In Theaters: Vampire Priests! Dolphin Slaughtering! Asperger's Syndrome! More!

A scene from Chan-wook Park's "Thirst." Image courtesy of Focus Features.

As July turns to August, the specialty box office will attempt not to self-destruct as a whopping ten new titles hit theaters, and two so-far success stories attempt to take themselves to the next level. For anyone not interested in Judd Apatow's attempt at channeling James L. Brooks, this is very good news. There'll loads to choose from, with Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" and Marc Webb's "(500) Days of Summer" reaching 523 and 266 screens, respectively, and therefore hitting markets not normally used to getting many much indie fare outside Oscar season. And there's those ten newbies, which range from the latest from the Dardenne Brothers, a massive festival favorite with potential to become one of the year's biggest docs, a Cannes alum about a vampiric priest, a romance set around Asperger's Syndrome, a doc about a seniors hip-hop dance team, another about "Ozploitation" cinema, and four foreign-language films representing Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Austria stateside.

How this plays out at a specialty box office that has shown significant fragility in the recent past is unclear (though betting against "The Cove" to take the weekend's per-theater-average crown might be unwise), but hopefully the following ten links - to our trusty iW film pages - helps you make clear where your non-Apatowian night at the movies might be:

Max Mayer's Adam
Louie Psihoyos's The Cove
Ole Christian Madsen's Flame & Citron
Monika Treut's Ghosted
Dori Berinstein's Gotta Dance
Ulrich Seidl's Import Export
Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Lorna's Silence
Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
Chan-wook Park's Thirst
Roy Andersson's You, The Living