You have the '60s revisited, what with the civil-rights thriller Mississippi Burning and its spiritual twin 1969, which deals with campus radicals.
You have your Christmas-cheer twins: Bill Murray as the skinflint in Scrooged, an update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and his counterpart, Jim Varney (a.k.a. Ernest P. Worrell) in Ernest Saves Christmas.
Charles Dickens is also represented in Oliver & Company, a Disney canine caper inspired by Oliver Twist. Even this has its counterpart in the dinosaur saga The Land Before Time. Both are animated features designed for the family audience.
Gene Hackman fans, please note that this is a banner year - quadruplets, cinematically speaking, that demonstrate the breadth of his talents: Hackman stars as an Air Force officer in the action-packed BAT 21, as a supporting character in Woody Allen's psychological drama Another Woman, as the boozy proprietor of a Texas roadhouse in the comedy Full Moon in Blue Water, and as an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of civil rights workers in Mississippi Burning.
Since release dates are perpetually subject to change, the following list has been grouped by month.
SEPTEMBER
ALICE An imaginative vision of the Lewis Carroll heroine's adventures in Wonderland, created by Czech animator Jan Svankmajer
BELLMAN AND TRUE British crime thriller from Richard Loncraine, director of Brimstone and Treacle.
COMMISSAR During 1922 in the Soviet Union, a pregnant commissar is stationed in the home of a Jewish family and learns to overcome her cultural and political prejudices. A suppressed 1967 Soviet film, belatedly released under glasnost.
DEAD RINGERS Chilling thriller, featuring Jeremy Irons in a double role as identical-twin gynecologists who share everything. Directed by David Cronenberg (The Fly).
