WHAT'S NEW: Punisher: War Zone returns the comic-book vigilante to theaters in ultraviolent and uniquely downgraded fashion, shedding the Thomas Jane/John Travolta bloat of the 2004 original in exchange for the cheaper, monosyllabic charms of Ray Stevenson. Bullets fly, shit blows up, audiences leave with slight bruising to the cerebral cortex, and Lionsgate banks about $10.4 million by Monday.

Universal, meanwhile, has far more modest hopes for Frost/Nixon in limited release, where Frank Langella and Michael Sheen will officially begin cross-training for the awards-season marathon as the disgraced president and his aggressive TV interrogator David Frost. You've heard our take (and we're not alone in our ambivalence), but older audiences in desperate need of a class fix will nevertheless drive it to about $36,000 per screen.

Also opening: Mariah Carey's Oscar-primed (or something) indie Tennessee; the Aussie autism study The Black Balloon; the child-abuse tale Gardens of the Night; the spicy, self-explanatory anthology It's a Good Day to be Black and Sexy; the overloud, underripe kidnapping thriller Nobel Son; the hospice dramedy Reach for Me; and the iconic Jeanne Moreau's latest, One Day You'll Understand.

THE BIG LOSER: Flopz™ beckons for Cadillac Records, but it probably didn't have to be that way. Adrien Brody stars as Leonard Chess, the Chess Records founder who oversees a stable of talent including Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry (acclaimed performances by Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def, respectively), Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker) and Etta James — whose portrayal by Beyonce Knowles still isn't quite the lauded cinematic breakthrough the singer so craves. All of which isn't bad in itself, but Sony is pulling a little more graceful Passengers move on this one — dumping on 600 screens, undermarketing (read: not marketing), and letting Cadillac crash into the post-theatrical afterlife following a soft opening around $1.6 million. Lame.

THE UNDERDOG: The British visual artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger, the austere semi-biopic of Irish Republican Army operative Bobby Sands, who died following a 66-day hunger strike in 1981. McQueen works one compositional trick after another in detailing truly shocking exchanges of abuse between IRA prisoners and their Protestant jailers, but really, we need recommend little beyond Michael Fassbender's lead performance as Sands — a silent wonder of dignity, crudity and emaciation that makes Christian Bale's Machinist/Rescue Dawn diets robust by comparison. Bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, but essential.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include four different versions of the brilliantly pulpy actioner Wanted, three versions of Step Brothers, one version of the stillborn X-Files: I Want to Believe, and the "Ultimate Collector's Edition" of Casablanca.

So what's your punishment this weekend? Can you rally the troops around Cadillac? Should we just screen Casablanca on a loop and call it good? Speak up, already!

And why bother traveling thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars just to hear Glenn Kenny call Sean Penn a dick in person? Look at it this way: Spout's Karina Longworth is doing some of her best writing from the airport, and her subject — Vogue's recent Sex and the City issue — addresses a movie not even screening at Cannes:

The Vogue spread restores a bit of the legitimate, grown-up class that has seemed to be lacking from the SATC campaign all along. ... Cannes likely would have been able to accomplish the same thing; the Vogue spread is probably cheaper, and it has the affect of reaching an audience of comparable demographics as those who would be exposed to as Cannes coverage, without ever having to make the actual quality of the actual film an issue. ... New Line just fired hundreds of people. Such frugality on their part is almost respectable.

There are some actual reviews floating around as well — Jeffrey Wells loves Three Monkeys, while Manohla Dargis is over the moon about Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about a massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The grim gets grimmer at Variety, where Leslie Felperin has a long shrug over Hunger, which chronicles IRA leader Bobby Sands' imprisonment, hunger strike and eventual death in 1982:

McQueen really overeggs the pudding is in the final reel, where (and this is no spoiler for anyone glancingly versed in Sands' story) the protagonist wastes away, the camera focusing intimately on his bedsores and emaciated frame. Tawdry, cliched images include Sands' vision of himself as a child sitting in the room, topped by a near final image of a flock of birds — free at last! — that seemingly symbolizes his soul's last flight. It's a disappointing last gasp for a film that otherwise demonstrates confidence, guts and the abundant promise of its helmer.

And which will likely be coming to a theater near you as distributors kick its tires today and tomorrow. The busy weekend ahead brings the world premiere of Indiana Jones 4, followed by another throng of reviews carrying over into Monday. We'll have ours then as well — we know, we're not holding our breath either.

[Photo Credit: Hollywood Elsewhere]