Football may currently be the most popular sport in America, but baseball will always be “America’s Pastime”.  It was our first widely popular sport, and it contained both the best of our abilities and the worst of our perceptions.  Segregation in baseball was never official.  It was an unwritten rule agreed upon by the owners and “enforced” by the commissioner.  Baseball, in its rules, is a pure sport, but in its practice, was tainted by institutional racism.  Jackie Robinson didn’t just break the color barrier in a sport; he completed the greatness of America’s Pastime. He is a transformative figure, and in 42, writer-director Brian Helgeland pays complete and utter devotion to Robinson’s legend.  Strangely, despite his attempt to paint Robinson’s accomplishment as a mythic battle between good and evil, the story never feels larger than a TV movie.

The trailer for Lola Versus has gone online.  The movie stars Greta Gerwig as a young woman who gets dumped just before her wedding, and who must then struggle with her newly single life.  Based on this trailer, your enjoyment of Lola Versus will vary based on how much you’ve enjoyed Gerwig work in the past.  The jokes don’t seem particularly strong (there’s a My Best Friend’s Wedding reference), but I tend to like Gerwig even though she’s never blown me away in a movie.  Hopefully, Lola Versus will be the film that does it.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer along with the new poster.  The film also stars Zoe Lister-Jones, Joel Kinnaman, Hamish Linklater, Debra Winger, and Bill Pullman.  Lola Versus June 8th.

The trailer for Miranda July’s The Future has gone online.  As I said in my review when I caught the film at Sundance, it’s a strange movie and that’s a large part of its charm.  The trailer does a good job of conveying the oddness of some of the plot’s elements (shelter cat as a narrator, talking moon), the offbeat humor of the main characters (played by July and Hamish Linklater), as well as the honest emotions that prevent the movie from being just a pile of quirk.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The Future opens July 29th.

Miranda July’s The Future, the follow-up to her successful 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know, may seem obnoxiously strange if you were to take some of its outlandish plot points out of context.  The story features time-stopping, conversations with the moon, and a shirt that can move on its own.  Oh, and the film is narrated by a cat waiting to be adopted.  These fantastical elements are balanced by July’s skill to find humor in the mundane and ability to cleverly express a couple’s fear that their dreams are dead and their future has already been written.  It’s not a comedy for everyone, but those who can appreciate July’s brand of offbeat humor will find The Future a rewarding experience.