Film

A little over a week ago, Sam Katz spoke to John F. Street's class at Temple University. Afterward, the onetime mayoral rivals turned political soul mates were seen huddling together for a couple of hours, prompting a cadre of usual suspects in the political class to wonder what they were cooking up. Was Street once again urging Katz to make one last mayoral run? It's never too early for rumor. There is speculation that Councilman Bill Green and mayoral aspirant Tom Knox recently reached an accommodation that would sideline Green in 2015.

So enough already with superheroes and $150 million-plus sequels, the apocalypses, buddy pics, and blowing stuff up. Here's a run through some of the summer's less-explosive, less-star-studded, less-mega-budgeted fare, which doesn't mean these films are in any way less worthy. (Dates may change.) In the black-and-white indie Frances Ha (May 24), Noah Baumbach steers his muse (and girlfriend) Greta Gerwig through a wistful Gen-Y study of friendship, loneliness, and spur-of-the-moment trips to Paris.

Repertory Films Adventure Aquarium 1 Aquarium Dr., Camden; 866-451-2782. www.adventureaquarium.com . 4D Theater. $22.95; $19.95 children 2-12. Ambler Theater 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler; 215-345-7855. www.amblertheater.com . The Red Shoes (U.K., 1948) $9.75; $7.25 seniors, students and children 17 and under. 4/23. 7:30 pm. Black Maria Film & Video Festival. $9.75; $7.25 seniors, students and children 17 and under. 4/24. 7:30 pm. The Barnes Foundation - Philadelphia 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.; 215-278-7000.

LOS ANGELES- "Simon Killer" is an amoral tale, and a cautionary one, that reminded me my mama was right when she said, "Never talk to strangers" and "Looks can be deceiving. " What is so disturbing about this contemporary noir is that Simon could easily be mistaken for just another American college boy wandering around Paris on break, one of those troubled, slightly broken intellectual types that women are forever trying to save. The truth takes shape over time, like a shadowy figure slowly emerging from the darkness.

LOS ANGELES - The surprise box-office success of the uplifting Jackie Robinson biographical film "42" suggests that audiences are ready for a PG-13-rated movie filled with coarse, racially charged language. It also raises questions about whether children should see it, and at what age. In the picture, which grossed $27.5 million over the weekend, a variety of slurs are directed at the ballplayer, the first African-American major leaguer, who began playing in 1947. Most pointedly, he is called the N-word many times.

Ken Burns is known as our most Wagnerian documentary-maker for an ambitious catalogue of nonfiction films like The Civil War , Baseball: The Tenth Inning, and The Dust Bowl , which distill and explain sweeping chunks of the American experience. On Tuesday night, he unveils a documentary for PBS with a narrower, more contemporary focus, The Central Park Five . It is not what we have come to think of as Burnsian except in its thoroughness of research and assurance of execution.

WHY DID Branch Rickey do it? Why did that Bible-quoting, cigar-chomping, bushy-browed president of the Brooklyn Dodgers sign Jackie Robinson to a major-league contract in 1947, knowing that Robinson would need armadillo skin and saintly patience to endure the venomous treatment he'd get from baseball's bigots? Why did Rickey do it? The question gets asked three times in "42," the new, patchwork yet well-intentioned film about Rickey and Robinson and the breaking of baseball's color barrier.

50 CHILDREN: THE RESCUE MISSION OF MR. AND MRS. KRAUS. 9 p.m. Monday, HBO. EVERY SO OFTEN, a documentary comes along with a story so good, it's easy to imagine it as a feature film. "50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus," which premieres on HBO on Monday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, is one such documentary: It has the characters, the plot points, and most importantly, it has the goose bumps. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the story of Philadelphians Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, who left their own two children behind to rescue 50 Jewish children from Nazi Europe, wasn't much talked about until recently.

On one flat-screen, a young woman talks about being stalked. On a monitor across the room, another sexual-assault victim describes the incident that changed, and still haunts, her life. "The next thing I remember, he was on top of me," she tells the interviewer. "I distinctly remember saying, 'I don't want to do this.' " Her name is Katya Palsi, and on the day we meet she is watching herself on video in a Rowan University editing suite, hoping that her candor will help prevent what happened to her when she was 15 from happening to others.