(Note: Release dates are highly subject to change.)
THE BOSS OF IT ALL
Cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler
Director: Lars von Trier
Von Trier, director of the beautifully glum Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, lightens up considerably in this comedy about the owner of a computer company who hires an actor (Albinus) to impersonate him, and thereby take the heat—socks to the jaw included—from pissed-off employees and shareholders. (June 8)
THE GOLDEN DOOR
Cast: Vincenzo Amato, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Director: Emanuele Crialese
This epic tale from writer/director Crialese (Respiro) moves from the Old World to the New as an early-20th-century Sicilian (Amato) sells his livestock and immigrates to America, passing through Ellis Island and into New York alongside a mysterious Englishwoman (Gainsbourg). (June 15)
LA VIE EN ROSE
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Jean-Paul Rouve, Clotilde Courau
Director: Olivier Dahan
Raised in a brothel, blind for a time as a child and suspected of murder, French chanteuse Edith Piaf is long overdue for a biopic. The year's first bit of Oscar buzz is building for Cotillard's fierce performance. (June 8)
A MIGHTY HEART
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Will Patton, Irrfan Khan
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, whose best-seller A Mighty Heart detailed her 2002 journey to Pakistan to search for her husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journalreporter who was kidnapped and killed by Islamic fundamentalists. Futterman (who wrote Capote) portrays, in flashback, the late journalist. (June 22)
LADY CHATTERLEY
Cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot
Director: Pascale Ferran
In this adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's second Lady Chatterley novel, John Thomas and Lady Jane, the Lady in question (Hands) has a tempestuous affair with the groundskeeper (Coulloc'h) at her paralyzed husband's country estate. (July 13)
SEPTEMBER DAWN
Cast: Jon Voight, Trent Ford, Tamara Hope, Terence Stamp
Director: Christopher Cain
A bearded Stamp plays Mormon leader Brigham Young in this dramatization of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, when 120 settlers in the Utah Territory were murdered by a Mormon militia. Don't expect a Salt Lake City red-carpet premiere. And sorry about the timing, Mitt. (June 22)
YOU KILL ME
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Pullman
Director: John Dahl
A crime-noir comedy from Red Rock West director Dahl about an alcoholic Polish mafia hitman (Kingsley) ordered to dry out in San Francisco, where he finds love and a part-time job as a mortician. (June 22)
GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL
Director: Asger Leth
Set in the infamous Haitian slum of Cite Soleil, this documentary tracks the rivalry between two brothers who rule separate factions in the brutal gang that's said to have been the muscle of dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Music by executive producer and native Haitian hero Wyclef Jean. (July 13)
DEATH AT A FUNERAL
Cast: Ewen Bremner, Peter Dinklage, Matthew Macfadyen
Director: Frank Oz
A black comedy about a proper British funeral where the mourning family is slowly coming unhinged, thanks to accidental drug trips, unexpected trysts and the unnerving appearance of the dead patriarch's secret gay lover. Great trailer. (June 27)
EVENING
Cast: Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close
Director: Lajos Koltai
Novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours) wrote the screenplay for this star-packed adaptation of Susan Minot's exquisite 1999 novel, in which a dying woman flashes back to a wedding 40 years earlier, at which she fell madly—and tragically—in love. (June 27)
INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS
Cast: Brenda Blethyn, Khan Chittenden, Emma Booth, Richard Wilson
Director: Cherie Nowlan
From Australia, a comedy about an overbearing mother and comedienne (Blethyn), her two devoted sons, and the new girlfriend who's coming between them all. Beware acid-tongued, jealous mothers. (July 4)
JOSHUA
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga
Director: George Ratliff
Everyone's thrilled when parents Brad and Abby (Rockwell and Farmiga) bring home their beautiful new baby girl. Everyone except 9-year-old older brother Joshua (Jacob Kogan), that is. Soon, evil plagues the family. (July 6)
DYNAMITE WARRIOR
Cast: Dan Chupong, Leo Putt, Panna Ritthikrai
Director: Chalerm Wongpim
A martial-arts extravaganza from Thailand about a young boy trying to avenge the murder of his parents and also stop a group of cattle rustlers. Thai cattle rustlers! (July 13)
MY BEST FRIEND
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Dany Boon, Julie Gayet
Director: Patrice Leconte
A gentle comedy about a lonely, uptight businessman (Auteuil) who accepts a bet that he can meet and make a best friend within two weeks. (July 27)
THE STRANGERS
Cast: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman
Director: Bryan Bertino
In a remote vacation home, a young couple must defend themselves against three masked invaders. (July 27)
ARCTIC TALE
Directors: Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson
From National Geographic Films, a documentary that tracks an Arctic walrus named Seela and a polar bear dubbed Nanu from birth to adolescence to parenthood. (July 29)
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GOYA'S GHOSTS
Cast: Stellan Skarsgard, Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman
Director: Milos Forman
Forman, Oscar-winning director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, dramatizes the rivalry between Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Skarsgard) and a powerful clergyman (Bardem) who's infatuated with Goya's teenage muse (Portman). (July 20)
CUT SLEEVE BOYS
Cast: Chowee Leow, Steven Lim, Gareth Rhys Davies
Director: Ray Yeung
After the death of a friend, two perpetually single British Chinese men (Lim and Leow) vow to make themselves over—literally—to find new and lasting love. (Aug. 17)
MOLIÈRE
Cast: Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Laura Morante
Director: Laurent Tirard
Duris, who was extraordinary in 2005's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, stars as the great French playwright Molière. It's 1644, and the 22-year-old starving artist encounters a succession of people who will later inspire and appear in his greatest play, Tartuffe. (July 27)
THIS IS ENGLAND
Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley
Director: Shane Meadows
In 1983 England, during the tumultuous Margaret Thatcher era, a 12-year-old boy (Turgoose) whose father was killed in the Falklands falls in with a skinhead gang, whose leader (Graham) returns from jail, preaching racism and hate. (July 27)
EL CANTANTE
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony
Director: Leon Ichaso
Latin singing sensation Anthony stars as the wildly popular 1960s and '70s salsa star Hector Lavoe, who couldn't overcome his addiction to cocaine and heroine. Anthony's real-life wife, J. Lo, plays Lavoe's wife. (Aug. 1)
BECOMING JANE
Cast: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, Maggie Smith
Director: Julian Jarrold
This costume drama from the director of Kinky Boots imagines that at age 20, budding English novelist Jane Austen (Hathaway) had a romance with a penniless but handsome young lawyer (McAvoy), an affair that in the film's conceit became Austen's model for Pride N Prejudice. (Aug. 10)
CHARLIE BARTLETT
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jr., Hope Davis
Director: Jon Poll
Kicked out of private school, Charlie Bartlett (Yelchin) soon finds himself dispensing easily acquired Ritalin, Xanax and Wellbutrin to his depressed public-school classmates. Soon, he's giving psychiatric advice from his bathroom, a development that makes him the enemy of school principal Downey Jr. (Aug. 3)
THE TEN
Cast: Paul Rudd, Jessica Alba, Winona Ryder, Adam Brody, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen, Liev Schreiber, Oliver Platt, Justin Theroux
Director: David Wain
Ten comic vignettes, set in the modern day, inspired by the Ten Commandments. (Aug. 3)
ROCKET SCIENCE
Cast: Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D'Agosto
Director: Jeffrey Blitz
Blitz, director of the popular spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, helms this comedy about a chronic stutterer (Thompson) who joins his high-school debate team at the insistence of the school's beautiful debate-team queen (Kendrick). (Aug. 10)
THE SIGNAL
Cast: A.J. Bowen, Justin Welborn, Anessa Ramsey, Scott Poythress
Directors: David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry
Told in three parts by three different directors, this horror film discovers what happens when a mysterious electronic transmission ignites a city populace's murderous aggressions. (Aug 10)
TWO DAYS IN PARIS
Cast: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg
Director: Julie Delpy
In a comedy that marks the directorial debut of actress Delpy, the filmmaker brings her American boyfriend (Goldberg) to meet her parents in Paris. Things do not go well. Delpy's real-life mom and dad, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, portray her onscreen parents, and early word has it that they give terrific performances. (Aug. 10)
FANBOYS
Cast: Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette, Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel
Director: Kyle Newman
A comedy about four sci-fi-geek best friends who travel cross-country in order to break in to George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch and somehow screen the then-unreleased Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. One suspects Mr. Lucas does not make a cameo. (Aug. 17)
PENELOPE
Cast: Christina Ricci, Catherine O'Hara, Peter Dinklage, James McAvoy, Reese Witherspoon
Director: Mark Palansky
A modern-day fable about a young woman afflicted with a pig snout of a nose, the result of a family curse that can only be broken if she finds love, within herself as well as from without. (Aug. 17)
SIETE DIAS
Cast: Eduardo Arroyuelo, Martha Higareda, Jaime Camil
Director: Fernando Kalife
A small-time concert promoter who dreams of bringing U2 to his Mexico town places a large bet with a mob boss and loses. The only way to save himself is to organize the concert in seven days. (Aug. 17)
THE COMEBACKS
Cast: David Koechner, Bradley Cooper, Matthew Lawrence
Director: Tom Brady
In this spoof of inspiring sports movies, the unluckiest coach in sports (Koechner) gets one last chance when he takes over a talentless football team with the worst record in history. (Aug. 24)
EXILED
Cast: Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Simon Yam, Lam Suet
Director: Johnnie To
Four hired killers descend on the house of a fellow bad guy. Two want to kill him; two want to save him. There's a gunfight. No one dies. All five sit down to dinner. Resume. Sergio Leone meets the Coen Bros. in this modern Western from virtuoso director To. (Aug. 31)
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DEATH SENTENCE
Cast: Kevin Bacon
Director: James Wan
A new adaptation of a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, which was a sequel to Garfield's earlier novel, Death Wish, the book that spawned a hit film for tough guy Charles Bronson. In this updated version, a businessman (Bacon) turns vigilante after a street gang attacks his family. Bronson, Bacon, same diff. (Aug. 31)
THE BROTHERS SOLOMON
Cast: Will Arnett, Will Forte, Chi McBride
Director: Bob Odenkirk
Saturday Night Live's two Wills—Arnett and Forte (who scripted)—play not particularly bright brothers who want to fulfill their dying father's wish for a grandchild. One problem: They can't talk to women. (Aug. 31)
