Lawrence Kasdan has it backwards. In his movies, language is the action, such as it is. That's certainly true of "Mumford," a gabfest about a phlegmatic therapist named Mumford (Loren Dean) who treats the mildly neurotic residents of a small town, listening to their problems, nudging them in the direction of happiness. "Mumford" is constructed a long and varied stream of patients and sessions, an approach that complements the director's customary ensemble approach.

THE CLOSER. 9 p.m. Monday, TNT. MAJOR CRIMES. 10:06 p.m. Monday, TNT. Moves to 9 p.m. Mondays on Aug. 20.   KYRA SEDGWICK closes out her seven-season run as one of TNT's biggest stars on Monday, and if all goes according to plan, fans of "The Closer" won't miss a step. At 10:06 p.m., Mary McDonnell, the show's star-in-waiting, takes over as head of TNT's new "Major Crimes," which is less a spinoff than a continuation of "The Closer. " Without, of course, the closer herself.

It's time to say goodbye to Brenda Leigh Johnson's sing-song, Georgia-scented " thank you! " The LAPD interrogator par excellence played with delightful quirk, brilliant intelligence, and disarming cunning by Kyra Sedgwick will take her leave on the season finale of TNT's The Closer at 9 p.m. Monday. The episode also will transition viewers to the series premiere of TNT's spin-off, Major Crimes , at 10 p.m. Set in the same squadroom, Major Crimes retains most of the Closer regulars we've grown to love, or in the case of Capt.

THE CLOSER. 9 tonight, TNT. AS TNT'S "The Closer" begins its long goodbye tonight, Kyra Sedgwick's a little closer to the door than her viewers, who won't be seeing the last of Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson until the summer of 2012. "We're shooting 21 episodes, so we're going all the way till December," Sedgwick said in a recent phone interview. TNT's chosen to split those episodes over two years, using the final six next summer to launch "Major Crimes," a "Closer" spin-off that will star Mary McDonnell.

THE CLOSER. 9 tonight, TNT. MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE. 10 tonight, TNT. CABLE SCHEDULES seem like a law unto themselves, but the return tonight of TNT's "The Closer" for the final third of its sixth season shouldn't be as unexpected as it once was. "The way I look at it is, it's for the fans, like five more episodes gets them through until next summer," "Closer" star Kyra Sedgwick said, laughing, in a recent phone interview. And though there was no break in production between the show's summer episodes and its winter ones, "often they're sort of the darkest episodes in some ways," she said.

It's a mystery how anyone can make a movie about Jean Harris and Herman Tarnower yet omit the grapefruit. In the late 1970s, Tarnower, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet doctor, put the nation on a severe grapefruit regimen while prescribing his long-suffering consort, the Madeira School headmistress, something stronger: a fierce cocktail of methamphetamines, Nembutal and Percodan. On March 10, 1980, a furious and discarded Harris shot Tarnower, a hunter of big game on four legs and two, and grabbed the nation's attention as the haughty defendant in pearls and tweed jackets.

The director John Huston said that action is the language of film. I think writer/director Lawrence Kasdan has it backwards. In his movies, language is the action, such as it is. That's certainly true of "Mumford," a gabfest about a phlegmatic therapist named Mumford (Loren Dean) who treats the mildly neurotic residents of a small town, listening to their problems, nudging them in the direction of happiness. "Mumford" is constructed a long and varied stream of patients and sessions, an approach that complements the director's customary ensemble approach.

The feather-light comedy Mumford is a quirkathon about a small-town psychologist who may be a fake but who is nonetheless more successful at his trade than the certified real deals. Where the other shrinks in town encourage their patients to vent, Mumford hears them out and empathizes in a way that may be less directive but is definitely more therapeutic. Instead of being left to stew in their own spleen, Mumford's patients move on to form healthy attachments. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this eccentric fairy tale with the feel of Our Town has a number of remarkable performances, chiefly those of Loren Dean in the title role and Jason Lee as Skip Skipperton, king of computers and skateboards.

There's a line in Mumford, Lawrence Kasdan's smart, lighthearted take on contemporary angst, in which Hope Davis' character - a pale thing who's either suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or just terribly depressed - confesses that she harbors a deep fear of being "revealed as an impostor. " The fact that she makes this announcement to a therapist (Loren Dean, in the title role) who may not be all that he's cracked up to be is one of the film's neat ironies. Kasdan, the writer-director of such ensemble boomer ventures as The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, is saying that, at some point, everyone feels like a sham.

A feature created by American Indians tops this week's list of new movies on video. Smoke Signals 1/2 (1998) (Miramax) 89 minutes. Adam Beach, Evan Adams, Gary Farmer, Tanto Cardinal, Irene Bedard. The first widely distributed feature film written and directed by American Indians musters bitter laughter rather than the rage one might expect. A deft balance of tragedy and comedy, this unique picture is appealing, assured, and a work that shows us - in more than one sense - what we have been missing.

John Sayles made evocative use of the swampy waters of the Louisiana bayou in Passion Fish, but it was his adamant refusal to allow a drop of sentimentality into the movie that sets it apart. Sayles wrote and directed the picture in 1993, after Eight Men Out and City of Hope, two superb films about public issues. Passion Fish returned him to his roots - and to the kind of intimately scaled, observant story that forged his reputation. Passion Fish focuses on the relationship of a crippled soap opera actress and her African American nurse without turning into a soap opera itself.