Familiar faces crowd lineup for fall films Reunions, returns and a remake of a Western are what’s in store.

By DAVID GERMAIN

AP MOVIE WRITER

HOLLYWOOD may not have a Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Shrek or Capt. Jack Sparrow on its upcoming lineup. Yet the fall and holiday schedule does offer filmgoers a chance to catch up with some familiar characters, stories and movie-making teams.

It’ll be reunion season for actors and filmmakers such as Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott (“American Gangster”); Cate Blanchett and Shekhar Kapur (“Elizabeth: The Golden Age”); Nicolas Cage and Jon Turteltaub (“National Treasure: Book of Secrets”); Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton (“Sweeney Todd”); and Ben Stiller and the Farrelly brothers (“The Heartbreak Kid”).

It’ll be reacquaintance season for some classic characters in Robert Zemeckis’ retelling of the Norse legend “Beowulf”; “Fred Claus,” a North Pole comedy about Santa (Paul Giamatti) and his black-sheep brother (Vince Vaughn); and “I Am Legend,” with Will Smith in a new take on the sci-fi thriller “The Omega Man.”

Bringing back a Western

There’s even the return of a venerable genre, the Western, which has fallen on hard times in modern Hollywood. Crowe and Christian Bale star in the remake “3:10 to Yuma,” about a poor rancher helping to escort a captured gang leader, while a second Old West tale comes close on its heels with “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

Brad Pitt, starring as James, said his own celebrity helped him sympathize with the outlaw, whose notoriety as a heroic Robin Hood figure was heavily fabricated.

“I liked the themes of fame, the obsession with fame. The idea of the Jesse James character being trapped behind a façade and not knowing how to get out,” said Pitt, who plays James in the last year of his life as he lapses into paranoia over potential betrayal by accomplices and intimates, including young idolizer Ford (Casey Affleck).

“We operate under the assumption everyone is pretty much up on the Jesse James myth, so we start dissecting the myth,” Pitt said.

Also on tap

In other fall films, Crowe plays a New York cop to Denzel Washington’s Harlem crime kingpin in director Scott’s “American Gangster”; Stiller rejoins the Farrellys, who directed him in “There’s Something About Mary,” for “The Heartbreak Kid,” about a man who meets the perfect woman — on his honeymoon with another bride; Cage sets out to clear an ancestor implicated in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in the “National Treasure” sequel; frequent collaborators Depp, Bonham Carter and Burton adapt Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” the musical about the murderous 18th century barber; Vaughn plays the title role in “Fred Claus” to Giamatti’s Santa, who bails his sibling out of jail and forces him to work off the debt at the North Pole; Reese Witherspoon is a woman searching for her missing husband, an Egyptian who vanishes on a flight to Washington, in “Rendition”; Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly are a couple in grief after their son is killed by a hit-and-run driver (Mark Ruffalo) in “Reservation Road”; Phoenix stars with Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall in “We Own the Night,” a crime tale in 1980s New York; and Tim Roth stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Youth Without Youth,” playing a professor on the run in Europe as World War II looms.

Also, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone are featured in “Beowulf,” with Zemeckis applying the performance-capture technology he used in “The Polar Express” to animate the epic of the hero’s battle against the monster Grendel and his mother; Steve Carell plays a widower who falls for his brother’s girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) in “Dan in Real Life”; Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon star in a murder mystery surrounding an Iraq war soldier after he returns home in “In the Valley of Elah”; Sarandon plays a wicked queen who banishes a fairy-tale princess (Amy Adams) to modern New York in “Enchanted”; Halle Berry is a widow who forges a relationship with her husband’s friend (Benicio Del Toro) in “Things We Lost in the Fire”; a gang of beloved cartoon critters come to life in “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” with Jason Lee; Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig appear in “The Golden Compass,” set in a fantasy world where a girl rushes to rescue her missing friend; Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts mastermind American strategy to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in “Charlie Wilson’s War”; and Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are terminal patients who take a final road trip in “The Bucket List.”