Rules for navigating this summer’s morass of unwatchable movies: 1) any movie with a title that includes more than one punctuation mark (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life; Legally Blonde 2: Red, White ‘ Blonde) = bad; 2) anything starring Hope Davis (The Secret Lives of Dentists, American Splendor), a hot young French actress (Audrey Tautou in Dirty Pretty Things, Ludivine Sagnier in Swimming Pool) or hot young actresses in France (Le Divorce) = good. Otherwise, in a season in which a derivative zombie flick seemed like a beacon of originality and a big-budget pirate movie wasn’t terrible, you were pretty much on your own. Here are the five summer movies that most failed at sucking.

Capturing the Friedmans

While researching a documentary on birthday-party clowns, director Andrew Jarecki stumbled upon David Friedman, whose unassuming Great Neck, Long Island family fell apart in 1987 when his father Arnold and brother Jesse were accused of sexual abuse on a grand scale. Better yet: David and Arnold both were home video junkies, so Jarecki’s film offers the gruesome and hypnotic spectacle of watching the family fall apart right in front of our eyes, against such backdrops as Thanksgiving dinner and Jesse’s last night before incarceration. The movie is queasily, wrenchingly intimate, but after half an hour of thinking, ‘I shouldn’t be watching this,’ you’ll be hooked by its riveting, ambiguous examination of denial (the family’s), mass hysteria (Great Neck’s) and voyeurism (ours).

Dirty Pretty Things

In grimy South London, a Nigerian hotel bellman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) steals Turkish chambermaid Audrey Tautou’s heart and possibly some other vital organs in Stephen Frears’ tight, authentically squalid, socially conscious thriller. It’s about the plight of illegal immigrants working in London under constant fear of deportation, but you’d never know it from its tight pace and subtle gallows humor.

Down with Love

It’s all style and no substance, and it tanked at the box office. But this zingy recreation of Rock Hudson-Doris Day pillow talk comedies, a kind of Far From Heaven with feather boas, gives that laziest and most poisonous of all movie genres the romantic comedy the bitch-slap it has long deserved. While so many leaden rom-coms offer the painful experience of watching two stereotyped mannequins attempt to convince us they care about each other, Down with Love gleefully reduces the formula to nothing but those stereotypes.

Director Peyton Reed knows we just want to see Renee Zellweger looking fabulous and Ewan McGregor doing push-ups in a towel. Zellweger’s hilarious, breathlessly deadpan final monologue, in which she explains how every detail of the meet-cute plot had been her plan all along, is a spitball aimed at the worst cinematic offenses of Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson and Reese Witherspoon.

The Secret Lives of Dentists

Yes, it’s Alan Rudolph’s first watchable movie since 1997’s Afterglow. Playwright Craig Lucas has adapted Jane Smiley’s novella ‘The Age of Grief,’ but don’t let the dourly titled source material deter you this is a surreally funny portrait of the loneliness that can exist within a marriage. Campbell Scott and Hope Davis star as Dave and Dana Hurst, married dentists who share a practice and three young daughters. When he becomes convinced she’s cheating, he struggles over whether to confront her or to just wait it out.

Dave so internalizes his marital panic that he imagines a surly ex-patient (Denis Leary) popping up at opportune moments to goad Dave into giving Dana what-for. The movie teeters on the edge between searing drama and dark comedy, and with actors as dexterous as Scott and Davis (who also excels as a very different kind of wife in American Splendor), it works beautifully on both levels.

28 Days Later

Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic horror flick stitches together elements of everything from George Romero’s Living Dead films to Stephen King’s The Stand and even a hint of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, but this clever blend of genre conventions is potent, timely and damn scary. Best update to the Romero formula: instead of lumbering along in a daze, these zombies (actually former humans infected with a virus known ominously as ‘Rage’) run like hell and vomit infectious blood. Creepiest line of the summer: ‘We promised them women.’