Reasons To Be Cheerful: This Summer's Movies

I've hardly ventured into a cinema in the summer in the last few years: between the remakes, action films and kids movies released in the "silly season" there never seemed to be much worth seeing. This summer didn't seem to be shaping up very promisngly, either: walking through an Odeon recently, with posters for The Karate Kid, The A-Team, Nightmare on Elm Street and Predators displayed, you could be forgiven for thinking that you'd entered into some hideous 1980s time-warp.

But miraculously, out of nowhere it seems, there's one interesting-sounding movie opening after another, and I don't think I'll be spending much of this summer outside in the sun, after all. Claire Denis's White Material, Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, Rachid Bouchareb's London River, Tom DiCillo's doc on one of my favourite bands, When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors, Pascal Chaumeil's Heartbreaker, Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard, Lucas Belvaux's Rapt, Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate, Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg, and Ozon's Le Refuge (release date very sensibly brought forward from December to August) are among the films I'm excited to see. And, not to completely desert the mainstream, who can resist Toy Story 3, or even Knight and Day with its crack supporting cast (Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, Jordi Mollà; forget Cruise and Cameron). Reasons to be cheerful, these.