Think outside the box office

Sets have been leveled, and sound editors have broken the china collection: Rest assured, shit will explode onscreen this summer. Michael Bay brings us Transformers (Jul 4), the movie he’s been working toward his entire career. After decimating Alcatraz (The Rock), Pearl Harbor (Pearl Harbor), Cuba (Bad Boys II) and an asteroid (Armageddon), Bay makes a movie that consists of giant hunks of metal clobbering each other. Those looking for action with a human face—or at least Bruce Willis’s face—should check out Live Free or Die Hard (Jun 27), the first Die Hard since 1994. (The new flick derives its title from New Hampshire’s state motto. Coming next: United We Stand, Divided We Die Hard.) The Bourne Ultimatum(Aug 3), directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93), is your basic paranoid geopolitical conspiracy thriller, in which Matt Damon breaks arms and blows up buildings while crisscrossing Europe.

BEST BETThe Bourne Ultimatum, because Greengrass knows how to class up action fare.

Beats us why people persist in remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers, given that it’s all about the evils of replication. The latest knock-off, The Invasion (Aug 17), stars Nicole Kidman but has a troubled history: Director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s cut was turned over to the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) for a makeover. Did they save it? Don’t count your pods before they’re hatched. Judging from the box-office performance of turkeys like Hannibal Rising, America’s fascination with serial killers has ended. But the producers of Mr. Brooks (Jun 1) will try to revive it with a Jekyll-and-Hyde gimmick: Kevin Costner plays the murderous title character’s well-behaved side, while William Hurt does the heavy slicing. Hot damn, two has-beens for the price of one! Or three, if you count Demi Moore as the cop on their trail. The title of 1408 (Jun 22) refers to a haunted hotel room and not to its numerical place on the list of films based on the work of Stephen King. John Cusack stars as a professional skeptic, and we all know what happens to them in ghost stories. When the heavy-hitters in the cast are B-listers like Elias Koteas and Rhona Mitra, it behooves a filmmaker to bring an idea or two to the screen. Alas, the makers of Skinwalkers (Jul 27) couldn’t come up with anything better than a dopey title and some bollocks about an ancient feud between the good werewolves and bad’uns.

BEST BET Mr. Brooks, because Hurt was so malevolently awesome in A History of Violence.

Just selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, Michael Moore’s Sicko (release date TBA) is an incendiary look at the U.S. health-care system, in which Moore reportedly brings Ground Zero responders to Cuba to prove that Castro runs a better health-care system than Bush. Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (Jul 6)—a loose adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s John Thomas and Lady Jane (later rewritten as Lady Chatterley’s Lover)—is said to be one of the most inventive literary reimaginings of the year. But the event of the summer promises to be the rerelease of Charles Burnett’s long-unavailable landmark of African-American cinema Killer of Sheep (1977, slated for Jul 27 at the Music Box), an incisive black-and-white drama about a family in South Central Los Angeles.

BEST BET Killer of Sheep, because so many people have written about its brilliance, and it’s been impossible to rent.

Napoleon Dynamite casts a global shadow: From New Zealand comes Eagle vs Shark (Jun 29), a story of love between a mouth-breathing misfit and his female counterpart. England puts its dorkiest foot forward with Son of Rambow: A Home Movie (TBA), about a rebel from a religious family who teams with a schoolmate to make a sequel to Rambo. The U.S. gives us two entrants: Rocket Science (Aug 17) is the story of a sad sack who joins the debate team to vanquish his stuttering problem and get chicks. Superbad (Aug 17), about three misfits who hope to get laid at the last party before high school ends, is produced by Judd Apatow (see “Revenge of the nerd,” page 18) and stars Michael Cera (Arrested Development’s George-Michael).

BEST BETSon of Rambow: A Home Movie, which sounds like a genuinely eccentric flick.

This summer, movies we’ve already seen will be rehashed with the genders flipped (Hostel: Part II, Jun 8), the cast size increased (Ocean’s Thirteen, Jun 8) or the locations changed (Rush Hour 3, Aug 10, set in Paris). And then there’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (May 25), which will feature Keith Richards (God bless him) and Johnny Depp doing his best minced ham. July 13 will bring Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,the fifth—or is it the sixth?—Harry Potter movie. No Reservations (Jul 27) is a remake of the too-cute-for-words German chefs-in-love romcom Mostly Martha (2001), possibly made even cuter by the casting of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart. Even Werner Herzog is getting into the spirit: His Rescue Dawn (July 13, starring Christian Bale as a German pilot fighting with the American military in Vietnam) is just a narrative-film version of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Even Bart and friends are getting a big-screen makeover, as The Simpsons Movie (Jul 27) finally hits theaters.

BEST BETOcean’s Thirteen, because Ocean’s Twelve was a lot better than anyone expected.

Jason Biggs notwithstanding, there’s at least an outside chance that Wedding Daze (Aug 17) will be that rara avis, the romantic comedy that doesn’t suck, given that it was written and directed by Michael Ian Black (The State, Stella). We’re nowhere near as sanguine about License to Wed (Jul 6), which stars Robin Williams as a nutty priest who puts a young couple through wacky, grueling premarital counseling. We might need counseling of a different variety after seeing it. Anyone nostalgic for 1970s levels of gay panic will doubtless want to check out I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Jul 20), starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as straight firemen who get married as part of a pension boon-doggle. As lavender-tinted comedies go, Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral (Jun 29) sounds more original. The British production stars Alan Tudyk (Dodgeball, Serenity) as a guy who finds out at his father’s funeral that the old boy was a switch-hitter with a thing for very short men.

BEST BET Death at a Funeral, because it costars the charismatic Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent).