NAMES & FACES

Connery's Legal Smackdown

Actor Sean Conner y's squabble with a neighbor has escalated into a legal dispute so nasty that a fed-up judge is telling both sides to back off.

In court papers, Burton Sultan, who lives below Connery in the Upper East Side town house they share, calls his neighbor "a bully who ignores norms of neighborliness and decency." Connery and his wife argue the Sultan family's complaints over the years have delayed needed repairs to the building's roof.

State Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman, in a decision made public Wednesday, tossed out many of the Sultans' claims and slammed the Connerys for what she called their "blunderbuss" legal salvos.

Saying both parties "have engaged in a 'slash and burn' litigation strategy," Friedman barred both familes from filing any more lawsuits without her permission.

Noted . . .

What to do with the free time between recording pop hits, penning children's books and adopting a new family? Direct a movie, duh. Madonna's directorial debut, a comedy, will have its world premiere at the annual Berlin Film Festival in February, festival organizers announced yesterday. "Filth and Wisdom" stars Eugene Hutz, Richard E. Grant and Stephen Graham. . . Having gone from Hollywood eccentric to global humanitarian in a few short years, Angelina Jolie topped a Reuters poll released yesterday of the best celebrity humanitarians of 2007.

. . . and Quoted

"We're not going to keep running and running and running, because at some point you do get the life beaten out of you. It hasn't been beaten out of us yet. We need to be in there now, while we're still fresh and open and fearless and bold."

-- Michelle Obama tells Vanity Fair that her husband Barack Obama's run for the presidency is "now or never."

-- Chris Richards, from staff and wire reports