July 9: ANCHORMAN Will funnyman Will Ferrell show us that Elf was no fluke, and be able to maintain the momentum generated by that film? Ferrell stars as a local TV news doofus drawn into the war of the sexes when pretty but uncommonly capable Christina Applegate enters the picture.
SLEEPOVER and A CINDERELLA STORY Dueling high school chick flicks, the former with Spy Kids' Alexa Varga, the latter with Hilary (Lizzie McGuire) Duff. Preteen girls will obviously be lining up for both, numerous times. The rest of us can flip a coin.
July 16: I, ROBOT There's a lot riding on this big screen adaptation of one of the most famous and best-loved science fiction stories of all time, and most signs point to the possibility that the film will actually deliver. Will Smith provides the star power and director Alex Proyas (Dark City) contributes the creative juices in a futuristic detective story that dabbles in science, ethics and philosophy.
July 23: CATWOMAN Even if you can get past Halle Berry's tacky-beyond-words costume, are you ready for a superhero brought back to life by an Egyptian cat to fight an evil cosmetics firm? Thought not.
THE BOURNE SUPREMACY Talented newcomer Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) is at the directorial helm of this sequel to The Bourne Identity, which sounds like good news all around. Matt Damon returns in an espionage thriller about a plot to start a war between the U.S. and China.
July 30: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE One of the niftiest little thrillers of yore gets a face lift courtesy of director Jonathan Demme and stars Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. The story's the same — ex-soldiers return to society as brainwashed, ticking time bombs — but the enemy's been changed from leering Koreans to shadowy Arab-Muslim operatives in the First Gulf War.
THE VILLAGE Strange creatures lurk in the woods surrounding a little Pennsylvania 'burg in M. Knight Shyamalan's latest movie. The premise sounds more Signs than Sixth Sense, but with Shyamalan you never know.
SHALL WE DANCE Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez star in a remake of a sweet Japanese romance about a boring businessman who spices up his life with dance lessons and falls for his instructor.
Aug. 6: COLLATERAL If Colin Farrell and Joel Schumacher can make standing by a telephone for 90 minutes exciting (Phone Booth), why not a movie about two guys riding around in a car all night? Of course, it helps when one of the guys is Tom Cruise as a contract killer making his rounds, and the other is Jamie Foxx as the cabbie desperately trying to figure out how to stop him. Michael Mann directs.
THUNDERBIRDS Poetic justice for all those moviegoers who have long maintained that Bill Paxton is a wooden actor. Paxton may not be a puppet, but he plays one (sort of) in this live action, big screen version of the popular "supermarionation" TV show for kids (and adults given to ingesting various mind-altering substances). Vaguely sci-fi-ish, clean-cut adventure hi-jinks aimed primarily at young boys.
Aug. 11: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR Don't expect it to end with a kiss. The director is Paul W.S. Anderson, specialist in video-game flicks like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, which is probably more than you need to know.
THE PRINCESS DIARIES 2 Director Garry Marshall's second offering of the summer is a sequel to last year's romantic fantasy about an ordinary American girl who discovers she's foreign royalty. The fantasy continues in this installment when Anne Hathaway tries to avoid an arranged marriage in order to find true love.
YU-GI-OH! You've seen the trading cards and eaten the cereal; now see the movie. Spiky-haired anime teens and goofy monsters for the I-just-graduated-from-Pokemon crowd.
Aug. 20: THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING Thirteen years after the sublime awfulness of Exorcist III, here's a prequel to the famous franchise, focusing on the early years of Max von Sydow's demon-battling priest. The story behind this one is bound to be more interesting than the film itself. Erratic visionary director Paul Schrader (Auto Focus, American Gigolo) was fired from this project and his completed film was summarily shelved by the studio, which then brought in hired gun Renny Harlin to produce a presumably more commercial version. The rumor is that both Harlin's and Schrader's versions will be available on DVD later in the year, but, in the meantime, we'll take what we can get.
JET LI'S THE HERO A magnificent martial arts epic from director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) that makes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look like, well, Yu-Gi-Oh. We're not quite sure why the idiots at Miramax saw fit to affix star Jet Li's name to the original title (The Hero), but hopefully they haven't made any other changes to a movie that's been knocking them dead in Asia and Europe for the past year.
