This summer’s movies can be separated into three categories, provided one is willing to make up three bullshit categories and put this summer’s movies into them.

You probably have been here before. The Last House on the Left is a remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 film by the same name, which was in turn based on the Oscar-winning, 14th century-set, fable-like and vastly superior The Virgin Spring by Ingmar Bergman. The setup for all of these films is profoundly simple: A virginal girl is raped and her attackers, by a twist of fate, seek refuge with the girl’s parents, who learn of the crime and exact revenge.

Kurt Kuenne has received thousands of letters and e-mails thanking him for the film, as well as festival awards and standing ovations. He has also seen long lines of people simply waiting to hug David and Kathleen Babgy, two of the film’s principal subjects.

A film that questions our acceptance of a placebo for justice.

Doubt arrives during a fortuitous collective crisis in confidence. Along with the jobs, the blood and the billions, so too has a great deal of doubt’s counterpoint, trust—that intangible psychological stuff—oozed up into the ether, poof, gone.

There is a way in which film is the reverse of literature, image as opposed to word. But film and literature are, of course, also part of a continuum.

In few films is this relationship more pronounced than I’ve Loved You So Long.

Milk is exceptionally well-directed—it displays near-perfect dramatic tone and masterful synthesis and fluidity—by Gus Van Sant. It’s unfortunate that the new biopic about the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US couldn’t have come out sooner: it could have made a difference on the fate of Prop 8

They don’t make ’em like this anymore. Thank God. Australia is worse than you think.

Two based-on-the-best-selling-novel vampire movies—one stars adults but is aimed at 12-year-olds, the other stars 12-year-olds but is aimed at adults—have arrived simultaneously. Good news for those who want nothing more than a sip of somebody’s blood.

SFR's winter reversal ratings of how temperature rocks the cinematic world. Or something.