After years of chatter, Steven Spielberg is finally getting to work on his long-awaited Abraham Lincoln biopic, and not a moment too soon, since fellow Oscar-winner Robert Redford already has his own Lincoln-inspired historical drama ready for release. However, Redford’s The Conspirator is less about the former president than the aftermath of his assassination, and the prosecution of Booth’s co-conspirators — specifically, Mary Surratt (Robin Wright — she’s back to going by Robin Wright now, right?). Dreamy James McEvoy will apparently thunder righteously as Frederick Aiken, her lawyer. Reports from the picture’s premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival indicated that the movie moves a bit slowly for some tastes, but with the lure of a vintage (and genuine) conspiracy theory, and a cast of our favorite character actors (Tom Wilkinson! Kevin Kline! Danny Huston! Colm Meaney! Stephen Root! Jim True-Frost! And, um, Justin Long), we’re definitely intrigued. Click through to watch the trailer, and let us know if you agree in the comments.
Like films that feature only one actor, movies that are set in one location can be a hard sell for audiences — unless you’ve got an amazing script and a solid cast. Case in point, the trailer for The Sunset Limited, an HBO Films adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy play that stars Tommy Lee Jones (who also directs) and Samuel L. Jackson, just landed online, and it looks fantastic. (This might be at least in part because McCarthy adapted the screenplay himself.) Like all of his work, the storyline is intense: A man stops another man from throwing himself in front of a train, and then forces him to come back to his apartment; there, the men proceed to debate on a variety of important topics — including but not limited to religion. Click through to check it out, and let us know in the comments what you think.
Attention Sunday Styles devotees: The trailer for Richard Press’ documentary on the New York Times’ intrepid street photographer Bill Cunningham just landed online, and it looks to be just as adorable as the man himself — even Anna Wintour acts like a giddy schoolgirl when talking about him. As Fashionologie reports, when Press first approached Cunningham about the project in 2000: “He just pooh-poohed the idea. He couldn’t entertain it. He said, ‘Why me? There’s no subject here.’” If you need even more reason to love the ever humble, 81-year-old Schwinn devotee (or if you’re just looking to familiarize yourself), check out an excellent profile of him that ran last year in The New Yorker, and click through to watch the trailer.
If some trailers can seem too good to be true, the trailer for Eldorado seems almost too bad to be true. The British 3-D musical — yes, you read that correctly, it’s a British musical in 3-D — stars Michael Madsen, Steve Guttenberg, Daryl Hannah, Brigitte Nielsen, and the late David Carradine on a “comedic, musical journey” that has a crooked cop chasing a stripper on the run. Even beyond the bad wigs and fake backdrops, the movie’s got two characters called “The Jews Brothers,” slow-speed car chases, oddly convivial cowboy songs, Neo-Nazi wrestling (?), and an obligatory chainsaw death. Okay!
Despite some suspicion that the almost painfully bad trailer may be a hoax, it’s the real deal with the official press release insisting that it’s a parody of films like The Blues Brothers, Sweeney Todd, and Little Shop of Horrors. Click through to watch the trailer and then let us know what you think: is this a silly parody or the best bad movie of 2011 in the making?
A Little Bit of Heaven stars Gael García Bernal as a sexy doctor. Okay, maybe its protagonist is technically Kate Hudson, playing a young, loveless, high-powered executive with a knack for provocative, off-the-cuff boardroom presentations about condoms. But that got your attention, didn’t it? Anyway, probably because she’s a successful woman without a love interest, Hudson’s character learns she has cancer and proceeds to fall in love with her physician, the aforementioned Bernal. Who is half-naked and playing with a yo-yo for a while in the preview below. Just sayin’. Also, Kathy Bates is in it and Whoopi Goldberg may or may not be playing… God? The movie comes out February 4th in the UK and will cross the pond sometime this year.
Thanks to Black Swan, 2010 has been a big year for Natalie Portman, and 2011 looks to be even more busy with major roles in Your Highness opposite James Franco and Danny McBride, and opposite Chris Hemsworth in the Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Thor. We’re not really sure how The Other Woman — a film about a homewrecker who has a difficult time with her stepson that is based on Ayelet Waldman’s 2006 novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits — fits into the picture, but the fact that it’s getting a VOD release by IFC on January 1, and a limited theatrical release on February 4, would indicate that this won’t be one of the films we remember — or even see. Plus, the project has been kicking around for two years now, which is never a good sign. We think that this looks like another Where the Heart Is for Portman — she’ll shine, but ultimately the film will fall flat — which means that we’ll just wait a few years and catch it for free on Lifetime. Click through and see if you agree.
An audio-only version of the teaser trailer for Kevin Smith’s upcoming horror flick Red State hit the internet a few weeks back, but now the official one is online. The film, which stars Michael Angarano, Kerry Bishe, Nicholas Braun, Kyle Gallner, John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Michael Parks, Kevin Pollak, and Stephen Root, will make its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival early next year. From the quick barrage of clips we see here (which reveal a lot about the tone, nothing about the plot), it looks good — but absolutely nothing like a Kevin Smith movie. Click through, and let us know what you think.
If you wished that last spring’s Kick-Ass had more scenes with Hit-Girl — along with a pretty European wilderness backdrop and a score by the Chemical Brothers — then you’ll probably dig the trailer for Joe Wright’s Hanna. The film follows a young girl assassin (played by Saoirse Ronan, who worked with Wright on Atonement) who has been trained by ex-CIA agent father (Eric Bana) to kill one of his former coworkers (Cate Blanchett, channeling an evil version of Clarice Starling). While it’s kind of odd to see a director known more for his period pieces tackling what looks like an action flick, thanks to the stunning cinematography and Ronan’s previous work, we’re willing to bet that this one feels more arthouse in the end. Click through to check it out.
As our friends at Vulture point out, the trailer for Jake Gyllenhaal’s new sci-fi thriller Source Code (the second feature from Moon director Duncan Jones), “plays like Inception, The Matrix, and Déjà Vu all rolled around on the floor and made a baby.” What we can’t decide yet is whether that’s a good thing or not. Gyllenhaal plays a soldier who — thanks to the very threatening sounding “source code” — keeps being transported into the body of a man on a train that’s about to be bombed. The goal is for him to figure out who’s behind the bombing in the eight minutes he has got. But then he goes and falls in love with the guy’s girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan), and obviously, it becomes more about saving her, even though it’s unclear whether that’s even possible. Click through and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
As fans of all-female action movies, we wanted to like Sucker Punch. But the trailer, like a lot of director Zack Snyder’s work, seems more concerned with flashing images and adrenaline over development of the narrative or creating connection with the characters. Here’s what we know about the plot: It’s the 1950s. A girl named Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is locked up in a mental institution by her stepfather. In order to escape an impending lobotomy, she must team up with her fellow inmates (Vanessa Hudgens and Abbie Cornish) on a quest that takes places in a video game-inspired alternate reality filled with dragons, robots, and samurai warriors. There are lots of machine guns and explosions. Also: Jon Hamm, but we didn’t spot him here.
