It's gearing up to be a strange summer at the movies.
Three of the big guns have already come and gone -- "Iron Man," "Prince Caspian," and "Indiana Jones etc etc" -- making piles at the box office without much of a dent in the cultural consciousness. (I confess to being confused by some of the sheer rage expressed toward Spielberg's return to this series: what were you expecting? This was always thin but fun Saturday matinee cheese.) Coming up are "Kung Fu Panda" (looks great, less filling) and Adam Sandler in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" (which Wes swears is pretty funny; maybe it's the Judd Apatow influence)
Now comes the big-screen "Sex and the City," and while many people care, I'm honestly not one of them. But Wesley liked it, and some of the other reviews are positive. And some of them are not.
If you want mindblowing eye candy in the service of a chilly, tonally wobbly "Princess Bride" imitation, by all means check out "The Fall," playing at the Kendall. The photo above is a tasting sample, and two others are here and here. Tarsem Singh's labor of love is a continent-spanning design layout that needs to be seen on a big screen if at all.
At the other end of the scale is "Chop Shop," a gritty little realist fable about a kid in the third-world automotive shops of Queens, New York. It's playing at the Brattle. Two solid documentaries kick in today, too: James Carroll's "Constantine's Sword" sticks it to church orthodoxy for ignoring Christ's message of peace in favor of war-mongering and anti-Semitism, while Laura Bialis' "Refusenik" is a thorough accounting of the struggle to save Soviet Jewry the 60s, 70s, and 80s. (Bialis will be present at the 6:50 screening tonight at the Kendall Square).
"The Strangers" is the latest torture porn movie from a young and soulless director out to prove himself. Liv Tyler showed up, but you don't have to.
Over at the Harvard Film Archive, the quite essential round-up of Shaw Bros. classics continues through the weekend. You want to see the originals that everybody from Quentin Tarantino to "Kung Fu Panda" have been ripping off for so long? Look no further. That's 1972's "14 Amazons" below; it's at the HFA Sunday at 3 pm.
The Armenian Film Festival takes over the Museum of Fine Arts for the weekend. Tonight is "The Lark Farm," the latest from Italy's Taviani brothers.
By the way, please join me in saying hello to the Globe's new art critic, the marvelously named Sebastian Smee, who we've somehow convinced to move here from Australia. Welcome, Sebastian, and I hope your family's adjustment from the Antipodes to the, um, Podes, goes smoothly. Here's his piece today on the Anish Kapoor show at the ICA. Like all good criticism, it provides the context and whets my appetite to experience the thing for myself; it also reads like a charm.
