Pimps, pugilists and a Pink Panther

MAY
The Longest Yard
Adam Sandler stars as a jailed jock in this remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds comedy about a high-stakes football game between prisoners and guards. Reynolds returns as a grizzled coach. (May 27)

Madagascar
This animated feature is deadly dull till the zoo inmates (voices of Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett-Smith) escape. Then heart-meltingly cute and bizarre African critters take over (many voiced by Sacha "Ali G" Baron Cohen), and this toon starts zipping along. (May 27)

JUNE
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Chick-lit for chicklets comes to the big screen in this jailbait-friendly tale of a magical pair of blue jeans that bring adventure, wisdom and romance to the wearer. But do they make our butt look big? (Jun 1)

Cinderella Man
Another Oscar-bait boxing movie! Pumped-up Russell Crowe stars as legendary athlete Jim Braddock, the real-life Depression-era man who turned pro to support his wife (a brunette Renee Zellweger) and kids. Sources say this Ron Howard–directed biopic could truly be the crowd-pleasing romantic-action-drama hit of the summer. (Jun 3)

Lords of Dogtown
Heath Ledger stars in this fictionalized account of a California skateboard gang that revolutionized the sport in the '70s. It's directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen), a specialist in the gamier side of kid culture. (Jun 3)

Mysterious Skin
L.A. indie provocateur Gregg Araki's best film to date, Skin is equal parts charming and disturbing. It's a tale of two boys molested by their Little League coach. (Jun 3)

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
The imaginary superhero friends of a ten-year-old help him to turn tables on the bullies who torment him. Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids) writes and directs. (Jun 10)

Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Home-wrecking kinkster (Angelina Jolie) and baby-craving heartbreaker (Brad Pitt) costar in Doug Liman's spy-action-romance that's dead last in Jennifer Aniston's Netflix queue. Will there be any telltale chemistry between the stars? (Jun 10)

Howl's Moving Castle
From the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, comes this animated tale of a girl (voiced by Emily Mortimer) transformed into a 90-year-old lady (Jean Simmons). (Jun 17)

My Summer of Love
Voted Best British Film of the year by the U.K.'s Academy, this sharply bittersweet gem follows two young women (Emily Blunt and Nathalie Press) from opposite sides of the tracks. Their relationship ignites quickly—a juvenile romance that seems like it will burn forever. But all is not how it appears on the warm and passionate surface. (Jun 17)

Herbie: Fully Loaded
Is it just us, or is Lindsay Lohan looking a little too Ann-Margret (circa Carnal Knowledge) to play a PG-rated teen heroine? In what may be her last under-21 role, Lohan gets behind the wheel of a sentient VW Beetle and enters a big race to defend the family honor. D.E.B.S. director Angela Robinson steers the kidpic. (Jun 22)

Bewitched
Is this a silly summer movie remake of a 1960s TV series, or has Hollywood gone all meta on us? An actor (Will Ferrell), playing Darrin Stephens in a new TV series of Bewitched, suspects that his costar (Nicole Kidman) actually is a witch. (Jun 24)

July
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Indie darling director and actor Miranda July's Sundance-winning debut follows a video artist (July) and a divorced shoe salesman looking for love in the digital age. (Jul 1)

Rebound
Martin Lawrence stars as a washed-up basketball coach who is forced to lead a junior high school team. It's like The Bad News Bears (only not as good) and The Mighty Ducks (only blacker). (Jul 1)

Fantastic Four
Four astronauts whose bodies are irreversibly altered by radiation battle the war-mongering, power-hungry Doctor Doom. Jessica Alba is inexplicably cast as the motherly Invisible Woman, but Michael Chiklis is perfect for the orange-body-armored brute the Thing. We're willing to bet he'll also do his share of super-heroic wise-cracking. (Jul 8)

Yes
Sally Potter (Orlando) writes and directs this love story between an American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese-British doctor (Simon Abkarian). The dialogue is all in rhyming couplets, which is either admirable or downright pretentious. (Jul 8)

Hustle & Flow
Terrence Howard is a pimp who just wants to sing! No, seriously. This improbable Sundance hit is like a latter-day Mickey and Judy musical, or perhaps Flashdance with bitch-slapping and blow jobs. With his skanky hos by his side, our hero dares to dream his crazy dream. Is this a great country or what? (Jul 13)

The Wedding Crashers
Chick-flick or slob comedy? Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson star as buddies who pick up women at the nuptials of strangers. It's the loser couple getting-to-know-you date movie of the summer! (Jul 15)

Beautiful Country
A Vietnamese man flees his homeland, risking love and his young brother's life, to meet the American father he never knew. And guess who the delinquent G.I. Dad is? It's not Harvey Keitel. Nick Nolte, of course. (Jul 22)

The Bad News Bears
The pitch: School of Rock's Richard Linklater remakes the '70s hit about a disgraced coach (a well-cast Billy Bob Thornton) and a lousy Little League team. The catch: Bears has got one crappy trailer. (Jul 22)

The Island
See hot clone action as custom-bred human duplicates Ewan McGregor and ScarlettJohansson get wind of their expiration dates and try to escape their water-bound prison. Michael "Make Things Go Boom" Bay directs. Quick, to the hydrofoil! (Jul 22)

The Brothers Grimm
Visionary director Terry Gilliam reimagines the fairy-tale–writing duo (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) as con men who promise to rid villages of mischievous creatures. With the Brazil auteur behind the lens, it should be stunningly beautiful, digressive, maddening and brilliant. (Jul 29)

Must Love Dogs
Based on Claire Cook's best-seller, this romantic comedy about love and commitment stars Diane Lane, John Cusack, some big dogs and cute kids. (Jul 29)

Night Watch
What's bigger than The Matrix in Russia? This Russian high-tech sci-fi hit. The plot concerns a war between supernaturally endowed "Others" who fight each other in a war between light and darkness. (Jul 29)

Sky High
This new Disney sci-fi kids franchise focuses on a high school filled with the spawn of superheroes. The son of Commander Stronghold (Kurt Russell) and Josie Jetstream (Kelly Preston), Will has to navigate the challenges of adolescence and his extraordinary powers. (Jul 29)

Stealth
It's A.I. meets Top Gun in a sci-fi story about high-tech fighter pilots, one of whom is an android, starring Jamie Foxx, Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel, and directed by The Fast and the Furious's Rob Cohen. (Jul 29)

AUGUST
Broken Flowers
Indie god Jim Jarmusch's latest stars Bill Murray as a man who discovers he's got a son by a long-ago girlfriend. He embarks on a quest to reexamine his life, find his old loves (Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone) and meet his spawn. Didn't Murray already go through this in The Life Aquatic? (Aug 5)

Cry Wolf
A group of high school students invent a serial killer called "The Wolf," but when real people start turning up dead, the game turns terrifyingly real. It's sort of like that Brady Bunch episode with Cindy's imaginary friend—only much bloodier. (Aug 5)

The Dukes of Hazzard
Can Jessica Simpson fill the short shorts of Daisy Duke? Find out in this remake of the '80s TV show. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers) and starring Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott, this is one retread that might actually not suck. (Aug 5)

Four Brothers
Are you old enough to remember the classic John Wayne revenge pic The Sons of Katie Elder, in which four pissed-off motherless men avenge their papa's murder? John Singleton, who ruined the Shaft remake, hopes not. This time, it's foster brothers avenging a foster mother. (Aug 5)

The Pink Panther
Steve Martin steps into the famously slippery shoes of Inspector Clouseau for this sight-gag–heavy detective farce about a murdered soccer coach and the missing Pink Panther diamond. At the very least, it'll have a memorable theme song. (Aug 5)

3001
Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Office Space) returns to the big screen with this prescient satire about a man (Luke Wilson) who sleeps 1,000 years only to wake up to a stupid future where he is the smartest man on Earth. (Aug 5)

2046
In this sexy sequel to In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong Kar-wai's gloriously romantic drama, Tony Leung returns as the brooding hero, sorting out the ashes of several doomed passionate trysts, and reimagining them as he writes a sci-fi novel set in the past and in the future. (Aug 5)

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
As the famous "man-whore," Saturday Night Live alum Rob Schneider trains in England to better his skills, and then takes on the women of Amsterdam in this sequel. (Aug 12)

Domino
Keira Knightley stars in this true-life story of Domino Harvey, a fashion-model-turned-bounty-hunter, and the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate). Directed by Ridley's less-talented brother Tony Scott. (Aug 19)

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Freaks and Geeks creator Judd Apatow directs Steve Carell (The Office) in the role of a lifetime: a grown-up man who has yet to sleep with a woman. Freaks and Geeks plus virgins? This could be either really funny or a near-fatal convergence of dweebiness. (Aug 19)

Red Eye
Horrormeister Wes Craven's mid-air thriller is destined to make you even more uneasy about flying the unfriendly skies. Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later) stars as the handsome but deadly seatmate of a nice young woman (Rachel McAdams) who should've known better than to talk to strangers. (Aug 19)

Valiant
In their continuing quest to convince us that they really won WWII, the Brits (via Disney) deliver a CG-cartoon about heroic, message-carrying pigeons who dare to take on evil Nazi falcons. But we'll never believe there's more to those rats with wings than crapping on park benches. Starring the voices of Ewan McGregor and Tim Curry. (Aug 19)

The Constant Gardener
Classy Brit Ralph Fiennes plays a mild-mannered diplomat who goes Billy Jack-berserk with vengeance when his hotcha wife (Rachel Weisz) is murdered in Kenya. Based on the novel by John le Carre —and you thought he was all about Cold War spy action. (Aug 26)

Hit the docs

This summer, find an escape in real life

This summer's best thrills and laughs may not come from sci-fi mega-pics and star-studded horror-adventures, but in stories about decidedly less glamorous subjects: marching penguins, rugby-playing quadriplegics and pint-size rock stars. These documentaries—real-life stories filled with tragedy, triumph and comedy—are more entertaining than the last half-dozen Bruce Willis movies put together.

If last summer's nonfiction wave was buoyed by politics, this season's films belong to captivating human-interest tales of regular folks going up against the odds. Many of this summer's documentaries premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where they excelled far beyond the fiction fare, generating standing ovations and avid talk.

Park City favorite Murderball chronicles a foul-mouthed U.S. quad rugby team (July) while Rize (June or July), directed by fashion photographer David LaChapelle, follows the evolution of "krumping," an electrifying dance style that came out of South Central Los Angeles in response to the 1992 Rodney King riots. Both are thrilling films about people overcoming insurmountable obstacles.

Nearly as gripping is the March of the Penguins (July), a nature doc that follows the death-defying adventures of the emperor penguins in the Arctic, who battle the elements to keep their species alive. Equally adorable and ready for action are the kids from Rock School (June), a real-life School of Rock about preteen musicians learning the ways of Led Zeppelin from a teacher as frenzied as Jack Black.

Far less successful in pursuing his dreams is Timothy Treadwell, whose story is recounted in the absorbing Grizzly Man (August), directed by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo). Absurd and disturbing, Treadwell's story begins where it ends: Killed and eaten by a grizzly, the failed-actor-turned-animal-lover lived among bears on and off for 13 years and video-recorded his cohabitation. Using hundreds of hours of footage from Treadwell's tapes, Herzog paints a fascinating portrait of the lines between man and animal, civilization and chaos.

It's not exactly a tale of survival, but The Aristocrats (July), by comedians Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, may feel like a test of your moral values. More than 100 entertainers, including Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Gilbert Gottfried, relate the "dirtiest joke in the world," a raunchy supply of shock that pushes the limits of vulgarity. It also happens to provide an engaging reflection on the nature of comedy. And it may be the funniest thing you'll see on screen all year—with nary a single A-list screenwriter or director attached.—Anthony Kaufman