Another “X-File” for David Duchovny? Nope. This one’s a sci-fi comedy from Ivan Reitman (“Ghostbusters”), starring Duchovny and Orlando Jones (Mr. 7Up) as professors who meet some way-out-of-towners. The aliens start as amebas. In two weeks they’re eight feet tall and, uh, oddly equipped. “We were taken with their genitalia,” Duchovny says. “It looked hermaphroditic. So [costar] Julianne [Moore] came up with the wonderful nomenclature of ’testina’.” JUNE 8
In auto-racing scenes, cameras are too fragile to withstand much more than 50mph speeds. Not bad, but this ain’t “The Sort-of-Quick and the Furious.” So director Rob Cohen invented a special rig that could film his actors doing 85. “That 35mph makes a big, big difference,” Cohen says. Stars Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, who play a young racer and the head of a street-racing gang, were hooked. Walker even bought his own roadster after filming. But who’s the better driver? According to Cohen: Walker, by a nose. “He said what? I’ll kill him,” jokes Diesel. “That’s it. Won’t see me at the premiere.” JUNE 22
Filming in Cambodia, Angelina Jolie was deeply moved by the exotic world around her. “We were in places like Angkor Wat, [where] you can just walk right up to the monks. There’s a beauty and a peace to it,” says Jolie. “It completely changed my life.” And what better way to honor a spiritual awakening than by squeezing off a couple of thousand bullets in “Tomb Raider”? To play butt-kicking videogame heroine Lara Croft in Paramount’s opulent $100 million would-be franchise, Jolie had to master sword fighting, martial arts, gunplay and “bungee ballet.” (She also had to have those tattoos on her arm honoring husband Billy Bob Thornton digitally erased.) The plot is complicated, but the fate of the world, naturally, hangs in the balance. JUNE 15
De planes! De planes! Two best-buddy pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) fall for the same nurse (Kate Beckinsale)–and contend with a totally inconvenient Japanese sneak attack. When Affleck read the script, he says, “I thought it could be one of the seminal movies of my life where I could look back and go, ‘I did this really huge, epic, classic movie that was about something substantive’.” Director Michael Bay (“Armageddon” and “The Rock”) is attempting to make a “Saving Private Ryan”–or at least a “Titanic.” “Pearl Harbor” is the most expensive movie budget Disney’s ever authorized, and promises to be one of the most lavish, memorable movies of the season. MAY 25
So it’s a musical set in fin de siecle Paris–you get that part. But the songs are from modern artists like Madonna, Nirvana and Elton John? And they’re sung by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman–the actors? Yes, we know how it sounds. But wait’ll you see how it looks. Director Baz Luhrmann (“William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet”) is a gleeful rule breaker, and that’s precisely what intrigued him about the Paris club. “This was a time when women were covered head to feet,” he says, “and a lot of the [club’s] girls didn’t even wear underwear.” MAY 18
Here’s what we can tell you about Steven Spielberg’s first new film in three years: . Yup, that pretty much sums it up. OK, we’re exaggerating. We do know that “A.I.” was a collaborative project with Stanley Kubrick about a boy robot (Haley Joel Osment) who wants to be human–a sci-fi Pinocchio. But after Kubrick died in 1999, Spielberg took control and kept the entire shoot top secret. Hence, interviews go something like this. NEWSWEEK: “So what can you say about ‘A.I.’?” Osment: “Well, really nothing about the plot or the characters.” At least we got the title. JUNE 29
An ultrafamous Hollywood couple. Their on-screen collaboration with a reclusive auteur. And a very messy, very public breakup. Hmm, isn’t that… “Trust me, this film doesn’t have anything to do with that,” says leading man John Cusack of the Tom-and-Nic allusion. In fact, “Sweethearts” is a comic fantasy inspired by Tom and Meg (Hanks and Ryan): what if two of the world’s top romantic leads were married off-screen and had a meltdown just before their new movie opened? Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones play the couple. Julia Roberts is her sister-assistant. And Billy Crystal, who co-wrote the film, plays a publicist with a disaster on his hands. JULY 20
A movie that confirms what we long suspected: our pets are indeed smarter than we are. In this kids’ flick, heroic dogs battle to thwart a feline plot for world domination–once the humans are out of earshot. If you ask us, this looks like summer’s silliest treat. Warner Brothers obviously thinks so. Check out the release date–it’s all by itself on the summer’s biggest weekend. Filming required hundreds of real animals, Jim Henson puppets, loads of CGI and even more patience. Turns out, getting pets to hit their marks isn’t easy. “It was a nightmare,” says producer Andrew Lazar. “The toughest film I’ve ever made.” And he didn’t even have to clean their trailers. JULY 4
You’d think it would be intimidating to remake–sorry, “revisit”–a beloved sci-fi movie like “Planet of the Apes.” Please. Try turning “Batman” into a movie sometime. For director Tim Burton, “Apes”–starring Mark Wahlberg in the astronaut role originated by Charlton Heston and Helena Bonham Carter as his simian love interest–is just the Goth auteur’s next eye-popping, megabudget poke at an old classic. Still, Twentieth Century Fox will go bananas if it doesn’t keep pace at the box office with Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow.” Oscar-winning makeup artist Rick Baker (“The Grinch”) has given Burton a helpful boost. His primate work looks slightly more realistic than the 1968 version’s glorified Halloween costumes. But we’ve got more subtle issues. Like: Wahlberg gets stranded on a remote planet with supermodel Estella Warren and he picks theape? If Burton can make that fly, he really is a genius. JULY 27
