By now, cinema’s seasonal output has become as precisely standardized as Greenwich Mean Time. The start of summer? We must be due for some aliens and explosions. Holiday season? Roll out the Oscar hopefuls. Late winter/early spring? Get to know your local video clerk, ’cause that’s when Hollywood typically unloads its spoiled fruit on unsuspecting audiences. Well, not so unsuspecting anymore.
But fall is a trickier beast. There are the leftovers from summer (the perpetually delayed Mariah Carey vehicle Glitter) and your pre-winter, top-tier projects making an early bid for Oscar gold (we like the Hughes brothers’ Jack the Ripper biopic, From Hell). Festival season has kicked into high gear, so expect some winners from the fest circuit (must we even bother mentioning local boy Richard Linklater’s Waking Life?).
We at Chronicle Film Central have assembled a crack team of film junkies to report on what looks good, or at least intriguing, for the season. A few caveats: This list is far from comprehensive. A lot of pictures are coming down the pike, but unfortunately, our editors weren’t interested in devoting the bulk of the paper to fall film coverage. So we pick and choose carefully and hope we don’t let the sleepers slip through our fingers. Also, because of the anticipated (but never realized) writers’ strike last spring, studios rushed projects along to get them in the can. That means it’s likely there’ll be a lot of dogs out there. We’re not endorsing any of the films in the following pages; we’re just getting the word out there about them. Although it should be noted, ahem, that we are professionals.
We’ve cut off our coverage at mid-December, which means some of the films we’re most excited about — Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky — were left off the list. I know, it hurts us too. But don’t worry. Seasons change. We’ll be back. Oh, we’ll be back.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.
