Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup, Patricia Arquette, Penélope Cruz

Hollywood doesn't make many westerns anymore, but when it does, the movies tend to have more on their minds than just ropin' and ridin'. So it is with The Hi-Lo Country, a ruggedly handsome and intelligent western from director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette and Hero). This elegiac drama is set just after World War II, a period when small ranches were being gobbled up by big ones and old-fashioned cattle drives were giving way to shipping cattle by freight train.

Hi-Lo features an exuberant central performance by Harrelson that almost makes up for the film's sometimes poky pacing. He plays a boisterous ex-Marine who's fast with his fists and fierce in his loyalties. Upon returning after the war to run his family's small ranch near the New Mexican town of Hi-Lo, Harrelson falls hard for a married gal (Arquette). He's not the only one. His best buddy (Crudup), another vet who's struggling to make a go of his own small spread, also pines for her.

It is here that Hi-Lo Country runs into trouble. Arquette's supposedly vixenish character, both as written and as pallidly played by her, is a big ol' zero. Why either man would have the hots for her turns the movie into more of a mystery than a romantic drama. (R)

Bottom Line: Hits more highs than lows

Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Meg Ryan, Robin Wright Penn, Chazz Palminteri

When a character here mentions the "vast hordes of creeps running loose in California," she is accurately describing the repellent screwballs who populate Hurlyburly, an ensemble drama adapted for the screen by David Rabe from his own 1984 play and impressively directed by Anthony Drazan (Zebrahead). Despite sensational performances by Penn, Spacey and Palminteri as a trio of drugged-out, raging misogynists, Hurlyburly's clueless characters are so loathsome and their rants so repetitious that one really doesn't want to spend five minutes in their company, much less the movie's two hours-plus running time.

Penn plays a casting director who shares a house in the Hollywood Hills with Spacey, his cynical business partner. Frequently dropping by to do drugs, diss women and play macho mind games are Palminteri, as a thug turned actor, and Garry Shandling, a successful showbiz exec. And Ryan shows up as a topless dancer. Leaving cute far behind, the You've Got Mail star more than holds her own in august company. (R)

Bottom Line: Love the acting but hate the characters

Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe

Featured attraction

As the lines etched on his face grow deeper, Nolte, now 57, seems to burrow ever more deeply into the characters he plays. He is nothing short of perfection playing a lost soul who can't stop himself from tumbling into the abyss in Affliction, a complex character study based on a 1990 novel by Russell Banks and sensitively directed by Paul Shrader (Touch).

The movie is set during winter in a small decaying New Hampshire town where Nolte is a part-time cop going nowhere fast. He has an ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt), a young daughter he rarely sees, a waitress girlfriend (Spacek) and an abusive, alcoholic father (James Coburn) whom he can't forgive. The movie has several subplots (a possible murder, a suspect land deal), but its main focus and the source of its power is Nolte's carefully crafted portrait of a man imploding. When he finally confronts Coburn, the years of pent-up rage explode in a brutal and all too inevitable climax.

Although shot in color, Affliction replays in your mind afterward in black and white. Between its drab wintry vistas and its chilling vision of a man helplessly slip-sliding down life's slope, its bleakness is what lingers. (R)

Bottom Line: Nolte's best shot yet for an Oscar

Emily Watson, Rachel Griffiths

Forget Eleanor Roosevelt. In Hilary and Jackie, Hillary Clinton has moved on to gabbing with Jackie Kennedy about straying husbands.

Oops, wrong film. This one is actually about sisters Hilary and Jacqueline du Pré. The latter, known as Jackie, and played by "Watson, was the English cellist who became a classical music superstar in the 1960s while still in her teens—half of a musical golden couple upon marrying pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim—and then had her career cut short at 28 when she developed multiple sclerosis, the degenerative nerve disease from which she died 14 years later in 1987. Hilary (Griffiths), a flutist, was her older sister, who opted out of a musical career for marriage and life on a farm.

Based on A Genius in the Family, a book Hilary wrote with younger brother Piers, H & J traces the close but often troubled relationship between the two sisters. How troubled? Jackie shows up at Hilary's farm and demands to sleep with sis's husband. Hilary lets her.

The movie is by turns fascinating and frustrating (Barenboim is still alive and the movie only delicately addresses questions about his fidelity), but always of interest. Watson has the showier role and Griffiths the more complicated one, but both shine. (R)

Bottom Line: Musician's bio doesn't just string you along