A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1992)

In this documentary based on Stephen Hawking's best-seller, Hawking, the renowned physicist who has ALS, ''talks'' to us using a synthetic voice machine. In the metallic tones of a '50s sci-fi robot, he poses questions like ''Why do we remember the past and not the future?'' The movie confronts us with the arresting paradox of Hawking's presence, the notion of a man whose mental universe grows ever larger even as his physical world keeps shrinking. Except that the director, Errol Morris (''The Thin Blue Line''), doesn't do enough with either half of the paradox. The details of Hawking's early life are fascinating, but the movie as a whole is plodding and disappointingly conventional.