From Spike Lee comes this vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school-teacher, her stubborn jazz-musician husband and their five kids living in '70s Brooklyn.

Wayne Wang's follow-up movie to Smoke presents a series of improvisational situations strung together to form a pastiche of Brooklyn's diverse ethnicity, offbeat humor, and essential humanity. Many of the same characters inhabiting Auggie Wren's Brooklyn Cigar Store in Smoke return here to expound on their philosophy of smoking, relationships, baseball, New York, and Belgian Waffles. Most of all, this is a movie about living life, off-the-cuff. Written by Tad Dibbern DIBBERN_D@a1.mscf.upenn.edu

When a robbery goes awry, the bandits all end up in a puddle of blood and only one lives and goes to jail for five years. Upon his release, the girlfriend wants her new boyfriend to kill him. Only trouble is the boyfriend knows that the fault was not the ex-con's and can't bring himself to do the town. Meanwhile, the ex-con tries to turn his life around by becoming a boxer and training under a former heavyweight contender. Written by John Sacksteder jsackste@bellsouth.net