STARRING Robert De Niro, Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Kirk Jones

In a remake of the 1990 Italian film Stanno Tutti Bene, Robert De Niro plays a New York telephone-factory worker who realizes, after the death of his wife, that he doesn't know how to communicate with his kids without her being there to mediate. Writer and director Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee) promises audiences a side of De Niro rarely seen on film. ''He's playing a regular, blue-collar, working dad,'' he says. Kate Beckinsale, who costars as his daughter, admits she was terrified to work with her acting hero: ''You're always aware you're in the presence of somebody whose photograph you had Scotch-taped to your fridge during college.''

STARRING Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman
WRITTEN BY David Benioff
DIRECTED BY Jim Sheridan

Brothers, based on the 2004 Danish movie Brodre, follows two siblings: a stolid U.S. Marine (Tobey Maguire) who's declared MIA and presumed dead in Afghanistan, and his ne'er-do-well younger brother (Jake Gyllenhaal), who begins to lend a hand to his brother's wife (Natalie Portman) and two kids back in the States. (The production took place mostly around Santa Fe.) But then Maguire's character suddenly returns home, traumatized by his experience on the battlefield, and the family dynamics shift yet again. The filmmakers hope all the domestic fireworks will appeal to audiences turned off by the recent spate of movies inspired by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Says director Jim Sheridan (In America), ''It's more a story about homecoming than it is about war.''