Coming Soon

The first 10 years of the 21st century may go down as the worst in Hollywood history, a candyfloss desert (not dessert) of blockbusters, comic book movies, three-quels, and torture porn. In ambition and achievement our contemporary cinema makes the empty 1980s seem like a Golden Age in comparison. The 1990s were very good indeed with the emergence of a viable "alternative Hollywood," but as we all know that, too, has crashed and burned in this low dishonest decade.

Yet while summer is the traditional playground for the industry's reliable big earners, and them alone, this season's lineup does offer other reasons besides the air conditioning to visit film theaters over the next couple of months.

Given the general collapse of standards in mainstream cinema, it's no surprise that two obvious examples of worthy viewing are in nontraditional genres (documentary cinema Michael Moore's Sicko is the obvious example, but there are others) and animation. Brad Bird's follow-up to The Incredibles, Ratatouille (June 29), is at the top of this viewer's summer viewing list. It defies all clichés in having a rat protagonist trying to make good as a gourmet chef, and may catch the same wave that has made Anthony Bourdain's expose of working conditions in fancy restaurants, Kitchen Confidential, so popular.

Prestigious, "Oscar-bait" releases are rare in the summer, but A Mighty Heart (June 22) may be an exception. A drama depicting Mariane Pearl's search for her abducted husband Daniel, it directly addresses the tragic true events that led to the Wall Street Journal reporter's horrific demise. Filmmaker Michael Winterbottom knows his way around the region and is very aware indeed of the realities of Middle Eastern politics, as previous work of his such as The Road to Guantanamo demonstrates.

Other predictions are harder. Most of these films are unseen — even unfinished. Producers of special effects epics like the latest Harry Potter (July 13), or even The Simpsons Movie (July 27), are working down to the last minute. One good bet, however, is to look at the credited director's previous work. Director-oriented auteurism is out in film studies, but always makes sense as a viewer guide.

Take for example veteran German eccentric Werner Herzog. That he's made an action drama about POWs tortured by North Vietnamese — Rescue Dawn (July 13) — isn't all that surprising. Many of his best films (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, even the documentary Grizzly Man) are about obsessives battling enigmatic Others (natives, bears), while others of his films deal empathically with the struggles of those locked in closets, blind, deaf, or all of the above (Kaspar Hauser, Land of Silence and Darkness). He's actually ideal for the material, whatever the ultimate merits of the film. Such are the joys of the auteur theory!

Other proven filmmakers releasing work this summer include Kasi Lemmons, whose Talk to Me (July 13) re-creates a lost era of positive radio activism from the maker of Eve's Bayou. Milos Forman returns with Goyas Ghosts (July 20), which involves a duel between the Spanish artist (Stellan Skarsgard) and a priest (Javier Bardem) over model Natalie Portman. It's ideal material for the director of the dueling musicians of Amadeus and the court intrigue of the overlooked Valmont.

There are still a few indie filmmakers standing from the 1990s. Greg Mottola directed an excellent indie, The Daytrippers, a decade ago; he breaks a long silence with the teenage sex comedy Superbad (Aug. 17). John Dahl is a good neo-noir filmmaker with a sharp sense of humor (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction); he may break a drought with the hitman comedy You Kill Me (June 22) with Ben Kingsley ("Sir Ben," as he told the late Christopher Moltisanti).

Promising foreign films include My Best Friend, by France's Patrice Leconte (The Man on the Train), The Willow Tree by Iran's Majid Majdi (The Color of Paradise), and The Wedding Director by Italy's Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket). And then there's Exiled, by Hong Kong's last man standing of classic gangster films, Johnnie To. To's Triad Election (Aug. 31) is already one of this year's best films.

And then ... who expects much — who expects anything — from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (June 15)? Or Transformers (July 4)? The trailer for 1408 had audiences laughing in the theater I saw it in: John Cusack in a no-exit hotel. Another coming attraction that sent me bolting was for Evening (June 29), an all-star ensemble piece that looked like a remake of The Notebook, packed with extra life-affirming action. Trailers can lie, as studios push them in predictable patterns, but reviews will have to be stellar to entice my bargain matinee participation.

Viewers should in any event seek out and support good work. The last seven years of bad movies aren't your fault — but the next seven years might be.

Most of these films haven't been seen yet; those that have are designated with an asterisk. Unless otherwise noted, all items were written by Chuck Wilson.

JUNE 22

A MIGHTY HEART

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Will Patton, Irrfan Khan

Director: Michael Winterbottom

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.

BROKEN ENGLISH*

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.

TALK TO ME

Cast: Don Cheadle, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Director: Kasi Lemmons

Don Cheadle stars as Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, a legendary 1960s radio and talk show host who galvanized Washington, D.C., by leading public protests against poverty and racism.

TEN CANOES*

Cast: David Gulpilil, Jamie Gulpilil, Crusoe Kurddal

Director: Rolf de Heer, Peter Djigirr

Directed by the Dutch expatriate filmmaker Rolf de Heer, this sometimes bawdy (remember: "Never trust a man with a small prick"), always beguiling work of imagination begins with a group of Aboriginal tribesmen setting out on an annual goose-hunting expedition, fashioning canoes from barks and sleeping in makeshift camps perched high in trees. Along the way, an elder member of the tribe, Minygululu, regales his restless young companion, Dayindi — who happens to covet one of Minygululu's three wives — with a cautionary tale about another young man smitten by similar desires and the hard-gotten wisdom of being careful of what you wish for. Then this story within the story within the story starts to unfold before our eyes. If the moral of Ten Canoes is familiar, the getting there is anything but. To watch this movie (shot in breathtaking wide-screen by cinematographer Ian Jones) is to enter into a whole new language of symbols and meaning, the likes of which I have rarely encountered in cinema outside of the African tribal films of Ousmane Sembene. And yet, as in Sembene, we are never lost, for as much as anything else, Ten Canoes is a celebration of the art of storytelling, and of the power of stories to transcend all barriers of space, time, and language. (S.F.)

JULY 20

HAIRSPRAY

Cast: John Travolta, Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken

Director: Adam Shankman

Filmmaker John Waters' lifelong dream of invading the suburban multiplexes of America finally comes true with this big-budget version of the hit Broadway play, which in turn was based on Waters' non-musical 1988 comedy. In full drag, John Travolta plays a '50s mom, continuing a tradition set by the late, great, and much-missed drag queen Divine, to whom the part will always truly belong.

INTERVIEW

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Sienna Miller

Director: Steve Buscemi

Buscemi stars as a hardened political reporter who's sent to interview a soap star (Miller). As their interview stretches into a long night, each discovers unexpected depths in the other. Buscemi directs from a screenplay that he co-adapted from one written by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was on the verge of directing Buscemi and Miller in the movie when brutally murdered by an Islamic extremist.

JULY 27

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

Director: David Silverman

Well, it took long enough. Other, less venerable animated TV shows went to the big screen much more quickly, such as South Park and Beavis & Butthead. Sheesh, even Aqua Teen Hunger Force cut a feature-length flick, for Jebus' sake. Now in its 18th season, the show isn't as funny as it used to be. Can the movie really improve on the TV show? A PG-13 rating suggests it can at least use four-letter words like ... d'ohh? Ahh, even if it sucks, you know you'll buy the DVD anyway. (Will Harper)

AUGUST 3

HOT ROD

Cast: Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, Sissy Spacek, Ian McShane

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Saturday Night Live star Samberg plays Rod Kimble, a motorcycle stuntman who plans to jump 15 buses to raise money for a life-saving operation his abusive stepfather (McShane) desperately needs. Once said stepfather is healthy, Rod plans to kick his ass.

AUGUST 10

BECOMING JANE

Cast: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith

Director: Julian Jarrold

This costume drama from the director of Kinky Boots imagines that at age 20, budding English novelist Jane Austen (Hathaway) had a romance with a penniless but handsome young lawyer (McAvoy), an affair that in the film's conceit became Austen's model for Pride & Prejudice.

TWO DAYS IN PARIS

Cast: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg

Director: Julie Delpy

In a comedy that marks the directorial debut of actress Delpy, the filmmaker brings her American boyfriend (Goldberg) to meet her parents in Paris. Things do not go well. Delpy's real-life mom and dad, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, portray her on-screen parents, and early word has it that they give terrific performances.

AUGUST 17

FANBOYS

Cast: Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette, Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel

Director: Kyle Newman

A comedy about four sci-fi geek best friends who travel cross-country in order to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and somehow screen the as-yet unreleased Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. One suspects that Mr. Lucas does not make a cameo.

PENELOPE

Cast: Christina Ricci, Catherine O'Hara, Peter Dinklage, James McAvoy, Reese Witherspoon

Director: Mark Palansky

A modern-day fable about a young woman afflicted with a pig snout of a nose, the result of a family curse that can only be broken if she finds love, within herself as well as from without.

SUPERBAD

Cast: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, Bill Hader

Director: Greg Mottola

A coming-of-age comedy about two lifelong buddies (Cera and Hill), nerds and virgins both, who head off to separate grad schools, and on one fateful night try to score with beautiful women. The screenplays is based on a script Rogen co-wrote with a buddy when he was only 13. You decide whether that's a good thing.

SIETE DIAS

Cast: Eduardo Arroyuelo, Martha Higareda, Jaime Camil

Director: Fernando Kalife

A small-time concert promoter who dreams of bringing U2 to his Mexico town places a large bet with a mob boss and loses. The only way to save himself is to organize the concert in seven days.

AUGUST 31

DEATH SENTENCE

Cast: Kevin Bacon

Director: James Wan

A new adaptation of a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, which was a sequel to Garfield's earlier novel, Death Wish, the book that spawned a hit film for tough guy Charles Bronson. In this updated version, a businessman (Bacon) turns vigilante after a street gang attacks his family. Bronson, Bacon, same diff.

Sicko

Harry Potter