Like casualties, war movies keep mounting. Now here's Restrepo, for which square-jawed, thrill-addicted journalistic-T rex Sebastian Junger and fellow war-zone regular Tim Hetherington embedded among a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan's "deadliest place on Earth," the Korengal Valley.

All ye who enter the jaundiced world of the late writer Stieg Larsson, cast aside all notions of Sweden as the snow-draped kingdom of Volvos, IKEA and swimsuit models.

That it’s called “a Banksy film” could mean a directing credit for the adored, elusive British street artist or just that it was made in the best spirit of his work: prankish, double-take-inducing, immediately appealing.

It’s been less than a year since we sat among squealing tweens and regarded with steely indifference the six-pack abs of New Moon’s teenage werewolf crew. Now, summer brings the third installment of the Twilight series: Eclipse. True to its name, Eclipse further obfuscates the muddy messaging of this book/movie phenomenon.

When a guy pulls a beautiful lady from the ocean in his fishing net, he’s bound to jump to conclusions. Maybe she’s not “like other girls.” Maybe she’s even a mythical sea creature.

Whiny, self-absorbed urban yuppies? Yes, please! Especially if the director doing the ethnographic surveying is the shaggy-cool Nicole Holofcener, who invests her characters with just the right balance of annoying quirks and squishy humanity to make them watchable—if not exactly lovable.

Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Dar'n) is at the end of his professional career as a court investigator, but remains haunted by one case. In 1974, he was assigned to investigate the vicious rape and murder of a lovely young woman, Liliana Coloto. It is a crime that has stuck with him for 25 years.

How do we account, Splice asks, for the kindred dorkdom of lab-cloistered scientists and monster-movie completists? Are we talking nature or nurture here?

It would be easy to go into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time believing cinema is dead—and even easier to believe after coming out of it.

We moviegoers can be such assholes. It’s not enough to project our shabby selves into so many better-looking lives. Just as often, apparently, we need to sit back in the dark doing nothing while other less clever souls plod haplessly toward their own doom.