Fall Movie Preview: October 1997

EVE'S BAYOU

Samuel L. Jackson produced and costars in this $6 million drama about a 10-year-old Louisiana girl (Jurnee Smollett) coping with family secrets. Filming in a bayou swamp, actress-turned- writer-director Kasi Lemmons cast some local talent: tarantulas and snakes. ''They're everywhere,'' she laughs. ''We had spider wranglers. You'd think it's some science, but he's just the person brave enough to grab the spider.'' (Oct. 24)

SWEPT FROM THE SEA

Finally, a film that shows Joseph Conrad's mushy side. Director Beeban Kidron (Used People) has adapted Conrad's short story "Amy Foster," with Vincent Perez (The Crow: City of Angels) as an 1800s Ukrainian adventurer who falls for a bored English girl (Rachel Weisz). "It's really about how you can't deny your roots," says Perez. (Oct. 24)

CRITICAL CARE

Director Sidney Lumet (Network) dissects the health-care system and finds a dark comedy about a doctor (James Spader) dealing with such modern ills as euthanasia, insurance — and a drunken hospital chairman (Albert Brooks) whose only concern is cost. "There's great humor in the story," says Brooks, who withstood six hours of makeup to become his seventysomething character. "But it's also sort of sad."

HAPPY TOGETHER

Don't think Flo and Eddie; think the ebb and flow of a relationship, in this case a gay couple from Hong Kong (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung) trying to start fresh in Argentina. Helmer Wong Kar-Wai, whose Chungking Express is a Tarantino favorite, took the best director prize at Cannes, beating out L.A. Confidential and The Ice Storm.

PLUS:

Hot off Scream, Wes Craven returns to low-rent horror as executive producer of Wishmaster, starring Robert Englund ("Freddy Krueger"), Tony Todd ("Candyman"), Kane Hodder ("Jason"), and a genie. Dean Koontz's 1983 thriller Phantoms reaches the big screen, with Peter O'Toole and Inventing the Abbotts' Joanna Going as survivors of a mysterious force that wipes out a Colorado town. O'Toole also shows up as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (opposite Harvey Keitel as Harry Houdini) in Fairy Tale: A True Story, in which two girls claim to have met pixies. Waitress Martha Plimpton flees her domineering husband and meets a lonely boy in Eye of God. Manhattan teen Claire Danes finds peace, quiet, and life lessons at the country home of her Holocaust-survivor grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) in I Love You, I Love You Not. Nenette et Boni are a pregnant high school student and her sex-obsessed brother, who reunite after their mother dies. Shelley Duvall and Beau Bridges costar in RocketMan, in which a bumbling scientist is tapped for the first manned mission to Mars. A philanderer and a nurse meet through a personal ad and embark on a murder spree in Deep Crimson. Three decades of interviews and concert footage make up Year of the Horse, Jim Jarmusch's tribute to Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Carried away by balloons, a retriever, Napoleon, must find his way in the Australian outback. A male cast tackles male and female roles in Lilies, a boarding-school love triangle starring Tony winner Brent Carver (Kiss of the Spider Woman). Nick and Jane follows a New York yuppie who gets a fake boyfriend to irk the real thing. Military vets-turned-club owners rob gangsters to save their doomed hot spot in Heaven. A bride picks a creepy husband in the Italian horror flick Seven Notes in Black. And in Chairman of the Board, Carrot Top somehow becomes head of a corporation and tries to woo his VP (Courtney Thorne-Smith).