Robin Williams won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck nabbed one for Best Original Screenplay, but the feel-good hit Good Will Hunting triumphs because of its gifted director, Gus Van Sant. The unconventional director (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy) saves a script marred by vanity and clunky character development by yanking soulful, touching performances out of his entire cast (amazingly, even one by Williams that's relatively schtick-free). Van Sant pulls off the equivalent of what George Cukor accomplished for women's melodrama in the '30s and '40s: He's crafted an intelligent, unabashedly emotional male weepie about men trying to find inner-wisdom. Matt Damon stars as Will Hunting, a closet math genius who ignores his gift in favor of nightly boozing and fighting with South Boston buddies (co-writer Ben Affleck among them). While working as a university janitor, he solves an impossible calculus problem scribbled on a hallway blackboard and reluctantly becomes the prodigy of an arrogant MIT professor (Stellan Skarsgård). Damon only avoids prison by agreeing to see psychiatrists, all of whom he mocks or psychologically destroys until he meets his match in the professor's former childhood friend, played by Williams. Both doctor and patient are haunted by the past, and as mutual respect develops, the healing process begins. The film's beauty lies not with grand climaxes, but with small, quiet moments. Scenes such as Affleck's clumsy pep talk to Damon while they drink beer after work, or any number of therapy session between Williams and Damon offer poignant looks at the awkward ways men show affection and feeling for one another. -Dave McCoy.

Elvis plays a roughneck country boy, seething with hostility but gifted with literary talent. In the occasionally precious Clifford Odets script, this comes across as James Dean by way of a Thomas Wolfe novel-and not a bad shot at respectable acting by Elvis. His monologue about his dead mother, delivered to sympathetic shrink Hope Lange, is one of the most affecting things the King ever did in a movie. The songs are kept to a minimum, and Presley has some good, thrumming energy with the young Tuesday Weld (bad girl) and Millie Perkins (good girl), two uncommonly smart actresses. This is one of many Hollywood melodramas suggesting the angst brewing beneath the prosperity of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, and it holds up decently, if not spectacularly. For Elvis fans, it's a poignant glimpse at a performer still in the young-buck stage of exciting possibilities. -Robert Horton.