Coming soon: The post-female American cinema: Nowhere is our irrelevance more starkly apparent than during the summer, the ultimate boys’ club. Over the next few months, U.S. cinemas - and many worldwide - will reverberate with the romping-stomping of comic book titans like Iron Man and the Hulk. The sexagenarian Harrison Ford will be cracking his Indy whip (some old men get a pass, after all, especially when Steven Spielberg is on board) alongside the fast-talking sprout from “Transformers.” Hellboy will relock and load, tongue and cigar planted in cheek. The girls of summer are few in number, and real women are close to extinct. [IHT]

Kazakhstan seeks identity on the big screen: If the satirical movie “Borat” spoofed an entire nation, then “Mongol” was a decent counterpunch, casting back 800 years to the glory of a world conqueror, and earning Kazakhstan its first nomination for a foreign-language Academy Award earlier this year. But “Mongol” was more than a big-budget Genghis Khan biopic, says Gulnara Sarsenova, the perfume and cosmetics magnate who helped bankroll the $23 million production. It also aimed to bolster the self-respect of a traditionally nomadic people aggressively Russified during 70 years of Soviet domination. [CSM]

Jewish culture, and anti-Semitism, on the rise in Hungary: It’s hard to know whether to feel disheartened by the large showing of neo-Nazis or encouraged by the larger opposition to it. It turns out that aside from the well-documented rise of the far right, Jewish culture has also been conspicuously on the rise here. [IHT]

Sex? Yawn. Politics? That’s Hot!: A FORMER editor of People magazine had some hard-and-fast rules: young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, television is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports. And anything is better than politics. Apparently that rule does not apply to the high-drama presidential campaign of 2008. [NYT]