FROM January to March is in theory, Quality Time at cinemas here, as the many high profile Oscar contenders released in the US towards the end of the year make their way into Irish cinemas. The frocks are out in force for the major literary adaptations, the cops are operating on both sides of the law, and there are plenty of shocks in store.
That venerable movie stand by, William Shakespeare, is the source for three spring pictures, including a four hour Hamlet and a contemporary Romeo And Juliet. Chris O'Donnell plays the young Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Hopkins portrays Picasso and Jared Harris (son of Richard) is cast as Andy Warhol. Actress Illeanna Douglas plays a singer modelled on Carole King, and singer Madonna plays the actress who became Eva Peron. And Ireland's first science fiction production is ready for blast off.
The season gets off to a very busy start next Friday with the opening of Evita, Shine, Sleepers, American Buffalo and Hearts and Minds - see Week Ahead (p.4) for details. Genre by genre, these are the movies scheduled to follow them into Irish cinemas up to Easter weekend at the end of March. Some may well turn up in the ACCBank 12th Dublin Film Festival, which runs from March 4th to 13th and promises another exciting international programme. And some of the release dates given below may well change over the next three months.
LITERARY ADAPTATIONS
Al Pacino turns director with Looking For Richard (Jan 31st) in which Pacino himself explores Richard III with the help of, among others, Alec Baldwin, Aidan Quinn, Winona Ryder and Kenneth Branagh. Branagh's own starstudded four hour screen version of Hamlet (with himself in the lead) is due on March 28th, as is William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet, a stylised contemporary treatment directed by Baz Luhrmann, the Australian who gave us Strictly Ballroom. Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes, play the star crossed lovers in what Time magazine has dubbed "a Rebel Without A Cause for the 90s".
In his first film since In The Name Of The Father, the gifted Daniel Day Lewis plays John Proctor in Arthur Miller's own adaptation of his Salem witch trials play, The Crucible (Feb 21st), directed by Nicholas Hytner, who made The Madness Of King George. But will Winona Ryder, who co stars, be credible in period for once?
Jane Campion's first film since The Piano, the Henry James adaptation The Portrait Of A Lady (Feb 28th), features Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer with John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey and Martin Donovan. And Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristin Scott Thomas are all likely Oscar nominees for Anthony Minghella's movie of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker winner, The English Patient (March 14th).
DRAMA
Anthony Hopkins plays Pablo Picasso in James Ivory's Surviving Picasso (Jan 10th), which spans the years 1943 to 1953 and deals with the women in his life, principally Francoise Gilot (Natasha McElhone). Ivory's production partner, Ismail Merchant, directs The Proprietor (Feb 7th), starring Jeanne Moreau as an acclaimed French author reflecting on an eventful life.
John Travolta and Harry Belafonte feature in Desmond Nakano's White Man's Burden (Feb 7th), set in a future America where blacks are the ruling majority. Richard Attenborough's In Love And War stars Chris O'Donnell as an 18 year old Ernest Hemingway falling in love with a nurse (Sandra Bullock) in Italy. A Sundance prize winner, Lee David Zlotoff's The Spitfire Grill features Allison Elliot as an ex convict in Fried Green Tomatoes territory.
Illeana Douglas plays a singersongwriter loosely modelled on Carole King in Grace Of My Heart (Feb 21st), Allison Anders's affectionate picture of the 1960s US pop scene, which has a wonderfully evocative original soundtrack. On a lighter note, the engaging That Thing You Do! (Jan 24th), directed by Tom Hanks, is set around the same time, as a small time pop group copes with the pressures of fame. Staying in the Sixties, Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi (March 7th) is a factually based drama with James Woods back in reptilian mode as a racist killer and Whoopi Goldberg as his victim's widow.
A modern day film noir with a strong lesbian twist, Bound (March 14th) features Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. The first feature scripted by Wexford playwright Billy Roche, Gillies MacKinnon's Trojan Eddie (March 21st) is set among Irish travellers and stars Richard Harris and Stephen Rea. In Milos Forman's critically acclaimed The People Vs. Larry Flynt (March 28th), Woody Harrelson plays Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, with singer Courtney Love tipped for an Oscar nomination as his wife.
ACTION/ ADVENTURE
Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer track down human eating lions in late 1890s Africa in The Ghost And The Darkness (Jan 17th), directed by Stephen Hopkins. Michael J. Fox plays a ghostbuster threatened by a supernatural force in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners (Jan 24th). Elizabeth Hurley produces and Hugh Grant stars with Gene Hackman in the medical corruption thriller Extreme Measures (Jan 31th), directed by Michael Apted.
A major box office hit in the US, Ron Howard's Ransom (Feb 7th) is an unusually morally complex kidnapping thriller in which the victim is the young son of a self made millionaire (Mel Gibson) with a murky past. Billy Zane plays the eponymous comic strip character in The Phantom (Feb 14th). The first large scale science fiction made in Ireland, Space Truckers (Feb 21st) stars Dennis Hopper and Stephen Dorff.
Dorff also joins Jack Nicholson, Judy Davis and Michael Caine in Bob Rafelson's robbery thriller, Blood And Wine (March 7th) and on the same day there's Peter Hyams's horror movie The Relic, with Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore. Val Kilmer takes the title role in The Saint (Mar 21st), co starring with Elisabeth Shue in Philip Noyce's movie based on the Leslie Charteris creation.
Yet to be scheduled for the period are two rival lava blockbusters, Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, and Dante's Peak, starring Pierce Brosnan, and the new Jean Claude Van Damme action movie, The Quest. And the 20th anniversary of the first Star Wars movie is marked with the re release of the trilogy starting on March 21st.
COMEDY & ROMANCE
Barbra Streisand directs herself as an ugly duckling who gets a makeover in The Mirror Has Two Faces (Jan 10th), co starring Jeff Bridges, Lauren Bacall and Pierce Brosnan. In Penny Marshall's The Preacher's Wife (Jan 17th), an updating of the 1947 The Bishop's Wife, Denzel Washington and a gospel singing Whitney Houston take on the roles originally played by Cary Grant and Loretta Young.
The exuberant, free wheeling comedy Flirting With Disaster, which closed Cannes in May, finally arrives here on January 24th, followed a week later by the well reviewed Jerry Maguire, featuring Tom Cruise as a sports agent who loses his job and his fiancee. The Fish Called Wanda team of John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin are reunited in the production plagued and long overdue comedy Fierce Creatures (Jan 31st).
Edward Burns follows The Brothers McMullen with another story of young Irish Americans with romantic problems in She's The One (Feb 14th). John Travolta is a sexually active angel in Nora Ephron's Michael (Feb 21st), co starring Andie McDowell and William Hurt. Due a week later, Mars Attacks!, the Tim Burton science fiction comedy with a self explanatory title, boasts a huge cast led by Jack Nicholson (as the US president), Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Danny de Vito, Michael J. Fox, singer Tom Jones, the ubiquitous Pierce Brosnan and many more.
It's hate at first sight for divorced New Yorkers played by Michelle Pfeiffer and ER star George Clooney in Michael Hoffman's romantic comedy, One Fine Day (Feb 28th). Eddie Murphy is back in the action comedy genre for Metro (March 14th), while Bugs Buggy and basketball megastar Michael Jordan are teamed up in the SFX driven romp Space Jam (March 21st). Unconfirmed for March are Debbie Reynolds making a comeback in Albert Brooks's Mother, and the new Jim Carrey vehicle, Liar. Liar.
ARTHOUSE
Lili Taylor is riveting as the man hating feminist Valerie Solanas, the title of I Shot Andy Warhol and with Jared Harris as Warhol and Stephen Dorff in drag as Candy Darling (Jan 10th).
Dates have yet to be finalised for a number of movies coming to the Screen and the IFC in Dublin among them The Starmaker by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore; Ken Loach's Carla's Song with Robert Carlyle as a Scot in Nicaragua; and Keith Gordon's Kurt Vonnegut Jr. adaptation, Mother Night with Nick Nolte as an American playwright undercover in Nazi Germany.
Look out, too, for Patrice Leconte's sharp period satire, Ridicule; Mathieu Kassovitz as a wartime impostor in Jacques Audiard's highly entertaining A Selk Ma de Hero; Paul Hill's picture of disaffected young English people in Boston Kickout; the overrated US independent picture of adolescent woes, Welcome To the Dollhouse; and Robert Altman's vastly overrated Prohibition era kidnapping yarn, Kansas City, partly redeemed by Harry Belafonte's performance land some hot jazz, but sunk by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the most grating and mannered performance anyone could fear to see next year.