Summer Movie Preview - August

Learning Curves
It wouldn't be summer without a high school nostalgia flick like Learning Curves, in which Jason London (Dazed and Confused) has to ace calculus in order to get into Harvard. To the rescue: a slinky tutor (played by — who else? — Tia Carrere), who also happens to be the wife of the evil math teacher. ''It's not a typical idiotic teen movie,'' promises director Bruce Leddy. ''It's what we all went through at that phase.''

The Brothers McMullen
Edward Burns, 27, wrote, directed, and stars in this low-key, ultra-low-budget comedy about three randy siblings prowling New York City and Long Island. Burns uses the McMullens to explore the contemporary Irish-American experience, including Catholicism and sexuality. ''Jeez,'' he says, ''I think we're a pretty colorful crowd.'' The 1995 Sundance Film Festival jurors clearly agreed: They awarded Burns the Grand Jury Prize.

PLUS Amanda Root stars in Persuasion, based on the Jane Austen novel, as a young woman who gives up love for all the wrong reasons and later tries to recoup her losses; Vanessa Redgrave and Uma Thurman pass an ungentle Month By the Lake in Italy as they vie for the attentions of Edward Fox; Michel Negroponte turns his documentary lens on Maggie, a homeless resident of New York's Central Park, and tries to discover her identity over a year of visits in Jupiter's Wife; Ron Vawter (Philadelphia), who died of AIDS last year, plays two homosexual men with completely opposing lifestyles in a screenplay he cowrote, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith; she thinks she's a sheepdog, but really she's Babe, a prize sow who breaks through the glass ceiling in her professional life to earn great honors in the field; filmed in China, The Amazing Panda Adventure pits man against the elements to rescue cuddly bears; a romance author gets a Lucky Break when she falls in love with a jewelry salesman (Anthony LaPaglia); 10 Torontonians are brought together by a lunar Eclipse as they search for the meaning of life in the shadow of the sun; an apparent death sends two misfit lovers on the road in the neo-noir River of Grass; in A Fine Speciman, Lisa Eichhorn tracks down Stanley Tucci, a sperm donor who may be responsible for her baby; a Dutch import from director Theo van Gogh (Vincent's great-nephew), 1-900 listens to the steamy voices on phone sex lines; in Art For Teachers of Children, based on a true story, a young girl has an affair with her teacher and years later is asked to testify against him in a child pornography case; writer-director Richard Williams uses his Who Framed Roger Rabbit expertise and the voice of the late Vincent Price to create Arabian Knights, the animated story of a princess and a cobbler whose lives are changed forever by a thief; fans of the first three installments should know that, yes, Pinhead does return in Hellraiser IV; as if nightlife in New York weren't scary enough, Michael Almereyda's Nadja brings vampires to life in an erotic tale starring Peter Fonda with a cameo by the film's executive producer, David Lynch; and two young men joyride on a rich father's money in Purple Noon, a rerelease of 1959's Plein Soleil, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.