Our first summer feast was both delicious and nutritious (thanks to the high iron content), and with the festivities officially underway, we at AllMovie are ready to stuff our faces. So take a seat and have a look at this summer’s specials as AMG breaks down your movie food schedule for the coming months.

May 2
Made of Honor: Stale Wedding Cake.
Zagat says: Wasn’t that good when it was fresh.

May 9
Speed Racer: Pop Rocks and Redbull.
Zagat says: Worth the risk of your stomach exploding.

What Happens in Vegas: Crappy, overpriced room-service.
Zagat says: You know what it’s going to be like, so you’d better be starving.

May 16
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: Renn Fair Turkey Leg.
Zagat says: As long as you’re wearing the cape, you might as well eat it.

May 23
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Grandma’s Mac and Cheese.
Zagat says: Might not be as good as you remember, but what you remember was really, really good.

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The curtain rises on Marvel Comics’ first in-house production to rousing results as their metal man of iron introduces himself to enthralled moviegoers everywhere. Just as billionaire playboy Tony Stark utilizes his technological know-how to fight evildoers, so does director Jon Favreau use his bag of cinematic tricks to lay the groundwork for yet another top-caliber franchise starring one of the biggest icons of the printed page. Delivering laughs as well as leaps of wonder, this comic-book fantasy gets it right across the board, with its buoyant tone never diluting the grounded dramatics of the story. For the flick to work, though, one needs an exceptional cast -– something this production has in spades. Sure, it’s an origin story, but to the cast’s credit, none of it ever seems tedious.

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The duo at the center of Baby Mama - Tina Fey, as a corporate climber with a loudly ticking biological clock, and Amy Poehler, as the uneducated slob hired to be her surrogate mom — are to comedy what Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were to dancing. They trust each other, and they know each other’s rhythms so well they can trade off who gets to be the straight man and who gets to deliver the laugh lines. If the film were just the two of them, it would be worth recommending, but writer/director Michael McCullers likes to share the comedic wealth - he knows that giving the supporting characters good lines pays great rewards.

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The Rolling Stones are no strangers to celluloid. Their celebrated, occasionally infamous career has been saved for posterity every step of the way by some of the most formidable filmmakers of all time. Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Ashby, and the Maysals all offered up their take on the danger, the swagger, the damage, and the glory of the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band. While each of those filmmakers did something unique and memorable, it took Martin Scorsese to figure out how to make a film about the aspect of band that matters most – that they are men who love to play music. By filling the oversized IMAX screen with the weathered, leathered faces of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ron Wood, Scorsese never lets his audience forget that these men have lived the kind of lives that give these powerful songs their visceral kick. They have earned the right to play these songs not because they wrote them, but because they feel them as strongly as ever. An old chestnut like As Tears Go By means so much more coming from a sixty-something Jagger than from the twenty something who wrote it, primarily because he seems to care about the song now even more than he did then.

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The following AMG Bio was originally written by Sandra Brennan, then updated by Nathan Southern

Steel-jawed, hard bodied, terse in speech, Charlton Heston was an American man’s man, an epic unto himself. While he played modern men, he was at his best when portraying larger-than-life figures from world history, preferably with his shirt off. He was born John Charles Carter on October 4, 1924 and originally trained in the classics in Northwestern University’s drama program, gaining early experience playing the lead in a 1941 filmed school production of Peer Gynt. He also performed on the radio, and then went on to serve in the Air Force for three years during WWII. Afterwards, he went to work as a model in New York, where he met his wife, fellow model Lydia Clarke, to whom he remained married until his death. Later the two operated a theater in Asheville, North Carolina where Heston honed his acting skills. He made his Broadway debut in Katharine Cornell’s 1947 production of Antony and Cleopatra and subsequently went on to be a staple of the highly-regarded New York-based Studio One live television anthology where he played such classic characters as Heathcliff, Julius Caesar and Petruchio. The show made Heston a star.

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A professional since the age of fourteen, British actor Paul Scofield was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s finest interpreters of Shakespeare. His first role of note was as The Bastard in a Birmingham Repertory staging of Shakespeare’s King John; following that, he performed in more than 80 plays over the course of his long and distinguished career. Scofield’s Hamlet, in particular, has entered the realm of theatrical legend: in 1955, he portrayed the Danish prince in the Soviet Union, the first English actor to be invited to do so since the 1917 revolution. In addition, his interpretations of Henry V, Pericles and King Lear made theatrical history.

While his rough facial features prevented him from becoming a movie matinee idol along the lines of Laurence Olivier, Scofield was always welcome in his extremely infrequent film appearances. His first picture was That Lady (1955), for which he won a Most Promising Newcomer British Academy Award for his portrayal of King Philip II of Spain. In 1966, Scofield gained international film stardom — and won an Academy Award — for recreating his Tony-winning Broadway portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Further acclaim greeted the actor for his work in films such as Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). In 1994, at the age of seventy-two, Scofield was once again nominated for an Oscar, this time for his performance as American poet Mark Van Doren in director Robert Redford’s Quiz Show. Two years later, audiences could see him in Nicholas Hytner’s The Crucible, lending somber authority to the role of Judge Danforth. Scofield earned one of his last credits doing voiceover work on the Hallmark television production of Animal Farm in 1999.

Over the course of his career, Scofield served as the co-director for the Royal Shakespeare Company (1966-1968) and as the director of the National Theatre (1971). His years of service to his country culminated in a several offers of of knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, honors that the actor gracefully declined on each occasion. Scofield died of leukemia in March 2008 at the age of 86.

The most effective thrillers and horror films are the ones that place sympathetic characters in precarious situations and then make the audience watch helplessly as those characters do everything that the viewer would in order to survive. If we, as an audience are lucky – and the filmmaker is only trying to entertain us – then perhaps one or two of those characters emerge from the conflict alive. On the other hand, if the filmmaker is operating by a different set of rules or trying to deliver a distinct message with their film, then the audience might be in for a bit of a rough ride. This said, anyone familiar with the name Michael Haneke knows that by no means is he simply trying to entertain us: Haneke’s films are persistently polarizing, consistently challenging, and never forgiving – and his English-language remake of his own 1997 film Funny Games is as bleak, nihilistic, and as difficult to endure as the original.

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Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind is both sweet and inventive, but to say that it lives up to the expectations laid down by his previous works like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would probably be going just a tad too far. The zany premise is that Mike (Mos Def) has been left in charge of the video store owned by his boss and quasi-surrogate-father (it’s unclear) Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) while he goes out of town. Upon the venerable man’s departure, Mike’s friend Jerry (Jack Black) accidentally gets himself magnetized in an incident at the adjacent power plant, and inadvertently erases all the store’s tapes, leaving the two to recreate the classic films with nothing but some elbow grease and the creative use of household objects. They dub their brand of film reinvention “Sweding” — a name Jerry comes up with on the spot, hoping to make the process sound exotic and possibly European.

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