THE MOVIES : LOOKING FORWARD TO SUMMER’S OFFERINGS : OUR CRITIC GETS IN LINE FOR THE MID-YEAR FILMS

If you don’t know the names, and maybe even the opening dates of what their studios pray will be the hot tickets of the summer, then a lot of advertising departments may have been spinning their wheels.

For film critics, however, everything is being played closer and closer to the vest these expensive days. Reviewers get a look at films practically neck and neck with audiences. So what we have here is an evaluation of the forthcoming summer parade, based largely on hunch and hype, on affection for films or performers past and optimism for the future, plus a few inside words and the advantage of having been at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Opening the summer with a blast last Wednesday was “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” from the hands of director Steven Spielberg, with Harrison Ford, the only possible Indy; Sean Connery as his father and River Phoenix playing Indy as a young man. Does any red-blooded movie-goer need to know more?

“Pink Cadillac” teams Clint Eastwood and Bernadette Peters and was directed by Buddy Van Horn. It arrived Friday and should be a must-see for Eastwood fans--that’s a few million tickets right there.

The buzz about Disney’s “The Dead Poet’s Society” (opening Friday) suggests that we may have at least one good strong drama for the summer. This character drama, directed by Peter Weir, stars Robin Williams as an English teacher in a Delaware prep school who instructs his boys in something more valuable than literature alone. Mark the names of his students, we may be hearing more from them later: Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen, Dylan Kussman.

“Ghostbusters II” bursts upon the unwary June 16, reprising our old ghost-busting pals: Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver, by its original director Ivan Reitman. If these jokers can conquer the almost irresistible desire to play entirely to themselves (the affliction that brought down the comic brilliance of Mel Brooks), then this should be fun.

“Batman” follows June 23 with “Beetlejuice” director Tim Burton at the helm, with Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton as Batman and Kim Basinger, Billy Dee Williams, Pat Hingle, Jack Palance, Jerry Hall. If the trailer for this film hasn’t worked its magic, then you are impervious to the great art of trailer-making.

“Great Balls of Fire” opens June 30, directed by James McBride (“The Big Easy”) with Dennis Quaid as stompin’, rompin’, rockin’ Jerry Lee Lewis and Winona Ryder as his baby-doll wife. If, somehow, the story isn’t to your liking, and with Lewis’ life that hardly seems possible, you could always just listen to the music.

“Do the Right Thing,” is by and with writer-director Spike Lee, alongside Danny Aiello. The word on this is that it’s the best and most assured Spike Lee yet. It’s a drama with a comic edge that looks at the reality of race relations in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on the hottest day of the year.

“Karate Kid III,” another June 30 entry, is again directed by John Avildsen, again with the team of Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio. Can they be rifting? Will they get together again in time for the big match? Did you doubt it for one instant?

Even if “The Abyss,” the big wet one for the July 4 holiday, is remembered one day as the only film ever shot entirely underwater and what of it, it may still be fascinating technically, and it does have Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Films made from a director’s compulsion are usually more interesting for it, and writer/director James Cameron has carried this story around since he was 17 years old. And think about it this way: there is no way in life that it can be as pretentious as “The Big Blue.”

“Lethal Weapon 2,” which arrives mid-July, is again in the strong hands of Richard Donner, its first director. It stars Mel Gibson, presumably a little less high strung than when we first encountered him, and the intrepid Danny Glover as Los Angeles-based detectives who have their hands full protecting a federal witness from a crime organization out to get him.

“Distant Voices, Still Lives,” which also opens in July, was one of the real treasures of the Cannes Festival last year. A pair of separate films, linked so inextricably they’re almost joined umbilically, they are memories of a post World War II boyhood turned into art when filtered through the sensibilities of British director Terence Davies. These are among the change-of-pace entries in the summer madness, movies for the connoisseur and those who are interested in the different directions that film, even now, can go.

Then in August we’ll have “Parenthood,” the newest look at a perennially complex subject, directed by Ron Howard, with a promising cast which includes Steve Martin, Tom Hulce, Dianne Wiest, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Martha Plimpton and Keanu Reeves. Do you have the feeling that all bases are being covered/all audiences appealed to with this casting?

“Cookie,” currently scheduled for Friday, Aug. 18, rounds off the summer as director Susan Seidelman frames a comedy about a hot-tempered Italian father and daughter, Peter Falk and Emily Lloyd, pursued by both the Mafia and the law. Emily Lloyd Italian? Aren’t movies great?