Pure magic, a three-act movie fantasy that transports us -- as the best films do -- to a world of its own, a place of ambiguous joy and delirious terror.

A film that might make you cry watching it is just as likely to give you the creeps thinking about it afterward, which is as it should be.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

The movie is exactly what it's billed to be: the successful blending of two distinctly different filmmaking sensibilities from two different generations. But the stronger, and more pessimistic, sensibility -- Kubrick's -- carries the day.

The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.

This is not "E.T.," nor is it a kid's film nor even necessarily a major mass-audience film, although Spielberg's name, high public anticipation and the child-oriented campaign will make it perform like one.

(Spielberg) tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams's unusually restrained. modernist score.

Actually, it's a childhood "A Clockwork Orange," a reverent realization of the late Stanley Kubrick's final obsession.

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.

Most of its features work fine, and it will dazzle you with its tricks and illusions. But it is not what it claims to be on the package.

Audiences may find that the deliberate, Kubrickesque pacing -- without his intellectual rigor -- causes them to tune out.

This is speculative, heady stuff, far removed from traditional Hollywood summer entertainment, which alone will earn A.I. a devoted following.

Be warned that the violence-prone Spielberg of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" is also on display.

This is a movie to be knocked, chewed and gummed, but not dismissed. It's the first 2001 release I've rushed to see twice.