This summer offers a surprisingly small number of sunny blockbusters. Downers, docs, funky comedies, the odd romance, and a few CGI spectacles mark a schedule that may still shift a bit around the edges.

June 6

Jon Favreau gets his Chef mojo back by food-trucking through the South, while a real-life adventurer (played by Mia Wasikowska) makes Tracks across the Australian outback. Teens plumb suburban angst in Palo Alto, Shailene Woodley finds love amid disease in The Fault in Our Stars, and Marion Cotillard is The Immigrant in James Gray’s 1920s tragedy. Future-soldier Tom Cruise relives the same battle repeatedly in Edge of Tomorrow, a Groundhog Day with monsters. And WolfCop follows a police officer through hairy times.

June 13

As the names imply, 22 Jump Street wants to go one better than its prequel, and How to Train Your Dragon 2 is obviously twice as good as the first cartoon.

June 20

Clint Eastwood directs a musical! Jersey Boys is the tale of Frankie Valli’s Four Seasons, with Christopher Walken lurking in their mobbed-up background. Haley Joel Osment keeps seeing nondead people, including Gillian Anderson, in the spooky I’ll Follow You Down. Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson lock horns in The Rover, set in an apocalyptic future. Canada’s chilly North is explored in Uvanga. And Tyler Perry’s gravy train continues in Think Like a Man Too.

June 27

Mark Wahlberg brings his WTF energy to Transformers: Age of Extinction. And things presumably get all simultaneous for Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler in the rom-com They Came Together. Also joining forces are Words and Pictures, starring Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche as rival teachers.

June 30

Dark forces, without and within, worked against the doc hero of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.

July 2

Susan Sarandon plays a hard-boozing grandma on a road trip with Melissa McCarthy’s Tammy. Plucky kids encounter an E.T. in Earth to Echo, while Eric Bana uncovers supernatural police corruption in Deliver Us From Evil. Docmaker Joe Berlinger gives organized crime the doc treatment in Whitey: The United States of America v. James J. Bulger. Don’t miss the newly restored version of A Hard Day’s Night, playing one week for all you youngsters in the audience.

July 11

Rob Reiner directs And So It Goes, with Michael Douglas a reluctant grandpa who turns to neighbour Diane Keaton for help. Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley are music people who Begin Again, courtesy of Once director John Carney. Mila Kunis and James Franco are among the troubled urbanites in Paul Haggis’s convoluted Third Person. Weird visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky returns with The Dance of Reality. And Dawn of the Planet of the Apes takes place a decade after said planet had its Rise. Any other simians confused?

July 18

Mila Kunis plays the title character in the Matrix siblings’ Jupiter Ascending, with Channing Tatum as a space dude trying to rescue her, whether she needs it or not. In Wish I Was Here, Garden State’s Zach Braff directs himself as an actor who takes time off when dad Mandy Patinkin gets sick. Those folks from Cars ride again in Disney’s Planes: Fire & Rescue. Everyone goes nuts for one night in The Purge: Anarchy.

July 25

Philip Seymour Hoffman makes one of his final appearances as a German intelligence agent in Most Wanted Man, adapted from a John le Carré novel. Ethan Hawke and others age a real 12 years in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Aging brothers-in-law travel across Iceland in Land Ho!. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson oils his pecs to play a Hercules for our time, while Scarlett Johansson garners accidental superpowers in Luc Besson’s Lucy. Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel hook up for an unorthodox Sex Tape. And the up-steppers in Step Up: All In are all into Las Vegas for this round of dance fever.

August 1

The F Word (also known as What If ) stars Daniel Radcliffe as a med-school dropout who meets Zoe Kazan’s quirky animator. Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in 42, takes on James Brown in Get On Up. Disney goes all Marvelous with the cartoon-based Guardians of the Galaxy, and Woody Allen returns with Magic in the Moonlight, starring Colin Firth as a skeptic out to expose Emma Stone’s phony fortuneteller.

August 8

Lasse Hallström directs The Hundred-Foot Journey, about an Indian restaurant in rural France. Brendan Gleeson is a priest in the darkly comic Calvary, while Megan Fox gets all actiony in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot.

August 15

Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden reunite to argue through more dinners during The Trip to Italy. Jeff Bridges is The Giver in this fantasy of a dystopian future. Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. say Let’s Be Cops in a raunchy comedy (opening August 13). For The Expendables 3, Sylvester Stallone has Harrison Ford, Jackie Chan, and youngster Jason Statham to help him not get expended.

August 22

That extra-noir graphic novel gets another workout in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Those Trailer Park Boys play themselves in Swearnet: The Movie. High-school football is under glass in When the Game Stands Tall, and Chloë Grace Moretz is a comatose cellist in If I Stay.

August 29

Rupert Grint and others provide voices for the foosball-flavoured cartoon Underdogs, and more unforgiving spirits are unleashed in Jessabelle.

Sometime This Summer

Nicole Kidman is Grace of Monaco, and Jesse Eisenberg is The Double he never meant to find. Opera singer Paul Potts (not to be confused with Pol Pot) gets the biopic treatment in One Chance. Pierce Brosnan is a former CIA spy in Roger Donaldson’s November Man. Psychiatrist Ewan McGregor tries to convince suicidal Naomi Watts to Stay, and those darned zombies won’t go away in The Returned. Jenny Slate plays a troubled comic in Obvious Child, and an 18-year-old lad slips into Harold and Maude territory in Bruce LaBruce’s Gerontophilia.