MOVIES . . . BABE

Brave and bright, good-natured and ambitious, naive and vulnerable -- all in all, saysTIME's Richard Schickel, Babe is "probably the most winsome orphan to appear on the screen since Freddie Bartholomew impersonated David Copperfield 60 years ago." Of course, he's a piglet, but still, he's a liberal humanist on trotters, capable of the occasional odd, soulful thoughts on mortality, and a welcome addition to a public life largely given over these days to swinishness of a less exemplary kind. Director Chris Noonan's fable shines with the classic virtue of the form--surface simplicity, seductive imagery and gently instructive resonances.