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As The Devil's Own demonstrates, there are really only two kinds of stars -- those who do accents (Brad Pitt does a warm Belfast brogue) and those who just don't (Harrison Ford does Ford). It's like burger toppings, as Meryl Streep, doyenne of dialect, explains. Doing accents, she says, ''is a facility, a simple thing that you have or you don't have, and it's completely not necessary to acting. It's an extra little, you know, 'Do you want it with cheese or without?'''
Look for these fine fromages coming to your grocer's cinema section soon:
-- Brad Pitt
He follows Devil's Own with this October's Seven Years in Tibet, playing Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, who encounters the Dalai Lama.
-- Val Kilmer
Next month in The Saint, Kilmer tries to top his Marlon Brando imitation (the one unalloyed pleasure in The Island of Dr. Moreau) as a master of disguise whose accents include Australian, Russian, German, and all-purpose, super-charming Continental.
-- John Travolta and Emma Thompson
Vinnie Barbarino's going Dixie as Gov. Jack Stanton, but will he do a Clinton impression? Will Emma channel Hillary? That's the question and follow-up as the film adaptation of Joe ''I'm Not So Anonymous'' Klein's Primary Colors heads toward production.
-- Kenneth Branagh and Gary Oldman
Southerners aren't necessarily American anymore. Belfast-born Branagh plays a down-home lawyer in John Grisham's The Gingerbread Man. London native Oldman adopts an outsize drawl as a wacky despot in The Fifth Element, Luc Besson's futurist fantasy coming in May.
-- Frances McDormand and Glenn Close
Shrugging off Fargo's tangy Minnesotan, McDormand appears as a German Jewish philosopher in Paradise Road, with Close as an inspirational Englishwoman nothing like Cruella DeVil. Bruce Beresford's World War II prisoner drama opens in April.
-- Minnie Driver
The Englishwoman was Irish in Circle of Friends, Russian in Goldeneye, and a New Jersey girl in Big Night. In April she plays a Detroit-area radio DJ in Grosse Pointe Blank.
-- Tim Roth
Having warmed up for the role with amusing domestic lowlifes in Gridlock'd and Everyone Says I Love You, the English actor plays a no-joke New Yawk gangster, Dutch Schultz, in MGM's Hoodlum, due in August.
And if you're imagining a cockney Robert De Niro in Great Expectations, just stop. The Dickens adaptation, which also stars Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, shifts the scene to modern-day Manhattan and Florida. It's 100 percent American beef.
-- Gregg Kilday, with additional reporting by Jeffrey Dawson
