OK, so the fall movie season threatens to hold the biggest batch of tawdry religious shockers since Gerald Ford was in office. Lost Souls, Stigmata, End of Days—you don’t need to visit your neighborhood survivalist store or Christian bookseller to see that apocalypsploitation beckons at the century’s end.

Yet so do many of the world’s most interesting directors, among them Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, Mike Leigh, and Errol Morris. The last quarter of the last year of the movies’ first century provides a glut of major talents bearing promising films—more than we can list or you can see. With that in mind, Scene reviewers Donna Bowman, Noel Murray, and Jim Ridley list some of the fall’s most interesting titles.

American Beauty This striking first film by acclaimed British theater director Sam Mendes belongs to a genre we’re starting to despise—the sick-soul-of-suburbia satire—but Kevin Spacey’s performance as an aging company man in the throes of a mid-life freakout is nothing short of beautiful. And Mendes makes the transition to film with enough visual ingenuity and command to remind you that Orson Welles started out in theater too. J.R.

American Movie In this well-received documentary, Chris Smith (American Job) follows Mark Borchardt, a Wisconsin filmmaker of dubious talents, in his quest to film a no-budget horror opus. This is one of several recent docs (like Todd Phillips’ Frat House) that’s as much about the director’s resolve as his subjects’. J.R.

Being John Malkovich John Cusack plays a puppeteer-turned-corporate-wage-slave who discovers a mysterious tunnel that enables him to enter and control...the brain of mannered actor John Malkovich. One of the weirdest and funniest ideas in years has already produced a suitably weird and funny trailer—we can’t wait to see the feature. Music video maestro Spike Jonze, responsible for two of the coolest clips ever (Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”), makes his directorial debut. N.M.

Bringing Out the Dead The story—a paramedic (Nicolas Cage) haunted by people he hasn’t been able to save—sounds a little gruesome for comedy, but Martin Scorsese’s latest has a heart of black humor. The last time the director entered this realm was in 1985, with After Hours—and your reaction to that film may be the best predictor of whether Bringing Out the Dead will turn you on. All we can tell you is that the trailer is the funniest, jazziest, most endorphin-pumping snippet of film since the trailer for Buffalo ’66. D.B.

Cradle Will Rock A season of novel film premises continues with this drama based on a footnote from showbiz history. Tim Robbins directs a stellar cast (including Susan Sarandon, John Cusack, Emily Watson, and Bill Murray) in a recreation of the controversy surrounding Orson Welles’ attempt to stage a pro-labor musical in 1937. As an examination of where art, politics, and entertainment intersect, Cradle couldn’t be more timely, especially with the power and purpose of the media being so vigorously debated. N.M.

Daddy and Them Before starting work on the movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses—now, there’s a movie to mark on your calendar—writer-director Billy Bob Thornton dashed off this comedy about a screwed-up Arkansas family united by an uncle’s legal woes. How’s this for a cast: Thornton, Laura Dern, Jim Varney, John Prine, Ben Affleck, Jamie Lee Curtis, Andy Griffith, and former Nashvillian Susan Davis. J.R.

Dogma Craven Miramax bowed out of distributing this way-out religious satire from Clerks/Chasing Amy writer-director Kevin Smith. If word from Cannes can be trusted, the company may have passed up one of the fall’s best movies. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon play fallen angels using a loophole in Catholic dogma to return to heaven, at mankind’s expense; standing in their way are abortion-clinic worker (and direct descendant of Christ) Linda Fiorentino, foul-mouthed 13th apostle Chris Rock, and Smith’s recurring stoner heroes Jay and Silent Bob. Oh yeah, we forgot—Alanis Morissette plays God. J.R.

The End of the Affair The English Patient meets The Crying Game, as Neil Jordan directs Ralph Fiennes in a World War II period piece based on Graham Greene’s novel. Julianne Moore stars as a woman cheating on her husband (Stephen Rea) with Fiennes. When Fiennes is injured in the London blitz, Moore makes a pact with God to end the affair if He saves Fiennes’ life. Sounds like the kind of rent-garment romance we can’t resist. N.M.

The Green Mile When Stephen King parceled out this serial novel—a spooky, episodic tale about guards and prisoners on a Southern jail’s death row—his readers learned how Dickens fans felt waiting for the author’s next installment. The story won’t be serialized onscreen, but its “triumph of the human spirit” aspect is sure to come through, given that The Shawshank Redemption’s Frank Darabont is directing. King’s story teeters on the edge of bathos at times, but thanks to the first-person narrator, the kindly guard Edgecombe (Tom Hanks), it has a powerful psychological riptide that could be riveting on film. Bonus attraction: It was filmed last year at several Middle Tennessee locations. D.B.

Holy Smoke Cult member Kate Winslet has been kidnapped and locked in a remote hut; her only way out is through deprogrammer Harvey Keitel, who’s not above using sex and violence to break her. As if this set-up needed more tension, the director is Jane Campion (The Piano). J.R.

The Hurricane A rail-thin, buffed-up Denzel Washington plays Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, the middleweight contender railroaded for a triple murder, in this prison drama and biopic from director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night). J.R.

The Limey Steven Soderbergh’s last film was the kicky big-budget dazzler Out of Sight; his next film will be the blockbuster courtroom drama Erin Brockovich. In between those high-profile projects, the sex, lies and videotape director found time to lens this spare thriller. Terence Stamp stars as an aging British con who stalks a sleazy L.A. record executive (Peter Fonda) with blood on his hands. N.M.

Magnolia Having followed up Hard Eight with a soft 13—i.e., his well-hung porn epic Boogie Nights—what will writer-director P.T. Anderson do for an encore? We’ve seen the amazingly odd trailer, and we still couldn’t tell you: A woman fires a shotgun, someone falls past a window, and then the entire cast introduces itself—including a frog! Did we mention the cast features Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy, and an unrecognizable Tom Cruise? That frog’s got some agent. J.R.

Man on the Moon Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman—the comic so transgressive that his fans took his death as another elaborate prank—in the latest offbeat biopic from the People Vs. Larry Flynt team of director Milos Forman and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski. Jerry Lawler plays himself, natch. J.R.

The Messenger Many actresses profess to want to play Joan of Arc. But in his brilliant From the Journals of Jean Seberg, director Mark Rappaport wonders whether male directors aren’t exorcising their own secret, masochistic desire by casting their lust objects as martyrs. Rappaport was talking specifically about Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, but he could just as easily have been dishing eccentric French director Luc Besson, who put his then-wife Milla Jovovich in Joan’s armor and tied her to the stake for this epic retelling. We’ll see this for a test of Rappaport’s thesis, for the presence of gifted Besson veterans like composer Eric Serra and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast—and above all for Dustin Hoffman as the Grand Inquisitor. D.B.

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) transfixed Sundance viewers last winter with an unfinished cut of his latest documentary: an account of a capital-punishment expert who has become a mouthpiece for Holocaust revisionists and radical-right wackos. J.R.

The Other Like dozens of other cool foreign films, this extravagant musical from Egyptian director Youssef Chahine doesn’t even have a distributor lined up. That doesn’t mean we’d want to see it any less than we’d want to see any of the big American fall releases. In a perfect world, we could see this and the new James Bond flick back-to-back without leaving the megaplex. Here’s hoping. J.R.

Princess Mononoke Hayao Miyazaki, maker of fine animated films (including the masterpiece Kiki’s Delivery Service), shattered box-office records in Japan with this fantasy epic about the war between humanity and forest spirits. Disney acquired the film, gave it a quality English translation—then shuffled it off to Miramax when the studio realized that the film’s graphic violence and earthy language might alienate Disney’s family audience. The question is: Will Miramax give the film a proper release, or will it bury the movie along with so many foreign films that it’s snapped up this decade? Our hope is that Miramax will want to cash in on the hunger for Japanese animation sparked by the Pokemon craze. N.M.

Sleepy Hollow With its spooky sets, desaturated Hammer-horror color, and grisly fairy-tale imagery, the trailer couldn’t be cooler for Tim Burton’s version of the Washington Irving tale—in which man of reason Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) contends with a certain shadowy horseman’s cranial fixation. All this and Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken, and Christopher Lee too—our Halloween plans are set. J.R.

The Straight Story A G-rated film by David Lynch? Yeah, and Disney has started slicing off ears. Actually, Lynch is getting some of the best notices of his erratic but fascinating career for this gentle, fact-based drama about an Iowa septuagenarian (the always watchable Richard Farnsworth) who decides to visit his estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) on a cross-country trek—by lawn mower. J.R.

Stuart Little As a child, I had an LP reading of this E.B. White classic, and I can still hear the woman’s voice describing the mouse hero’s battle with a paper bag as he races his toy schooner in Central Park. A mix of computer-generated images and human actors, the success of this adaptation (co-written by hot Sixth Sense creator M. Night Shyamalan) will depend not on its special effects, but on whether it captures the subtle loneliness of the search for one’s self. D.B.

The Talented Mr. Ripley Alfred Hitchcock made a classic film of her novel Strangers on a Train, but Patricia Highsmith’s mysteries and thrillers have been filmed in foreign tongues more often than in her native English. Now comes this glossy American version of her most popular novel, which also inspired Rene Clement’s French mystery Purple Noon. Matt Damon plays the calculating title character, who admires the carefree lifestyle of a young gadabout and sets out to duplicate it—by hook or by crook. Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) adapted and directed. D.B.

Three Kings We never pegged Flirting With Disaster writer-director David O. Russell as an action-caper kinda guy. But this black-comedy thriller about a gang of American soldiers (including George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg) turned gold thieves in Gulf War-era Kuwait is one of the fall’s most anticipated releases. J.R.

Topsy Turvy You wouldn’t think the director of Naked, Secrets & Lies, and High Hopes would have any conventions left to defy, but British filmmaker Mike Leigh returns with...a musical! And a period piece, at that. Leigh’s latest follows Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sullivan (Allan Corduner) from a daunting case of writers’ block to the creation of The Mikado. J.R.

Toy Story 2 As delightful and poignant as Pixar’s 1995 feature debut was, it suffered from a naggingly repetitive plot. This sequel sounds like it has solved that problem, with a clever story that deepens the original’s “what is a toy?” theme. Here, Woody is stolen by an obsessive toy collector, and he’s rescued by Buzz and the whole toybox gang—who are fascinated and dismayed to find a roomful of toys in their original packages. This was originally intended to go straight to video, before Disney noticed the exceptional quality of the film-in-progress. N.M.