Safe prediction number one: G.I. Joe will handily win the weekend and dominate the box office based purely on the brand recognition and sheer number of screens it is taking up.

Safe prediction number two: It will be absolutely horrible. So horrible, if fact, that I wager this will be yet another case of a big event movie topping the charts and tailing off so quickly afterwards that it fails to make its production budget back, putting it in the strange position of being a chart-topping flop. This has happened a few times already this summer.

Luckily, however, the more discerning viewer has a number of much better choices available to them, providing they live in one of the major cities where there are four high-profile films hitting limited release opposite the mighty Joe. Thank god for counter-programming.

Option number one - or number four, really, since I'm listing these in the reverse order of what I'd choose myself - is The Cove.  Considering that the hugely acclaimed dolphin doc is the only one of these that I haven't actually seen already it probably should be my top priority but... well... I kind of hate dolphins. That said, audiences everywhere have been going wild for this, with the film picking up audience awards at both Sundance and closer to home at Hot Docs along with so many others that the creators must have had to build several extra mantles just to have space to display them all. 

Option number two: Flame and Citron. Bizarrely, Ole Christian Madsen's big-budget, much-acclaimed WWII resistance drama appears to only have a Danish website despite being released in several nations around the globe already but, luckily, 'trailer' is the same everywhere. Mads Mikkelsen, best known as the villain in Casino Royale, and Thure Lindhart, most recently seen in Angels And Demons, star as legendary real-life Nazi resistance fighters who spent years struggling against the occupation of Denmark, gunning down Nazi collaborators, before finally being brought down themselves. Production values and performances in this one are astounding, though I find that the burden of including so much historical storytelling softens the emotional punch of Madsen's best work.

Option three: See that poster up there? That's Thirst, the sexed-up vampire movie from Park Chan-Wook, the director of Oldboy. Song Kang-Ho stars as a priest who contracts the vampire virus when volunteering for medical experiments and finds his lust for blood mixes nicely with the other, more old-fashioned kind as he targets a young woman in his parish. Of course, it eventually turns out that she is even more of a (metaphoric) vamp than he is, subtly manipulating the priest to her own advantage and making the leap to physical vampirism herself. I find this one a touch uneven and a step below Park's best work but middling Park is still better than a whole lot of other people's best films and it's very well worth seeing.

And, finally, option four: Cold Souls. I reviewed this one a couple weeks back when I caught it at a festival in Korea and hereby dub it the best of this week's extensive choices. Paul Giamatti stars as himself in the midst of an existential crisis that prompts him to remove his soul and place it in cold storage.