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Your support makes all the difference.The sound of the Hollywood big guns releasing their big-budget, Oscar-seeking costume dramas, space-operas and weepies, will be accompanied at the start of 1997 by guerrilla fire from the independent sector, as it takes pops at the mainstream audience and sounds its own mini fanfares.
January is thick with interesting, little, off-beat films to see you through those sluggish post-Christmas days. Apart from this week's rightfully lauded Shine, films worth clocking this month include Walking and Talking, a smart, girls' buddy movie directed by Nicole Holofcener, a young film-maker whose witty neuroticism means she's already being dubbed the female Woody Allen. Also unmissable is Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse, a fantastic black comedy that shows schoolgirl Dawn Weiner suffering the worst days of her life. Unfortunately then comes Total Eclipse, Christopher Hampton's dreadful sex melodrama, with David Thewlis and Leonardo di Caprio as French poets and lovers, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Scheduled for this month, the film has been put back repeatedly, so there's a chance it may not be out for some time (which is probably a blessing).
February sees the 1996 Sundance favourite, The Spitfire Grill, hitting cinemas with its tale of small- town redemption. The following month you can decide whether Friends's Jennifer Aniston is a better screen actor in She's the One than her co-star David Schwimmer (who bombed badly in his US film debut, The Pallbearer, despite making doggy eyes at the camera all the way through). The movie is Ed Burns's follow-up to The Brothers McMullen and not a huge departure, being a comedy exploring the romantic trials of Irish-American brothers.
In the spring, Living in Oblivion director Tom di Cillo releases his latest, and Channel Four makes a bid for the home audience with Fever Pitch, a scrappy footie film adapted from the Nick Hornby bestseller and starring Colin Firth.
Finally, fans of The Piano will be excited by the arrival of Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady. Adapted from Henry James's novel, the movie may star top dogs Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich, but the director's lack of reverence for the period drama means this is no soft-focus exercise in costume design. Expect it to be the arthouse hit of the year.
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