Jodie Foster believes in recycling. Her screen appearances since playing agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs have been rare; that Oscar-winning role, by her own admission, took a lot out of her. But she did not invest all those months in the gym, pore through all those F.B.I. manuals learning how to do things the rest of us little gray people will never understand, research all those human survival techniques or practice the perfect scream until she gave herself nightmares without an eye on long-term dividends. In her new thriller, Panic Room , she gets quite a cardiovascular workout. They should have called it Clarice Buys a House . You gotta be in shape to act in this one. Hell, you gotta be in shape just to watch it.

First, the good news. Considering most of the junk that crowds the screen these days, Panic Room is slickly made, well acted, relentlessly exciting and never boring. It's premise is simple-a troubled divorcée (Ms. Foster) and her diabetic teenage daughter (Kristen Stewart) abandon their comfortable country life in Greenwich and move to a humongous brownstone townhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side (a "townstone," the hatchet-faced realtor calls it) the size of the Museum of Natural History. At the top of an interminable gnarl of staircases, next to the master bedroom, there is even what medieval kings used to call a castle keep. The realtor calls it a "safe room": four concrete walls, a buried phone line separate from the other cables, a ventilation system to save you from suffocating, a bank of surveillance monitors that shows you what's happening in every other room in the house, and a protective door of four-foot steel that can't be opened from the outside once you lock yourself inside the room.

This place has all the charm of a city morgue. Boris Karloff wouldn't live there. The whole thing gives Jodie the creeps, but for reasons only the screenwriter knows, she buys it anyway. Naturally, on the first night, there's a howling rainstorm and the old mausoleum is invaded by three vicious thieves looking for millions in cash left behind by the former owner. The terrified women lock themselves inside the panic room-not exactly the perfect sanctuary for a distraught mother with claustrophobia and a sick daughter who has left her insulin needles in another part of the house. Even worse, it turns out the missing fortune is locked inside the room with them. These girls are in trouble, big time-as Thelma Ritter once said in All About Eve , everything but the bloodhounds snapping at their rear ends.

In the shockfest that follows, there's a new horror per minute. Brawny of biceps and beady of eye, Jodie meets every challenge. The bad news is that what starts out as a real situation (geez, Gert, this could happen to you!) turns preposterous. When the brutal intruders try to choke them out by pumping gas through the ventilating system, Jodie throws a lighter down the chute and envelops one of the attackers in flames. When she finally retrieves her cell phone, the signal is dead. I have never met a housewife who knew how to cross the telephone wires to get a dial tone. Then, when she reaches 911, the operator puts her on hold. This goes on until Jodie is outside, the killers are inside with the daughter who is having a diabetic attack, and things turn even uglier … but why spoil the rest? This movie is rugged enough to give a couch potato a stroke.

Panic Room is elevated by many fastidious talents, not the least of whom is writer David Koepp, who penned the screenplay for one of my all-time favorite thrillers, Apartment Zero . The director is David Fincher, who specializes in grim, repellent and terrifying tales such as Alien 3 , the woefully misguided Fight Club and the unforgettable Seven . What he can do with cameras in the dark is impressively nasty, and he seems to have a gruesome affinity for the dismal fates awaiting naïve rubes who move from rural areas to New York, where the least of their fears is the rats. (Jodie Foster in Panic Room and Brad Pitt in Seven both move to the city from the country to find themselves in hell.) So much of the movie takes place in the shadows that there are times when you wonder if Mr. Fincher has ever heard of electricity. Milton, Chaucer and Dante are obvious influences. Almost the entire thing takes place in one night inside the walls of the same confined set (think Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark ), yet the entertainment value Mr. Fincher gets from claustrophobic muck when good people try to survive in the dark is compelling, and the contrast between Panic Room 's climactic outbursts of deplorable bloodshed and the dazzling sunlight of the film's peaceful epilogue in Central Park makes for a startling dramatic metaphor.

The performances serve the material confidently. Jodie Foster is such an expert at handling big scenes as well as small details that she keeps you fascinated throughout. Jared Leto and country singer Dwight Yoakam are convincingly menacing as the two most dangerous marauders, and the always reliable Forest Whitaker, saddled with the clichés as the nice-guy member of the trio, walks the line between hero and hood. No actor could do more to balance audience sympathy and remain in villainous character at the same time. I am still wondering why the husband, who has been described throughout as a millionaire Wall Street investment tycoon, finally turns up looking like a 100-year-old Bowery bum. How does the daughter know to signal a neighbor across the street with an S.O.S. on a flashlight? When Clarice Starling meets Nancy Drew, it's a team you definitely want on your side if danger strikes. Panic Room doesn't hold up under close scrutiny, but at least it's fun to argue about. Flawed but riveting, it won't be everyone's cocktail of choice, but if you can suspend disbelief long enough, you'll get a whopping good wallop without the hangover.

Tele-tubby Robin Williams

If Panic Room is the color of ashes, the fruit-loopy comedy Death to Smoochy is all the nauseating hues in a box of 48 Crayolas. Here is truly a movie that is every bit as awful as its title. I guess it's intended as a sendup of the greed, avarice, fraud and behind-the-scenes deceitfulness in network children's programming, but everything about it lands with a thud as artificial as a pie in the face.

Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) is a kiddie-show icon surrounded by dancing midgets in wigs the color of exploding sorbets who exploits moppet consumers with unhealthy products like Krinkle Krunch and Icy Pops while singing "Friends Come in All Sizes." In real life, he's a vicious con king on the take from sponsors and gangsters alike. When this duplicitous clown gets busted for extorting bribes from parents to get their kids on his show, the scandal ruins him. It's up to network honchos Jon Stewart and Catherine Keener (Randolph's ex-girlfriend, who seems to have slept with everyone in kiddie TV except Pee-wee Herman) to find a new clown with a spotless reputation. That dope is nerdy Sheldon Mopes (played by that excellent actor Edward Norton, who knows he's slumming and shows it). Mopes is a disaster reduced to playing fun fairs, retirement homes and rehab centers, but when he dons a fuchsia animal suit and calls himself Smoochy the Rhino, his ratings soar.

Smoochy has high ideals to reach the level of his idol, Captain Kangaroo, by delivering wholesome entertainment and resisting the sale of products with fat and sugar. While the dastardly Randolph plots one treachery after another to reclaim his old fame-filling Smoochy's on-air organic cookie jars with treats shaped like huge dildos, luring the purple rhino to a neo-Nazi rally where the skinheads yell " Heil , Smoochy!"-Smoochy's two-faced agent (Danny DeVito) and a phony charity promoter (Harvey Fierstein) join the skullduggery for their own gains. Even when Smoochy gets arrested and smeared by the tabloids as a racist rhino scumbag, innocence triumphs: The kids love Smoochy. Randolph will not sleep until the rhino takes a permanent "dirt nap." There's only one way to insure the ultimate revenge: death to Smoochy! As it leads up to a luridly overproduced ice show, the proceeds of which will rebuild the Coney Island methadone clinic where Smoochy was discovered, the movie turns idiotic and violent. Now it's up to the miraculously rehabilitated Rainbow Randolph to stop a deranged junkie killer called Buggy Ding Dong. Have you had enough, as the Republicans used to say?

I suppose there is something to be said about the corruption of innocence in kiddie TV and the jockeying for power and profit by marketing dangerous products to a consumer audience in pigtails, but all Death to Smoochy does is scare the living daylights out of the very under-6 audience its corny production numbers (by David Newman) aim to embrace. Danny DeVito's bewildered direction gives everyone free rein to fly over the top of the circus tent like a rocket launching. The film has no trajectory and finds no ballast between the murderous violence and the gumdrop goofiness, and it all just explodes in your face like a blast of bubble gum.

Robin Williams gets a chance to display his vast repertoire of accents and disguises, but every time he crashes into another brick wall the joke gets thinner. Edward Norton is one of the most pathologically wasted young actors on the screen; his range is admirable and his skills are vast, but he can't seem to find a script as intelligent as he is. I don't know what he's doing frittering away his time in a mess like Death to Smoochy . Maybe he's not Tom Cruise. Maybe he's glad. But he's not one of the Three Stooges, either.