Artsy Alternatives By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 5, 2000

Ethan Hawke and Diane Venora as a contemporary Hamlet and Gertrude. (Miramax)

Next week, for instance, Kevin Spacey heads the cast of "The Big Kahuna" (May 12), a playlike drama about two washed-up salesman (Spacey and Danny DeVito) whose plans to land a big contract at a convention are undone by their born again junior trainee.

Shakespeare's always good for a modernized update or two, it seems. Ethan Hawke plays Scandanavia's thinking dude in "Hamlet" (May 19), Michael Almereyda's modernized version of the classic play, is set in modern-day New York. And Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare's best pal in moviedom, assembles his latest dramatis personae for "Love's Labour's Lost" (June 23), a 1930s-musical-style version of the romantic comedy starring Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Lillard.

From Peter Greenaway, who never met a piece of arcana or body function he didn't want to make a dialectic movie about, comes "8½ Women" (May 26), which is about a father and son who start their own personal bordello.

Quietly industrious Alan ("Choose Me") Rudolph has made "Trixie" (June 9), an offbeat romance starring Emily Watson as an undercover detective at a casino. And the Coen brothers' wonderful first hit, the 1985 "Blood Simple," gets a rerelease sometime in June.

Canadian director Jeremy Podeswa, an artistic kissing cousin of fellow countryman Atom Egoyan, comes out with "The Five Senses" (July), a drama that examines the lives and senses of five characters entangled in a melodrama about a missing child. And the hottest foreign film of the season could be Frederic Fonteyne's "An Affair of Love" (August), a French documentary-style drama about a sexual liaison that occurs when a woman (veteran actress Nathalie Baye) answers a personal ad in a newspaper.

There are more offerings from France – all to do with love, of course. There's "Alice and Martin" (August), in which Juliette Binoche plays a violinist drawn to an emotionally haunted male model (Alexis Loret); and Patrice ("Monsieur Hire") Leconte's "Girl on the Bridge" (June 28), about the relationship between a knife-thrower (Daniel Auteuil) and his new human target (Vanessa Paradis).

From elsewhere, we have the Spanish "Butterfly" (June 23), Jose Luis Cuerda's teacher-pupil story set during the Spanish Civil War; the Chinese "Shower" (July), Zhang Yang's drama about the relationship between an elderly bathhouse owner and his two sons; and "Kikujiro" (June 23), a Japanese gangster comedy directed by Takeshi Kitano. Finally, from England comes "Wonderland" (August), Michael Winterbottom's intimate portrait of three generations of one family during a weekend in London.