The cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake," Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that's true — and who are we to dispute the master? — then summertime is when we gorge (unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-'em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies). This year's summer movie season is sure to contain its share of brain goo — is that the march of angry robots we hear? — but there are more satisfying things on the menu, too. Gorging, we say, is good — it's the American way — but as we peruse the upcoming multiplex offerings, let's pledge to seek out the occasional rare delicacy. To help, we've narrowed down the season's gazillion releases, and what follows is our list of the best, most intriguing and most promising films. All dates are subject to change. Happy viewing.
MAY
Terminator Salvation
Christian Bale goes ballistic in this reboot of Governor
Schwarzenegger's signature film series. It's 2018, and Bale is John
Connor, the resistance leader whose birth Arnie was trying to prevent,
way back in the day. Reviewed in full in this issue. Directed by
McG. Release date: May 21
Dance Flick
Damon Wayans Jr. dons tights and ballet shoes for this parody of
those teen dance dramas in which a white girl from the 'burbs and a
black youth from the 'hood find true love in time for the big recital.
Directed by Damien Dante Wayans. Release date: May 22
Easy Virtue
Jessica Biel moves up the social ladder in this adaptation of
Noël Coward's 1920s comedy about an American bombshell about to
marry into an aristocratic British family. Kristin Scott Thomas plays
Biel's future mother-in-law/nemesis. Directed by Stephan Elliott.
Release date: May 22
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Ben Stiller returns as a museum security guard who discovers that
the statues and exhibits come to life at night. This time, the guard
gets to fall in love with a real-life human (played by the increasingly
ubiquitous Amy Adams). Directed by Shawn Levy. Release date: May
22
Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead trilogy) returns
to his horror-film roots for this tale of a young banker (Alison
Lohman) who makes the fatal mistake of denying a loan to an old gypsy
woman. Demonic curses soon follow. (Does this explain the banking
crisis?) Directed by Sam Raimi. Release date: May 29
Kambakkht Ishq
Bollywood stars Akshay Kumar and Kareena Kapoor head from India to
Hollywood in this romantic comedy about a stuntman and a supermodel who
become media sensations. Cameos by Sylvester Stallone and
Superman's Brandon Routh. Directed by Sabbir Khan. Release
date: May 29
Munyurangabo
This debut feature from a New York-based Korean American filmmaker
follows two Rwandan boys out for a walk in the countryside. One boy is
Hutu; the other, Tutsi. Wildly acclaimed at recent film festivals,
Munyurangabo reportedly begins with the sight of a bloody
machete and ends with a poem. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
Release date: May 29
Pontypool
Veteran character-actor Stephen McHattie stars as a Canadian DJ
trying to figure out what's going on when reports start coming in of
townspeople viciously attacking each other. Bruce McDonald directed the
little-seen but visually remarkable film The Tracey Fragments,
starring a pre-Juno Ellen Page. Directed by Bruce
McDonald. Release date: May 29
Departures
This year's surprise winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar tells of
an unemployed cellist (Masahiro Motoki) who lands a job for which he
displays an unexpected aptitude — bathing, dressing and grooming
the dead before cremation. A comedy, with tears. Directed by
Yojiro Takita. Release date: May 29
Up
Only a Pixar animator — in this case, Monsters, Inc.
director Peter Docter — would dare ask studio bosses for millions
of dollars to make an animated movie about a depressed 78-year-old
widower (voiced by Ed Asner) who doesn't like children. We trust all
things Pixar, but don't expect a run on Ed Asner plush toys at your
local superstore. Directed by Peter Docter. Release date: May
29
JUNE
Away We Go
Married novelists of staggering genius, Dave Eggers and Vendela
Vida, team with Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) to send pregnant
newlyweds (John Krasinki and Maya Rudolph) on a sweetly comic road trip
across America. Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Schneider
costar as the friends and family (a.k.a. eccentrics) who offer the
couple temporary refuge. Directed by Sam Mendes. Release date:
June 5
Séraphine
Yolande Moreau stars as the French painter Séraphine Louis,
who worked as a servant girl before her gift for painting was
discovered in 1912. Martin Provost tracks Séraphine's fast rise
and heartbreaking fall in a film that won seven César Awards
(the French Oscars), including Best Picture and Best Actress.
Directed by Martin Provost. Release date: June 5
Tetro
In writing his first original screenplay since 1974's The
Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola reportedly mined his own
back-story for this tale of two brothers (Vincent Gallo and Alden
Ehrenreich) trying to come to terms with their complex family history.
Set in contemporary Buenos Aires, Tetro was filmed in
black-and-white, a style Coppola last employed for 1983's Rumble
Fish. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Release date: June
11
Food, Inc.
Moviegoers aren't likely to rush to the supermarket after seeing
this disturbing exposé of the under-regulated, profit-mad
American food industry. It's time to plant that garden. Directed
by Robert Kenner. Release date: June 12
Moon
After three years alone on the moon, a spaceman of the near future
(Sam Rockwell) begins hallucinating — and eventually wakes up to
find that he's sharing the ship with an exact replica of...himself.
This is the first feature for Duncan Jones, whose father (just so you
know) is David Bowie. Directed by Duncan Jones. Release date:
June 12
Whatever Works
Allen returns to Manhattan after an extended European vacation and
casts Larry David as a hypochondriac physicist whose spirits are lifted
when he befriends and later weds a dippy twenty-year-old (Evan Rachel
Wood). The film is reportedly based on a script Woody Allen wrote 30
years ago — luckily, neuroticism is timeless. Directed by
Woody Allen. Release date: June 19
$9.99
New York animator Tatia Rosenthal traveled to Australia to make this
acclaimed stop-motion comedy concerning the peculiar adventures of the
residents of an Aussie apartment building, including two boys who've
spent $9.99 (and not a penny more) on a book that promises the secret
to life. Directed by Tatia Rosenthal. Release date: June
19
The Hurt Locker
Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Guy Pearce go to war in this
intense drama about a bomb-defusing unit stationed in Baghdad at the
height of the Iraq War. Look for cameos by Ralph Fiennes and David
Morse. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Release date: June
26
Quiet Chaos
Nanni Moretti stars as an Italian film exec devastated by the death
of his wife. Left to raise a ten-year-old daughter, the man finds
himself unable to part from her and ends up spending his days in the
park opposite her Rome school. Featuring Roman Polanski in a small
role. Directed by Antonio Grimaldi. Release date: June
26
JULY
The Beaches of Agnès
The renowned French filmmaker Agnès Varda (Vagabond),
now 80, continues her ongoing cinematic autobiography with this
César Award-winning documentary. Using the world's beaches as
both backdrop and metaphor, Varda recalls the important people of her
life, including her late husband, filmmaker Jacques Demy, as well as
rock star Jim Morrison. Directed by Agnès Varda. Release
date: July 1
Public Enemies
Johnny Depp is 1930s bank robber extraordinaire John Dillinger;
Christian Bale is FBI super-agent Melvin Purvis, hot on his trail,
Tommy gun in hand. The director is Michael Mann (Miami Vice,
Heat), who knows a thing or two about bad-guy/good-guy
showdowns. Bullets will fly. Directed by Michael Mann. Release
date: July 1
Brüno
Sacha Baron Cohen jettisons Borat for Brüno, a gay,
hot-pants-wearing Australian fashion reporter. Beyond that, words fail
us. Directed by Larry Charles. Release date: July 10
Humpday
It seemed like a fun idea at the time: Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew
(Joshua Leonard), lifelong buds, get high at a party where they agree,
in front of witnesses, to "do it" (with each other) for a sex-tape film
festival. Their girlfriends are amused, and then...they're not.
Directed by Lynn Shelton. Release date: July 10
Soul Power
In the days preceding Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's '74 fight,
musical giants such as James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers and Celia
Cruz gathered in Zaire for a three-day concert. Oscar winner Jeffrey
Levy-Hinte (When We Were Kings) has restored a mountain of found
footage of the concert and the chaos that surrounded it for this
high-energy doc. Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte. Release date:
July 10
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
A nerdy but increasingly sexy teenage boy with magical powers and an
invisible cloak learns the true history of his archenemy, whose name we
dare not utter. Directed by David Yates. Release date: July
15
500 Days of Summer
An LA greeting-card writer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finds true love in
the form of a beautiful coworker (Zooey Deschanel) in Webb's romantic
comedy, which literally counts the days of this up-and-down
relationship. Directed by Marc Webb. Release date: July
17
In the Loop
British satirist Armando Iannucci (BBC's The Thick of It)
goes to Washington in this fictional riff on the political scrambling
— British and American alike — that preceded the Iraq War.
Starring Tom Hollander, and featuring James Gandolfini as an American
general who speaks in snappy one-liners. Directed by Armando
Iannucci. Release date: July 17
Flame and Citron
Flame (Thure Lindhardt) and Citron (Mads Mikkelsen) were the code
names for two resistance fighters in Denmark during the Nazi
occupation. Ole Christian Madsen tells their story in a film that's
been a smash hit in its home country, where Mikkelsen is a superstar.
Directed by Ole Christian Madsen. Release date: July
31
Lorna's Silence
Belgium's Dardenne brothers (La promesse, L'enfant),
among the world's finest filmmakers, return with this story of an
Albanian refugee (Arta Dobroshi) who finds herself going to extremes in
order to gain Belgian citizenship. Advance buzz, including a screening
at last year's Cannes Film Festival, heralds Dobroshi as a great
discovery. Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Release
date: July 31
The Cove
In the 1960s Richard O'Barry captured five dolphins and trained them
to play "Flipper" on the popular TV show. Since then, he's become
obsessed with getting footage of the brutal slaughter of dolphins in a
Japanese port town. Louie Psihoyos tracks O'Barry's quest in this
wrenching documentary. Directed by Louie Psihoyos. Release date:
July 31
AUGUST
Julie & Julia
Nora Ephron adapts Julie Powell's memoir of the year she spent
making all 524 recipes in Julia Child's classic cookbook, Mastering
the Art of French Cooking. Amy Adams portrays Powell, whose inner
musings on Child's life and times are enacted by none other than Meryl
Streep. Looking forward to that accent. Directed by Nora Ephron.
Release date: August 7
Paper Heart
In a documentary that's not really a documentary, comedian Charlyne
Yi (Knocked Up) conducts interviews to see if anyone still
believes in true love. Enter actor Michael Cera, playing himself (sort
of) and falling for Yi, who, in real life, is already his girlfriend.
Got that? Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec. Release date: August
7
District 9
From first-time director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson,
a sci-fi epic about extraterrestrials that landed in South Africa 30
years ago, only to be captured, segregated and brutally mistreated by
the government. The rest of the plot is a secret (so far), but we all
know what happens when you piss off a space creature. Directed by
Neill Blomkamp. Release date: August 14
Ponyo
From Disney, the new film by master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki
(Howl's Moving Castle). In Miyazaki's take on the Hans Christian
Andersen fairy tale "The Little Mermaid," a goldfish named Ponyo longs
to become human. (Looks like Ariel's got competition.) Directed
by Hayao Miyazaki. Release date: August 14
Taking Woodstock
The Brokeback Mountain director lightens up for this
tie-dye-filled adaptation of Elliot Tiber's terrific Woodstock memoir.
Tiber, played here by comedian Demetri Martin, isn't famous, but his
family's dilapidated motel was ground zero for the iconic festival.
Directed by Ang Lee. Release date: August 14.
The Time Traveler's Wife
Henry (Eric Bana), a Chicago librarian, is forever bouncing around
in time (literally). This makes life/marriage hard for Clare (Rachel
McAdams), his wife, whose attempts to hold him still are captured in
this film version of Audrey Niffenegger's bestseller. Directed by
Robert Schwentke. Release date: August 14
Inglourious Basterds
Blame the bad spelling of the title on those infernal Nazis, who
refer to the band of Jewish American soldier-assassins led by Brad Pitt
as "The Basterds." Quentin Tarantino's World War II action flick also
stars Diane Kruger, B.J. Novak (The Office), Hostel
writer-director Eli Roth and last, but never least, the mighty Cloris
Leachman. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Release date: August
21
It Might Get Loud
The Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth cuts
loose in his new documentary, which finds rock gods Jimmy Page, the
Edge, and Jack White singing the praises of their respective electric
guitars. Then they jam. (Loudly.) Directed by Davis Guggenheim.
Release date: August 21
The Boat That Rocked
It's 1966, and rock & roll has yet to make it to the airwaves of
the BBC, which controls all radio stations in England. So Philip
Seymour Hoffman leads a renegade band of disc jockeys as they broadcast
the Devil's music from a boat off the UK shore in this comedy from the
director of Love Actually. Directed by Richard Curtis.
Release date: August 28
Mesrine: A Film in Two Parts
Vincent Cassel, who was so extraordinary as the mob boss' son in
David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, moves up the crime ladder
in this four-hour epic about the action-packed life (murders,
kidnappings — the works) of modern-day French criminal Jacques
Mesrine. Directed by Jean-François Richet. Release date:
August 28
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