This summer’s best movies

Summer starts early this year with a huge, nostalgic May at the box office, but then things settle down a little bit. Here are some of the best bets among big studio films in the coming months.

JUNE 13 The Happening

This isn’t some mass gathering of like-minded hippies. M. Night Shyamalan bounces back from the dismal Lady in the Water to tackle this Hitchcockian thriller that promises to leave a myriad of highways and byways looking like the video for REM’s “Everybody Hurts.” From the typically cryptic trailer, it appears mass panic strikes, causing much of humanity to spontaneously off themselves. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel avoid the plague and run for their lives as the film’s leads. This being from Shyamalan, watch out for a twist. thehappeningmovie.com

JUNE 20 Get Smart

It seems the forces of destiny often call for analysts at intelligence agencies to become heroic field agents in times of greatest distress, but Jack Ryan, Maxwell Smart ain’t. In this update to Mel Brook’s hit TV series of the 1960s, Steve Carell plays Smart, who is called to fight the forces of the evil KAOS group with little more than a shoe phone and his often absentee wits. Anne Hathaway plays his competent partner Agent 99, and Bill Murray pops up in a series of comical circumstances as the mysterious Agent 13. getsmartmovie.warnerbros.com

JUNE 27 Wall-E

Get used to this guy because he is going to be the most requested stuffed animal, LEGO set and probably Halloween costume of the year. Looking like the son of Short Circuit, Pixar’s Wall-E is a kind of high-tech janitor who gets left behind to clean up Earth when humanity departs to colonize the cosmos. But when a comely female probe is sent back to inspect the planet, Wall-E falls hard and hitches a ride on her rocket for a fish-out-of-water outer space adventure. disney.go.com/disneypictures/wall-e

JULY 18 The Dark Knight

Leave it to the adventures of a billionaire in body armor and a cape to comment on the hotbed of U.S. foreign policy, but that’s just one of the things Bruce Wayne does in this sequel to Batman Begins. That 2005 reboot saw the defender of Gotham—finally played with some dignity by Christian Bale—strike a blow against anarchic terrorists. What ensues is an escalation of crime and mayhem. That is, the freaks really come out to play. The late, great Heath Ledger takes a disturbing turn as The Joker. But danger also lurks in the district attorney’s office, as Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, like Eliot Spitzer, hides his own dark side. thedarkknight.warnerbros.com

AUGUST 15 The International

Tom Tykwer is a director American audiences need to know. His thrilling Run Lola Run was a blip on the domestic indie radar a decade ago, and in 2006 his surreal, fast-forward segment starring Natalie Portman was the highlight of Paris, je t’aime. Now he gives James Bond fans a good, hard look at what might have been if Clive Owen had not politely declined his 007 status. The British brute stars as an Interpol agent tracking down the financiers of a global arms-dealing ring in New York City. Naomi Watts gets mixed up in the ensuing chaos, poor girl.