We are willing to look ahead at future film releases, but only as far as the end of the calendar year. Even then, the crystal ball gets fuzzy, as these release dates are highly likely to change as Hollywood strategizes and counter-programs.

Nevertheless, there are bound to be Oscar nominees within these subjective picks of what will hit screens in the next three months (because there were few award-worthy movies in 2010’s first nine months).

Among the A-list directors trawling for statuettes are Eastwood, the Coens and Coppola (well, Sofia at least). And for some reason, there are several films about family members trying to clear the names of their convicted relatives. No, we have no idea why that would be. Still, here is a rundown of what to look for during that small window of time before these are all available on DVD:

Nowhere Boy (Oct. 8) -- In 1955 Liverpool, a young lad named John Lennon (Aaron Johnson) is in search of himself and his musical expression, as two women -- his influential aunt and his prodigal mother -- clash over him, in this cinematic view of the lead Beatle’s early years.

Secretariat (Oct. 8) -- What, you thought Seabiscuit had an interesting history? Wait ’til you see the biography of the 1973 Triple Crown winner, the housewife (Diane Lane) who inherited him and the trainer (John Malkovich) who took him to the winner’s circle.

Stone (Oct. 8) -- The acting lessons begin when Robert De Niro and Edward Norton hit the screen as a corrections officer and the scheming inmate who is under his supervision. Norton is a convicted murderer who has to argue his case for parole to De Niro. Hey, you pleadin’ to me?

Conviction (Oct. 15) -- Tony Goldwyn directs this tale of a sister’s (Hilary Swank) unwavering devotion to her brother (Sam Rockwell), who has been sentenced to life in prison. So she puts herself through college, then law school, in a quest to have his conviction overturned.

The Company Men (Oct. 29) -- Here’s a tale for our times. Ben Affleck is a rising corporate executive who gets laid off in an economic downsizing move, so he has to learn to redefine his life building houses for his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner).

Hereafter (Oct. 22) -- Clint Eastwood tosses his hat into the Oscars race with this supernatural thriller, with a screenplay by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), about three people touched and profoundly changed in different ways experiences with death. Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard star as individuals whose belief in the hereafter go through a reassessment.

Fair Game (Nov. 12) -- Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, a CIA agent investigating the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) decides to blow the whistle and write a New York Times editorial column, Plame is outed and her life put in danger.

Unstoppable (Nov. 12) -- A runaway train carrying toxic chemicals is chased by another locomotive that tries to bring it under control before it derails and spills its deadly cargo. Denzel Washington stars, in a role that sounds awfully similar to the part he played in The Taking of Pelham 123 remake.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (Nov. 19) -- Harry, Ron and Hermione, before checking into an old age home, head off from Hogwarts to battle the Horcruxes, on their way to a final battle with the Dark Lord, Voldemort. Either to encompass everything in the series’ final novel or just to squeeze every penny they can from the book, the filmmakers have divided this last adventure into two halves.

The Next Three Days (Nov. 19) -- A college professor (Russell Crowe) makes a last ditch effort to save his wife (Elizabeth Banks), who was wrongly convicted of murder, plotting to break her out of the prison where she is incarcerated. Hey, that’s what good husbands do. Yes, it sounds hokey, but the movie is directed by Paul Haggis (Crash), so it probably plays better than its synopsis.

The King’s Speech (Nov. 24) -- King George VI (Colin Firth), whom history buffs know gained the throne after his brother Edward VIII abdicated, has to learn to be an orator, so he is assigned an Australian speech therapist/vocal coach (Geoffrey Rush), who succeeds so well that he eloquently leads Great Britain into war. (Gee, didn’t George W. Bush do the same without any speaking ability?)

Tangled (Nov. 24) -- Disney dips its toe again into the pond of animated musicals with this fractured fairy tale version of Rapunzel and her adventures with a daring bandit. Mandy Moore supplies the voice of the lass with 70 feet of magical golden hair and Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast) supplies the original score. (Relax, Toy Story 3, the Oscar is still coming your way.)

The Fighter (Dec. 10) -- A drama about Irish boxer Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), who works his way up to the world lightweight championship, and his half-brother (Christian Bale), who chooses a life of crime, then goes straight and helps Mickey win the title.

TRON Legacy (Dec. 17) -- A follow-up to the first digital live-action film, 25 years ago, in which Jeff Bridges was sucked into a world of computer programs and gladiators. Now, his 27-year-old son investigates his dad’s disappearance and is pulled into that same world. The original movie is generally acknowledged to be ahead of its time, but is the sequel behind the time?

Gulliver’s Travels (Dec. 22) -- Your English lit teacher would probably be appalled, but Jack Black has been cast as Jonathan Swift’s oversized traveler. With improvements, of course. This time around, Gulliver is a mailroom clerk who accidentally lands in the Bermuda Triangle and finds that among little people he is a relative giant.

Somewhere (Dec. 22) -- Do not be turned off by this plot, which is something about an out-of-control actor (Stephen Dorff) who has to change his lifestyle when his daughter (Elle Fanning) unexpectedly arrives at the Chateau Marmont to stay with him. Yeah, it sounds like it was tailor-made for Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson, but we reassessed and got interested when we heard it is directed by Sofia Coppola.

True Grit (Dec. 25) -- Joel and Ethan Coen love to defy our expectations, as they do again with a remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle about an aging marshal and a 14-year-old girl who travel to hostile Indian territory to track down her father’s killer. That is what the earlier movie was about. Any resemblance to what the Coens make of it -- with a cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin -- is likely to be mere coincidence.

The central irony of The Social Network is that while the website Facebook was devised to bring friends together, it split longtime friends among its creators apart.

Populated with hyper-smart, glibly articulate characters based on real people, this is that rare studio release that allows itself to wallow in dialogue and gives moviegoers credit for being willing to listen. Although directed with assurance and restraint by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the film really belongs to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who gives it the same bullet-train verbal quality that became his signature on TV’s The West Wing.

The story of arrogant, snide Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (played pointedly by a nerdy, sullen Jesse Eisenberg), his invention of Facebook and the lawsuits he incurred as a result, The Social Network begins in a Cambridge pub. There, after a round of verbal sparring, his had-it-up-to-here girl friend (Rooney Mara, son to be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Fincher’s remake) dumps him and Mark jogs back to his dorm to slam-blog her as well as exact revenge against all Harvard coeds by posting a which-one-is-hotter Website.

From there, it is a short hop to coming up with Facebook, initially a vehicle for hooking up with Crimson cuties. Enter Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, two hulking, WASPy, privileged twins who row crew and enlist Zuckerberg in creating a social Website of their own, eventually suing him for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them. When they take their grievance to Harvard president Larry Summers (a drolly uninterested Doug Urbanski), the result is a sequence of gem-like dry humor.

Interspersed throughout the film are scenes of deposition-taking as Zuckerberg is grilled by lawyers for the Winklevosses and for his former best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the Facebook chief financial officer who gets left in the dust when the site takes off. Mark’s contempt for those he perceives as his intellectual inferiors -- which us to say just about everyone -- is nicely illustrated by his witheringly sarcastic comebacks to the attorney interrogations.

Ultimately, though, the movie is stolen from Eisenberg by Justin Timberlake, who gives a very crafty, unctuous performance as nouveau riche elder wunderkind Sean Parker. The founder of Napster, he takes it upon himself to advise and mentor Mark, luring him to Silicon Valley, worming his way into the Facebook hierarchy and ultimately engineering the marginalization of Eduardo.

By the film’s end, Fincher and Sorkin leave it up to us to decide who are the villains of these obsessive machinations, but no one really comes off well. The Social Network is indeed a morality tale for our times.

If the movie belongs to Sorkin -- an Oscar screenplay nomination seems a sure thing -- Fincher deserves a lot of credit for the film’s insistent forward motion. The Social Network is wordy, but it never feels static. And in a signature Fincher touch, employing the digital wizardry of Benjamin Button without calling attention to itself, ponder as you watch the Winklevoss twins that they are both played by a single actor -- Armie Hammer -- with the aid of a body double.

Still, The Social Network is a movie of ideas, not special effects, a harbinger that perhaps we really have turned the corner from the summer to awards-worthy autumn. This is a film that is going to generate water cooler conversation, a must-see movie that just might put Facebook -- barreling on to its 1 billionth member before long -- on the map.

The Social Network is rated PG-13. Opening Friday in area theaters.

Cinevardaphoto (Cinema Guild)

Standard list price: $29.95

Release date: Aug. 31

For a filmmaker of Agnes Varda’s renown, it’s important to note how few features she has made over her 40-plus-year career. She boasts 47 directorial credits on the Internet Movie Database, yet most cineastes who haven’t spelunked into the deepest depths of the French New Wave know her mainly for four features: Cleo From 5 to 7, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnes. She’s been a lot more productive than this slim CV entails, but because she’s worked so often in the commercially unviable world of short films – or on equally hard-to-distribute features of an hour in length – her work has been neglected.

Perhaps recognizing this, Varda in 2004 released Cinevardaphoto, a triptych of short films from throughout her career, repackaged as a three-part, feature-length meditation on photography. Newly released on DVD, it’s a fascinating experiment from one of the cinema’s most uncompromising alchemists, dancing effortlessly in the chasms between fiction and reality, narrative and documentary, stillness and motion.

The film starts with her 2004 movie Ydessa, The Bears and Etc., a 42-minute documentary about Ydessa Hendeles, a Canadian artist whose massive “Teddy Bear Project” debuted in Munich in 2003. Over the span of a decade, Hendeles amassed hundreds of black-and-white images of people with teddy bears, culled from family photo albums, then organized thematically or pictorially, individually framed and hung in a gallery space on every wall, floor to ceiling.

Like Varda herself in this series of films, Hendeles constructs narratives out of still pictures, creating elegiac time capsules for a vanished age, and whose oppressive totality is both moving and unsettling. The child of Holocaust survivors, Hendeles doesn’t let spectators of her art forget this, coloring the ostensible innocence of her subject matter with a second room, bare except for a kneeling sculpture of Adolf Hitler. The fact that teddy bears can be so provocative and disturbing is a triumph of artistic reinterpretation, and Varda realizes this and much more in a probing, fascinating look at artistic process, judgment and temperament. Varda’s films are always forthrightly personal, and you get the feeling she recognizes in Hendeles a kindred spirit.

The second film in this triptych, the shorter Ulysses, again captures a nether world between fiction and reality, while adding an ephemerally powerful subtext: Who has a claim on memory? If an image is taken but completely forgotten by its subject, who owns the emotions attached? Again and again Varda returns, with relentless obsession, to a photo she took in the 1950s of a nude boy and a man on a beach near a dying goat. The boy, now an adult with a family, has no recollection of the image, but Varda revitalizes it. More than that, she ruminates, deconstructs and reconstructs the photo from every angle imaginable until it becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The final film in this installment, Salut La Cubans, is a photographic essay, with narration, on the Cuban Revolution. While the other two movies in Cinevardaphoto suggest life from stillness, this time Varda creates life on the screen by animating her shots in a flipbook style. Stills becoming moving images, rhythmically repeated to a musical soundtrack.

Cinevardaphoto is a beguiling survey film that delineates exactly Varda’s place in the film-history canon: born of restless New Wave chutzpah only to transcend its affectations and go her own way. The Cinema Guild DVD release is more than just these three shorts, offering an additional six shorts and a critical video survey, totaling some three hours of combined viewing. Of the six bonus shorts, a couple of them are downright dull, but the most interesting is probably 1975’s Response de Femmes, an 8-minute compendium of feminist arguments spoken by a handful of diverse women against a vacant backdrop. Some of it is dated, but other concerns are as relevant as ever, from the misogynistically desirous mother-whore duality to body-image issues perpetuated by a penis-placating consumer culture.

It doesn’t get much weirder than 1984’s Seven Rooms, Kitchen and Bath, a 28-minute semi-narrative experiment in time, space and aging shot during an exhibition titled “Alive and Artificial” at a hospice in Avignon. Inserting actors into a capacious building occupied by animatronic models and spending as much time on the spatial architecture of the location than on anything resembling a coherent narrative, the short is compellingly watchable despite its inscrutability. And it links Varda to Chantal Akerman, another rebellious female director who would follow her trailblazing lead.

The Exploding Girl (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

SLP: $27.49

Release date: Sept. 7

In the opening shot of The Exploding Girl, lead character Ivy is obscured by a window, asleep in a car while trees blur by in the window’s reflection. It’s a telling preamble, for Ivy remains an obscure character to the very end, her character defined almost solely by her epilepsy (hence, perhaps, the film’s otherwise enigmatic title). The American debut of writer-director Bradley Rust Gray (whose only other feature is the 2003 Icelandic film Salt) follows the 20-year-old Ivy on her spring break sojourn from college, where she returns home and reacquaints with longtime platonic friend Al (Mark Rendell). Her boyfriend, meanwhile, is back at college and can barely be bothered to pick up her phone calls. Nothing much happens, and Ivy is an occasionally frustrating cipher whose emotional canvas remains unpainted. But I admire the film’s photographic naturalism, its dogged resistance toward the traditional grammar of film entertainment and its seemingly unscripted dialogue. Maybe The Exploding Girl is nothing more than a lo-fi, mumblecore variant on the classic teen-movie formula of the girl who should be courting the best friend who cares about her but is tethered to a jerk who doesn’t. But it meanders through this formula lithely and pleasantly.

Grey’s Anatomy: The Complete Sixth Season (ABC Studios)

SLP: $38.99

Release date: Sept. 14

Is it uncool of me to love Grey’s Anatomy? Isn’t it kind of, like, a chick show? And didn’t it jump the shark a couple seasons ago? Malarkey to all. I will concede that its sixth season was far from perfect. The Valentine’s Day episode was unforgivably maudlin, and I lost a modicum of respect for the writers when they went the route of the dreaded flashback episode, progressing nothing in the characters’ stories and instead hashing over irrelevant drama from their pasts. But the sixth season included two of the best episodes in the show’s history. One is the genuinely tear-inducing Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s episode in which Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) confronted her cruel father over his lack of acceptance of her divorce. The other, of course, is the staggering finale, in which a shooter invades the hospital, killing a few doctors and putting other’s lives in grave danger. It’s a more riveting 80 minutes than almost any movie I’ve ever seen.

Boogie Woogie (IFC)

Release date: Sept. 14

SLP: $17.99

On the heels of recent theatrical releases such as (untitled) and Exit Through the Gift Shop, Duncan Ward’s Boogie Woogie is the latest savage indictment of the superficial modern art world, devouring its shallow, reprehensible subjects as hungrily and callously as those fish feasted on nubile spring break flesh in Piranha 3D. But unlike those other modern art films, Boogie Woogie forgets to make us laugh, failing to realize that a proper satire lampoons its subject with subtle wit, not mere vitriol. Adapted from Danny Moynihan’s acrid novel, there isn’t a single likable, relatable character in Ward’s ensemble of archetypes, from unctuous gallerist Art Spindle (Danny Huston) to haughty collectors Bob and Jean (Stellan Skarsgard and Gillian Anderson) to pompous avant-garde artist Joe (Jack Huston) to cash-strapped collector Alfred (Christopher Lee), whose ultra-rare, titular painting attracts the film’s art-world carnivores like vultures to a carcass. Treating its audience with as much contempt as its characters, there’s nothing of value in this screeching screed aside from the juvenile observation that beyond all the pretentious posturing of modern art, everybody just wants to get laid with many people, and in as many positions, as possible. But it’s hard to take even this message credibly when Ward’s direction is as lecherous as his characters’ philandering libidos. Amanda Seyfried’s sole purpose in the picture appears to be the exhibition of her ass, which is revealed in one crassly titillating angle after another. I thought modern-art porn went out with Warhol?

If you’re not wary of the clichés of the heist movie by now – the well-laid plans gone violently awry, the criminal with a heart of gold who wants out of the racket after this “one last job,” the cop always on his tail with superhuman relentlessness – then you’ve managed to remain blissfully sheltered from one of Hollywood’s most exhausted formulas.

Every now and then, a movie such as Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead or the recently opened Animal Kingdom will inject some vitality and vigor into this corpse of a genre, which was already starting to feel a little orthodox when John Huston directed The Asphalt Jungle.

Ben Affleck, in his second feature as director and co-writer, tries his hand at the game with The Town, casting himself against type as the unofficial leader of a small but sophisticated crime syndicate in the brutal Boston neighborhood of Charlestown. Working from Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves, Affleck distinguishes his film, somewhat, in the novelistic details of the heists’ particulars. These aren’t the sloppy armed robbers of yesterday whose human anxieties and lack of preparation foretell their downfall. In the opening bank job, they don expensive horror-movie costumes, confiscate patrons’ cellphones, microwave the surveillance tapes and torch any evidence that might contain a fingerprint.

But as Affleck’s film progresses, it settles, sentimentally, into the tired mechanics of its genre. His character, Doug MacRay, is a noble soul at heart, granted a tortured backstory to explain his life of crime. His drug-addicted mother abandoned the family when he was 6, and his father (Chris Cooper) is a lifetime criminal and drunk still serving time. Doug was drafted to the NHL as a youngster, only to blow his chance at success when he physically assaulted his teammates.

So the thug life came naturally and inevitably. He hooked up with James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), a loyal baddie with an intimidating neck tattoo to prove it. Doing nine years in prison for defending Doug’s honor, James is a brother-like figure who won’t permit Doug the law-abiding, upstanding life he desires. It isn’t until Doug begins to stalk – and subsequently romance – Claire (Rebecca Hall), an assistant manager at the bank his team pillages, that he begins to develop the courage to go straight, if only his friends weren’t such a problem.

Claire is an angel of extreme goodness, volunteering at the local Boys & Girls Club while unknowingly courting the man who could have ended her life the week before. She’s more archetype than character, but no protagonist is drawn thinner and with less distinction than FBI agent Adam Frawley (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm), a square-jawed Alan Ladd type, quick with a wisecrack but always one step behind his prey. We know nothing of the guy beyond his obsession with Doug; there’s no depth or heart beneath the alpha male machismo.

As a writer, Affleck clearly has affections for the down-and-out proles of South Boston, a world that has grown considerably more sinister since his Good Will Hunting breakthrough. His 2007 directorial debut Gone Baby Gone was a riveting story of a kidnapping and police manhunt, a better film for its lack of over-the-top action-movie set pieces that damage The Town’s patina of realism. Though his films share a geographic and thematic consistency befitting a possible auteurist status, his observations about redemption, trust and loyalty aren’t the most original.

Moreover, as a director, he’s clearly absorbed his share of Eastwood and Scorsese movies in all their CinemaScope brutality, but without those masters’ visual poetry or uncompromising cynicism. Instead, Affleck settles for a kind of secondhand distinction, wearing his influences competently for a surprise-free Hollywood product and nothing and more.

The Town is rated R. It opens Friday in area theaters.

A debate is raging in this country over what it means to be Muslim. The ethnic comedy The Infidel will hardly resolve things, but it least it tosses some leavening humor at the question.

Following its debut in the spring at the Tribeca Film Festival and its subsequent limited runs in New York and California, director Josh Appignanesi’s send-up of religious stereotypes opts for South Florida as the next market to attempt to gain a box office foothold. Not a bad strategy when you consider the left turn the film’s plot takes.

You see, the infidel of the title is British Muslim Mahmud Nasir (Omid Djalili), as indifferent to his religious faith as his children are to him. The biggest challenge he expects to face is his son Rashid’s looming wedding, but -- shades of La Cage aux Folles -- his fiancee’s stepfather is a fanatical and intolerant Muslim cleric who doubts the Nasirs are “proper Muslims” or that Rashid is worthy of his stepdaughter.

But that crisis pales next to Mahmud’s discovery, upon the death of his mother, of his birth certificate. It seems that middle-aged, pudgy, bald-headed Mahmud -- who looks like a Muslim Bob Hoskins -- was adopted at birth. Not only that, but he is actually Jewish, and his birth name is Solly Shimshillewitz.

Oy.

It is not that he hates Jews, just that he is hopelessly ignorant of them beyond their stereotypical characteristics. So he needs a crash course in what a Jew is and how they behave -- how they walk, dance, shrug and sigh – again, shades of La Cage. The only Jew he knows is the antagonistic transplanted New York cabbie, Lenny (Richard Schiff from TV’s The West Wing), who inexplicably takes on the role of Jew coach. Then, like Eliza Doolittle at the ball, Mahmud gets tested by attending a bar mitzvah with Lenny.

Much of this could easily come off as offensive, but is saved by the performance of Djalili, a comedian-actor with an ingratiating manner and a sky spin on the dialogue.

Not even he can save the film from its sentimental conclusion, which grinds the tale to a decided halt, but there are a few solid laughs before then, enough to wish the film luck trying to get out beyond Florida.

The Infidel is currently showing at Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, Sunrise Cinemas-Deerfield Mall and Sunrise Cinemas-Sunrise 11.