June 28-July 4: School's Out! 6 new movies + 4 cult classics = A+

"In writer-director Ritesh Batra’s latest work, Photograph, Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Rafi, a transplant from a poor village in northern India. In an attempt to repay an old family debt, Rafi works doggedly as a street photographer at Mumbai’s famed waterfront landmark and busy tourist attraction, Gateway of India.

“Written by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman, and directed in a stunning debut by actress Olivia Wilde, Booksmart is the kind of feel-good teen movie young women plan their sleepovers around.

“A good old-fashioned British spy thriller with a bewitching female heroine (or anti-heroine, if you will) played by the excellent actresses Judi Dench and (as her younger self) Sophie Cookson, Red Joan revisits the incredible real-life spy case of Melita Norwood. It is directed with a strong sense for character by Trevor Nunn, the former director of the Royal Shakespeare Co.

“Ken Russell makes movies the way others might design a ride through a funhouse. He deals in headlong but harmless plunges from giddy heights, abrupt changes of pace, joke turns, anachronistic visual effects, ghouls that pop out of the dark, all accompanied by the sound of a force to loosen one's most firmly rooted back teeth.

The Lord of the Rings continues to be one of the most-read, most beloved book series of all time, and with good reason. The level of thought and detail imbued in its pages gives it an air of authenticity that can make it easy to forget that someone actually had to make it all up. But what drove the man who devoted his life to the creation of this fictional world?