Giving films the silent treatment: More movies now are including sequences with no dialogue and sometimes even no sound at all

Some of the most notable scenes of the recent summer movie season involved great sights and spectacles - and little to no talking.

In several of the biggest upcoming fall releases, directors have crafted memorable characters out of a mute janitor, a deaf young girl and a near-silent victim of a Cambodian genocide.

Film dialogue is for suckers?

After a generation of scripts from the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin celebrated the motor-mouthed and the silver-tongued, many directors are embracing a new moment. They're making movies that include long stretches without speech or even sound.

Modern moviemaking is rife with counter-trends, reactions to once-novel ideas that have since grown tired. A boomlet in practical effects succeeded years of CG overkill. A pronounced lack of backstory followed a slew of exposition-mad films.

Now another formerly hot cinema notion may be getting dragged to the rubbish pile: talking.

"I'm a big fan of silent cinema," director Christopher Nolan says, "telling the story primarily pictorially and through sound