In this week's Scene, Craig D. Lindsey lusts unabashedly after the cast of the Italian comedy The Salt of Life, opening today at The Belcourt:

In his modest 2008 first feature Mid-August Lunch, writer/director/star Gianni Di Gregorio played a bachelor who spent most of the movie in the company of some wily yet charming old ladies, most of whom were dropped off on his doorstep by vacationing friends and associates. Somebody must've told him that if he ever made another movie in his native Italy, he'd better nix the golden girls and pack it with some of the finest dime-pieces that boot-shaped country has to offer!

That he definitely does in his sophomore feature, The Salt of Life. Serving once again as the lead player (in every sense of the word), Di Gregorio plays a retired husband and father who gets the itch to have an affair. But which object of desire will he choose to engage in some adulterous action? Will it be his flighty, flirtatious downstairs neighbor (Aylin Prandi — damn!), whose dog he takes out for walks? Or how about the breathtaking caretaker (Kristina Cepraga — double damn!) who looks after Gianni's extravagant, subtly domineering mother (Valeria De Franciscis, who played Di Gregorio's mom in Lunch)? And we haven't even gotten to the cougarific old flame, the bosomy opera singer, the statuesque blond twins or the various boobalicious bit players and extras who keep bouncing into frame, taunting our boy at every turn. (Seriously, whoever was in charge of casting the women in this deserves a damn medal or something!)

Read the whole review here. And send Craig a cigarette and a towel.

Starting today in local theaters: the sunset-years ensemble piece The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, starring the PBS pledge-drive dream team of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson (good luck getting a parking spot at Green Hills); radioactive shocker Chernobyl Diaries, not starring Anne Hathaway; the great James Cromwell in the family drama Cowgirls n' Angels, from the director of Wheels on the Bus: Mango and Papaya's Animal Adventures.

The reason people sometimes say “popular entertainment” as if it were something any factory line could produce is because Steven Spielberg makes it look so effortless. Trust the kids who spent their entire adolescence trying to re-create Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot: It ain’t.

Children of the Aughts, imagine walking cold into a sneak preview in 1981, seeing the Paramount logo replaced by a real mountain, and reading that title for the first time. Ten minutes later — 10 minutes of perforated skeletons, booby-trapped caves, runaway boulders and hair-breadth escapes — my brother and I were pretty much convinced we were watching the most awesome movie ever made.

Showing it to my own kids, I was delighted to see how well it stands up, from Harrison Ford’s surly bravado to Lawrence Kasdan’s snappy movie-movie dialogue (“Bad dates”). And the classic setpieces — the truck chase, the market chase, the anything chase — remain a wizard-level instruction in the assembly and pacing of action scenes.

For 1994’s Jurassic Park, Spielberg took a clever Michael Crichton idea — basically the author’s 1973 theme-park thriller Westworld with raptors instead of robots — and made the dinosaur movie every 10-year-old had been wanting to see since the dawn of Willis O’Brien. Raiders is playing Friday through Monday at The Belcourt in a new restoration that’s said to look spectacular; Jurassic Park’s there at midnight Friday and Saturday. See ’em both, for the popcorn-movie double feature of a lifetime.

Why doesn't anyone make NC-17 movies about good sex? After the cinematic saltpeter dosage of Shame, the French prostitution drama Elles, opening Friday at The Belcourt, is the latest movie to use the NC-17 like a three-star Michelin rating applied to an electrified dog bowl.

Juliette Binoche, using the international symbol for serious acting (little makeup), plays an Elle reporter investigating the sex trade among French college girls (represented by Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig). Though it's directed by Poland's Malgorzata Szumowska, it's as schematic and cliché-ridden as any hack American TV movie: When the more fresh-faced of Binoche's subjects says she rather enjoys her work but forbids sodomy, you can set your watch by her inevitable comeuppance.

Even in her dumb uptight-bourgeois role, however, Binoche comes closest to escaping the movie's narrow conception. While connoisseurs of fetish on film will be happy to see some checklist items well outside the mainstream — golden shower, anyone? — what's most interesting about Elles is its place on The Belcourt's schedule.

While the just-concluding Cannes Film Festival has taken lumps for the dearth of female directors in competition, The Belcourt has quietly programmed film after film this summer directed by women: Mia Hansen-Løve's beautiful Goodbye First Love through Thursday; Bess Kargman's hit dance documentary First Position, drawing ballet lovers for another week; and coming soon, Your Sister's Sister with Emily Blunt and Rosemarie Dewitt, from Humpday director Lynn Shelton. That's not to mention the cult thriller Sound of My Voice, produced and written by its rising star Brit Marling (Another Earth), which opens June 15.

Those are elles worth celebrating.

Let's set aside the sure-to-be-common question of whether anyone actually wanted another Men in Black sequel in the first place. The answer is, "No, they didn't," but No. 3 is here, and funnily enough, it's mostly painless. Of course, the MIB franchise was never much more than that: painless, and somewhat better for it. For all the gazillions spent on their elaborate CGI effects, the films never really demanded your attention; they were just kind of there, more tolerated than beloved. But in an age when every wannabe tentpole indulges in expansive running times and self-important grabs at seizing the cultural spotlight, the idea of a movie that feels like a breezy afterthought is strangely welcome.

Maybe that's because MIB3 actually manages to capture the playful inconsequentiality of the earlier films. This time out, intergalactic invasion-prevention specialists Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Will Smith) are faced with an unspeakably ruthless and powerful being named Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement). This supervillain breaks out of a prison on the moon and travels back in time to 1969 to kill the younger Agent K (Josh Brolin, doing an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones imitation), preparing Earth to be overrun and devoured by an alien race.

Read the whole review here.