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Let the fantasy wars begin. The first installment of New Line's $300 million "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, this long-awaited film, starring Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett, promises to hew closely to the original work. Peter Jackson, the co-writer and director of all three movies, is using the film's Web site to assure Hobbitheads that their favorite books will not become "a Hollywood travesty of what 'Lord of the Rings' should be." All the same, Jackson says, "the definitive 'Lord of the Rings' is your own private vision. This is just one interpretation." But a hotly anticipated one nonetheless.
Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone
The stakes couldn't be higher for Warner Bros., which sees "Harry Potter" as a six-sequel multibillion-dollar global franchise. Mangle that first film, and the whole series is over. "It's probably the most challenging thing I've ever done," says Steve Kloves, who has written the scripts for the first two films. Still, it seems safe to assume that "Harry Potter" the movie, directed by Chris Columbus and featuring Maggie Smith, Richard Harris and John Cleese, will generate the biggest buzz in family entertainment since, well, "Harry Potter" the book.
Monsters, Inc.
This eagerly awaited computer-animated treat from Pixar ("Toy Story") takes us to the heart of Monstropolis, where the creatures that freak out children manufacture scares. But they're facing a unique energy crisis: their power source is fueled by kiddies' screams, but today's jaded tots refuse to be frightened. Sounds frightfully clever.
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From Hell
Based on a serialized graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, this account of the notorious British serial killer Jack the Ripper stars Johnny Depp as the chief investigator and Heather Graham as a prostitute and potential victim. Directors Allen and Albert Hughes re-created entire city blocks of Victorian London for their shoot just outside Prague. Co-screenwriter Terry Hayes says the film is not just about murder: it's about an aristocratic "class of people who get swept up into something and try to cover it up."
Vidocq
Directed by France's top visual-effects wizard, who goes by the single name of Pitof, this thriller centers on a notorious 19th-century Parisian criminal turned chief of detectives called Vidocq, played by the ever-delightful Gerard Depardieu. It will be the first major feature shot with the new Sony/Panavision high-definition video camera, which closely mimics the 24 frames per second of film.
Zoolander
Ben Stiller is a superstar male model brainwashed into assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia. OK. And? And Owen Wilson is his blond rival in this off-the-wall satire inspired by a skit Stiller wrote for the VH1 Fashion Awards. Stiller also directed.
Training Day
For a change, Denzel Washington gets to play nasty. In Antoine Fuqua's down-and-dirty tale of LAPD corruption, he plays a legendary underground narc who twists the law to enforce it, and Ethan Hawke is the wide-eyed rookie cop under his command.
Vanilla Sky
Tom Cruise and director Cameron Crowe produced comic magic in "Jerry Maguire." In this reworking of the mind-bending Spanish love story "Open Your Eyes," they're going for otherworldly eroticism. Will Cruise and costar Penelope Cruz generate notable heat? The other woman in this twisty tale is Cameron Diaz.
Gangs of New York
Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of Martin Scorsese's 19th-century criminal epic, was just out of diapers when the director first announced his plans to make this tale of immigrants in old New York. Twenty-four years later, with a cast that includes Cameron Diaz, Daniel Day-Lewis and Liam Neeson, we'll find out if it was worth the wait. Keep your fingers crossed.
Ali
Will Smith put on 30 pounds of muscle to play the heavyweight role of his career, living legend Muhammad Ali. Director Michael Mann ("The Insider") focuses on the period from 1964, when Cassius Clay rose to the top of the boxing world, through his battles with the U.S. government over his refusal to fight in Vietnam, to Ali's epic fight with George Foreman in Zaire. With perfectionist Mann behind the camera and a $100 million budget, we know it will sting like a bee. But will it float like a butterfly?
Books
Nadine Gordimer
Gordimer's 13th novel, "The Pickup," set in post-apartheid South Africa and an unnamed Arab state, is both an exploration of liberal guilt and a domestic drama about a cross-cultural love affair. When middle-class Julie Summers starts an affair with Abdu, an illegal migrant Arab mechanic, her bohemian Johannesburg set talks of her "oriental prince" as a "grease monkey." The couple go to Abdu's home, an unidentified Arab state, where they marry, and she discovers she has unexpected sympathies with the women in his family.
Beryl Bainbridge
In "According to Queeney," shortlisted for this autumn's prestigious Booker Prize, Samuel Johnson appears as an insecure, clumsy, lovesick writer--quite a change from Boswell's better-known genius. Bainbridge's novel artfully stitches together fact and fiction to chronicle Johnson's friendship with the Thrales, a wealthy family who took him in when he was awash with depression in 1766. Johnson falls for the vivacious Hester Thrale, and teaches Latin to the couples' daughter, whom Johnson nicknamed "Queeney."
Stephen King and Peter Straub
Horror novelists Stephen King and Peter Straub first collaborated 20 years ago on "The Talisman," an epic fantasy with a teenage hero named Jack Sawyer. Now they've returned with "Black House," and they've brought Jack back, too--to battle a serial killer who's murdering and devouring children in a small Wisconsin town. So do King and Straub justify their publisher's optimism (first printing: 2 million copies)? Totally.
Jack Welch
This revered corporate honcho got $7.1 million upfront to tell how he ran GE in "Straight From the Gut." If anyone can make boss-talk exciting, he can.
Leif Enger
In this assured first novel, a teenager kills two intruders in his family's home, then takes off on a horse, pursued by the law and his family. "Peace Like a River" is the fall favorite of independent booksellers.
W. G. Sebald
His quiet, unsettling novels are usually narrated by someone vaguely like the author--German-born but living in England--and illustrated with old photographs. The results--and the new one, "Austerlitz," is one of his best--are both documentary and dreamlike. The literary event of the fall.
Wen Ho Lee
In "My Country Versus Me," the Los Alamos, New Mexico, scientist falsely accused of espionage in 1999 gives his version of the FBI's bungled case. Alice Munro
"Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" is not the most felicitous title, but then it's nice to see that there's something that isn't perfect about this extraordinary short-story writer.
Mark Twain
You could spend the fall reading nothing but new books by and about Twain (not a bad idea). In September, there's a previously unpublished novella, "A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage." Then "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn." And finally, "Mark Twain," a new biography by Geoffrey Ward, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns linked to Burns's four-part documentary to air in January.
Quincy Jones
This musician's story, as he tells it in "Q," exactly parallels the rise of 20th-century pop, from his days with Lionel Hampton's jazz band to his work on Michael Jackson's albums. Jones tells most of the story, and lets friends such as Ray Charles chip in, too.
Jonathan Franzen
In "The Corrections," two generations of a Midwestern family come together for one last Christmas. Franzen's sweeping novel of the American domestic scene arrives bedecked with praise from Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace.
Dennis Bock
In "The Ash Garden," a poetic yet mightily disturbing first novel, three lives, separated by cultures and continents, are entwined and redefined by the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945.
Roy DeCarava
DeCarava took the photographs, wrote the poetical text and designed "The Sound I Saw," a showcase for his moody, exquisite images of jazz musicians and urban life in the early '60s. If there is a visual equivalent to jazz, this is it. A one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
Studs Terkel
Using the oral-history format he employed to such advantage in "Working," Terkel tackles the tricky subjects of aging and mortality in "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"
Music & Theater
Sorrows & Rejoicings
In his first play to premiere in Cape Town since the 1970s (at the Baxter theater through September), Athol Fugard explores postapartheid South Africa through the love of two women--one white, one of mixed race --for a white Afrikaner poet, who returns home to die after 17 years of exile in Britain. As the two women sit around an old table after the funeral, they confront the past. The current production moves to Johannesburg next spring; a separate company will debut in New York in December.
Queen of Spades
Long criticized for its staid and artless productions, Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre is opening its fall season with a bang. Under the new direction of 37-year-old Alexander Vedernikov, the Bolshoi is staging the debut of this one-act ballet by the French choreographer Roland Petit, with music by Tchaikovsky. Three of the principal dancers have taken significant pay cuts. Says the Bolshoi's Katya Novikova: "We're trying to raise money for our own stars so they will dance with the same pleasure in Russia as abroad."
Private Lives
Coming in October at an as yet unnamed London theater, this Noel Coward comedy reunites Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan, whose onstage chemistry shocked audiences of the Royal Shakespeare Company's original "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" 15 years ago. Rickman and Duncan are just the pair to bring out the moral depravity lurking beneath the charged one-liners of this marriage satire. They play the divorced couple Amanda and Elyot, who are honeymooning in the same Paris hotel with their new spouses. Their chance meeting reminds them both why they fell in love--and why they couldn't live together.
The Little Match Girl
A French-German coproduction, this textured opera (through September at the Palais Garnier in Paris and moving to Stuttgart in October) explores the depths of solitude and offers a critique of contemporary society. Director Lothar Zagrosek's multicultural cast includes sopranos Elizabeth Keusch and Sarah Leonard, and narrator Salome Kramer.
Mamma Mia!
One British critic apologized in print for liking this musical, which manages to thread 22 ABBA hits into a story about a middle-aged single mum and her daughter's search for her dad. The critic's guilty pleasure was nothing compared with the audience's rapture: the show is the fastest-grossing London hit ever and has already racked up a $20 million Broadway advance.
The Visit
Friedrich Durrenmatt's dark drama about revenge has been turned into a Kander and Ebb musical, with a book by Terrence McNally ("The Full Monty") and choreography by Ann Reinking. The show stars Chita Rivera as a wealthy woman who does go home again--and offers the locals a fortune to murder the treacherous lover who drove her from town years before. It premieres at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
Hedda Gabler
During last season's production in Boston, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called Kate Burton's performance "a rare benchmark... that redefines both a classic character and an actress." Now Burton will bring Ibsen's neurotic heroine to Broadway.
Dance of Death
Another Scandinavian portrait of a bad marriage. This time, two British greats--Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren--will tangle in a limited Broadway run of Strindberg's psychological drama.
Arts
The Seventh Annual Istanbul Biennial
A great chance to take in both Istanbul, Turkey, and modern art, this multimedia extravaganza (Sept. 22-Nov. 17) features artists and performers from all over the world showing their works in some spectacular venues, from the fifth-century Haghia Irene Church to the old Ottoman state mint. Concerts will be held in one of the city's oldest Turkish baths. Another highlight will be light shows in the Yerebatan Sarayi, a vast underground Byzantine cistern half-filled with water that has raised walkways for spectators.
Rembrandt's Women
Bringing together some 100 masterpieces, this exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts ( Sept. 22-Dec. 16) is the first to focus on the Dutch master's depiction of women. Both Rembrandt's wife, Saskia van Uylenburg, and later his mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels, sat for many of the pictures. The radically realistic way in which Rembrandt portrayed them, and his other models, shocked many of his contemporaries. But the exhibition reaffirms the artist's unequaled ability to combine the classical and the northern traditions, the personal and the universal.
Surrealism: Desire Unbound
One of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century, surrealism is based on the belief in the subconscious-fed "imagination without chains." This ambitious show, at London's Tate Modern, examines one of the defining themes of surrealism: desire. It features iconic works by big names like Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Dali, Giacometti and Magritte, as well as surrealist films, photographs by Man Ray and some rare books and manuscripts. The exhibition travels to New York's Metropolitan Museum early next year.
Yokohama Triennial
Titled "Mega-Wave," this year's art festival, set in various locations around the Japanese city, features the work of more than 100 artists, about one third of whom are Asian. On display is a new crop of talent, in addition to well-known stars like Pipilotti Rist, Krsysztof Wodiczko, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Yoko Ono. According to its curators, the festival (Sept. 2-Nov. 11) aims to promote greater exchange between art and other fields like science and philosophy. Andy Warhol
One of the most comprehensive retrospectives ever of Warhol's work is coming to the Neue Nationalgalerie (Oct. 2-Jan. 6) in Berlin, Germany. His major pieces will all be there, from the Campbell Soup cans to the Jackie Kennedy lithographs. But the show will emphasize his "disaster period," when the founder of pop art sought to capture the horrors of the 20th century through scenes of war and nuclear-bomb explosions.
Thomas Eakins
America's great realist (1844- 1916) was canned from his teaching job at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for allowing a coed class to draw a male model's undraped you-know-what. Now, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is attempting to make it all up to him with a retrospective. Eakins's landscapes and rowing scenes will be the fall's hottest art ticket. The exhibit moves to Paris's Musee d'Orsay next February, then the Met in June.
Hieronymus Bosch
A true one-of-a-kind artist, Bosch (1450-1516) went from designing embroidery to being a very religious painter whose wild depictions of heaven and hell presaged everything from surrealism to modern movies' special effects. Little is known about his life, and the exact meaning of such masterpieces as "The Ship of Fools" is still up for grabs. There are 17 other Bosch panels in this remarkable gathering at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (through Nov. 11).
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