Another Friday, another wave of movies — though this week’s options are arranged along a distinctly Middle Eastern theme.

“Ajami“: Nominated for last year’s Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s Israeli take on “Pulp Fiction” — a grim, chronologically scrambled look at crime and punishment in a Jaffa suburb — finally gets a Canadian commercial run. Check it out. It’s good.

“Excited”: Bruce Sweeney’s latest study of despairing Vancouverites stars Cam Cronin as a miserable fellow confronting the sexual dysfunction he’s allowed to destroy his chances at happiness. It’s not as tight as “Dirty” or “Last Wedding”, but it does have its moments.

“Kites Remixed”: A week after Anurag Basu’s Bollywood romance opened in Toronto (see Rad’s review here), its distributor releases this shorter, more America-friendly version assembled by Brett “the ‘Rush Hour’ guy” Ratner. This one wasn’t screened for the press, which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

“Micmacs“: After the relative seriousness of “A Very Long Engagement” Jean-Pierre Jeunet kicks back for some Rube Goldbergian fun with this silly tale of Parisian underdogs who take on a couple of arms merchants. It’s not half as deep as it thinks it is, but it’s awfully entertaining.

“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time“: Jake Gyllenhaal runs, jumps and fights in this disappointingly thin Arabian fantasy-adventure. But at least Alfred Molina is funny, and Gemma Arterton will get a boost out of it.

“Sex and the City 2”: Having run out of serious storylines, Carrie and her posse go to Dubai to, like, hang out and do whatever. It’s been pulling atrocious reviews, and as someone who never much liked the series, I have no intention of seeing it until I absolutely have to. But Susan found it … passable.

Well, there you have it. My advice this week is to stick to the subtitles. Wait, does “Kites Remixed” have subtitles? Caveat emptor, then.

The latest issue of NOW is out, featuring my interview with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Dany Boon, director and star of the giddy “Micmacs”. If the quotes seem a little light, that’s because we were struggling to hear each other through the wall of noise generated by a construction project next door. (You’d expect that sort of thing to happen to Terry Gilliam, but Jeunet? He’s just not used to this.)

Hopefully, the TIFF people can learn from this, and re-zone the city to prevent peripheral construction during the ten days of the festival. It wouldn’t be the silliest idea, honestly.

UPDATE: I must have been more distracted than I realized this morning; I forgot to even mention my piece on the Worldwide Short Film Festival, which starts next Tuesday and features a great many shorts. You should definitely check that out.

File this under “things that cannot be real”: On a promotional run through India for “Shutter Island”, Martin Scorsese apparently declared he’d like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro to play Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in his upcoming Sinatra biopic.

That’s a misquote, right? I mean, it’s got to be. Of course, if Kevin Spacey could make a Bobby Darin movie, I guess anything’s possible … but I was kinda hoping the project would end up with Soderbergh, who’d change up his “Ocean’s Eleven” formula and cast Matt Damon as Sinatra, George Clooney as Martin and Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis, Jr.

Think about it for a second. That would be something to see.

With “MacGruber” providing commentary on the ’80s action movie, and the nigh-indestructible heroes of that era, it seemed appropriate to dedicate this week’s MSN Movies gallery to another kind of hero — the last person anyone would want to save the day.

You know the type, right? Unprepared, untrained, prone to panicking in the clutch … kinda like MacGruber, actually, but with just slightly more follow-through.

Go on, you know you want to see who I picked …

How can you doubt that summertime is upon us? There’s a “Shrek” movie opening! And lots of other stuff, too, which you may well want to check out after reading the review roundup below …

“The Cry of the Owl“: Creepy aerospace engineer Paddy Considine stalks lonely, isolated Julia Stiles; she stalks him right back, which he finds disconcerting. There’s a really interesting idea in there, but writer-director Jamie Thraves does nothing with it.

“Harry Brown“: Michael Caine kills a bunch of hoodies in this laughable English thriller, which feels more like a clip reel of “Death Wish” moments than anything else. Also, it takes Sean Harris, the wiry villain of the “Red Riding” series, and turn him into Gollum. What a waste.

“Kites”: Bollywood director Anurag Basu tries to conquer the American box-office with an epic romantic thriller set in Las Vegas, with dialogue in English and Spanish. Rad ain’t buying it.

“Leslie, My Name is Evil”: Reg Harkema’s Godard obsession reaches its logical conclusion with this scabrous protest against the bourgeois values of 1960s America, as symbolized by a clean-cut Manson juror (Gregory Smith) smitten by one of Charlie’s homicidal angels (Kristen Hager). Rad wasn’t too impressed, either — though Jason’s a fan.

“MacGruber“: If loving Jorma Taccone and Will Forte’s salute to the cheesy ’80s action movies they spent most of the ’90s watching on TBS is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Also, I think it’s time we take another look at “Hot Rod”. Clearly, these films belong together.

“Mid-August Lunch“: Gianni di Gregorio, one of the screenwriters of “Gomorrah”, makes his directorial debut with this tiny little nothing of a movie, playing a middle-aged Italian who spends a holiday weekend in the company of four little old ladies. In the good old days, this would have played for a year at the Park or the International; now, we’ll be lucky if it gets a two-week run. So catch it as soon as you can.

“Shrek Forever After“: DreamWorks’ animated series rebounds after the regrettable third outing with a darker, smarter adventure that feels very much like the last call for the franchise. And now Mike Myers will have to find somewhere else to be intermittently Scottish.

There, that’s everything. I feel strangely full.

The big deal in Toronto this week, film-festival-wise, is the Inside Out festival — but you won’t find me talking about it in this week’s NOW. Glenn and Susan tackled that while I pushed through the many discs of the Worldwide Short Film Festival for next week’s issue. (In my defense, there’s plenty of gay and lesbian content in the WSFF, too.)

Don’t worry, though — I’m still on the festival beat, with a piece this week on the Found Footage Festival, coming to the Bloor in Sunday. Watching a reel of terrible videos isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I find the FFF horribly fascinating.

Oh, and speaking of “horribly fascinating”, the Bloor is hosting the Canadian premiere of James Nguyen’s “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” tonight at 9:30 pm. So that’s … something.