FALL MOVIE PREVIEW: NOVEMBER

JENNIFER EIGHT A severed hand and a bra at the city dump: These are the clues police sergeant John Berlin (Andy Garcia) discovers on his first morning on the job in Eureka, Calif. And though Berlin has been lured from Los Angeles to the Northern California countryside by his old partner (Lance Henriksen) for a taste of the quiet life, he finds himself on the trail of a serial killer whose victims have all been female, blind, and dubbed with the case name ''Jennifer.'' Factor in the lack of a corpse and his colleagues' unwillingness to believe the evidence is part of a serial spree, and you've got yourself one tough career relocation. ''There are moments of great tension,'' says Garcia of his quest to prevent Uma Thurman from becoming Jennifer Nine. ''It's not a violent picture, not gratuitous at all. It's a thinking man's thriller.'' Both he and Henriksen say the screenplay, by Bruce Robinson (The Killing Fields), is one of the best they've read (Robinson also directed Jennifer Eight). ''We all became obsessed with making Bruce's vision come true,'' says Henriksen of the film's impressive cast, including John Malkovich as an FBI agent and Kathy Baker as Henriksen's wife. ''It was a total conspiracy.'' ''I'm proud of it because it deals in a genre that's easily exploited by American movies nowadays,'' Garcia says. ''And everything is handled with a very delicate touch.'' That subtlety extends to his love scenes with principal witness and potential victim Thurman (''I didn't take my shirt off, it was 20 degrees,'' Garcia adds). But, he insists, romance fans won't be disappointed. ''It's very genuine. More like life and less like the movies.'' (Paramount)

ALIVE In 1972, a planeful of Uruguayan rugby players crash-landed in the frozen Andes. By the time they were rescued 10 weeks later, they had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Bringing this true story to the screen was no picnic either. Filming took place on the 9,500-foot-high Delphine glacier in British Columbia. The cast was fattened up during rehearsals so they could convincingly lose 10-15 pounds each on a low-fat diet during the 15-week shoot. One of the real-life survivors, Nando Parrado (played by Ethan Hawke), served as technical adviser, and he faced the toughest assignment. ''He was unconscious for the first days (after the crash),'' says director Frank Marshall (Arachnophobia). ''So when we were shooting those scenes where they were removing his mother's body and his sister was dying, it was pretty emotional. He was seeing things he had never seen before.'' (Touchstone)

PASSENGER 57 Die Hard on a plane: Wesley Snipes stars as John Cutter, a security expert who takes a break from his job only to wind up on the same flight as a gang of terrorists. ''One thing that takes it a step further than Die Hard is that Cutter has hand-to-hand combat with just about all of the villains,'' says director Kevin Hooks (Strictly Business). Snipes enjoyed showcasing his 14 years of martial-arts training, and there was another, unexpected reward. ''It hides some of my nervousness,'' he says. (Warner Bros.)