Attractions: Will the Real Salt Please Step Forward?

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or superstarry at the movies. This weekend, Angelina Jolie drops in as the spy with a thousand faces -- or at least three or four -- in the hopes of overtaking Leonardo DiCaprio's box-office belt. And the art house is backed up to the popcorn machine with new openings. Let's break it down.

WHAT'S NEW: On the bright side for Sony, the spy thriller Salt has virtually no new studio competition to worry about this week. On the other hand, they've got last week's high-performing Inception still barreling along like a locomotive through traffic, having already broken $90 million in less than a week and showing no real signs of slowing down. What to do? Nothing you can do, really, except maybe rig up some new ads wherein Jolie actually has lines. After all, the replace-Tom Cruise-with-Angelina Jolie gambit that everyone is the press is so over-the-moon about might grab more women viewers if the lead character were shown, however briefly, to be more than just another scowling, gun-waving, limb-swinging superagent. Call me old-fashioned! All I know is that people seem to love the character and the movie as a whole, and, Inception notwithstanding, Salt should be looking at a little more than its projected $38 million-$40 million this weekend. I'll call it for $46 million, with Inception looking up from second place at around $36 million.

Hats off to Fox for bringing the family-friendly counterprogramming Ramona and Beezus, featuring Selena Gomez in a mashed-up, all-too-niiiiiice adaptation of Beverly Cleary's influential string of young-adult novels. The only problem is that it remains kind of a crowded all-ages marketplace for this kinda thing to take off beyond maybe $9 million. Which is fine! Every straight-to-DVD franchise needs a theatrical flagship. Mission accomplished.

Also opening: A restoration of Sally Potter and Tilda Swinton's gender-bending 1993 darling Orlando; Todd Solndz's Happiness half-sequel Life During Wartime; and the French Cold War espionage drama Farewell hit both coasts in limited release.

NYC, meanwhile, gets the harrowing nuclear-threat expose Countdown to Zero, the microbudget Mumblecore alum Audrey the Trainwreck, the super-revealing if stunningly poorly produced Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Brillante Mendoza's better-late-than-never 2007 effort Tirador, the poetry-slam family drama Spoken Word, and the Zimbabwean land-grab doc Mugabe and the White African.

Out in Los Angeles, look for expansions of the global-warming survey Beautiful Islands, the French love-triangle Mademoiselle Chambon, the African-American depression-era effort Kings of the Evening, and Marshall Curry's fine documentary Racing Dreams.

THE BIG LOSER and THE UNDERDOG will not be seen today; it's just one of those water-seeks-its-own-level weekends. And anyway, face it: We're all just biding our time waiting for Mad Men on Sunday night. Happy viewing.