Don't know what the Wilco documentary will be like, but the title is as lovely on a film as on a song: "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." It's poised to open the same week as M. Night Shyamalan's latest ooh-it's-spooky and oh-I'm-serious-as-death shocker, the Mel Gibson-starring crop circle tale, "Signs." Then again, the methedrine bubblegum of Robert Rodriguez's sequel "Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams," might be a better late summer tonic. I'm particularly intrigued by the formally restless Michael Winterbottom's latest, "24 Hour Party People," shot on video by camera great Robbie Muller, and chronicling the late 1970s Manchester music surge through the life and times of Factory Records. If not love, handheld cameras will tear us apart again.

Seventy-one-year-old Clint Eastwood keeps going with "Blood Work," which opens the same weekend as a "Fatal Attraction"-in-college bonbon, "Swimfan." Andrew Niccol's second directorial effort, after the cool, stylish "Gattaca" is a comedy about celebrity and virtual reality, starring Al Pacino, Winona Ryder and a leading actress who's entirely computer-generated. And at all costs, avoid ending your summer with "Secretary," a dank monstrosity that wastes the immense charm and likability of talented young actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. She'd be great in a movie that didn't try so goddamn hard to prove its S&M credentials while punishing its actors almost as much as those swindled into theaters by racy trailers.

Also by Ray Pride

OEDIPUS WRECKS
A giddy light-saber duel near the end of "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones," full of glowers, pacing, feints, fakeouts and deliriously impossible action, bears an important lesson: George Lucas doesn't have to make a silent movie, but if he had made a mute one, minus an introductory hour of tedious, even superfluous self-mythologizing, the action sequences in this damn thing would sing.
(2002-05-16)

TIP OF THE WEEK
While comparisons to Hitchcock and Mamet were made on the festival circuit, writer-director Fabian Bielinsky's first feature has the cool classicism of directors like Wilder: The story is where the faces are.
(2002-05-09)

REAL SEX
Drawing from Claude Chabrol's 1968 classic, "La femme infidele," Lyne fashions one more cautionary tale against letting your knickers down. It's deeply mature work, with some of the most transportingly happy sex to be seen in an American-made movie in ages.
(2002-05-09)

SCREEN KISS
At the sight of her massively swollen belly, you can only inquire, How are you? "I'm eight months," she says, leaning back in her chair. "Any time. I'm very sensitive, y'know. I'm very pregnant. We take things very personally."
(2002-05-02)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-05-02)

WORLD WIDE WEB
(2002-05-02)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-25)

PLUG & PLAY
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-11)

CRAZY LOVE
(2002-04-11)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-04-04)