River Phoenix

Newcomers to the country-music business seek love and stardom. Miranda Presley moves from New York to Nashville to become a songwriter. At an unsuccessful audition she meets James Wright, a promising newcomer. They fall head-over-heels and after only a few days they marry but very soon they start to regret this action. —Matthias Scheler <tron@lyssa.owl.de> Miranda Presley (no relation in it actually being her middle name as her now deceased father was a fan) has just arrived in Nashville in her quest to become the next big country singer/songwriter, she planning on using the same stepping stone as many of the open weekly auditions to perform at the Bluebird Café. Lucy, the café owner who decides who gets to perform, has strict rules and tells the auditioners that not getting picked one week does not mean that they are bad, but that they are not yet ready, meaning that they can audition every week. She has a wall of fame showcasing the handwritten songs that have been first performed at the café, some which made it big and some that she just felt marked a milestone for that specific singer/songwriter. Beyond Lucy, the café where she ends up working as a waitress in needing to earn a living in the meantime, Miranda befriends three of the non-Nashvillian regular auditioners, each who have a differing realistic chance of making a success in the business: Linda Lue Linden, who is always looking for the approval and friendship of others; earnest Kyle Davidson; and James Wright, arguably the one outwardly with the greatest chance of success among the four. As the four spend time together and work on their craft both individually and sometimes in collaboration, complications ensue when both Kyle and James start to fall for Miranda, Kyle who wears his heart more on his sleeve, while James deals with his feelings more like a childhood playground first love in being somewhat standoffish, and where his music may still be first priority. —Huggo Young Miranda Presley, an aspiring country singer/songwriter, comes to Nashville, Tennessee, to enter the weekly singer contest held at "The Bluebird Cafe". There she meets energetic but chaotic James Wright, the more laid-back Kyle Davidson, and Linda Lue Linden, whose career might not necessarily be in country music... When both James and Kyle get attracted to Miranda, she makes a decision. —Thomas Meyer <i03a@zfn.uni-bremen.de>

A computer expert heads a team of renegade hackers to test security systems. But his past comes back to haunt him when they are blackmailed into tracking down a secret black box.

Two best friends living on the streets of Portland as hustlers embark on a journey of self discovery and find their relationship stumbling along the way. Mike Waters lives on the street and befriends the somewhat older and streetwise Scott Favor who shows him what is necessary to survive. Waters suffers from narcolepsy and can fall asleep at any moment and in almost any circumstance. Favor comes from a rich family and is rebelling against his own background. They travel together extensively - Waters is driven by the need to find his biological mother - and spend time in Italy. Later in life however, Favor has joined mainstream society and has little time for his old friend. —garykmcd Mike Waters and Scott Favor are young male hustlers (with both male and female clients) working the Pacific Northwest, they often hanging out with other young male hustlers in an abandoned building in Portland under the mentorship of an overweight homeless gay man named Bob Pigeon. Among the group, Mike and Scott are best friends. Mike identifies more as gay, while Scott identifies more as straight, seeing his sexual encounters with male clients solely business. In their friendship, Scott sees himself as Mike's protector as Mike suffers from stress induced narcolepsy, and as such Mike passes out unconscious sometimes at the most inopportune time or place, while Mike eventually admits to Scott that he loves him more than just a friend. Mike grew up in a poor and broken family environment in Idaho, with his mother, Sharon, abandoning him and his much older brother Richard when Mike was a child, her whereabouts unknown. Especially when he is unconscious, Mike often has an idealized view of his mother. Scott grew up in a house of privilege as the son of the current Portland mayor, with his street life a manifestation of the rebellion against the oppression of that privilege. Feeling he is maturing, Scott contemplates giving up the street life when he turns twenty-one to collect his trust. Mike and Scott will do almost anything for the other, but under the circumstances of the different view of their own future, their friendship may have a limited shelf life. —Huggo In Portland, the bisexual Mike Waters is a young man from Idaho who suffers from narcolepsy and survives working as a hustler on the street. He befriends the also bisexual hustler Scott Favor, who is the son of the wealthy Jack Favor. He is waiting to be twenty-one years old to inherit a large amount. His mentor is the old rascal Bob Pigeon and Scott says that he loves him more than his own father. Mike is needy and wants to find his mother. He decides to visit his brother Richard "Dick" Waters in Idaho and Sick says that his mother is working Scott travels with him by motorcycle. Dick says that his mother is working as a maid in a hotel. However, the manager tells him that she traveled to Italy. Now the friends will travel to Rome, where their friendship will be affected. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Surreal character study focusing on the friendship between two male hustlers, Mike and Scott, in Portland, Oregon. They live on the streets, do drugs, and sell themselves to men and women. Mike is quiet, gay and suffers from narcolepsy. Abandoned as a child, he is obsessed with finding his long-lost mother. Scott is the rebellious son of a high-ranking family, who lives this life mostly to embarrass his father. Mike is in love with Scott, who still maintains he is straight and insists that his wild lifestyle on the streets is only temporary. Together, they embark on a quest to find Mike's mother, traveling from Portland to Idaho to Italy, with Scott picking up a beautiful girl along the way. —Anonymous

Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) owns a pizza parlor, and is married to Rosalie (Tracey Ullman). He's also a serial womanizer. Rosalie goes to extremes when she finds he has been cheating. Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) works with Rosalie (Tracey Ullman) in their pizza parlor. She is convinced that he works all of the time for them and her world dissolves when she finds that he has been fooling around for years. Being Catholic, divorce is out of the question, so she, her mother, and her best friend decide to kill him. Hopelessly incompetent as killers, they hire incompetent professionals as they beat, poison, and shoot Joey, who remains oblivious to their attempts. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net> In Tacoma, Washington, Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) and his loving wife, Rosalie Boca (Tracey Ullman), have two children, own and operate their own successful pizzeria, and own an apartment building, which Joey manages. All of their customers and tenants seem to love affable Joey, perhaps a little too much, as Joey is a chronic philanderer, something of which Rosalie is completely unaware. Things change when Rosalie secretly catches Joey undeniably cheating on her. After she gets over the initial shock and grief, which makes her want to kill herself, she instead figures a better idea is to have Joey killed. She decides to confide in her mother, handy woman Nadja (Dame Joan Plowright), who lives with them and has not liked Joey for a long time for taking Rosalie for granted, and Devo (River Phoenix), Joey and Rosalie's busboy and cleaner at the pizzeria, who Rosalie knows has always loved her. Unable to do the job to completion, they figure they need some professional help. Who Devo finds to do the job, are druggie cousins Harlan (William Hurt) and Marlon (Keanu Reeves), whose interest is solely in the money, as they have never killed anyone before. Through the entire proceedings, the truth may set them all free. —Huggo

Following a trail from America to Venice to the deserts of the Middle East, Indiana Jones must find his kidnapped father and save the Holy Grail from Nazi enemies.

An F.B.I. Agent works to uncover an All-American family as Soviet sleeper Agents, and gets caught up in friendship with their unaware son. Roy Parmenter is a veteran FBI agent who has spent the last 20 years trying to find the Russian agent who killed his partner whom he calls Scuba. When a couple of deep cover Russian agents are killed Parmenter thinks Scuba is the one doing it. The Russians who have received word from Scuba that if they want him to stop, they have to pay him. So they send a veteran Russian agent, Karpov to stop him. Parmenter was tasked with performing background checks on people applying for certain things requiring security clearance and when he comes across Jeffrey Grant who's applying to the Air Force Academy, he discovers that his parents' info is false. He also learns of Karpov coming into the country and suspects that he is here to stop Scuba and that Karpov went to the city where Jeffrey and his family live, so he decides to keep an eye on Jeffrey and his family. —rcs0411@yahoo.com Roy Parmenter is an FBI agent in San Diego; 20 years ago his partner was killed by a Soviet spy, nicknamed Scuba, still at large. Scuba is now trying to extort the Soviets; to prove he's serious, he's killing their agents one by one, including "sleepers," agents under deep cover awaiting orders. Roy interviews a high school lad, Jeff Grant, an applicant to the Air Force Academy. In a routine background check, Roy discovers that Jeff's parents are sleepers. He must see if Jeff is also a spy, confront the parents yet protect them, and catch his nemesis. Meanwhile, the Soviets have sent their own spy-catcher, the loner Karpov, to reel in Scuba. Alliances shift; it's cat and mouse. —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Four friends decide to go hiking to find the dead body of a local boy who got hit by a train.

Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke) is a young teenage boy living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., who experience vivid dreams about flying through clouds and over a vast, city-like circuit board, usually after falling asleep watching 1950s sci-fi movies (The War of the Worlds (1953) is a favorite). Every night, upon waking from the dream, he draws the circuit board. Ben shows the sketches to his friend, child prodigy Wolfgang Muller (River Phoenix). At school, Ben develops a crush on Lori Swenson (Amanda Peterson), but he isn't sure whether it's mutual. Both boys meet punkish-but-likable Darren Woods (Jason Presson), with whom they share their circuit-board concepts. Wolfgang builds an actual microchip based on Ben's drawings. The chip enables the generation of an electromagnetic bubble which surrounds a pre-determined area. As the boys discover, the bubble is capable of moving at near-limitless distances and speeds without the usual effect from inertia. They construct a rudimentary spacecraft out of an abandoned Tilt-A-Whirl car; they named their ship the Thunder Road, after Bruce Springsteen's song of the same title. Their experiments with the Thunder Road draw attention from the United States government, which sends agents to scout the area for UFOs. After Ben receives more dreams about the circuit board, Wolfgang discovers a means of producing unlimited sustainable oxygen; this means longer flights, whereas previously they were limited to whatever a typical oxygen tank could hold. They finalize their plan to explore the galaxy in search of alien life. The boys complete liftoff, despite interference from the authorities (one of whom silently wishes them well). Shortly after breaking Earth's orbit, something overrides the boys' personal computer-controls. The Thunder Road is tractor-beamed a much larger spaceship. They boys venture out to meet their captors, Wak and Neek; two green-skinned aliens whose knowledge of Earth comes almost entirely from junk culture, particularly television reruns. The young explorers develop a relationship with their extraterrestrial hosts, but the alien spaceship is intercepted by a larger-still alien vessel. Feigning an attack by space pirates, Wak urges the boys to leave. They are in the process of doing so when they are interrupted by a gigantic brown extraterrestrial, this one bearing a close resemblance to the other two, who gestures furiously while grinding out barely-comprehensible alien language. As this turns out, Wak and Neek are brother and sister; they have taken their father's ship out for a joy ride, sending the dreams to the boys in the hopes of meeting humans. Transmissions of old black-and-white movies have kept extraterrestrial populace at a distance -- except for the curious Wak and Neek -- due to the way humans generally depict violence toward alien life. Wak and Neek's father allows the Thunder Road and its crew to depart, after Wak and Neek give the boys a parting gift: an amulet which, according to the extraterrestrials, is the stuff that dreams are made of. The boys succeed reaching safely back to Earth, but a malfunction results in them crashing the Thunder Road into their neighborhood lake. Now they are back to square one... or so they think. A week later, Ben has a dream at school in which he envisions another vast circuit board while flying though more clouds overhead. This time -- thanks to Wak and Neek's amulet -- Ben is joined in the dream by Wolfgang, Darren and Lori. They proclaimed that the circuitry is really complicated, and wonder where this one will take them once they have constructed this. Lori smiles at Ben while holding his hand.