Everyone knows you can’t judge a book by its cover, but were you aware that movies shouldn’t be judged by a trailer either? I know, seems counter-intuitive, but while the trailer advertises a feature the two aren’t interchangeable. Terrible trailers sometimes give way to fantastic films just as brilliant trailers sometimes reveal ridiculously bad ones. It’s a crap shoot really. The list below features twelve of our favorite trailers that premiered in 2012. Some of the movies turned out to be gems, others ended up being far less impressive and a few won’t be released until 2013, but all of them made us excited to watch one more movie…

Welcome back to This Week In Discs! As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. Justified: The Complete Third Season Deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is a patient man, but even he has his limits. His feuds with Boyd (Walton Goggins) and Dickie (Jeremy Davies) are still going strong when two more men enter the fray in the form of a Detroit mobster (Neal McDonaugh) and a local butcher named Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson). Not everyone will be standing by the end of these thrilling and entertaining as hell thirteen episodes. Three seasons in this FX series continues to shine thanks to sharp writing, a colorful cast of characters and the absolute coolness that Olyphant brings to Givens. Fun stuff, perfect length, highly recommended. Also available on DVD. [Extras: Commentaries, outtakes, deleted scenes, featurettes, interviews]

Looking back over the past year in film, it is impressive to remember the different styles and forms of music that accompanied these various releases as they bring back the memories and emotions felt when first hearing a particular song or watching a piece of orchestration pair perfectly with what was happening on screen. When it comes to music, it is not simply a question of what was the best; it is a question of what resonated the most. Music created for film is unlike any other type of music because it is intended to be listened to while watching specific images. Of course there are songs that stand well on their own (see: Adele’s “Skyfall”), but hopefully even outside of the film, those songs conjure up memories of the films they came from. Sometimes a song placed in a particular scene can take on a whole new meaning, giving you a new ideas to reflect on when you hear it (see: “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies as used in a pivotal scene in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.) Soundtracks and scores help add to the emotion of a film and this year’s musicians delivered in spades. From turning found sounds into orchestration to adding a new layer of depth to the end of a trilogy to proving that sometimes words simply are not enough, 2012 was filled with new, inventive, and memorable music. Let’s look back and listen to the twelve selections

Warning: This article contains possible spoilers for Cosmopolis. At some point about halfway through David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton) informs young billionaire asset manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) that the chaotic protestors wreaking havoc outside the windows of the state-of-the-art, impenetrable limousine 2.0 they occupy subscribe to an anarchist philosophy that holds destruction itself to be a creative act. Implicitly citing the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter, Kinsky then points out (perhaps ironically, perhaps not) that capitalism is also a form of “creative destruction”: the market moves through cyclical ebbs and flows, older resources must be exploited in new fashions, the seemingly new is always replaced by the purportedly antiquated, and so on. This view of destroying the old as a means in of itself to produce something new also emboldens the work of productive critique, a practice in which Cosmopolis (as both novel and film) is heavily and centrally invested in terms of its narrative and intellectual preoccupations. Cosmopolis is no doubt a strange and unique film, a provocation as necessary as it is unwelcome in the wake of Hollywood’s stock cloning practices. That the film stars Pattinson, an actor both beloved and despised because his astronomical fame has been created by this Hollywood, highlights the film’s inevitably polarizing difference all the more. Cosmopolis is a sort of narrative “essay film,” at once a polemic without urgency, a manifesto that doesn’t design a way out, and an apocalyptic suicide note too disillusioned with and desensitized in the

Cosmopolis fits quite nicely in actor Paul Giamatti‘s wheelhouse. Like the over-the-top Shoot’Em Up, the ridiculously bloody Ironclad, and this year’s John Dies at the End, Giamatti is more than willing to jump into a world with no ceiling. Or, as Giamatti and the British say, to get “wet.” Wet is certainly what Giamatti gets in director David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis. Rarely does Giamatti speak a line which isn’t abstract or approaching any level of sanity in the film. Key point: Giamatti’s character’s towel and fungus. In the film, a sweaty and disgruntled Giamatti emotionally clings onto a dirty towel and speaks of a fungus between his toes urging him to kill. Countless interpretations could be applied to their actual meaning, but, clearly, Giamatti has his own explanations, explanations that even the actor wouldn’t fully discuss. Here’s what actor Paul Giamatti had to say about working with David Cronenberg, the film’s straight-faced wackiness, and why he won’t tell you what the towel means:

Music and sound are not just elements that underscore select scenes in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, they are each specifically discussed and used in the story itself. Cosmopolis follows 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) as he drives around Manhattan over the course of a day, trying to get from one end of the city to the other to get a haircut. A seemingly simple premise, but as any Cronenberg fan (or those who have read Don DeLillo’s novel) know, it does not stay simple for long. It is clear that Eric is incredibly rich and his wealth has caused him to become removed from (although still amused by) the general population – a point that is further driven home as he travels through town in a showy, tricked out, bulletproof white stretch limousine. The score, created by composer Howard Shore and indie rock band Metric, may start the film at a kinetic pace with “White Limos” (which almost echoes the opening to U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name”), but once Eric enters his limo it is not just the music that is suddenly stripped away, all noise evaporates once he is inside. We learn that Eric had lined his limo with cork to eliminate street noise and it is this lack of ambient noise that makes every move, breath, and grunt in his limo sound all the more intrusive and off-putting. Cronenberg does not let up with this complete lack of ambience, and it makes the expansive limo feel no bigger than

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our Cannes 2012 coverage. Cosmopolis hits theaters this weekend, August 17th. Though it is faintly vulgar to talk of any actors in terms of only one project, who would have thought a couple of years ago that the two lead actors from Twilight would both feature In Competition at Cannes, starring in brave and bold adaptations of two iconic, but problematic American novels? Two days after Kristen Stewart’s next release – Walter Salles’ On The Road – screened in the Theatre Lumiere, the same screen played host to the Robert Pattinson-starring adaptation of Don DeLillo‘s Cosmopolis. The film follows Eric Packer (Pattinson), a young billionaire asset manager on a journey across a thronging New York City in his limousine, flanked by his head of security Torval (Kevin Durand) in order to get a hair cut. Along the way he encounters colleagues (Jay Baruchel, Samantha Morton, and Philip Nozuko), protesters (Mathieu Amalric), his wife (Sarah Gadon) and lovers (Juliette Binoche and Patricia McKenzie), all of whom contribute to unravel his cold, clinical world. It helps little that the New York he seeks to cross is in open revolt, with anti-corporation demonstrations making way for violence, and somewhere amongst it, an unknown killer stalks Eric.

This hasn’t been the most prolific of summers as far as blockbusters are concerned. The Avengers gave this season a promising start, but no action film came close to matching its scope and sheer love for fun. Last month was the most disappointing proof of that, with the very flawed Amazing Spider-Man and the messy finale we got with The Dark Knight Rises. However, there’s been a good run of independent releases so far – Killer Joe, Headhunters, Safety Not Guarnteed, Your Sister’s Sister, Take This Waltz, etc. —  and this August is no different, with plenty of small and greatly satisfying offerings to be discovered.

Simon has already weighed in on Moonrise Kingdom – his first Cannes film of 2012 – but we check in with him to see what 6 films he’s looking forward to the most. Plus, Movies.com’s Peter Hall faces off against Landon Palmer in the Movies News Pop Quiz, and we end up asking important questions about repertory screenings. Will the films of the future digitally last forever? Download Episode #134

By now, it seems fairly obvious that this year’s Cannes Film Festival will serve as a coming out party of sorts for Robert Pattinson, at least, a coming out party for the actor’s talents beyond just sucking blood and turning girls into emotion pancakes, as he’s been doing for years with his work in The Twilight Saga. The actor’s performance in David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis looks better with every trailer released, and the film’s in-competition premiere at the festival should be a watershed moment for Pattinson. But Pattinson has now added another Cannes-centric project that will help establish him as an actor who is more than capable of breaking out of Edward Cullen’s coffin. Pattinson has signed on to star in Jean-Stephane Sauvaire‘s (Johnny Mad Dog) Mission: Blacklist. The film’s script has been adapted from its source material, military interrogator Eric Maddox’s (written with Davin Seay) novel “Mission: Black List #1,” by Band of Brothers scribe Erik Jendresen. The book is described as “a psychological thriller that details the true, inside story of the search for Saddam Hussein and the interrogator, Eric Maddox, who spearheaded his capture.” The film will be sold at the Cannes Film Market by Embankment Films.

The first teaser we saw for David Cronenberg’s upcoming film Cosmopolis gave us a glimpse of a stylish, violent work that not only looked like a throwback to the disturbing genre pictures the director made his name on, but that also seemed to be taking a page out of the playbook of Gaspar Noé, a director of French films who made waves in the U.S. with a couple of mind-bendingly stylized films in Irreversible and Enter the Void. That was probably enough to get film fans to mark this one on their calendars already, but after the movie was announced as being a big part of this year’s Cannes lineup, anticipation for Cosmopolis has reached a fever pitch. Or, at least, that’s what its producers are hoping, because they’ve put some new trailers out to capitalize on the Cannes announcement. This one comes from French site Allocine, and it expands on the colorful visuals and cringe inducing violence of the teaser trailer by giving us a better idea of what the story of this film is going to be about. Cosmopolis seems to be a timely tale, taking advantage of the growing Occupy Movement and the mounting frustrations with the world’s richest 1%, as much of the violence we saw in the teaser has now been given the context of being the brutal results of a world rebelling against its ruling class. A ruling class that, in this film, is represented by Robert Pattinson.

After literally days of rampant speculation and fanciful rumor-spreading (on my part), this year’s official line-up for the Cannes 2012 Film Festival has officially been unveiled by officials in the South of France. Officially. Unsurprisingly, and as predicted, my own 13 film wishlist was largely completely wrong – but I did predict a massive four (including the absence, thankfully, of Terrence Malick), and in my defense, Michael Haneke’s Love was the 14th film on my list until I decided to oust it for timing reasons. Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson and Tom Hardy will battle each other as Killing Them Softly (the awfully renamed adaptation of Cogan’s Trade), Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and the other needlessly renamed flick, Lawless (why not just keep it as The Wettest County?) compete for the Palme d’Or.

Cannes! It’s upon us! At this stage last year, I offered my pre-festival wishlist for what films might screen at Cannes (and got six out of eighteen picks correct in the process), which was based on rumors and guesswork from around the net. This year, in the interest of embracing the spirit of imagination, the emphasis is on spurious gossip and pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. Plucking films that might have an outside chance of screening on the Croisette this year (in some cases so far outside they won’t even be in France until months after the fest, probably), I’ve compiled my Ultimate Cannes 2012 Wishlist. The caveat to this of course is that probably very few of the bloody things will actually screen – at least not to the majority of the collected press – but what’s life without whimsy? Yes, the bent is firmly on American films, and English language ones, but in my defense, I don’t care. It says “wishlist” up there for a good reason. Realism aside, here are 13 movies I hope play at Cannes this May.

Whoa. Alright. If Robert Pattinson is trying to break out of his mold, he couldn’t have picked a better project than David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis. At least if he was looking for a movie where he gets to pee in a car, he picked well. Based on the book from Don DeLillo, the basic synopsis involves a millionaire rocking his way across Manhattan. From the teaser trailer, it looks like 80s-style Cronenberg with a touch of Jacob’s Ladder. Fair warning. It’s got some large-breasted nudity and some interesting gun violence. If Robert Pattinson was trying to break out of his mold… Check it out for yourself:

It’s already the second day of 2012, which means we’ll all be sober within the next day or two. It also means that we can officially start looking (through blurry eyes) ahead to the future. A future of promise and potential. A future of hope. A future of tingling anticipation that the road stretched out in front of us that leads to the cinema will be paved with gold. Will there be piles of excrement along the way? Of course, but we don’t know how many or how badly they’ll tarnish our yellow-bricked roller coaster ride. All we can see from this far out is the shimmering wonder of movies to come – the vast unknown that looks wonderful (and might just live up to the hype). In past years (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), we’ve gone with a fairly arbitrary count of 20-30 movies. This year, we decided to prove that there were 52 movies worth prematurely celebrating (even though what we found were many more). That’s one for every week (even if there are some weeks with a few and some weeks with none at all). Regardless of the number, Rob Hunter, Neil Miller, Kate Erbland, Allison Loring, Landon Palmer, Brian Salisbury and Cole Abaius have joined forces to remind us all that there are a lot of great movies to hope for this year. Go grab a calendar and pencil in everything that gets your blood pressure up toward unsafe levels. It’s going to be a busy, flick-filled

Top-tier director David Cronenberg hasn’t released a movie in four years, so anticipation to see more of his work is kind of at a fever pitch. I know first hand, as I just tried to buy a ticket to a festival showing of his new 2011 release A Dangerous Method and discovered that it was completely sold out. Why is there so much excitement over Cronenberg releasing a new film? Well, it’s because the guy always makes movies that are edgy and cool, and more often than not, they end up also being pretty good. That’s why I was interested to hear that Shock Till You Drop got ahold of Cronenberg while he was doing publicity for A Dangerous Method and asked him about the possibility of doing sequels to a couple of his best films, and his responses were encouraging enough that I thought I’d pass the info along. When asked about the rumors circulating a couple of years ago that he was working on a remake of his 1986 sci-fi/horror classic The Fly, Cronenberg revealed that a reboot wasn’t exactly the real story, but that something a bit more interesting is a possibility. He explained, “The Fly is not exactly a remake, it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. Yeah, that was a thing. I’ve written a script of that, and I don’t know if that’s going to really happen, but that has to do with Fox.” Watching Jeff Goldblum slowly morph into a slobbery fly creature left a

Somewhere out there, a movie geek already lamenting the death of exclusivity and the sacrosanct nature of heroes just broke into the tears he or she has been holding back. “That guy from Twilight” is going to be in a movie with the director of Videodrome. According to The Wrap, the young actor will replace Colin Farrell as the star of Cosmopolis – playing Eric Packer, an insanely wealthy man who treks across a huge slightly-futuristic metropolis while someone’s trying to assassinate him. There will be speculation about whether this will help Pattinson move beyond Twilight, but…he already has. He’s been in two minorly successful indie flicks, and he’s appearing in Water for Elephants later this year. In fact, there are probably a ton of people out there that don’t even think of him as the Twilight guy either because they haven’t seen the movies (and also don’t own Hello Kitty merchandise of any kind) or because they’ve seen his other work. This sounds like a great pairing, and an opportunity for Cronenberg to rip a great performance from a fairly sleepy actor who can’t seem to express emotion beyond lovesick irritation. Colin Farrell would have been better, but Pattinson will be more interesting.

Another day comes, and another opportunity for us to lay down some of the day’s hot news stories is upon is. But instead, we begin your Thursday with The B-Roll. Or as we like to say, “And now, for something completely different.”