Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and franchised to within an inch of its life at the movies. This week offers an embarrassment of mass-market riches and at least a couple art-house gems for anyone wanting to spend some of the holiday weekend indoors; let's break through the bottleneck after the jump.
WHAT'S NEW: Terminator Salvation got a head start on its competition with a Thursday opening, which wasn't such a bad idea with Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian threatening to suck away 10-15% of its opening-day gross on Friday proper. And with both films facing sticky-fingered holdovers including X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Star Trek, either movie has as good a chance as the other to win the long weekend. Museum has what seems like a pretty clear edge on the bases of genre and word-of-mouth alone (not to mention 500 more screens); Terminator is essentially a siren call to 14-year-old boys, and Christian Bale isn't the review-proof leading man that Ben Stiller is. Look for Museum to win out with $74.8 million by Monday night, trumping Terminator's $69.9 million for four days (and $84.1 million for five).
Also opening in limited release: Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey's austere hooker-in-crisis piece The Girlfriend Experience; Jessica Biel's slouchy Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue; the quirky Norwegian drama O'Horten; the personal doc Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight; the Holocaust doc As Seen Through These Eyes; and the ex-stripper-and-Ian-Ziering drama Stripped Down.
THE BIG LOSER: Bringing up the box-office rear is Paramount's counter-counterprogramming Dance Flick, the latest genre spoof by the Wayans family. I'd like to say you won't have to worry about these films much longer after this weekend -- and not just because we're paring the clan down to one survivor -- but because its projected $13.7 million opening doesn't boast quite the launching-pad promise that Scary Movie's $42 million wielded nine years ago. Or hey, maybe I'm completely wrong, and this new Wayans generation (leading man Damon Jr., director Damien) are comic legends in the making. I'm not wrong about its gross, though, which is all the 'Mount cares about in the end.
THE UNDERDOG: The gang at Oscilloscope Pictures enforces its activist mandate this weekend with the doc Burma VJ, a rare, riveting glimpse at one authoritarian regime's bloody crackdowns and the guerrilla journalists who risk their lives to expose them. Merging front-line footage from 2007's massive pro-democracy marches (and their subsequent suppression) with gritty re-enactments and commentary from exiled reporters, VJ boasts an intrigue made all the more intense by its shocking violence and devastation. Wincingly tragic and cleverly assembled by director Anders Østergaard, Burma VJ might not change the world, but it's as good -- and infinitely more conscientious -- than any other thriller on screens this weekend. (Currently playing at Film Forum in New York, opens next month in L.A.)
FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include last winter's surprise smash Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the ghastly My Bloody Valentine 3D, Tom Cruise's folly-turned-sleeper Valkyrie, the doomed Fanboys, and the complete first season of the vampire soap True Blood.