CRITIC’S NOTES : FILMGOERS’ GUIDE FOR LAZY DAYS OF SUMMER

Summertime. Moviegoin’ is easy, or so the studios devoutly hope.

We have very nearly the full complement of summer movies and once Snow White, Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), that dashing new James Bond (“The Living Daylights”) and that revenge-bent shark (you need to ask?) arrive, we will have landed the big commercial films of the season, at least through July. Let’s not forget “Jean de Florette,” the first two hours of a pair of films by Claude Berri based on Marcel Pagnol’s epic novel of Provence, which may prove to be the juicy big one on the art-house circuit, since its cast includes Gerard Depardieu and Yves Montand.

How does the summer stack up overall? What are its delights as well as its pitfalls? Glad you asked. Here is a quick clip-and-save to work your way through when the pleasures of the sun have left you burned and nothing sounds better than a few hours with ice cream bonbons and air conditioning.

NOT TO BE MISSED

“Roxanne.” The essence of the summer feel-good movie, which brings romance back to a romance-starved world and, wonder of wonders, values intelligence as highly as beauty. The balletic grace and skewering self-deprecation of Steve Martin in his own updating of the Cyrano story has a tenderness to it that’s magnetic. And it’s hard to know what is more alluring: the sublimely beautiful, slightly salty Daryl Hannah as Roxanne incarnate, or the way director Fred Schepisi paints their surroundings, a hilly, old-fashioned ski town so glowingly warm you ask yourself why you don’t move.

“Full Metal Jacket.” Stanley Kubrick’s rethinking of Vietnam is as cool, as lethal and as perfectly fashioned as the bullet casing from which it gets its name. It’s a far cry from the polarized good-bad of “Platoon,” more likely to haunt you afterwards than exert its full power while you see it, but Kubrick’s harrowing method--to show us the molding of a 17-year-old into a killing machine, then the uses to which those machines are put--becomes ecstatically effective.

“My Life as a Dog.” Never, never to be confused in any way with Benji, this award-winning Swedish import by Lasse Hallstrom covers a crucial year in the life of a wonderful 12-year-old boy who zigzags between being rambunctious as a puppy and thoughtful as any young Truffaut hero. Set in the 1950s, partly in a Swedish small town as idyllic as “Roxanne’s,” it is a film that understands childhood-to-adolescence as few films do, with dark and loving affection.

STRONG CONTENDERS

“Tampopo.” Who’d have thought to look to noodles as a source for slurpily delicious satire? Only Juzo Itami, the same director who could find the comedy lurking under the Japanese rituals of funerals. His subject is the intrinsic connection between food and sex: His targets include the Western, the spaghetti Western, Olympic training (and documentaries about it), gangster movies and the sort of sex-and-food scenes that lit up “Tom Jones,” “In the Realm of the Senses” or “The Decline of the American Empire.” Funny and uninhibited, this.

“Withnail and I.” A darkly comic character study from autobiographical roots, about a pair of young actors barely surviving London’s drugged-out ‘60s who repair for a week in the country and barely survive that. The film’s first-time director, Bruce Robinson, the “and I” of the portrait, did make it through, to eventually be cast as Adele’s British lover in Truffaut’s “Adele H.” and to see his screenplay for “The Killing Fields” win an Academy Award nomination. The film, held together by the fine pairing of Richard E. Grant as the gaunt, histrionic Withnail and Paul McGann as his only slightly more down-to-earth roommate, is a collection of marvelously sketched characters, best of which is Withnail’s aristocratic, cooingly aggressive homosexual uncle, a magnificent performance by Richard Griffiths.

“Innerspace.” If somehow Canadian actor-comedian Martin Short’s career has eluded you, what delights you have in store in this variation on “Fantastic Voyage,” and at the hands of director Joe Dante. Dante likes cluttered, cartoonish comedy, and while this one gets a leetle long, the combination of Dennis Quaid as the macho pilot miniaturized and trapped in Short’s smallish body, and the unleashed Short, frugging, romancing, careening on the edge of disaster, is frequently hilarious. Summer silliness at its most pleasant.

“Gardens of Stone.” The elegaic other side to Vietnam, with Francis Coppola in complete control of a splendid cast: James Caan and James Earl Jones playing Army lifers who’ve drawn ceremonial duty at Arlington National Cemetery in 1968, D. B. Sweeney as the surrogate son to both, Anjelica Huston as a Washington Post reporter and Mary Stuart Masterson as a Colonel’s daughter in love with non-com Sweeney. Muted but moving, and definitely worth catching up with if you have missed it.

THE BUZZ IS ABOUT ...

“The Untouchables.” Somehow, the very plywood perfection of Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness, exhorting his four-man gang with “Come on, men, let’s do some good!,” doesn’t excite director Brian De Palma as much as the luxurious evil of Robert De Niro’s Al Capone, living in marbled splendor, bashing in the head of a gang member in ritual fashion. It’s a show-offy turn for De Palma, smart enough to use Sean Connery as the old hand of Ness’ gang and to lift his best scene from Sergei Eisenstein and another bravura death fall from Hitchcock, but you feel the movie’s juice running to the wrong side of the moral equation De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet have created.

“Ishtar.” If you pay no attention to the hysteria surrounding this, you may find that Elaine May’s eye and wit are sharp as ever. Be brave. Try!

“River’s Edge.” This portrait of numbed-out adolescents drawn together when one of their group kills his young girlfriend may be the summer’s biggest controversy, not so much for its deeply disturbing premise but for the question of whether director Tim Hunter and writer Neal Jiminez have made an exploitive or a compassionate film. It’s uneven enough to make a case for either side, with performances that veer from the wildly out-of-control Crispin Glover to the melodrama of Dennis Hopper’s one-legged biker-drug dealer, to the immaculately fine Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye as the young lovers.

“The Witches of Eastwick.” The grand fun of the movie’s first 20 or so minutes gets swamped when director George Miller abandons the book and strikes out for . . . the devil knows what, but you probably won’t have a better time this summer than wallowing around with acting’s grand overachiever, Jack Nicholson, as the chic pony-tailed devil himself. Terrible waste of three magnificent women, however. And, faint hearts, beware those spewing cherries in the movie’s grossest moments.

“Prick Up Your Ears.” Alas, we never learn just why playwright Joe Orton was the ground-breaking farceur that all London perceived him to be, although we certainly learn why he drove his lover to kill him: Gary Oldman’s Orton and Alfred Molina’s Kenneth Halliwell are a marriage made in some constricted sort of hell. Although both Molina and Vanessa Redgrave, as Orton’s agent, in no way resemble their characters, they, and especially the puckishly ribald Oldman, make the theatrical best of a depressing story, directed by Stephen Frears (“My Beautiful Laundrette”).

AND THEN THEY MADE

“Beverly Hills Cop II.” Its din does not have to be heard to be appreciated. Take it from survivors, this Xerox of the first Eddie Murphy brash success has all the fun of a heart attack. It’s a high-water mark in underestimating one’s audience, something in which producers Simpson and Bruckheimer excel.

“Dragnet.” The perfection that Dan Aykroyd brings to his nephew-of-Joe-Friday characterization and the sheer woolly delight of Tom Hanks as his hippie partner are soon overrun by the sheer dumbness of the plot, which decides that hedonistic cults and Playboy-like empires are what “Dragnet” was all about. What a waste.

“Spaceballs.” If you were storm-stayed in a multiplex somewhere, you probably wouldn’t die of this one. But a “Star War’s’ satire 10 years later? What’s the matter with Mel Brooks’ usually impeccable timing? The amiable little short “Hardware Wars,” put out by Ernie Fosselius in 1978, was more on-target than this lumbering effort.

“Adventures in Babysitting.” Very, very tinny farce that takes white-bread suburban kids into the (mostly black) dangers of the inner city. A distasteful hidden message lurks in this one, directed by Chris Columbus.

“Harry and the Hendersons.” If you were a collector of John Lithgow performances, an admirable thing to be, this story of a cutely tamed Bigfoot would still strain your good will. And why are size 16-and-overs such targets of abuse by director William Dear?

“Million Dollar Mystery.” Unh uhhh. Not even if they promise you the million.