Call it the cinematic Dead Zone, that period between the lucrative summer and award-worthy winter seasons when studios release less hyped titles they hope will nevertheless prove to be successful with audiences and critics. The year-end holiday season officially opens on Thanksgiving, but the truth is that the clarion call can be heard at the start of November (this year's early rollouts include Chicken Little and The New World); to that effect, we're offering only a checklist of the 32 movies slated to open locally in September and October, followed by a few limited releases that may or may not show up during that span.
SEPTEMBER 2: Based on a Ray Bradbury story, the time travel yarn A SOUND OF THUNDER stars Ben Kingsley as the head of a company with the means to send people back to prehistoric times to embark on hunting expeditions; Edward Burns plays the travel guide who first notices that tampering with the past can lead to devastating changes in the present . . . TRANSPORTER 2, the sequel to (duh) 2002's The Transporter, finds ex-Special Forces operative Frank Martin (Jason Statham) serving as chauffeur to a wealthy family; when the young son gets kidnapped, he springs into bone-crushing action . . . A rookie detective (Nick Cannon) poses as a student at a posh private school in order to crack a case in UNDERCLASSMAN.
SEPTEMBER 9: Inspired by a factual event, THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE casts Tom Wilkinson as a priest who performs an exorcism on a 19-year-old college student; after the girl dies and the priest is accused of criminal negligence, he hires a lawyer (Laura Linney) to defend him . . . In the action comedy THE MAN, a federal agent (Samuel L. Jackson) attempting to find out who killed his partner gets mixed up with a bumbling salesman (Eugene Levy).
SEPTEMBER 16: In the terror tale CRY WOLF, a group of high school kids fool their peers by insisting a serial killer known as The Wolf is on the loose -- a game that goes too far once dead bodies start turning up . . . Refusing to believe she's been killed in an accident, a young woman (Reese Witherspoon) haunts the new inhabitant (Mark Ruffalo) of her apartment in the romantic comedy JUST LIKE HEAVEN . . . LORD OF WAR stars Nicolas Cage as an international arms dealer who must wrestle with his own conscience as he's being pursued by an Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke) . . . Based on David Auburn's play, PROOF stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a young woman who attempts to take care of her brilliant but possibly demented father (Anthony Hopkins) while coping with the advances of one of his math students (Jake Gyllenhaal) . . . In the Louisiana swamps, a gang of teens must save themselves from a lurking menace in VENOM.
SEPTEMBER 23: In FLIGHTPLAN, a grieving widow (Jodie Foster) is alarmed after her six-year-old daughter disappears during a Berlin-to-New-York flight; as she frantically searches the plane, she's repeatedly told by crew and passengers that she never had a child on board with her . . . Tim Burton and Johnny Depp follow up their Charlie and the Chocolate Factory success with TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE, which employs stop-motion animation (as did Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) to relate the tale of a Victorian-era gentleman (Depp) whose planned wedding to his sweetheart (Emily Watson) is sideswiped by his forced marriage to the underworld's Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham-Carter).
SEPTEMBER 30: Actor Bill Paxton steps behind the camera to direct THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED, set at the 1913 Open when an amateur golf player (Shia Labeouf) managed to beat the defending champion (Stephen Dillane) . . . One of the most discussed films at this year's Cannes Film Festival, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE finds director David Cronenberg exploring the issue of violence in America via this story of the owner (Viggo Mortensen) of a diner who's forced to take action during an attempted robbery. Ed Harris and William Hurt also star . . . Held from a summer release, INTO THE BLUE stars Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan and Ashley Scott as hot-bodied divers whose deep-sea discovery draws the attention of a local crime boss . . . There have been well over a dozen movie adaptations of OLIVER TWIST; the latest version of the Dickens chestnut, from the Oscar-winning team behind The Pianist (director Roman Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood), casts newcomer Barney Clark in the title role, with Ben Kingsley contributing the acting chops as Fagin . . . Adapted from the short-lived TV series Firefly, SERENITY is a futuristic adventure saga about the scruffy crew members of a spaceship and the troubles that develop after they welcome aboard two enigmatic passengers.
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