Jean Jacques Beineix

What strikes you first about Isabelle Huppert is that the camera doesn't lie: She is the auburn-haired beauty in life that she is on the screen. She is also as self-possessed in person as are many of her heroines, most notably her latest, Marie Latour, in Claude Chabrol's masterful "Story of Women," opening today at the Guild in San Diego.

The hottest star in home video right now is Whoopi Goldberg. She has two movies in the Top 10 of Billboard magazine's rental chart--Warners' "The Color Purple" (No. 4) and CBS-Fox's "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (No. 9). Her remaining movie, Warner Video's "Burglar," a heist comedy set in San Francisco, is due out Sept. 16. Her co-star is Bobcat Goldthwait, who's also starring in another Warner comedy, "Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol," due Sept. 23.

When Nicolas Seydoux, the man who runs Gaumont, looks around for that entity's peers, he doesn't see any. "We are dean of all the movie companies in the world," Seydoux says with not unnatural pride. "All the others have disappeared." For though Americans like to think that everything to do with motion pictures had its beginnings over here, it was in Paris in early 1895 that the Lumiere brothers had the first public showing of a projected film.

All in all, this has been a pretty strange summer at the movies. Two of the biggest hits are "Top Gun," starring Tom Cruise, who looks like an altar boy dressed up in his uncle's pilot uniform, and "Back to School," starring Rodney Dangerfield, a Borscht Belt refugee doing rock 'n' roll.

Film festivals anywhere inevitably become like a term of time spent underwater, with films projected non-stop on the walls of one's submarine. Dimly, there's the knowledge of a real world out there, yet the only news that creates a stir is self-contained--the successes, scandals, buzzwords and jokes that a festival as huge as Toronto's Festival of Festivals kicks up in the course of a 10-day run.

A few months ago, a group of Texans flew in for an evening to see "The Madness of George Dubya," a satirical play about the man who some people in the world still have a hard time believing is really the president of the United States.

Two giants of the film industry, Lee Marvin and John Huston, died last week, but home video fans can continue to enjoy their many outstanding movies. Marvin was great at playing shady, sinister heroes--the bad good guys. He started out excelling as a villain, shining in '50s movies such as "The Big Heat" and "The Wild One" before settling into hero roles in the mid '60s. If you want to sample the best of Marvin, focus on the second half of the '60s.

Jessye Norman is on the phone in her suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. "I ordered room service 30 minutes ago. I think that's a rather long time to wait for a pot of tea," she says with an operatic gravity that makes the words quiver. Moments later a cart rolls in, and Norman, mollified, cheerily bustles about, serving the tea and passing a platter of sandwiches.

If the marketing department at Sony Pictures Classics was to put together a newspaper ad using quotes to promote the company instead of one of its movies, they could do worse than these: "Those guys love film, they see everything, they have good tastes, and they work like hell for their movies." --Milos Forman "They believe in cinema, they fight for their films, and they have a kind of passion that is rare now in our business."

No one who has read "Last Exit to Brooklyn" can easily forget Georgette, the "hip queer" whose penchant for a cruel ex-con culminates in drug-fueled abasement, or Tralala, the greedy prostitute who dies as brutally as she lived. First published in 1964, "Last Exit" exploded onto the American psyche like a 10-megaton nuclear bomb and set off a searing controversy among critics, who called it an extraordinary literary achievement while praising and panning its dark vision and violent prose.