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THELMA & LOUISE is, as John Simon says in this issue, this year's Movie of the Moment. Liberals and feminists tend to love it; conservatives, and many just plain men, see it as male-bashing. The normally cool and collected John Leo of U.S. News & World Report calls its motif of "transformative violence" an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism." The aesthetic merits we happily leave to the unsurpassed Mr. Simon. As for the film's philosophy, we can only say: Please, everyone, calm down ! Thelma & Louise is an entertaining little film, with obvious debts to such predecessors as Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Except, of course, that both leads here are women. The ending seems to be saying something about sisterhood, but it could as easily be taken to mean Thelma should have stayed home with her man. (It actually means that the scriptwriter, Callie Khouri, had created a situation she didn't know how to resolve, except by an arbitrary Big Gesture.)

The only peril we see to the Republic is that the amazing overreaction to Thelma & Louise may deter some people from seeing a lightly entertaining movie, or lead them to expect something more.

Meanwhile, also from Hollywood comes Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner as a New Age Robin, along with a feminist Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and an affirmative-action "Moor" (Morgan Freeman). The critics are already hooting at the film's ideological anachronisms. Vincent Canby of the New York Times calls the movie "a mess, a big, joyless reconstruction of the Robin Hood legend that comes out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all." Rita Kempley of the Washington Post calls it "a fantasy about the redistribution of wealth and the failure of the trickle-down theory." What's more, the Merrie Men are all Americans, while the villains are Englishmen-leading Richard Corliss of Time to remark witheringly: "They sound like tourists stranded in Sherwood Forest. And they inadvertently give a new meaning to the story: now Robin and his band are vagrant colonials who save England from those who can actually speak the language."

It seems that formerly safe liberal attitudes, far from giving a film immunity, have suddenly become either "controversial," or the butts of sophisticated humor. This could be the start of something big.