This week’s movie releases

Two of this summer’s big movie juggernauts pull up this week. First up, Monsters University is the long-awaited follow-up to Pixar’s classic Monsters, Inc. Set a decade or so before the 2001 original, it tells the story of how future friends and “scarer” colleagues Mike (the squat, one-eyed one, voiced by Billy Crystal) and Sulley (the big hairy one, voiced by John Goodman) first meet as teenagers in college. But they are far from hitting it off from the start…

Less easy to get excited about, given that it’s yet another reboot of yet another superhero franchise, is Watchmen director Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. The Superman update stars Henry Cavill, last seen gallivanting around Madrid with Bruce Willis in The Cold Light of Day, as the man in the cape with Amy Adams as Lois Lane. Russell Crowe is Jor-El and Michael Shannon plays General Zod. As producer, Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan aims to banish the specter of previous 2006 reboot Superman Returns.

French-Canadian drama Laurence Anyways, written and directed by Xavier Dolan, is the story of a 30-year-old writer who confesses to his girlfriend that he wants to restart his life as a woman. At first shocked, she agrees to help him out, only for the consequences to take a major toll on their relationship.

From Germany’s Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) centers on the intellectual’s reporting on the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker in 1961, during which she coined her concept of the “banality of evil.”

Finally, Carlos director Oliver Assayas’ Something in the Air is a part-autobiographical portrait of a teenager’s coming of intellectual age amid the fervor of post-May ’68 France.