TRANSFORMERS
PG-13, 144 minutes

Big, dumb fun, “Transformers” is an all-American blast of shock-and-awe action cinema. You do the blockbuster math: If you like car chases, then how about cars that morph into walking, talking robots from outer space primed for battle? What if it all happened on an army base in the desert, or in running skirmishes between skyscrapers and under highway overpasses, or at the Hoover Dam?

Director Michael Bay recognizes the pressing question on the summer movie-goer’s mind: What if stuff exploded, and it was awesome?

Mr. Bay, best known for the glories of “Armageddon” and “Bad Boys 2,” knows the boisterous answers to these and other questions of wide-eyed, unself-conscious spectacle. “Transformers” is, for the most part, a slick, entertaining summer flick like the ones mom used to make — provided that your Mom was a 1990s action-movie director intent on realizing your playtime fantasies with 50-foot computer-generated death machines.

Nicolas Rapold (July 3)

RESCUE DAWN
PG-13, 126 minutes

In a dramatic retelling of his 1997 documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” the iconoclastic director Werner Herzog examines the point at which civilized man ends and his animal instincts begin. The actual story is military legend. During the Vietnam War, American pilot Dieter (Christian Bale) is shot down and taken to a Laotian POW camp, where he survives for years. Initially, he is offered freedom in the form of a letter he must sign denouncing America, but he refuses even to look at it.

From that point on, he is mixed in with the other American hostages, including Duane (Steve Zahn), who has the worn and weary face of a man who’s endured captivity for quite some time. As the days crawl by, Dieter comes to learn the rhythms of the prison, first in the cycle of meals and the agonizing sleeping conditions, then in the moods and temperament of the prison guards. Finally, an escape plan is hatched, and Dieter attempts to lead his fellow prisoners to safety.

S. James Snyder (July 3)

VITUS
PG, 120 minutes

How refreshing it is to see a child acting unpredictably on a movie screen, and even nicer to see a child prodigy depicted as something other than a foregone conclusion. To tell you that “Vitus” is about a brilliant child pianist who decides one day that he’s fed up with the way his hobby has come to dominate his life — his mother berating him to practice, quitting her job to focus more on developing her son’s “career” — would suggest a typical sort of child in a very typical sort of movie.

“Vitus,” though, much like its lead character, is a film with tricks up its sleeves. Not “tricks,” as in surprise endings or double-crosses, but tricks that make a character into something more than just an artificial construct; a character who seems able to think and act on his own terms.

S.J.S. (June 29)

RATATOUILLE
G, 111 minutes

In Pixar’s new film “Ratatouille,” director Brad Bird wastes little time in plunging beneath the surface of a schizoid symbiotic world of rats that thrive on the waste of a mankind they fear and despise. One young rodent dreamer named Remy (voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt) is sustained by more than just the compost and slops that the rest of his pack assaults with gusto. Remy has become enchanted by “Anyone Can Cook,” a discarded cookbook penned by deceased chef Auguste Gusteau, and dreams of becoming a five-star chef.

The Paris of “Ratatouille” is so fiercely gilded with high-resolution detail that it should be rated “T” for texture. Every one of the film’s vivid surfaces — jiggling aspics, dented copper pots, thinly sliced legumes, glass jars, turbid sewer water, and alternately sleek and bristling rat pelts — is rendered with a voluptuous tactility in colors you can almost feel and taste. “Ratatouille” is a five-course kinetic feast as well as a visal one.

Bruce Bennett (June 29)

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
PG-13, 130 minutes

“Live Free or Die Hard” is laughably exhilarating. You’ll applaud the comic book heroics and bonecrunching absurdity in equal measure. Compared to the current crop of blockbusters, which are the cinematic equivalent of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, it’s a fantasy shoot ’em up that defies physics with one combat boot planted on terra firma. Leave it to an aging, if still charismatic, action star to deliver what a summer movie should be: a shot of adrenaline.

Director Len Wiseman has kept the hallmarks of the original “Die Hard” in place: Bullet-resistant NYPD cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) is the right man at the right time, waging a one-man war against a brilliantly evil mastermind. Our hero engages in tense games of verbal cat and mouse over cell phones while the lives of beloved family members hang in the balance.

John Devore (June 27)

LADY CHATTERLEY
Unrated, 168 minutes

“Lady Chatterley,” the awardwinning new adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence classic by the French filmmaker Pascale Ferran, clears away all the rot and lets in the light. Working from an earlier, more intimate version of Lawrence’s work titled “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” Ms. Ferran and especially her Chatterley, Marina Hands, infuse the film with an absorbing sensuality and a moving sense of equanimity. The yearning and connection experienced by the characters feel like life being restored, not a desperate escape from it.

Much of Ms. Ferran’s success lies in bringing the sentiments of Lawrence’s heady prose to a tender, human level. The book’s most torrid passages, after all, aren’t the sex scenes but the screeds decrying the ravages of the Industrial Revolution and man’s rude will. “Lady Chatterley” fervently embraces the story of a man and woman coming alive in love, without tethering their rustic communion to a greater didactic point.

N.R. (June 22)