Fall Movie Preview: September 1997

THE LOCUSTS

Test audiences have been, no pun intended, buzzing about the graphic on-screen castration of a bull in first-time writer-director John Patrick Kelley's noirish romance set in rural Kansas. ''There was no real castration of any kind done, thank God,'' insists Vince Vaughn (Swingers, The Lost World). A sex scene between Vaughn and Ashley Judd in a pickup truck reportedly earned the film an NC-17 rating, but an MGM rep says the film is rated R, and the scene is still intact. (Sept. 26)

BREAKING UP

Robert Greenwald's low-budget romance about ill-fated lovers was filmed two years ago, but Warner Bros. showed interest only recently, as the careers of its two stars, Russell Crowe and Salma Hayek, heated up. "[First] they were waiting for Fools Rush In to come out," explains Hayek. "And [now] they're waiting for L.A. Confidential." (Sept. 26)

PLUS:

The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca ponders what might really have happened to murdered Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, played by Andy Garcia. (He still ends up dead.) Working at a hospital on the Nightwatch, Ewan McGregor plays a law student who is out to catch a killer. College professor Sally Kellerman hires a private investigator to track cheating hubby Ed Begley Jr. in The Lay of the Land. A feckless Frenchman impersonates a decorated World War II soldier in the import A Self Made Hero. An alienated 15-year-old boy escapes his brutal father only to wind up with blood on his hands in Delinquent. Teenagers and blood are also the recipe for Gravesend, in which four Brooklyn boys end a night with a corpse on their hands. A transsexual When Harry Met Sally..., Different for Girls shows what happens when Karl becomes Kim and "forgets" to tell his best friend, Paul. An Irish governess falls for her employer's son on the eve of the Spanish civil war in Talk of Angels. A man who traces his lineage to both slaves and slave owners sets out to find their descendants in the Sundance prize-winning documentary Family Name. Jail guard Giancarlo Esposito and his wife (Regina Taylor) take in an accused serial rapist in The Keeper. A documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman, The Long Way Home chronicles the plight of thousands of Holocaust survivors, while Riding the Rails recounts the story of children during the Great Depression. Newcomer Marisa Ryan and Moon Zappa take to the road in Love Always for a girls-only adventure. Bandwagon follows the fictional four-man band Circus Monkey from garage practice to frat-house gigs. An actor lands a job at an adult phone service in the Spanish comedy Mouth to Mouth. Donald Sutherland and Ben Kingsley costar in The Assignment, a thriller in which Aidan Quinn has the misfortune to look exactly like an international terrorist hunted by the government. The animated Aaron's Magic Village is based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's collection Stories for Children. Set in the Balkans after World War I, Capitaine Conan looks at what happens to soldiers when they're no longer in battle. A Mexican-American in Brooklyn comes to terms with his homosexuality in Latin Boys Go to Hell, and a French philosophy student comes to terms with graduate school in My Sex Life...Or How I Got Into an Argument.