Imagine that you like candy, and you’ve been deprived of sweets until Memorial Day weekend. Suddenly, the floodgates open, and you’re deluged with log-sized Baby Ruths, Hershey Bars the size of barges, and Milk Duds as big as hubcaps.
For movie lovers, that’s a fair approximation of summer fare. Starting Memorial Day weekend, when the studios traditionally launch their biggest summer releases, the nation’s multiplexes are bombarded for three solid months with featherweight comedies, muscular dramas, and megaton action movies that routinely unleash more firepower than the Allies shelled out at Midway.
That isn’t to say it’s not fun while it lasts. And since you’re going to gorge yourself on cinematic cotton candy this summer no matter what your doctor says, you might as well know what to expect.
Here’s a guide to this summer’s slate of blockbuster releases, with worthwhile picks in each category. Wherever possible, we’ve also provided some tasty alternatives to major-studio fare. Think of them as palate cleansers—something to refresh you after the summer’s sugar rush.
Action
Audiences that somehow missed getting deafened by the Dolby onslaught of Twister will have still more chances to lose their hearing this summer, as an advancing army of action movies thunders just over the horizon. The first, Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, pits Tom Cruise and the Impossible Missions Force against a crooked agent; it arrives this week in theaters with a fine supporting cast that includes Jon Voight, Ving Rhames and French actress Emmanuelle Beart. It’s followed closely by Rob Cohen’s effects-laden fantasy Dragonheart, which stars Sean Connery as the voice of the world’s last dragon, befriended by medieval warrior Dennis Quaid. Dragonheart opens next week.
In June, nerdy chemical expert Nicolas Cage and Alcatraz escapee Sean Connery bust into The Rock to stop terrorist Ed Harris from blowing San Francisco into Oakland. Not to be outdone, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as the Eraser, a secret agent assigned to protect federal witness Vanessa Williams by erasing all traces of her existence. The director is Chuck Russell (The Mask). As The Phantom, a big-budget homage to Saturday-afternoon serials, Billy Zane uses his superpowers to defeat the forces of darkness (a.k.a. Treat Williams).
Massive alien warships arrive in July to blast Earthlings to kingdom come on Independence Day, notable not so much for its Fox TV-movie cast—Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Will Smith—as for the preview’s striking image of a death ray nuking the White House. The director, Roland Emmerich, made Stargate, one of the most inexplicably popular sci-fi flicks of all time; perhaps that ol’ death-ray magic will strike twice. Vincent Perez takes over for the late Brandon Lee in The Crow: City of Angels, romancing Exotica’s Mia Kirshner and battling cold-blooded killer Iggy Pop.
August brings Kurt Russell reprising his role as futuristic badass Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s Escape From L.A., the transcontinental sequel to Escape From New York. Hotshot Wall Street businessman Mel Gibson forms a plan of counterattack to rescue his kidnapped son in Ron Howard’s thriller Ransom. Robert DeNiro stars as The Fan, a psychotic baseball nut who stalks slump-stymied major-leaguer Wesley Snipes under the direction of Tony Scott (True Romance). Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin lead a prison break in Fled, and Mario Van Peebles goes Solo as a futuristic killing machine who discovers his humanity.
Our pick: Supercop (August), the third movie in Jackie Chan’s phenomenally popular Police Story series, in which Chan teams with the amazing Asian action superstar Michelle Yeoh for an all-out assault on Hong Kong gangs. Watch Chan leap from a helicopter onto a moving train!
Comedy
A summer without Jim Carrey would be like a summer without ticks. Those who can’t get enough of the rubber-faced dynamo are instructed to wait for The Cable Guy, a black comedy with Carrey as a manic cable installer who destroys the life of a customer (Matthew Broderick). Ben Stiller directs. As if there couldn’t be too many Jerry Lewis imitators, Eddie Murphy hopes to energize his sagging career with his computer-enhanced remake of The Nutty Professor, playing not a bewigged geek but a portly chemist transformed into a skinny stud.
A different Eddie, basketball fan Whoopi Goldberg, gets appointed coach of the New York Knicks in a romp directed by Steve Rash (The Buddy Holly Story). A more promising sports comedy is Bull Durham writer-director Ron Shelton’s Tin Cup, with Kevin Costner as a down-on-his-luck golfer who suddenly thrusts himself back into tournament play. Don Johnson and Rene Russo costar. Danny Glover and Joe Pesci bait their hooks for hilarity in Gone Fishin’, which ought to satisfy anyone waiting for Tim Conway to make Dorf: The Motion Picture.
Elsewhere, gimmicky premises abound. In Multiplicity, Michael Keaton clones himself to handle his many familial and financial obligations, causing—you guessed it—comic complications to ensue. The smash French comedy The Visitors transports a 12th-century knight (The Professional’s Jean Reno) and his squire to contemporary Paris, where they struggle with modern times and modern appliances. And an apartment full of singing, dancing and talking cockroaches spells entertainment in Joe’s Apartment, based on the MTV shorts.
After their husbands abandon them for younger trophy wives, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton form the First Wives Club and exact revenge on their former spouses. Hugh Wilson (Guarding Tess) directs. Struggling Spanish actor Javier Bardem becomes a phone-sex operator in Mouth to Mouth, while David Zucker of the Naked Gun series spoofs idealistic-teacher movies in High School High, set in transitional Marion Barry High. Neo-Brady Bunchers Shelley Long and Gary Cole return in A Very Brady Sequel. In the whimsical Cosi, which brings together Strictly Ballroom’s Barry Otto and Toni Collette from Muriel’s Wedding, a young director stages Cosi fan tutte at an asylum. To understand how he feels, imagine yourself directing Kingpin, the new farce from the makers of Dumb and Dumber. It stars Woody Harrelson as an Amish bowling prodigy.
Our pick: Large As Life (June), with Bill Murray as a curmudgeon who must travel cross-country with an elephant to meet the conditions of an inheritance. The screenplay is by humorist Roy Blount Jr., a good sign that the movie could be the modern-day equivalent of a W.C. Fields two-reeler.
Children
If you could pick any work of literature as the basis for a Disney animated musical, would you ever, in a million years, settle on Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Well, it’s too late for crying now, so prepare to hear Thomas Hulce, Demi Moore and Kevin Kline swapping bouncy show-stoppers and tearful ballads from the Pocahontas team of Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. We’ll just start checking McDonald’s for those Gargoyle Meals and hold out hope for a grand finale of “Ring My Bell.”
In July’s Kazaan, an inner-city kid tormented by bullies rubs a magic boombox and unleashes genie Shaquille O’Neal. Two kids place their divorcing parents, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Pollak, under House Arrest in the basement, hoping they’ll iron out their differences. Louise Fitzhugh’s lovable heroine Harriet the Spy comes to big-screen life in July.
Our pick: Matilda (August), based on Roald Dahl’s wicked little children’s novel about a brilliant girl (Mara Wilson) who overcomes the stupid, oppressive adults around her at a grim private school with the aid of her wondrous first-grade teacher Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz from Schindler’s List). The movie is a pet project for director Danny DeVito, who also stars; if he captures the book’s whimsical, free-thinking spirit, the movie’ll be a delight.
Drama
This category offers a surprisingly strong lineup, promising darker fare than usual for the summer months. John Sayles’ Lone Star, a dense, intriguing mystery that plays like a contemporary update of Chinatown on the Tex/Mex border, stars Chris Cooper as a small-town sheriff investigating police-department corruption and a crime from the past. Kris Kristofferson makes a memorable villain.
Lone Star’s costar, Matthew McConaughey, takes the lead as a defense attorney in Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of the John Grisham novel A Time to Kill, with Samuel L. Jackson on trial for murder in a racially divided Mississippi town. The all-star cast includes Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Ashley Judd and Brenda Fricker. Another bestselling author, quirky Florida crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, reaches the screen in Andrew Bergman’s Striptease, with Demi Moore as a single-mom stripper mixed up in a blackmail plot involving a lecherous, dimwitted senator (a highly touted comeback role for Burt Reynolds).
Other literary adaptations include Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the meddlesome heroine of Jane Austen’s novel. Even better represented onscreen this summer is Daniel Defoe, both in June’s Moll Flanders, which stars Robin Wright as Defoe’s scandalous prostitute heroine, and August’s Robinson Crusoe with Pierce Brosnan. Defoe must’ve hired the same agent who represents Austen and E.M. Forster.
A gang of Edinburgh lowlifes and addicts spirals into the gutter in Trainspotting, adapted by Shallow Grave director Danny Boyle from a popular Scottish underground novel. Later in the summer, Anthony Hopkins plays Picasso in Merchant-Ivory’s Surviving Picasso, while multimedia dabbler Julian Schnabel directs Courtney Love and David Bowie in a tribute to the late painter Jean Michel Basquiat.
In July’s Phenomenon, a variation on Flowers for Algernon, John Travolta’s IQ skyrockets after a chance encounter with a meteor; Robert Duvall and Kyra Sedgwick are among the few who remain his friends. Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan black-and-white absurdist Western Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as wanted man William Blake, running afoul of Gabriel Byrne, Robert Mitchum and Michael Wincott, while convict Tim Roth and prison dentist Julia Ormond embark on a feverish romance in the well-reviewed British drama Captives.
Finally, two Sundance Film Festival prizewinners arrive in theaters. Welcome to the Dollhouse, winner of this year’s top dramatic honors at Sundance, depicts the world as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl. The Spitfire Grill, voted the festival’s audience favorite, stars Ellen Burstyn and Marcia Gay Hardin in the story of an ex-convict who finds acceptance in a small-town diner.
Our pick: I Shot Andy Warhol (June), which features the wonderful young actress Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanis, the SCUM Manifesto author and fringe radical who shot and critically wounded Andy Warhol in the 1960s at the height of his notoriety. The cast includes Jared Harris as Warhol and alternative faves Yo La Tengo as the Velvet Underground. Early reviews are outstanding.
Reissues
Newly restored in a subtitled print, Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical drama The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is now in limited release in select cities across the country; virtually unseen for the past two decades, the movie features Catherine Deneuve at the height of her youthful glamour and Michel Legrand’s famous score (including the 1960s pop hit “I Will Wait for You”). Due in July from Martin Scorsese’s Zöe imprint is a re-release of Purple Noon, Rene Clement’s 1960 thriller (from a Patricia Highsmith novel) about a man (Alain Delon) who plots to kill a playboy and assume his identity.
Our pick: Switchblade Sisters, Jack Hill’s outrageous 1975 exploitation classic about a girl gang called the Jezebels and their confrontations with rival men’s gangs, cops and each other. The movie is being reissued by Miramax through Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder subsidiary, and drive-in fans should rejoice. Dynamic, fast-paced and funny, this lurid gem brims with post-Patty Hearst imagery of women sporting weapons and kicking ass. What could be more summery?
