Every Friday here at Flavorwire, we like to gather up the week’s new movie trailers, give them a look-see, and rank them from worst to best — while taking a guess or two about what they might tell us (or hide from us) about the movies they’re promoting. This week, we’ve got new trailers featuring Anna Kendrick, Chris Rock, Ethan Hawke, and Ari Graynor, among others; check ’em all out after the jump, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Resident Evil: Retribution
Yes, they’re releasing a fifth Resident Evil film. As far as we can tell the only redeeming quality here is the return of Michelle Rodriguez, who hasn’t been around since the original.
Pitch Perfect
Maybe if this flick had come out before Glee started going downhill, we would have been more excited to watch a cheesy movie about a college a capella group. Instead, the trailer just makes us feel sad and frustrated. Why does Anna Kendrick insist on confusing us with her film choices (on one hand you’ve got Up in the Air and 50/50; on the other, the Twilight movies and What to Expect When You’re Expecting)? Why couldn’t 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon have come up with a more interesting way to use Rebel Wilson than a bunch of cheap fat jokes? What college hands out welcome-to-campus rape whistles? A lot of people have been comparing this movie to Bring It On, but from the looks of the trailer, it’s a lot closer to one of its direct-to-video sequels.
2 Days in New York
Reader, we really wanted to like this cross-cultural romantic comedy, but other than a few funny moments involving Julie Delpy’s real-life father and Chris Rock looking totally adorable in glasses, we simply can’t get on board. Why watch something that so badly wants to be an old school Woody Allen movie when you can just stream the real thing?
Americano
Americano, the debut feature of Mathieu Demy — son of famed French filmmakers Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy — stars Salma Hayek as Lola, a mysterious stripper who lives in Tijuana. Demy plays an unhappy Parisian real estate agent who travels to Los Angeles following his mother’s death only to discover that she has left her house to Lola; he travels to Tijuana to find her and figure out what kind of relationship she had with his mother. While the trailer itself isn’t all that exciting (outside of seeing Hayek writhe around in a bad wig) and the storyline is a bit clichéd, Demy does a nice job of setting the mood, and we suppose that certain cinephiles will enjoy looking for hints of his parents’ influence.
Sinister
What it might lack in originality, this horror film from The Exorcism of Emily Rose director and the producer of Insidious and Paranormal Activity, looks like it will more than make up for in quality scares. Ethan Hawke plays a crime novelist who moves his family into a house where another family was recently murdered in order to write “the best book anybody’s ever read.” What he doesn’t realize is that the house is also a hangout for Bagul, a pagan deity who consumes the souls of human children. That contorted kid in a box around the 1:30 mark is the scariest thing that we’ve seen in a good while.
For a Good Time, Call
Remember how much we wanted to like that Julie Delpy movie? Well, multiply that times ten, and that’s how much we didn’t want to like this lowbrow comedy about two female roommates (played by Ari Graynor and Lauren Anne Miller) in New York City who go into the amateur phone-sex business. But it just looks like so much fun! We blame Graynor. And Seth Rogen in an airplane pilot hat. And Justin Long’s mustache.
I Killed My Mother
Known for his work on 2010’s Heartbeats, Canadian director Xavier Dolan wrote, directed, and starred in this intense, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale when he was just 20 years old, funding the entire project himself. While the film already received a release in Canada years ago, it’s finally getting a US run this fall following a long rights battle. “I bet most people believe that hating your mother is a sin,” he says in the voiceover. “They’re hypocrites. They’ve also hated their mothers. Maybe for a second, maybe for a year. Maybe no longer, maybe they forgot, but… They all have.” Dark.
Life of Pi
OK, so this isn’t really a trailer, just a few seconds of footage from Ang Lee’s highly-anticipated 3D adaptation of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel Life of Pi. But we’re ranking the brief clip so highly because we can’t help be excited by the prospect of having that huge Bengal tiger swipe at us when we’re wearing our special glasses in the theater. Terrifying!
Queen Of Versailles
When we say that this looks like the trailer for a new reality series on Bravo, we mean it as a the highest compliment. If that makes you sneer, then it’s worth noting that Lauren Greenfield’s doc earned her Best Director honors at Sundance, so it has street cred too. The film follows billionaire timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie Siegel in their quest to create their own version of Versailles — and then the financial collapse happens. Yes, that kind of storyline could easily devolve into #richpeopleproblems, but from the looks of the trailer, Greenfield manages to keep things funny and surprisingly compelling.