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OCTOBER

Hot knife: Thurman as the Bride, a character she calls "a fierce deity."   (Photo: Andrew Cooper)

Killer App
Uma and Quentin are back with Kill Bill, fall’s most buzzed-about film. This time, things really get messy.

For once, the phrase “one of the most anticipated movies of the year” isn’t mere marketing hyperbole. Listen in to the obsessive chatter about Kill Bill on the Internet—where the film’s trailer has been endlessly deconstructed and any dubious bit of gossip about the movie can inspire weeks of debate on message boards—and you might find yourself thinking, Um, is this a new George Lucas movie?

Actually, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s latest Uma Thurman vehicle. Last time those two teamed up, of course, it resulted in the coolest accidental blockbuster of the nineties, Pulp Fiction. “When I first met Quentin,” says Thurman, “he was making a movie with constraints, and now he’s made a movie without constraints.” It’s this sense—that Tarantino’s latest magnum opus might be Pulp Fiction on steroids—that’s fueling much of the buzz about Kill Bill.

It helps, too, that the film is a martial-arts thriller (martial-arts cinemaniacs are an order unto themselves). Thurman’s character, the Bride, is an assassin who awakens from a four-year coma to hunt down her would-be killers. (Hyperviolence ensues.) Her character, Thurman says, “is like a fierce deity—a phoenix. She’s not compassionate; she’s vengeful.” It’s all part of a meditation on resurrection and retribution that’s so operatic it turned out to be too much for one movie: Tarantino persuaded Miramax to release Kill Bill in two parts (no date has been set yet for the second half).

Thurman admits to being as consumed by Kill Bill as are Tarantino’s panting fans. She had to be—she’s in almost every frame of the film, spent an extraordinary 150 days shooting it, and endured months of grueling martial-arts training before filming even started. “I had to learn how to handle a samurai sword and to master several forms of combat—all this mad stuff.”

Reality, post-Tarantino, seems oddly muted. “Now I’m just re-examining life,” says Thurman. “It’s really something to go into a movie and walk out a year later. I’m still in the process of unraveling myself from Kill Bill.” —Simon Dumenco

• Details: Kill Bill: Volume 1, October 10 (Miramax).

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(Photo: Marcellus Hall)

Mystic Powers
Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, a smart drama with Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins, may be rolling toward an Oscar.

There’s a reason Mystic River will open the 2003 New York Film Festival: It’s one of Clint Eastwood’s “greatest works,” says festival director Richard Peña.

Long the 73-year-old director’s pet project, the film adapts Dennis Lehane’s story about a trio of childhood Boston friends who reunite after 25 years when one of their daughters is murdered in the city. With a script by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential), a strong showing at Cannes, and top billing at Lincoln Center, the film’s already generating Oscar talk for Eastwood and his A-list ensemble cast.

Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins play the friends at the center of the story, with Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laura Linney taking supporting roles. “We’re pros, so we could have faked it if we’d had to, but we all connected,” says Bacon. He plays a cop, Robbins plays a conflicted family man, and Penn smolders as a volatile ex-con looking to avenge his daughter’s death.

“This film has a lot to do with unspoken history, and we’ve all been through various chapters in our careers and lives,” Bacon says. “When you see the film, you see it on our faces—we’ve all been road-tested.” —Logan Hill

• Details: Mystic River, October 8 (Warner Bros.).

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Gothika revival: Berry was drawn to the role in part because her mother worked in a psych ward.   (Photo: Cliff Watts/ICON)

Berry Scary
Halle Berry’s creepy mental-hospital thriller Gothika is, as the Oscar winner says, “mental.”

Gothika is your first lead role since winning the Monster’s Ball Oscar. Did the award give you new confidence?

It’s a validation—winning an award like that restores a bit of your creative juice. But then you feel like, Okay, now everything I ever do is going to be compared to that performance. With Bond and X-Men, the first thing everybody said was, “It’s not Oscar-worthy.”

You play a criminal psychologist who awakens to find herself a patient in her own hospital. Your mother was a psychiatric nurse. Did that draw you to the role?

I always admired what my mother did—it’s a tough job for a woman, working in a psych ward—and that world felt familiar to me because of the stories my mom told me. I felt an instant connection.

The film is apparently terrifying.

It’s a horror-thriller going on inside a psychological mind-bender.

It sounds mentally—

Oh, it’s mental.

What can you do to create more quality roles for black women?

I can fight to play parts that are not just written for black women. That’s what Gothika is.

What will people take away from this film?

I think they’ll ask themselves, If I were dropped in this situation, what would I do? How fierce would I be? I think what people will discover is that they’d do just about anything to get out of that place.

You loaned your Oscar to the Academy for an exhibit on the history of the Oscars. When you get it back, where will you keep it?

I’m building a house, and I’m thinking of building a special place for it. I don’t want a lot of people touching it—I don’t want all kinds of energies on Oscar. —Lauren DeCarlo

• Details: Gothika, October 24 (Warner Bros.).

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Train man: The Station Agent's Peter Dinklage.   (Photo: Courtesy of Miramax)

Small Wonder
Sundance winner The Station Agent could be the indie hit of the fall.

‘Basically, it’s a throwback to the Western,” says Tom McCarthy, writer-director of The Station Agent. “A mysterious stranger blows into town on a train and changes everyone’s life.” What he doesn’t mention is that the town is in western New Jersey, and the stranger is played by dwarf actor Peter Dinklage. In the 37-year-old McCarthy’s debut, Dinklage plays Finbar McBride, a lonely model-train repairman who inherits an abandoned railroad depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey, befriends an outgoing Cuban lunch-cart salesman, and woos a depressed artist. The sweet, bizarro comedy took the Audience and Screenwriting awards at Sundance, and McCarthy drew comparisons to indie god Wes Anderson. Still, a romantic comedy about a sad dwarf? “This isn’t a story about Peter dealing with his height,” says McCarthy. “It’s a story about something we all deal with—feeling like we don’t belong.” —Ben Kaplan

• Details: The Station Agent, October 3 (Miramax).

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Great Depression: Reading Plath at 20 put Paltrow "perilously close" to understanding her madness.   (Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features)

Twisted Plaths
In Sylvia, Gwyneth Paltrow explores the life of the tortured poet. Let the Best Actress buzz begin.

Plath is the kind of character that Oscar nods are made of. When did you first read her?

I was doing Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. I was 20, and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jennifer Beals took me under their wing and told me I had to play Sylvia Plath someday. They gave me a copy of The Bell Jar and signed it.

What did you make of it?

If you’re a certain sort of young woman, with a curious and artistic brain, and you read it when I did, when you’re not wholly formed yet, it puts you perilously close to understanding what it’s like to be on that borderline . . .

Why make this film, after so much ink has already been spilled over Plath and Ted Hughes?

Much has been made of Plath as a strong, determined woman, and Hughes has been vilified as a murderer for so long, but this is a story about people who are very much in love, with the understanding that there’s never just a monster and a victim.

Plath’s daughter Frieda is furious.

I’m a public figure, and I don’t like people invading my private life, so I understand. But I think that Plath’s and Hughes’s work is so extraordinary, and their relationship will, throughout time, be held up as one of those incredibly passionate, tumultuous artistic relationships . . .

So you have rules for what makes a story meaningful, not exploitative?

I try to do things that attempt to reach a greater understanding. Some documentary on E!—that’s just a pile of wasted brain cells.

You’ve had experience with that sort of thing . . .

Yeah, it sucks. It’s stupid. It’s like I can never get out of high school. —L.H.

• Details: Sylvia, October 17 (Focus Features).

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The Best of The Rest

Wonderland Scarily convincing as porn star John Holmes, Val Kilmer anchors director James Cox’s sleazy true story about sex, drugs, and murder in Laurel Canyon in the early eighties. Fellow derelicts include Carrie Fisher, Janeane Garofalo, and Kate Bosworth—in a breakout performance as Holmes’s underage muse. (October 3; Lions Gate.)

The School of Rock Richard (Dazed and Confused) Linklater’s latest finds failed rocker Jack Black trying to win a “battle of the bands” with an 11-year-old guitar prodigy from the prep school where he’s been substitute-teaching. (October 3; Paramount.)

Bus 174 José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s extraordinary documentary about the infamous bus hijacking that riveted Rio in 2000 mixes archival footage with new interviews and examines not only the crime and the ensuing media coverage but a subculture of graphic violence also seen in City of God. (October 8; ThinkFilm.)

Intolerable Cruelty The Coen brothers dream up a serial divorcée (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who vows revenge against her latest ex-husband’s slick lawyer (George Clooney) by marrying him, then cleaning him out in the divorce. With Billy Bob Thornton and Geoffrey Rush. (October 10; Universal.)

Runaway Jury The latest John Grisham adaptation has real-life ex-roommates Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman facing off as opposing counsel in a fictional landmark gun-control case whose verdict goes up for bid when John Cusack starts tampering with the jury—from the inside. (October 17; 20th Century Fox.)

Veronica Guerin Joel Shumacher enlists Cate Blanchett in this true story about Irish journalist Guerin, whose efforts to expose the connection between Ireland’s drug dealers, police, and criminal courts ultimately led to her 1996 murder. (October 17; Jerry Bruckheimer Films.)

Pieces of April Katie Holmes stars as a 21-year-old free spirit who invites her estranged family over for Thanksgiving after learning that her mother (Patricia Clarkson) has breast cancer, only to find herself scurrying around her Lower East Side tenement looking for a place to cook her bird. Along the way, she encounters, in turn, an African-American gourmet, a family of Chinese immigrants, and Will & Grace’s Sean Hayes, the proud owner of a brand-new, self-cleaning convection oven. (October 17; United Artists)

In the Cut Piano director Jane Campion rescues Meg Ryan from romantic-comedy hell with this sexy thriller, adapted from Susanna Moore’s 1995 bestseller about a lonely English professor (Ryan) who strikes up a steamy affair with a homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) investigating a brutal (and possible serial) murder Ryan may have witnessed near her East Village home. Naturally, Ryan starts wondering if her new lover may indeed be the killer—and if she might be next. (October 22; Sony Screen Gems)

Elephant Gus Van Sant won Best Director and the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this mostly improvised look at an ordinary day in a Portland, Oregon, high school that builds toward a Columbine-like end. (October 24; Fine Line.)

Shattered Glass Stephen Glass was making up stories while Jayson Blair was still fetching coffee at the Times. Hayden Christensen (Star Wars: Attack of the Clones) plays the fabulist in screenwriter Billy Ray’s directorial debut. (October 31; Lions Gate.)

Die Mommy Die A campy whodunit written by and starring New York drag legend Charles Busch (whose Off Broadway play was adapted for the film) in a Sundance-award-winning role as a promiscuous fallen pop diva who may or may not have murdered her husband with a poisoned suppository. (October 31; Sundance Film Series.)