The Long Hot Summer

Here's a quick take on some other films currently scheduled for release this summer:

May

The psychological thriller Ambition stars Lou Diamond Phillips as a writer who becomes obsessed by the murderous skills of his subject, a convicted murderer (Clancy Brown).

Director Jane Campion follows last year's acclaimed Sweetie with An Angel at My Table, a biopic of New Zealand author Janet Frame.

In the first 15 minutes of Drop Dead Fred, Elizabeth (Phoebe Cates) loses her husband (Tim Matheson), her job, and her purse, and is consoled by her long-lost imaginary childhood friend, Fred (Rik Mayall).

In Everybody's Fine (Stanno Tutti Bene), Marcello Mastroianni plays an aging patriarch who travels across Italy to round up his scattered family for a final celebration. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso).

June

When Christina Applegate (Married...With Children) and her four siblings discover their elderly babysitter Lil has passed on, they're left home alone for two months in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead.

Based on a true incident, Prisoners of the Sun stars FX2's Bryan Brown as an Australian military trial lawyer who gets opposition from all sides when he tries to prosecute Japanese officers for World War II war crimes.

A 1950s period piece, The Reflecting Skin tells the nightmarish story of an 8-year-old Idaho boy (Jeremy Cooper) who's convinced that the woman his brother loves is a vampire.

Talkin' Dirty After Dark takes us into an all-black Los Angeles comedy club where the comics, their boss, and their loved ones engage in what writer- director Topper Carew calls ''an Afro-French farce.''

July

Liam Neeson stars in The Big Man as a miner, thrown into prison for his part in a strike, who turns to bare-knuckle boxing after his release.

In Dutch, Ed O'Neill (Married With Children) gets stuck on a cross-country road trip with girlfriend JoBeth Williams' stuck-up son.

Lame Ducks stars John Turturro, Mel Smith, and Bob Nelson as mismatched oddballs enlisted by a wealthy dowager (Nancy Marchand) to help run her ballet company.

A student at the Ajax School of Broadcasting (Terrence ''T.C.'' Carson) gains fame and fortune — but nearly loses his soul — in Livin' Large!

Teenagers Jimmy and Rose (Niall Byrne and Lorraine Pilkington) find their quiet life in an Irish seaside town disrupted when Jimmy falls for a mysterious American (Beverly D'Angelo) in The Miracle.

* After wreaking havoc (and earning $50 million) in last summer's Problem Child, Junior the terrible (Michael Oliver) moves with Dad (John Ritter) to a new town in Child 2.

August

In the kiddie feature Bingo!, Chuckie (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.) is in love with a telephone-capable, car-driving mutt who saved him from drowning, but Chuckie's parents (Cindy Williams, David Rasche) aren't so enamored. Getting a good camera angle on the thigh-high star was tricky: ''You'll see that Bingo spends a lot of time on the mantelpiece,'' says producer Tom Baer.

Jeff Fahey stars as a criminal psychologist whose life slips out of control after he receives an arm grafted from a convicted murderer in Body Parts, a horror thriller.

In John Sayles' City of Hope, Vincent Spano plays the son of a building contractor (Tony LoBianco) and Joe Morton is an idealistic councilman who grapples with big-city moral issues.

An aging, white has-been (William Russ) who plays minor league baseball in the 1950s bonds with a black rookie (Glenn Plummer), who's also alienated from the team, in One Cup of Coffee.

Pure Luck pairs the world's unluckiest accountant (Martin Short) with a tough detective (Danny Glover) to rescue an accident-prone heiress (Sheila Kelley) after she has vanished.

It's a dog's life for Rodney Dangerfield as the voice of a Las Vegas hound who hits the road to rescue a friend in the animated Rover Dangerfield.

John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) joins New York writer-actor Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio) in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, a disturbingly comic stream of monologues based on Bogosian's one-man Off-Broadway show.

Intergalactic macho hero Hulk Hogan moves in with Shelley Duvall and Christopher Lloyd when his spaceship is damaged in Suburban Commando.

Written by: Giselle Benatar, Meredith Berkman, Jess Cagle, Don Chase, Margot Dougherty, Melina Gerosa, Christopher Henrikson, Gregg Kilday, and Kelli Prior.

Researched by: Steve Daly, Tim Purtell, and Caren Weiner