افلام

Director: Georgina Riedel Stars: Elizabeth Peña, America Ferrera, Lucy Gallardo (Full Cast) Studio: Maya Releasing The Plot: Residents of a sleepy Arizona town find plenty to gossip about when three generations of women from a local family experience sexual awakenings over the course of a summer. THE BUZZ: Short-film director Georgina Riedel finds her 2005 debut feature picked up by fledgling distributor Maya Releasing (who has the Independent Spirit Award-winning August Evening on deck for later this summer). Why? America Ferrara's one of the leads, and Garcia Girls has been compared to the young star's first film, Real Women Have Curves in terms of its themes and overall good cheer.

Director: Joachim Trier Stars: Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman-Høiner, Viktoria Winge (Full Cast) Studio: Miramax Films The Plot: A look at what happens -- and also what could have happened -- after best friends Phillip (Lie) and Erik (Klouman-Høiner) drop their respective manuscripts into the same mailbox, both of them hoping their first novels will be picked up for publication. THE BUZZ: Norwegian Joachim Trier's first film has impressed the harshest critics and has been called one of the best movies about making art in some time. Twitch Film says: "... Trier proves himself remarkably adept at moving between moods, flitting easily between comedy, romance and tragedy - simply refusing to delineate these different elements into neat little compartments because this is simply not how life happens." Read the rest of their review here and watch the trailer over

Director: Andrew Adamson Stars: Ben Barnes, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley (Full Cast) Studio: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures The Plot: The Pevensie children return to Narnia one year after their first adventure in the magical land. Soon after entering the kingdom, however, they learn that 1,000 years has passed here, and all is not well since an evil king ascended to the throne. The children and allies both old and new band together to help restore the kingdom to its rightful heir, Prince Caspian (Barnes). THE BUZZ: Remember how popular The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was -- how it literally was twice as successful as the Golden Compass worldwide and, of course, how the "Lazy Sunday" video reignited "Saturday Night Live"'s creative streak? How exactly Prince Caspian has failed to generate much advance hype is a question for marketing types to research and blogger types to get snarky about, but I will assert that Wardrobe was a slow, unmemorable movie, and that might be part of the reason there's a general lack of excitement for Caspian. That said, the second chapter's ratcheted-up action might help reignite the franchise, even if Disney's thinking of ending the story after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ... I have to imagine there'll be lots of talk about future Narnia adventures soon after Caspian's opening-weekend numbers are announced.

Director: Xavier Gens Stars: Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik, Patrick Ligardes (Full Cast) Studio: After Dark Films The Plot: A band of criminals find refuge in a secluded country inn, fully unaware of the nightmare that will greet them this evening. THE BUZZ: French director Xavier Gens is having a tough time with his movies in the States; first he was kind of fired from his last offering and then Frontière(s) was quietly dropped from the roster of the second HorrorFest because of MPAA-related issues (the ratings board wasn't keen on the movie's level of violence). But now After Dark Films is giving the movie a tiny theatrical release before it hits the DVD market of May 13, so you have two chances to see some Hostel-like sadism complete with a pregnant felon as a lead character, a gnarly troupe of Nazis ensconced inside the primary set piece, and, from what we hear, plenty of unnecessary, ill-handled political commentary about the collapse of the French government and its ideology. Maybe we'll stay home and read some more of The Stranger this week...

Director: Tom Vaughan Stars: Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher (Full Cast) Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation The Plot: Joy (Diaz) and Jack (Kutcher) meet while on a Las Vegas bender, where their drunken nuptials are only part of a larger problem: What to do when Jack wins $3 million with Joy's quarter, and they are forced to spend six months as wife and husband if they are to see a penny of their winnings. THE BUZZ: Let's just skip over Ashton (I mean, really) and address the real sad story here: Ms. Diaz, who used to be a movie star and not just someone you see in magazines and print ads, has been absent from the top of the box office in quite some time. Unlucky in work and love, we guess. (Whoa, she's like America's own Nicole Kidman!) And now she and Ashton have to star in a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, the kind that reveals its entire hand in its trailer. Was this even filmed in Las Vegas?

Director: Andy Wachowski Larry Wachowski Stars: Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox, Christina Ricci (Full Cast) Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures The Plot: Speed Racer (Hirsch), a skilled young car driver who belongs to a family of gearheads, is blackmailed by the head of the nefarious corporation Royalton Industries to participate in The Crucible -- the annual cross-country rally that claimed his brother's life years ago. Behind the wheel of the Mach 5, his father's greatest invention, Speed goes head-to-head with his chief rival, the mysterious-yet-familiar Racer X (Fox). THE BUZZ: In an earlier iteration of this project, Vince Vaughn was attached; in another Alfonso Cuarón was set to direct Johnny Depp as the man behind the wheel of the Mach 5 ... The main question mark here is whether Andy Wachowski and his still-a-man brother Larry can make a family film that they themselves would go see? (Our answer: of course, since there's no pressure for the plot to make a shred of sense.) We're definitely not worried about cool visuals, but there a lot of writers present here.

Director: David Mamet Stars: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer (Full Cast) Studio: Sony Pictures Classics The Plot: A fateful event serves as the first chapter in a new story for top Jiu-Jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Ejiofor). Though he has shied away from the professional side of the medium -- opting instead to run his own struggling self-defense studio -- circumstances conspire to force him to step into the ring for money for the first time. THE BUZZ: We really are curious as to what David Mamet is up to with Redbelt, a more grown-up version of the spring release Never Back Down. The two movies are both looking to cash in on the mixed-martial arts craze that dominates pay-per-view ratings, and in this head-to-head movie battle, it's the latter film that looks to emerge victorious what with its hotter bods (a fact) and focus on action over character development (a guess). Can you see Mamet's regulars queuing up for this?

Director: Harmony Korine Stars: Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant (Full Cast) Studio: IFC Films The Plot: A Michael Jackson impersonator (Luna) ekeing out a life in Paris joins a Marilyn Monroe look-alike (Morton) on a trip back to her commune in the Scottish Highlands -- a seaside castle at which Michael discovers an alternate family of impersonators all in preparation for their first-ever gala. THE BUZZ: The tastemakers of cool haven't been kind to Harmony Korine's long-overdue third picture (but have they really ever embraced him? has he ever been embraceable?), a surprising push toward something resembling a mainstream effort that we hear lacks any sort of commentary on the themes it artfully depicts: isolation, romantic triangles, celebrity culture, alterna-societies and their struggle for survival ... Still, few popular filmmakers can create the type of visual memories Korine brings to the screen, and we imagine he and his accessible cast (which includes another role for documentarian Werner Herzog, here playing a priest running a missionary aid organization in an unnamed Latin American jungle) will make for a good late-spring day spent indoors. Korine has also pulled off a few creative coups here: Getting Marcel Zyskind (Michael Winterbottom's go-to cinematographer) to shoot the film, outsiders extraordinaire Jason Spaceman and the Sun City Girls to contribute music, and Performance duo Anita Pallenberg and Richard Fox to pad his cast. So there should be enough there to keep even his harshest detractors (who are probably, let's face it, totally jealous of HK) in their chairs for the two-hour runtime. We say zip your lip and look at pretty pictures.

Director: Garth Jennings Stars: Bill Milner (Full Cast) Studio: Paramount Vantage The Plot: A shy boy growing up in a sheltered British community makes an unlikely collaborative partnered in his rough-and-tough schoolmate in his attempt to film his own shot-by-shot version of Rambo: First Blood. THE BUZZ: After winning over the crowds at Sundance and nestling in the deep pockets of Paramount's indie lable, Jennings latest opus proves to be much less ambitious than his last project and is poised to be this year's Little Miss Sunshine -- although it looks more like this year's Billy Elliot on Human Growth Hormone. Really though, we saw this at the Seattle Film Festival (last year, ahem) and were pulled into a nostalgic haze by the film and the performances of its two young leads. Then again, it could have been all that opening-night champagne ...

Director: Jon Favreau Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard (Full Cast) Studio: Paramount Pictures The Plot: While in captivity, industralist Tony Stark (Downey) creates a high-tech suit of armor which he first uses to fight his way to freedom, and then to prevent a dark-minded scientific genius from carrying out his nefarious plot against humankind. THE BUZZ: After 15+ years in development, the comic hero first based on Howard Hughes is refashioned as a contemporary industrialist whose technology is being used in the Middle Eastern war effort. (Funny, we can't compare him to any present-day eccentrics, just a list of bad guys come to mind.) Director Jon Favreau was the first name talent associated with project, and any doubt as to his ability to bring in a polished, smart-looking film should have been erased by not only the principal cast he got to sign on, but also his plan for the first film of a proposed trilogy (we hear Downey, Paltrow, and Howard signed 3-picture deals). Here's what we know: Stark is taken prisoner is Afghanistan, and that's where he builds the suit; both the grey suit and the red and gold suit will appear; Stark's alcoholism won't be addressed during the first go-round. And a note to old-school comics fans: It's kind of cool that Stark's old split book counterpart, Steve Rogers (a.k.a Captain America) was greenlighted soon after IM began pre-production. While that project seems to be languishing in development-heck, we imagine IM's initial returns might help get the red, white, and blue balls rolling.