Nurse Betty is what happens when a filmmaker who specializes in nasty tries to do quirky: it's only the nasty moments that ring true, and the quirky remainder lacks conviction and defies belief. Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Friends & Neighbors) may have thought by throwing together Morgan Freeman, who only plays serious and noble, with Chris Rock, who only does irreverent and loquacious, might equal whimsical, but casting them as ruthless hit men on the trail of a young and delusional Kansas widow becomes neither suspenseful nor entertaining; it all simply cancels itself out into nothing.

Key to Nurse Betty's success is convincing us that Renee Zellweger, after witnessing her unfaithful husband's violent murder at the hands of Freeman and Rock, would mentally retreat out of shock into the world of her favorite hospital soap opera, "A Reason To Love." Such an absurd transference requires a dose of comedy, but LaBute plays it straight, resulting in a sequence so unconvincing it almost kicks us completely out of the story. LaBute may have needed to warm us up a bit before attempting this crucial scene - how about an early moment or two reassuring us we're attending a comedy, as the commercials claimed? - but that this premise doesn't exercise our sense of humor instead becomes our first clue that the film lacks a leg to stand on. Zellweger subsequently heads for Hollywood to find the soap opera universe she believes herself a part of, and her husband's killers soon follow in pursuit to finish their assignment.

It is also essential to the story that we believe that Freeman would then fall in love with Zellweger's title character, unraveling mentally as he scours the Southwest for her trail, eventually even hallucinating a romantic dance with her by the Grand Canyon. LaBute's crucial misstep is casting Freeman too radically against type - not that it is so unreasonable to envision him as an assassin (he'd actually be quite terrifying, in the right film), but to accept him as mentally delusional. At the end, Freeman proposes to Betty rather than offing her, reciting lines that sound like a personals ad, a scene so counter to anything Freeman has done before, and he cannot pull it off. Amoral, we can accept, but not senile. (That was Jessica Tandy's job, remember?)

Zellweger acquits herself better as Betty, sympathetic despite her resemblance to Pia Zadora, and when she finally insinuates herself into the set of "Loma Vista," the fictional set where the object of her affection works ("Dr. David Ravell," played with appropriate shallowness by Greg Kinnear), her innocence is an effective contrast to the casual cruelty among the actors and producers who regard her as little more than an opportunity to boost ratings. It's when Zellweger's on the screen that we are given scenes of authentic power, but they're in service to a mishmash of a film, an ultimately stillborn project that somehow won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival but not surprisingly failed to win over American filmgoers. It's only in the final scenes that we see sparks of legitimate humor, but it's too little too late. If LaBute tries his hand at comedy in the future, he might want to go blacker.

One can only hope Almost Famous found a greater audience, for Cameron Crowe knows how to do whimsical like the best of them. This levity is personified by the glorified groupie (or "Band-Aid") Penny Lane, played with translucent beauty by Kate Hudson, surely the major find of the season. She's also the big find of Almost Famous' protagonist, the precocious teenager Tommy (Patrick Fugit) who somehow scores an assignment for Rolling Stone to follow an up-and-coming band named Stillwater around the country in the mid-seventies. Ignoring warnings from his mentor to never compromise his journalistic objectivity by befriending rock stars, and despite Penny's involvement with Russell (Billy Crudup), Stillwater's lead guitarist, there is never enough tension to interrupt the film's essentially partying mood. Tommy's mom (a brilliant Frances McDormand) is permissive enough, Penny never loses her smile even with the knowledge Russell is married, and even as Tommy risks blowing his deadline we never stop having fun.

Later Penny's getting her stomach pumped, and Tommy slowly realizes he may never get the girl, and he's eventually deflowered by the other Band-Aids, but there's no sense of loss, and this is the film's mark of distinction. ("It's all happening" becomes the motto of all the youngsters, a proverb completely devoid of value judgements and utterly optimistic.) Almost Famous is generally all smiles, an about-face from Nurse Betty's dramatic aspirations, much less concerned with its image than is the band it profiles. In truth, though Tommy's supposed to be deconstructing Stillwater's artistic greatness, the film never explores how they come up with such good music, betraying its true focus: on absolutely nothing. It's just one big love-in, and that's perfectly fine with us.

When Russell is almost electrocuted by his mike during a concert, he briefly seeks out what's "real" as an antidote to his band's obsession with success, but soon all is back to the status quo. They replace their manager, barely escape a plane crash, callously lose their Band-Aids in a poker match, and ultimately double-cross Tommy whom they spent the whole film coddling, but none of this triggers anything approximating real concern. Though masquerading as a pseudo-autobiographical coming-of-age film, Tommy never comes to any real harm, resulting in an adolescence we all could only wish for. Perhaps Crowe, despite knowing better, dreamed of creating a cinematic fantasy world that could just once uncynically illustrate the rock-and-roll ideal, where the goal is to just be happy and uncomplicated. (As Penny philosophizes, "If you never take it seriously then you never get hurt. If you never get hurt then you always have fun, and if you ever get lonely you can just go to the record store and visit your friends.") VH1's "Behind the Music" may show us otherwise, but for the duration of the film, it's all happening.

Meanwhile, over in the WWI-era France of Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé) the emphasis is on "all," for so much is happening, and in such random sequence, you'll be wondering if Marcel Proust wasn't using more drugs than all of Stillwater. Raoul Ruiz's adaptation of Remembrance of Things Past (a novel long considered unfilmable) is unqualifiedly brilliant, but threatens to both overwhelm the average American viewer (thanks to an aleatory series of events, conversations, memories, and sensual associations utterly faithful to the source material) as well as underwhelm (by never truly letting on what anyone is feeling). In truth this may be the biggest cinematic accomplishment of the year, but it isn't for everyone, as it epitomizes everything one might expect in a French art film, which is rapturous for some but poison to others. It's long, it's vague, it's subtitled, it's a period piece, and it never ends when you expect it would, and none of this is necessarily bad.

The autobiographical novel destroyed literary conventions by indulging the author's every sudden recollection in no logical order, flashing back and forward at the slightest prompting, exploring an entirely subjective perspective of everyone around him, and attempting to unite the Prousts of all ages into a coherent identity. It's a feat that succeeds better than most memoirs by focusing on the smallest details over claiming to know the big picture or moral of the story, and we could only hope to take such a stab at artistic immortality.

The film, following in the novel's footsteps, almost defies attempts to delineate a plot, for more important is the portraiture of the major personnages in Marcel's life as they are encountered at various points in time, and we are slowly given a glimpse into the concerns and disappointments of each. It's all incomplete, to be sure, especially as concerns our understanding of the author himself, but Time Regained makes no comprehensive claims, and that makes it the most honest biographical enterprise around. We can, at the least, make out that the upper-crust French of the early twentieth century were not too proud to marry for status, never too virtuous to eschew back-stabbing, and largely destined to fall short of their romantic dreams. (It's a relief to know people haven't changed that much.)

Marcel has clearly loved and lost in his own lifetime, tires of all the formality by which most relationships are conducted, and suspects his friends' infidelities are more sordid than expected. Maintaining a stoic face throughout, Marcel never lets on that the revelations he stumbles upon might be the slightest bit shocking, and if he feels any dismay at the falsity of appearances, we have only his sad eyes to guide us. Perhaps this disillusionment with the present is what triggers his nostalgia and frequent attempts to mentally plumb his memories for the beauty they once held. His one brief breakdown at a concert is all that defies the stifling etiquette governing his social circle, sufficiently proper even when confronting the tragic fates of most of their friends.

Reduced to its essentials, the plot has the same soap opera-esque elements as "A Reason To Love" (the idle rich, adultery, homosexual deceptions, matrimonial gold-digging, illness, and war), but this is a Raoul Ruiz film, which guarantees us nothing less than the avant-garde at every turn. Ruiz, one of the more obscure and experimental directors to finally strike it big, understood well that every single scene is communicated subjectively, the details included only selectively, which means their retelling would be surreal at best. He does not disappoint: furniture will move, doors will open into new locations, people will float, faces will change as suits he who is doing the remembering.

The film positively overflows with ideas, but none of them are presented explicitly, and we are left trying to piece together the puzzle of Proust's disparate experiences. This may not sound like a fun way to spend your money and free time, but this is how the mind works, constantly free associating according to whatever triggers our senses at that moment. If you want easy truths, go elsewhere where films might dare claim to have a purchase on it; but if you want reality in all its complex mystery and intractability, its emotions presented without Cliff's Notes, Time Regained is where it's all happening.