"Spider-Man 2"

"Spider-Man 2" (May 20, 2004)

May 20, 2004
Tomorrow

  • The Agronomist: Jonathan Demme, keeping his hand in documentaries and pursuing his fascination with Haiti (previously reflected in a CD compilation of Haitian music), tells the story of the volatile Caribbean nation through the dissident voice of Jean Dominique. A wealthy agriculturist turned agitator, Dominique founded Radio Haiti Internationale and made an enemy of murderous dictator Papa Doc Duvalier and his equally nasty son.

  • The Battle of Algiers: Gillo Pontecorvo's legendary political film is about the Algerian rebellion against French colonial rule.

  • Super-Size Me: One of the big-buzz films at this year's Sundance festival, this first-person documentary has filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eating at McDonald's exclusively for a month and comically charting the physical and mental reactions he experiences. Though subject and director Spurlock attempts to portray himself as a Michael Moore-esque everyman, he's apparently had some experience making reality shows, and charges have already started to fly that he danced around, or at least exaggerated, some of his conclusions.

    May 26

  • Raising Helen: Kate Hudson is Helen, a New York modeling agency assistant whose older sister and brother-in-law are killed in an accident, leaving her to raise their children -- a teen girl, a 10-year-old boy and a kindergartner played by Abigail Breslin, the little girl from Signs. The cast includes John Corbett as a minister she turns to for help and eventually comfort, Helen Mirren as her boss and Paris Hilton as a sideshow attraction.

    May 28

  • The Day After Tomorrow: Another save-the-world epic from director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day). Dennis Quaid plays a paleoclimatologist whose knowledge comes in pretty handy when global warming turns out to be more than a political scare tactic, and every disaster-movie threat, from hurricanes to earthquakes, comes at us all at once. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the son he has to save from an Ice Age assault on New York City, and computer-generated effects play very bad weather.

  • I'm Not Scared: A young Italian boy discovers a boy his own age chained in a hole in the ground. The boy brings the other child food but doesn't tell anyone else about his existence, and soon he begins to discover why the child has been confined.

  • A Slipping Down Life: Lili Taylor stars as a woman who hears a song by an obscure rock-poet named Drumstrings Casey (Guy Pearce) and becomes so obsessed that she drops everything to attend a club performance in North Carolina, where she decides on the spur of the moment to carve his last name on her forehead. This gets his attention, and that of a lot of other people as well. Based on a novel by Anne Tyler, this low-budget film, made five years ago, was a labor of love for Toni Kalem, an actress making her directing debut.

  • Soul Plane: Despite the title, its producers say this comedy is not Airplane goes to the 'hood: It's said to be more on the lines of Barbershop. Kevin Hart plays a young entrepreneur who parlays a $1-million settlement he receives when his dog dies from airline neglect into his own business, a small airline catering to black customers. On the other hand, the airline is called NWA and Snoop Dogg is a pilot, leaving us to believe some farce may in fact be involved.

    June 4

  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The third installment loses director Chris Columbus, who abandoned his plan to make three Potter movies in three years, replacing him with. Mexico's Alphonso Cuaron, whose last film was the sexy hit Y Tu Mama Tambien, but who also has the fine family film A Little Princess on his resume. The story, as everyone probably knows, begins the summer before Harry's third year at Hogwarts, in which he discovers his powers can't always be controlled, and that the escaped wizard of the title (Gary Oldman) is out to get him.

  • Young Adam: Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton star in this story about a drifter who works on a barge and the mystery that unfolds when he and the couple he works for discover a corpse floating in the water.

    June 11