Cult

A dream had carried the boys so far from home, some 5,000 miles across the ocean to a cramped and dingy apartment in Philadelphia: a hope that ice hockey could change their lives. Ivan Pravilov could fulfill that dream, they were told. He could take them from the daily grind of post-communist Ukraine to the gleaming ice of the NHL. He'd done it before. He'd done if for Andrei Zyuzin, who went on to play for six NHL teams. He'd done it for Konstantin Kalmikov, a third-round draft pick of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1996.

As of Friday, it will have been 2,300 days since fire and bullets took the lives of 80 people at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. That seemingly obscure fact has some cult watchers worried that we may see another mass suicide or act of apocalyptic violence sometime this week. Hints of an impending disaster can be found at the Davidians' Web site (www.seventhseal.com). According to their "Chronology of Latter Day Events," the Davidians believe that when leader David Koresh was killed on April 19, 1993, it marked the beginning of a 2,300-day period during which the so-called sixth seal would be fulfilled.

Hilary's last spring at the University of Vermont, she took us out on a fire escape to watch the sunset. It was her solitary communion with nature and she shared it with us. We never felt closer to my stepdaughter. A month later, Hilary disappeared. A single terse letter followed. Hilary assured us she was well. She had found peace and we should not worry about her. What did we do? We worried. A month later, Hilary's backpack was found by Burlington, Vt., police, and returned to us. We feared the worst - that Hilary was the victim of foul play.

They're already lining up at video stores everywhere for two big releases: a gem from Woody Allen and the riotous remake of a bizarre cult film. HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986) (HBO/Cannon) $89.95. 106 minutes. Woody Allen is older and getting even better. He returns to Manhattan and the anxieties that attacked Annie Hall, but this is no mere recycling project. A consummate piece of filmmaking, Hannah ponders love and death and the way the fear of the latter undermines the former.

A goofy conflation of sexploitation and soap opera, Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - showing tonight at International House as part of its cult film series - is a sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll saga that marked '60s softcore king Meyer's first foray into studio-backed moviemaking. Originally released in 1969 with an X rating, this tawdry tale of the Kelly Affair, an all-girl trio that makes it big in Hollywood and then falls apart in a storm of drugs, depravity and rampant nakedness, is a camp classic.

They were quiet yesterday. But today, the Fraternal Order of Police will charge that a religious group co-sponsoring death penalty hearings in City Council chambers this week is a totalitarian cult whose leader once packed a .44-caliber gun. The Bruderhof, a religious group whose isolated communities and plain clothes evoke images of the Amish, have been the target of increasingly harsh criticism in recent years from a group of ex-members....

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies has compared composer Philip Glass' operatic achievements - most of them highly dependent on savvy theater designer Robert Wilson - to those of Richard Wagner. Purists may wince at the comparison but, for duration and ambitious scale and their attempts at contemporary mythmaking, an opera by Glass and Wilson does suggest a Wagnerian ethos. The artists' first collaboration, Einstein on the Beach, received its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1976, and has become a cult classic.

MOVE, the radical cult hardly anyone understands, was born of the friendship between a white former college teacher and a black handyman, who had only a third-grade education but a keen interest in philosophy. Vincent Leaphart, the handyman, moved into the Powelton Village apartment of Donald Glassey, the former college teacher, in January 1972, and they began to write an 800-page "Book of Principles," which outlined Leaphart's beliefs. Before the end of 1972, Leaphart was calling himself John Africa and had recruited several members for his group, which first was called the Christian Movement for Life, then Community Action Movement and, finally, MOVE.

A radio announcer has informed me that for $25,000 I can buy a car with such a splendid stereo system that I will feel I am in my own concert hall. If I were going to pay that sum of money for an automobile I think I would be more interested in making sure that its four wheels turned. The joy of having my ear drums blasted out by the Drop Dead rock group, just as though I were sitting in the front row of some hall, would be a secondary consideration. The touting of the stereo system of a car rather than the performance of its engine is just one example of the stress that is now laid on gadgets, gimmicks, decorations.

Three former Church of Our First Love members say church leader Anthony Marcolongo has an unquenchable desire to control the lives - and minds - of his followers. The three, who spoke on condition that they not be named, say Marcolongo, who started his church in 1983, made rigorous demands on his group. Marcolongo, a 33-year-old Glenolden native, demanded that followers fast Wednesday through Friday, attend one-hour morning prayer sessions five days a week and evening prayer services three times weekly, they said.

CORCORAN, Calif. - On Aug. 9, 1969, two naive 17-year-old girls were launched on a path that led to the unlikeliest of friendships. That infamous night, four young people under the sway of a charismatic career criminal slipped into a neighborhood of Hollywood glitterati, then bludgeoned and stabbed rising young actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and two others. Across town the next night, the band killed again. The name Charles Manson quickly became a synonym for unimaginable evil, which nobody knows better than Debra Tate, Sharon's little sister, and Barbara Hoyt, the Manson family member whose testimony helped put the killers in prison.

NACOZARI, MEXICO - It was a family people took pity on, one the government and church helped with free food, used clothes and farm animals. The men were known as trash pickers. Some of the women were suspected of prostitution. Mexican prosecutors are investigating the poor family living in shacks outside a small town near the U.S. border as possible members of a cult that sacrificed two 10-year-old boys and a 55-year-old woman to Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a figure who is adored mostly by outlaws but whose popularity is growing across Mexico and among Hispanics in the United States.

By Hari Kunzru Alfred A. Knopf. 384 pp. $26.95 Reviewed by Richard Burgin Like the desert in which it is set, Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men is a novel that is simultaneously simple and complex, clear and ambiguous. It's accessible because of Kunzru's lucid, often vivid, use of language (though he's better at narrative prose than he is at dialogue) and characters that are convincing and relatively easy to identify with. Kunzru also gives the novel more cohesion and clarity by having all the major characters drawn to the Mojave desert, especially to a group of three large rocks called the Pinnacles, where their interlocking stories unfold.

Zalman King, 70, who became known for his erotic work after writing and producing his breakthrough film 91/2 Weeks , died Friday morning at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a six-year battle with cancer, said his son-in-law Allison Burnett. Born Zalman King Lefkovitz in 1941, Mr. King began his career as an actor in the 1960s. He and his wife, Patricia Louisianna Knop, collaborated on the screenplay for 91/2 Weeks (1986), which became a cult hit starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

"MARTHA Marcy May Marlene" is an effective indie about cult psychology, but it will probably be remembered as the movie that put Elizabeth Olsen on the map. She's the younger sister of former child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley, and it's no disrespect to the other two to say that Elizabeth is by far the best actress. She's a natural and a camera magnet, with a changeable face that recalls Faye Dunaway one moment, Merle Oberon the next. And a curvy figure that itself is a throwback to plushly appointed actresses of yore - there is a topless scene in "Martha" that gives new meaning to the phrase "the Olsen twins.

PYONGYANG, North Korea - The "Illustrious General" has had a busy year. Since making his international debut a year ago, Kim Jong Un has been serving as military strategist, political statesman, and trusted deputy to his father, leader Kim Jong Il. The newly minted four-star general, believed to be in his late 20s, is widely credited at home with orchestrating a deadly artillery attack on a front-line South Korean island that nearly brought the...

Identical twins gave writers the original basis for situation comedy. Mistaken identity, the ability to appear in two places at once, and jealousy all flow from this prenatal premise for humor. Dramatists from Plautus to Paula Vogel have built plays around twins, but none with as much flair and comic mastery as Carlo Goldoni's 1747 The Venetian Twins . Under Alexander Burns' inspired direction, Quintessence Theatre Group's side-splitting contemporary staging surpasses Goldoni's success.

Leonard Kastle, 82, considered one of America's most intriguing one-shot movie directors, died May 18 at his home in Westerlo, N.Y., after a brief illness, said Tina Sisson, a friend. When Mr. Kastle's debut movie as a writer and director, The Honeymoon Killers , was released in 1970, critics raved over the grimly realistic, low-budget, black-and-white crime drama about a lowlife lothario and his overweight nurse lover whose partnership in conning lonely women leads to murder. French director Francois Truffaut called it his "favorite American film.

CULT LEADERS are the pied-pipers of America, leading the outcast, the despondent, and sometimes the highly intelligent off into the dark, isolated fringes of society. And then there's Rick Alan Ross, poking around in that darkness with a flashlight. From his eclectic office in a former cracker factory in Trenton, Ross, 58, runs the Rick A. Ross Institute, a nonprofit Internet archive on "destructive cults" and "controversial groups and movements. " Attorneys, universities and the media often go to Ross for explanations when seemingly benign groups go off the rails, and parents turn to him when their children fall under a cult's spell.

One of the biggest legacies Kurt Cobain left behind was good taste, and in this case it's causing a comeback for former Scottish indie-pop cult faves the Vaselines . Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee formed the band as teenagers in 1986, released the now-classic "Dum-Dum" in 1989 and then called it quits, having never crossed the Atlantic. Nirvana went on to cover three of their songs, and their legend has grown since then, with a new legion of fans and bands inspired by their pervy lyrics, barbed wit, sunshiny boy-girl harmonies, twangy guitars and endlessly catchy hooks.