Coming Soon

Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, whose best-seller A Mighty Heart detailed her 2002 journey to Pakistan to search for her husband Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and killed by Islamic fundamentalists. Futterman (who wrote Capote) portrays, in flashback, the late Daniel Pearl.

Cast: Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Gena Rowlands, Drea de Matteo

Director: Zoe Cassavetes

Frustrated with her love life, and bored with the job of making sure a luxury hotel runs smoothly, thirtysomething Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) gradually runs down until a chance encounter with visiting Parisian Melvil Poupaud restarts her. Posey brings every nuance she can to making a tritely conceived and written character come alive, her work here providing further confirmation that she's one of the best film actors today, in any sort or size of role. Writer-director Zoe Cassavetes fills this film's early going with declamatory characters who proclaim their woe (rather than showing us through dialogue and action). Like her late father John, Zoe seems to want to deal with prickly, self-destructive characters, but unlike Dad, whose films consist of interminable burrowing into his characters' souls via lengthy, drunken, revealing, and/or pointless scenes, Zoe's film is a series of short slick scenes that move Posey's character along on a predictable arc of self-discovery. Nonetheless her work improves as the film progresses, going off in odd if fragmentary tangents before its far-fetched if pleasing ending. (G.R.)

CAPTIVITY

Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gilles, Pruitt Taylor Vince

Director: Roland Joffé

In the conservative 1950s, prestigious, establishment liberal filmmakers reacted against the conformist tenor of the times by making family-held-hostage films like William Wyler's The Desperate Hours. These films at once upheld the wholesome standards of the day, but made it so unpleasant to do so you had a bad taste in your mouth after the requisite happy ending. (Other examples: Suddenly, Ransom — all of them film noir for the upper crust.) Roland Joffé's Captivity is to The Desperate Hours as Joffé's previous Oscar-winners The Killing Fields and The Mission are to Wyler films like The Best Years of Our Life. In the formerly high-minded Joffé's film, a crazed fan tortures model Elisha Cuthbert, probably in the same way Humphrey Bogart tortured Frederic March's family in Wyler's film (or Frank Sinatra threatens to slit a little boy's throat in Suddenly). The result can only be depressing even if the film turns out to be well made. (G.R.)

YOU KILL ME

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Pullman

Director: John Dahl

A crime noir comedy from Red Rock West director Dahl about an alcoholic Polish mafia hit man (Kingsley) ordered to dry out in San Francisco, where he finds love and a part-time job as a mortician.

JUNE 29

THE BOSS OF IT ALL*

Cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler

Director: Lars von Trier

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier took a break from his much-ballyhooed (but financially disastrous) U.S.A. Trilogy to make this unexpectedly playful, small-scale farce about the president of an IT company who invents a phantom "boss" to shoulder the blame for his own executive decisions. The movie is, on one level, an ideal workplace comedy for the era of downsizing, outsourcing, and fantasy accounting. On another, it's a revealing check-up on the health and well-being of its own director's career — and of cinema itself — in the digital era. A decade after von Trier and a cabal of filmmaking countrymen took a semi-infamous "vow of chastity" and a movement known as Dogme was born, The Boss of It All was made in accordance with a new set of dictates called Automavision, by which a randomized computer program serves as the movie's de facto cinematographer and sound mixer. It's as if von Trier, who has been publicly critical of Hollywood's CGI-laden epics, is showing us how close we are to the time when movies will be directed by machines instead of artists. Perhaps he's telling us that we're already there. (Scott Foundas)

DEATH AT A FUNERAL

Cast: Ewen Bremmer, Peter Dinklage, Matthew MacFadyen

Director: Frank Oz

A black comedy about a proper British funeral where the mourning family is slowly coming unhinged, thanks to accidental drug trips, unexpected trysts, and the unnerving appearance of the dead patriarch's secret gay lover. Great trailer.

RATATOUILLE

Voice Cast: Patton Oswalt, Brian Dennehy, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo

Director: Brad Bird

Pixar Animation and the director of The Incredibles team up to tell the inspiring tale of Remy the Parisian Rat, who dreams of being a master chef in a world that doesn't always respond enthusiastically to a rodent in the kitchen. Even a cute one.

JULY 13

RESCUE DAWN

Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies

Director: Werner Herzog

This taut and surprisingly straightforward action film from iconoclastic director Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) tells the true story of Dieter Dengler (Bale), shot down over Laos in 1964, captured, and thrown into a brutal North Vietnamese prison where he finds two Americans (Zahn, Davies) reluctant to join his escape plan.

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