Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Perhaps it's no surprise that the greatest patriotic films ever made about the United States were also made by the United States…and I’m not talking about how Michael Bay somehow convinces the army to help him make movies time and time again. During World War II, and also slightly before we actually entered the war, a number of Hollywood directors entered various branches of the military to make films supporting the war effort. The list of patriotic luminaries included such famed directors as John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, Darryl Zanuck and, most importantly, Frank Capra.

Release Date: July 1

Director: Michael Mann

Writers: Ronan Bennett and Michael Mann & Ann Biderman

Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard

Cinematographer: Dante Spinotti

Studio/Run Time: Universal Pictures, 140 mins.

20th Century gangsters through a 21st Century lens

Early reviewers are shrugging their shoulders at the new Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Christian Bale film, Public Enemies, but it’s miles better than Terminator Salvation or any other gun-blazing film you could pick at random from the first half of the summer crop. It’s more entertaining, more thought provoking, and were it shot on film I bet it’d be more acclaimed.

Giant anthropomorphized robots are pretty popular these days, but they've been a part of our worldwide pop-culture for quite a while. Three decades, in fact. A testament to the enduring appeal of this sci-fi subgenre is currently towering over a Tokyo park as we speak: a full-scale replica of the iconic Gundam is almost complete.

Consider it a collaboration on top of a collaboration: Director Jonathan Glazer, responsible for major feature films like Sexy Beast and Birth as well as award-winning Radiohead music videos, has joined forces with supergroup The Dead Weather to direct the band's newest short. The Dead Weather already boasts an all-star lineup, including Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age), Jack White (The White Stripes/The Raconteurs), Jack Lawrence (The Greenhornes/The Raconteurs) and Alison Mosshart (The Kills).

Although the book has not yet been published, science-fiction novel I Am Number Four, co-authored by James Frey, is set to become a film, and it's got big names behind it. Given Michael Bay's taste for big-time special effects, DreamWorks' talent for creating box-office brilliance and Frey's penchant for touching (yet not always wholly truthful) stories, it's likely to gather hype in the coming months.

DVD Release Date: June 30
Director/Writer: Spike Lee
Cinematographer: Ernest Dickerson
Starring: Lee, Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis
Studio/Run Time: Universal, 120 mins.

Spike Lee's searing masterpiece turns 20

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a camera glides over a street with a sprawling population of blacks, Italians and Koreans, who together endure a mercilessly hot summer afternoon. Fragile harmony is in the air, but racial unease is never too far off—within the first several minutes, one character has evoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, figures whose influence looms over the entire movie.