The coolest, most essential, most unusual flicks of the season.
Summer is traditionally the time for big, empty popcorn movies, but the season has been known to deliver more subtle, even unusual, pleasures—and this year there’s a bumper crop of them. Here, in chronological order as of press time, are the top-ten flicks to see this summer, or risk having nothing to say when that curvy new receptionist brings them up at the water cooler.

Splice
Adrien Brody will try his hand as an action star later this summer in Predators, but first he’ll take time out for this piece of genuine weirdness: a science-run-amok thriller that costars Sarah Polley and one seriously frightening genetic creation. This flick could give The Fly director David Cronenberg the creeps. (June 4)

Winter’s Bone
Critics at Sundance were blown away by this minutely observed slice of rural Ozark life, starring Jennifer Lawrence (in a career-making performance) as a teenager who treks into the wild to find her meth-dealing absentee father. It’s a hillbilly adventure that will linger in the mind long after the bigbudget dreck fades. (June 11)

I Am Love
Between Michael Clayton and her unhinged performance in Julia (worth a rental), Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton has proved she can do anything. So how about getting frequently naked in a riveting Italian sex drama? (June 18)

Cyrus
Every once in a while, some tragically indie director will grow up and deliver an unpretentious, engrossing film worth your time (not to mention your money). Austin’s filmmaking brothers Mark and Jay Duplass arrive with this discomfiting domestic drama about a divorcé (John C. Reilly), his hot new lover (Marisa Tomei), and her paranoid adult son (Jonah Hill), who wants to see his mother’s relationship fail. (July 9)

Inception
Curiosity has been sufficiently stoked for this super secret project—director Christopher Nolan spent all his political capital from The Dark Knight to get it made exactly his way. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page; at stake, evidently, is the fate of the planet. (July 16)

Dinner for Schmucks
Said schmucks include Steve Carell and Zach Galifianakis as unknowing dupes invited to a swanky party where the most embarrassing guest wins his corporate host a secret prize. Ah, the mean games businessmen play. Imagine The Office with a big dollop of Glengarry Glen Ross. (July 23)

The Adjustment Bureau
You could argue that no author, living or dead, has produced a cooler filmography than the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly). The latest Dick adaptation, a paranoid mystery, stars Matt Damon as a rising politician who starts to question reality after meeting Emily Blunt’s alluring ballerina. (July 30)

Get Low
It’s not too early to start talking 2011 Oscar race—and this character study has the great wild man of American cinema, Robert Duvall, grabbing the baton and running with it. He plays a hairy hermit named Felix Bush—a moonshine-swilling backwoods Tennessean who emerges to plan his own funeral. The story comes from real life; Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek also star. (July 30)

The Expendables
As much as we dug Inglourious Basterds, it could have used, to paraphrase Elvis, a little less conversation and a little more action. So here’s the movie to satisfy that yearning, starring our 2009 Badass Cast of the Year from last year’s annual Badass Issue. Director/star Sylvester Stallone has assembled an action-hero dream team: Arnold, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham—the list goes on. The result is mayhem just the way you remember it: juicy, thick, and medium-rare. (August 13)

Lebanon
Much as Das Boot created a powerful claustrophobia within the confines of a single German submarine, this ingenious war drama, a film festival favorite, gets the maximum impact by sealing us inside a single Israeli tank that’s trundling across the border into the war zone. (August 13)

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