Photo: Will Ragozzino/Getty Images

Summer at the movies is always rife with second acts. In 2008, the world's most durable jeans get another go-round in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (left), and Christian Bale slips into the Batsuit again for The Dark Knight. Other big releases carry a whiff of déjà vu, too. Brideshead Revisited (featuring Emma Thompson as a formidable matriarch) is a big-screen version of Evelyn Waugh's novel, which was famously adapted for British television in 1981. Step Brothers reunites Talladega Nights's Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as two grown men still living with their parents. And in one of the summer's most raucous comedies, a hapless high school drama teacher attempts perhaps the most difficult sequel of all: Hamlet 2.