“Summer movies” may bring to mind the mindless entertainment fit for packs of kids just out of of school and looking for diversion that doesn’t test the brain or press the heart too much. For mainstream Hollywood output, that is often the operating premise, as the studios present the usual

parade of trite romances, action thrillers, sequels, and, more and more, remakes of earlier pop culture dross rechristened for new audiences unfamiliar with the old originals (scheduled release date are noted for each picture cited).

Kingpin among this summer’s sequels is, of course, the sixth – and last – piece of George Lucas’s Star Wars

extravaganza, Star Wars: Episode III – The Revenge of the Sith, which will have already opened (May 19) when this column appears. The Star Wars films are by now utterly critic-proof; whether they are genuinely interesting, intriguing, or creative hardly matters for their built-in audience of boys from eight to 38. Zillions of them will show up to see how the young Anakin Skywalker becomes the iniquitous Darth Vader and, whether the story is potent or prosaic, the film will gross 500 million bucks worldwide. So juice up your light sabers for those who have them.

Another kind of sequel – the kind that nobody really asked for – is Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, (August 12) wherein the smarmy Rob Schneider

exercises his non-existent charms in exotic locales. For prequel fans, instead, there is Batman Begins (June 15) with Christian Bale taking on the role of Bruce Wayne.

More than sequels this summer will see numerous remakes of earlier successes done up for new sensibilities. There is The Longest Yard, for example (May 27), an Adam Sandler redo of a Burt Reynolds movie featuring a football challenge game within a prison.

Instead of Reynolds’ smoldering machismo as a believable quarterback, however, be prepared for Sandler as a much more ditzy footballer. Another sports comedy retread, Bad News Bears (July 22), is back, this time with Billy Bob Thornton taking on the Walter Matthau role of a drunk curmudgeon taking on a hapless little league baseball team. Expect a coarser, rawer performance from Mr. Thornton (remember Bad Santa?) than the avuncular Mr. Matthau provided.

A major studio remake is War of the Worlds, a science fiction thriller (liberally adapted and updated from the earlier novel by H.G. Wells) that did decent business in its 1953 version (opens June 29). Here the remaker is Steven Spielberg’s, with Tom Cruise as his hero and child actors Dakota

Fanning and Justin Chatwin as his kids in distress. Expect acting that is little more than stalwart alongside elaborate and precision-crafted special effects. One especially risky remake is a new Pink Panther, risky because of the total identification for many moviegoers of Peter Sellers with the story’s protagonist, Inspector Clouseau (August 5). The new Clouseau is Steve Martin, an actor

capable of pulling off the silly, hapless detective, but whose record in remakes is mixed (with hits like Father of the Bride and misses like Sgt. Bilko). Mr. Martin was also a co-writer of the film, so we can only hope he gives himself good lines.

Old TV series are being recycled

also, as in the new version of Bewitched, the 1960’s TV comedy (June 24), with Elizabeth Montgomery’s character of the benign witch Samantha taken over by Nicole Kidman. Will Ferrell co-stars. Ms. Kidman can be an effective actress, but her most recent attempt at reworked comedy, last year’s The Stepford Wives, does not bode particularly well for this rehash of this innocuous TV property. The Honeymooners gets another lease on life but with a black accent, as Cedric the Entertainer and Michael Epps take on the classic roles of Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton (June 10). There will also be a big-screen version of The Dukes of Hazzard (August 5), with Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott starring in what looks like one more dreary hash made from deficient TV leftovers.

Beyond a rundown on the studio fare offered this summer, the balance of this Hill Rag column is addressed to adults contemplating a visit to the

multiplex. It aims to identify a few movies that have potential to offer some more complex and genuine human drama.

One major studio picture that may have more class and character than most is Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man, both a biopic about a real underdog heavyweight fighter, James Braddock (Russell Crowe)as well as a depiction of the struggles of Depression-era America. The wonderfully versatile Crowe this time co-stars with Rene Zellweger as his long-suffering wife and Paul Giamatti as his dogged trainer, as good an acting line-up as any movie displays this summer. Vibes are good, too, because the film teams The Beautiful Mind colleagues Howard and Crowe along with that film’s screenwriter Akiva Goldman. As much, if not more than Million

Dollar Baby, Cinderella Man (opens June 3) is not so much a boxing flick as a story of personal commitment and human relationships.

The Merchant-Ivory team surfaces again, this time as producers only, for director Chris Terrio’s film Heights (in July), which – like the recent Crash – introduces a varied ensemble cast whose intersecting lives crisscross during an events-packed 24-hour period, this time in Manhattan. The cast is led by Glenn Close playing a New York actress whose marriage is coming apart as her daughter contemplates her own. Memphis is the distinctive setting for Hustle and Flow (July 13), with former pimp Terence Howard (fresh from Crash) trying to make it in the music business as a hip hopper by hustling an incoming star, played by Ludacris. Under Craig brewer’s direction, the smoldering Mr. Howard gets a chance to shine as a “playah” trying out his last hand.

Asylum (opens in August) is a new British thriller that has potential. Directed by David MacKenzie from a novel by Patrick McGrath, its plot gives us a woman (Natasha Richardson) who is married to the director/psychiatrist (Ian McKellen) of an asylum but is attracted to one of the inmates (Marton Csokas), an architect who has been convicted of murdering his wife. Another British

import, directed by Sally Potter, is Yes, a cross-cultural drama which has Irish-American scientist Joan Allen disaffected from her British politician husband (Sam Neill) and attracted to a Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian). With actors as good as Ms. Allen and Mr. Neill, some exotic locales, and the idiosyncratic ways of director Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson), Yes (in July) could be an intriguing smolderer.

Another movie for special – and cultivated – tastes is a new animated film (for grown-ups, too) called Howl’s Moving Castle (June 17). For this film, the Pixar animation group has hired the celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki to fashion a fairy tale about a strange mobile house and a young woman transformed into a crone. Mr. Miyazaki, a legend in Japan, won an

Oscar in 2002 for his fascinating animated feature Spirited Away, and he brings his special, all-drawn, animation style back to the screen. One of the incidental pleasures of this effort will be the voice talents of screen greats Lauren

Bacall (as a witch) and Jean Simmons (as a 90-year-old).

The quirky Jim Jarmusch, long an indie-film favorite, has come up with what might be one of his more accessible films, Broken Flowers (August 5), wherein Bill Murray (whom the director used in his recent Coffee and Cigarettes), discovers he has a grown son, and goes on an odyssey in search of his one-time lovers – an intriguing line-up of Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton, and Frances Conroy – any of whom might be the boy’s mother. This is, apparently, a relatively straight Murray (for whom the film was written), rather than the usual spaced-out, dry-ice style the actor usually affects.

Among worthy new documentaries will be a BBC production Deep Blue, a filmic exploration of the ocean that may do for the sea and its denizens what Winged Migration did for bird life a couple of years ago (July). Filmed with the same patient, focused attention to the water as the earlier feature, Deep Blue (narrated by Pierce Brosnan) looks at our water world from the ice at the poles to the utter bleakness of the sea floor--and a great deal in between. Look out, too, for a precious French documentary, March of the Penguins, which follows the amazing trek of Emperor penguins to their breeding grounds (July 1). Perhaps the most compelling will be the Sundance Festival’s award winner Grizzly Man (August 12), made by German director Werner Herzog, which pieces together arresting video footage made by filmmaker Timothy Treadwell as he lived 14 summers with Alaskan grizzly bears. Treadwell’s intensity in dealing with the bears is such that he comes to identify completely with them, and it is his psyche that Mr. Herzog investigates in turn.

Screenings at the Hill’s

Black Box Theater

The stars during June for this popular Capitol Hill movie venue are Buster Keaton and Gary Cooper. One of Keaton’s undoubted silent masterpieces, The Navigator (1924) – screening Saturday, June 18 – offers a non-stop selection of sight gags as Buster and his girlfriend find themselves abandoned on an ocean liner in mid-ocean. The film will have live piano accompaniment from Robert Israel. The redoubtable “Coop” will be seen in two rare films from his early days: A Man from Wyoming (1930) on Wednesday, June 15, and His Woman (1931) on Wednesday, June 29. All showings are in 16mm film and begin at 7:00 pm in the Black Box Theater of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop located at 545 7th Street, SE. (For more information call 202.547.6839.) Admission is five dollars.