TEN
Director Abbas Kiarostami, the grand old man of Iranian cinema, attached a camera to a dashboard to chronicle 10 trips made by a woman driver (the riveting Mania Akbari). Divorced and struggling for a sliver of freedom in the male-dominated Iranian Republic, Akbari’s character examines the range of experiences for Iranian women through conversations with various passengers: her resentful son, a pious old lady en route to a shrine and a giggly hooker who tells her that wives and whores are basically the same. “You’re the wholesalers,” says the prostitute. “We’re the retailers.” With the camerawork of a home movie and raw performances, “Ten” has the classic Kiarostami touch: audacious simplicity and deep-seated humanism. September.
TOGETHER
Chinese director Chen Kaige’s ( “Farewell My Concubine”) lush new film explores life in modern Beijing. It’s told through the eyes of Liu Xiaochun, a 13-year-old, prize-winning violinist who was raised in the countryside by his devoted but uneducated father. Realizing his son’s future lies in the capital, the father takes the boy to Beijing to audition at a music school. The result: a charming coming-of-age story. September.
RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
Jang Sun-woo’s hallucinogenic version of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous Christmas tale is the most expensive Korean movie ever made ($10 million). Loaded with special effects, the plot involves a girl who wanders the streets of Seoul trying to sell lighters, then inhales butane. Delusions ensue. September.
SWEPT AWAY
Anyone with any doubts that we’re living in a post-ideological era, look no further. The proof: Italian surrealist Lina Wertmuller’s 1975 film about a communist fisherman and a bourgeois bitch has been remade with Madonna as a sex, drugs and loadsa-money comedy. Mrs. Ritchie, directed by her husband, Guy (of “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” acclaim) plays Amber, the Hermesed wife of a pharmaceutical kingpin. Marooned on a desert island with earthy Giuseppe (Adriano Giannini, whose father created the role in Wertmuller’s version), the two become lovers. When Wertmuller explored the master-slave sexual relationship between the two stranded characters back in the ’70s, feminists and film buffs alike debated whether rendering the rich woman a sexual slave to the boorish, primal fisherman was debasing or liberating for women. Even if the film creaks slightly, it’ll be fun to watch Madonna–herself no stranger to the “is she or isn’t she a feminist?” debate. October.
CALLAS FOREVER
What if Maria Callas had a second career–in film? Would the opera legend have lived longer than her short 53 years? This is director Franco Zeffirelli’s supposition in his newest film, “Callas Forever,” starring French actress Fanny Ardant as the tragic diva and Jeremy Irons as her devoted agent, Larry. Back in 1977, Larry is in Paris promoting a Sex Pistols-like group when he drops by to visit his old friend and client Callas. He finds the great beauty holed up in her flat, clad in her robe and living on pills and booze. Her voice is gone, and with it, her confidence. Larry has a scheme to bring Callas out of seclusion: film her playing her most famous roles dubbed with her early recordings. Ardant, who has played Callas onstage in “Master Class,” gives a startling performance as the diva, who died in 1977, and there are times you forget that it is not the great soprano herself. The film is pure Zeffirelli: flashy, larger than life. But it has a sweetness to it, too, as if Zeffirelli has sprinkled it with the love he had for his dear friend Callas. And, of course, the soundtrack is sublime. September.
THE HOURS
The film opens with Virginia Woolf’s (Nicole Kidman, plus nose) weighing her coat down with stones and wading into a river with no intention of going for a swim. Yes, “Billy Elliot” director Stephen Daldry is diving into dark waters here, but if he pulls off “The Hours”–and an early screening suggests he has–it’s sure to be one of the most moving, and gorgeously acted, films of the year. Based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about “Mrs. Dalloway,” the film follows a pivotal day-in-the-life of three women living in different cities–and different decades. There’s Woolf, who’s writing “Mrs. Dalloway.” There’s a ’50s housewife reading the novel as she decides whether she wants to live or die (Julianne Moore). And there’s a modern-day Manhattanite (Meryl Streep) who appears to be living out the novel as she plans a party for a poet friend who’s dying of AIDS (Ed Harris). It’s wrenching stuff, but Kidman, Streep and Moore should be laughing all the way to the Oscars. December.
ALSO CHECK OUT: Hannibal Lecter returns for his third helping in Red Dragon, based on Thomas Harris’s first novel to feature the hungry madman. The cast is delicious: Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mary-Louise Parker. Oh, and Anthony Hopkins. Universal, Oct. 4. The first Harry Potter film grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, but are people just as excited for part two, The Chamber of Secrets? Warner Bros., Nov. 15. We don’t know anyone who isn’t excited about the next installment of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings.” The Two Towers promises to be bigger, bolder and bloodier. New Line, Dec. 18. Steven Spielberg barely gives us a chance to miss him: after June’s “Minority Report,” he’s already back, directing Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks in Catch Me if You Can, a caper about a charming young con man and the FBI agent trying to catch him (if he can). DreamWorks, Dec. 25. And finally, the musical Chicago hits the big screen, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger as the two lady killers who sing and dance their cold hearts out. Miramax, Dec. 25.
