Summer of lovin' the movies

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Fasten your safety glasses, because it’s going to be a 3-D ride. But do keep checking venues, because these babies will shift in transit.

      May 23
      No idea what The Hangover Part III is about. Perhaps we’ll know the morning after.

      May 24
      Romania’s Beyond the Hills gets orphan-story dark, while Denmark’s Love Is All You Need goes sunny, with help from Pierce Brosnan and the Italian coast, and Ken Loach hits Scotland (and some Scotch) for The Angels’ Share. Holy FernGully: Amanda Seyfried joins the tiny Leaf People in an animated Epic. Elsewhere, Fast & Furious 6 finds our hot-rodding pals souping up their wheelchairs.

      May 31
      Jesse Eisenberg leads heist-minded magicians in Now You See Me, and father-son Will and Jaden Smith team up in the apocalyptic After Earth. Italo-Canadian actors get a Toronto workout in The Resurrection of Tony Gitone, a Spanish retirement home is visited in animated Wrinkles, a Mexican returns from the U.S. in Aquí y allá, a Korean loan shark has mommy issues in Pieta, and a tragic African phenomenon is examined in Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children.

      June 7
      Wedding crashers Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson go back to work in The Internship, while Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke hook up one more time (in Greece) for Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight. Horror awaits in The Purge, and the Romanian Crulic tells a harsh, true-life story in cartoon form. Michel Gondry goes all multiculti in the NYC–set The We and the I.

      June 12
      This Is the End, my only friend, of planet Earth—if Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and their stoner pals are expected to save us.

      June 14
      Wish we had the Man of Steel, played by Brit Henry Cavill, to end America’s Dirty Wars, as documented by journalist Jeremy Scahill. Three Ohio teens become The Kings of Summer when they set out to build their own cabin, and Ellen Page belongs to a radical group in The East.

      June 21
      Billy Crystal and John Goodman (or their voices) graduate to Monsters University, while Brad Pitt outruns zombies in World War Z. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis try to Fill the Void between marriage and independence, and Noah Baumbach directs Greta Gerwig in the bittersweet Frances Ha. Emma Watson and other ingénues join The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s comedy of comely jewel thieves.

      June 28
      Joss Whedon tackles Shakespeare in his updated take on Much Ado About Nothing, and Barbara Sukowa plays Hannah Arendt; while covering the Adolf Eichmann trial, she wrote about “the banality of evil”. Speaking of which, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy make unlikely cops in The Heat. Two other women merge identities in Canada’s Blood Pressure, and Channing Tatum saves his nation in White House Down.

      July 3
      “What you mean we, white man?” asks Johnny Depp’s Tonto in The Lone Ranger, silver-screened by Gore Verbinski. Despicable Me 2’s Steve Carell faces the horror of cartoon family life in the suburbs.

      July 5
      An unusual flight crew encounters trouble in Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited! In the doc department, survivors of El Salvador’s civil war build The Tiniest Place in a Mexican jungle, and Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth profiles young Mayans today.

      July 12
      Adam Sandler and pals get even more mature in Grown Ups 2, Guillermo del Toro goes all robots and battleships in Pacific Rim, and Neil Jordan attempts a thinking-girl’s vampire movie in Byzantium. Singer Mary Margaret O’Hara makes an unusual appearance in the poetic Museum Hours, and Bob Dylan’s early ilk is explored in Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation.

      July 17
      Ryan Reynolds is the voice of Turbo, an unusually zippy snail.

      July 19
      Reynolds returns as a cop in R.I.P.D., alongside Jeff Bridges as a ghostly lawman. It’s from Robert Schwentke, who also directed Red but didn’t return for Red 2, although Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren are still painting the town. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play a paranormal couple in The Conjuring, and documentary filmmakers bite off more than they can view in The Conspiracy. Mads Mikkelsen is a teacher wrongly accused of child abuse in The Hunt, Indonesian death-squad leaders reenact The Act of Killing, and seemingly ordinary British Sightseers cut an unexpectedly lethal swath through the Lake District. Animation, drama, and documentary meet in Terence Nance’s autobiographical An Oversimplification of Her Beauty.

      July 26
      X-Men spins off a nonsinging Hugh Jackman for the second time as The Wolverine, while Crystal Fairy’s less hairy Michael Cera is a mildly ugly American in Chile. And ’50s France gets the Mad Men treatment in Populaire, while new college student Aubrey Plaza adds losin’ the ol’ cherry to The To Do List.

      July 31
      The Smurfs 2? Smurf said!

      August 2
      Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin are unhappy marrieds in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. Paul Schrader gets Lindsay Lohan in trouble (again) in The Canyons. Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are 2 Guns in the war on drugs. It’s man against machine in the ’80s-set Computer Chess, and doc Blackfish is about a troubled orca. Great Xerxes’ Ghost, it’s the Frank Miller–inspired 300: Rise of an Empire!

      August 7
      Logan Lerman is ’tween the devil and the deep blue sea in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters.

      August 9
      Jennifer Aniston’s a stripper and Jason Sudeikis a low-level drug dealer; they impersonate a family in We’re the Millers. Film technician Toby Jones encounters a world of Dario Argento–style pain in Berberian Sound Studio. Matt Damon is badass and bald in Elysium, another sci-fi romp from District 9’s Neill Blomkamp. Finally, how does Disney top its own Cars? With Planes, of course (celebrity voices included).

      August 16
      In Kick-Ass 2, we find out if Chloë Grace Moretz is now too old to swear. Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford star in Paranoia, a corporate thriller.

      August 23
      You’re Next has a skeezy home-invasion scenario, and fille du jour Lily Collins plays a New York teen following her mother into the underworld of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Simon Pegg and his mates set out on an unusual pub crawl—to avoid The World’s End.

      August 28
      Rebecca Hall and Eric Bana team up for a tricky terror trial in Closed Circuit.

      August 30
      Ethan Hawke is the Cape Fear–like patsy in Getaway, and coed Ashley Greene gets attacked on campus by Random (formerly known as Satanic) forces. And a big British group is documented in One Direction: This Is Us (assuming they’re still popular at summer’s end).

      Likely this summer
      Steve Coogan gets The Look of Love in Michael Winterbottom’s wicked new satire, and La Monroe’s mystique is dissected again in Love, Marilyn. An Italian police riot is recalled in Diaz: Don’t Clean Up This Blood, and a real-life tragedy is explored in Fruitvale Station. France in 1968 is seen through youthful eyes in Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air, while a British twosome defies expectations in I Give It a Year. Brian De Palma channels Joe Eszterhas in Passion, pitting Rachel McAdams against Noomi Rapace. The Drive team is back and boxing in Only God Forgives, and Terence Stamp does not go gentle into old age, according to Unfinished Song. Kristen Wiig is the Girl Most Likely to melt down, Julianne Moore has hot trouble as The English Teacher, and Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell offer opposing models of masculinity to a lonely boy in The Way, Way Back.

      Comments