Everybody knows that the world is going to be ending sooner rather than later. Heck, the end of days is getting so close that we’ve been counting down our must-see apocalypse films. But until I watched the trailer for the upcoming comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it didn’t occur to me how much fun those last few days we all spend on Earth are going to be. I mean, other than when faced with impending asteroid-related doom, when else is a guy like Steve Carell going to get a chance at a girl like Keira Knightley? Stress-induced romantic hook-ups aren’t the only perks of the world ending, either. There’s slacking off at work, taking part in some cathartic looting, and who knows how many other base pleasures to partake in. Heck, this movie sees Patton Oswalt turning into some sort of hedonistic little Satyr, Gillian Jacobs kissing everyone on the mouth, and Connie Britton hosting dinner parties for her single friends. Not only are these all great ideas for how to spend your last days, they’re also glimpses at a movie that seems to have a stellar supporting cast. Check out how the end times might look with the first trailer for Seeking a Friend for the End of the World after the break.

Listen, everybody knows that eventually a world-beating threat is going to come out of its hiding place on the dark side of the moon and try to take over Earth. That’s just obvious. What the upcoming SXSW midnight movie Iron Sky does is present our eventual moon-birthed doom with an interesting twist. It asks the question, what if the hulking space armada that eventually threatens the well-being of free folk everywhere is actually the Nazis regrouped and back for a second go-around at world domination? Crap, why didn’t I think of this before? Of course this is what the Nazis have been up to! Energia Productions have been teasing this movie for quite a while now, but now that it’s ready to hit the festival circuit, they’ve hit us with a full-length trailer that, more than any thing else, proves how far you can stretch a $10m budget if you’re absolutely, batshit crazy. This movie seems to have all sorts of spaceship stuff, all sorts of battle sequences, myriad cities being destroyed; and it’s all presented alongside that patented, iconic production design that only the Nazis can pull off. Give the new Iron Sky trailer a look to see just how warped in the head our Nazi overlords are, and what sort of over-the-top tech they’ll be using to blow us all to smithereens. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared, right?

MTV, TMZ, The Real Housewives of Whereever, Dancing With the Whoever…modern pop culture is a wasteland of broken people being made famous for little other than the willingness to humiliate themselves. But the bigger problem is, more and more we’re viewing what the people involved in these projects do not as humiliation, but as “living the dream.” If you’re one of the good ones who thinks that the current cultural milieu in the United States is poisonous and is creating a society of vain, ignorant, entitled freaks…well, then director Bobcat Goldthwait has a cathartic expression of violence in store for you. Goldthwait’s latest film, God Bless America, is about a man who gets pushed to the brink and responds by going on a murderous rampage where he systematically mows down all of pop culture’s most vile, vapid icons (with some collateral damage involving rude, selfish, everyday behavior along the way). Check out the film’s red band trailer after the break.

The teaser trailer for the upcoming Guy Pearce vehicle Lockout (formerly Lock-Out) gave us a glimpse at the rogue charm Pearce has mustered up in the lead role, but it didn’t let us in on much of what the movie is actually about. The new full-length trailer over at IGN gives us a bit more of that Pearce sass, but it also lays out pretty much the whole plot. Some of my favorite movies ever take multiple genres and blend them together. Sometimes blending genres creates a tonally weird mess (Cowboys & Aliens), but when you do it right you create something fresh and new out of used parts (Serenity), and it seems like Lockout has some potential to do the latter.

I don’t know where you stand on the issue, but the release of a new Wes Anderson movie is pretty much cause for a gigantic celebration around my house. I know that he’s kind of a love him or hate him director, but personally, his dry humor, fairy tale tone, and satirical yet sentimental look at neurotic intellectuals hits my funny bone in a way few other things do. And his meticulous attention to production design detail make his movies a joy to pick through and study over the course of multiple re-watches. These are films that grow in my esteem over time, and his newest work, Moonrise Kingdom, looks like it’s going to fit, perhaps quite predictably, right in that oeuvre. Anderson’s movies always feel like they’re taking place in a world slightly more magical than our own, but his last film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, went a step further by being an animated film starring talking animals. Though Moonrise Kingdom sees the director stepping back into the world of live action, it looks like he’s bringing more of that animated absurdity back with him. This trailer has impossible tree forts, Ed Norton in a Cub Scout uniform saying things like “Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop,” lightning strikes, and little kids brandishing homemade weapons. Make no mistake, Wes Anderon’s latest movie looks absolutely bat-poop crazy, and I’m super stoked to see how far he’s willing to take things. The final scene, where Bill Murray interacts with some children [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

If you’ve seen the 2009 Greek release Dogtooth, then you know that Efthymis Filippou is a unique storyteller. That film, which details the lives of a family with an interesting take on child rearing, plays like an onion of crazy that makes your brain cry harder every layer of plot you peel away. If you haven’t seen Dogtooth, drop everything you’re doing and go watch that one before you read further here. It’s still streaming on Netflix…just prepare to be disturbed. Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s talk about this new movie, L. It’s a film about a man living in a car that’s set to debut at this year’s Sundance. Okay, to be more specific, it’s a film about a divorced man who lives in a car, whose family lives in another car, and who often has meetings with him in random parking lots. One of those meetings makes up the bulk of this trailer, which kind of plays like a weird microfilm. As you might imagine, this isn’t such a great way to live, even for a professional driver/honey delivery man, so the protagonist is also wrestling with the idea of giving up cars for motorcycles.

When the theatrical trailer was released for Paramount’s upcoming horror movie The Devil Inside, I responded to it by groaning and putting my face in my hands. There wasn’t anything in the footage that made this film look any different from the one million exorcism movies or the one thousand found footage horror movies that are already out there. Was this project really necessary? Well, the new red band trailer hints that though it might not be necessary, The Devil Inside might still be pretty fun. No, there isn’t anything revolutionary going on here that’s going to separate this film from the rest of the pack in your mind, but it’s starting to look like this one goes a few steps further than the rest of the recent exorcism films as far as big time spectacle, creepy effects work, and offensive content goes. This time around we get extended bone-crunching gymnastics, camera-splattering vaginal blood, lots of action, and a bit with a baby that’s bound to give you the willies.

Director Lasse Hallström’s newest picture, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is about an eccentric sheik who loves fishing so much he’s willing to pay obscene amounts of money to create a permanent river in the deserts of Yemen, stocked with salmon. It then becomes up to his legal council to find a fisheries expert who can make it happen. And here we have the set-up for a really boring movie. Except, watching the trailer, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen doesn’t seem boring at all. Most of that probably has to do with the fact that the legal council and the fisheries expert are played by Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor, two actors with more charm in their fingernails than most people have in their whole bodies. I kind of have big crushes on both of them, so watching McGregor play nervous and proper, and Blunt playing blunt and driven, and seeing the two of them turn banter into romance…well, it all just seems to be too cute for words. Add in Kristin Scott Thomas as a sassy newspaper woman with shady motives, and this may be a movie with too much charm for its own good.

My anticipation for the original The Expendables was massive, only to be matched in size and scope by my disappointment after I actually saw the film. Stallone’s new version of Rambo was awesome, it was packed full of R-rated action movie sleaze and it wasn’t at all ashamed of being exploitation. The Expendables looked like it was going to be a continuation of that, and also a massive team-up of bitchin’ 80s action stars the likes of which we’ve never seen. It didn’t really turn out to be all that though. It was kind of lame and boring, and really it was just a Stallone and Statham team-up movie with a handful of other cameos thrown in. So I’m approaching The Expendables 2 much more cautiously. But even with lowered expectations, I can’t help but feel a little bit of a tingle watching the first teaser. I don’t know if it’s going to be the classless, take no prisoners, R-rated schlock that I’m hoping for, but at least it looks like this one is finally going to be the huge team-up of old guys that I wanted from the first. The team-up aspect is all that can be discerned from this teaser though. It’s a teaser in the truest sense, basically we get the names and head shots of the principal cast and not much else.

The first glimpse we got of Peter Berg’s upcoming board game adaptation (it hurts me somewhere deep to have to type those words) played a little coy with us, and at first made it look like the film would be sticking to the Battleship board game’s naval battle roots. Once a spaceship popped up and the whole thing turned into an alien invasion movie, it was kind of a surprise. This second look at Battleship, however, doesn’t bother to take any time tying this movie to the board game at all. It’s all alien invasion from beginning to end. And with a color palette very reminiscent of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, a bunch of elaborately techno ships and weapons that look like they’re right out of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, sound effects that seem to be ripped from Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and a big ol’ headline that says this movie is from the company that brought you Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, I think it’s safe to say that Universal is aiming this thing less at fans of grid based strategy games and more at fans of Michael Bay’s big, dumb Transformers movies. It leaves me with a question: if this movie isn’t going to have anything to do with naval battles at all, why even attach it to the Battleship name? Why not just admit what you’re doing and call it Gobots? Check out the new trailer below.

The trailer for The Five-Year Engagement doesn’t make it look like a movie I’m too excited to see. Which is strange, because it’s not just the latest film from director Nicholas Stoller, it’s also his latest writing collaboration with Jason Segel, and I love pretty much everything that these guys do. I think the problem is that this one looks like it’s going to be a romantic comedy that’s a little bit heavier on the relationship drama than it will be on the comedy. I like my Jason Segel more silly and whimsical than the one I’m seeing here, dealing with the trials and tribulations of loving a woman who’s career path is taking his life in a different direction than he saw it going. On the flip side of the coin, this little two-and-a-half minute trailer is pretty much the most comedy I’ve ever seen Segel’s co-star Emily Blunt do, and she seems to be rather good at it. Not every actor can do comedy, so you’re never sure what you’re going to get until they try. The image of Kate Hudson getting shot in the leg with an arrow really doesn’t do much for me, but when it happens to Blunt here I got my one solid laugh from the trailer. Emily Blunt certainly isn’t my issue. Check out the first trailer for The Five-Year Engagement after the break.

Despite the fact that they have a go-to wheelhouse of gags that include mostly low-fi special effects, shrill noises, absurdism, and repetition, I find that I never get used to the strange video creations of comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Every time I sit down to watch an episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job or take a look at a short that they’ve made for the Internet I have a general idea of what’s coming my way, but they always manage to get under my skin again nonetheless. Some people just find the stuff they do to be uncomfortable and weird, other people think that it’s fall down hilarious. Me? I fall somewhere in the middle. I laugh at how uncomfortable and weird they are always able to get, and then I move on. Which is why I was impressed at how much they were able to creep me out in just a few seconds in the teaser trailer for their upcoming film Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, which ludicrously claims to be the most expensive movie ever made. A lot of people have been announced as appearing in the new Tim & Eric film, huge names in comedy like Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Zach Galifianakis, Will Forte, and Robert Loggia (he had that one orange juice commercial!). But you won’t see any of them appear in this teaser. No, what you’ll see is decidedly…different. You’ll just have to watch yourself.

There has been a lot of talk about the sexual content in Steve McQueen’s upcoming drama about sexual addiction and bratty little sisters, Shame. How explicit does it get? Exactly how many seconds is Michael Fassbender’s wang on screen? What gets glossed over a lot, however, is that Shame has been stuck with an NC-17 rating not because it shows too many boobs and butts, but because of how dirty, creepy, and downright…well, shameful watching this movie is going to make you feel. This is a no frills, brutally honest look at sexual compulsion, and the explicit content it contains is much more likely to repulse than it is to titillate. There is nothing healthy about the way Shame portrays human sexuality. You wouldn’t know that from the newest red band trailer for the movie though. What we get here is an isolated scene from the film, where Fassbender’s character eyeball humps a redhead on the subway. His wolflike leering and her suggestive thigh shuffling are interrupted by brief bursts of images from all of the dirty, dirty sex that Fassbender has over the course of the film, and the effect of watching it all cut together is rather… well, exciting. Make no mistake, this trailer paints Shame as being a much more pleasingly erotic experience than it really is, and is in some ways misleading.

Much ado has been made about the nudity and explicit sexual content in director Steve McQueen’s upcoming drama Shame. In it, Michael Fassbender plays a compulsive sex addict whose routine of perversion is interrupted when his flighty younger sister (Carey Mulligan) comes calling and crashes at his apartment for a few weeks, and the results are both a little titillating and a little repulsive. That’s understandable and everything, but the thing is, in all of the whispering and hullaballoo about wieners and boobs, I haven’t seen much reported about the fact that Mulligan shows off some of her talent for singing in this film. Which is a shame (pun acknowledged), because not only is she pretty good, but the scene where she performs “New York, New York” kind of becomes a huge moment in the film. Sorry to disappoint the pervs out there, but Shame isn’t all about sex stuff. So, while I have enjoyed the marketing for this film so far, this second full-length trailer played to me like a breath of fresh air. We get a lot of the same images from the first trailer, but this time they take on a whole other tone because Mulligan’s singing is playing over them. And then, once we’ve run through the already familiar images, the trailer ends with a scene of Mulligan finishing her performance, and her and Fassbender sharing a look. What’s really going through the heads of these two basketcases? You’ll have to check out the movie to [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Pixar is a company that has developed a very focused vision. They put creators first, they put human drama over visual spectacle, and then they knock the visuals out of the park anyway. For a while I’d been following along with all their releases in a state of near delight, enjoying each film they put out more than the one before it, and I started to think that they were as close to infallible as a movie studio could get. But then they put out Cars 2, which was kind of an overlong mess of juvenile humor set in a pun driven, unrelatable world. This wasn’t the Pixar I loved, this was for kids! But with Brave they seem to be getting back to the basics of what makes them great; stories that can be appreciated by kids and adults alike. Here we have a young girl who is different than everybody else, who doesn’t want to be what the rest of the world tells her a young girl should be. She’s driving at something that everybody is telling her she can’t do. She’s in danger, must rely on herself, and she must rise up and become something she never thought she could if she’s going to survive a great adventure. That’s more like it. That sounds like a prototypical Pixar movie, to a tee. Check out the trailer for yourself:

When The Lord of the Rings trilogy hit theaters and became a money-making juggernaut at the beginning of the last decade, a rash of fantasy epics soon followed, trying to ride the coattails. None of them were really up to the task of cashing in on the Rings craze though, unless you count Harry Potter, which was going on at the same time and was mostly its own thing. These days, HBO has a popular show called Game of Thrones, which is also based off of a series of fantasy novels and, at first glance, looks a lot like The Lord of the Rings, and the Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit is on its way as well, so it’s looking like we might see another fantasy epic craze hit theaters soon. If that’s the case, then Snow White and the Huntsman is the first of the bunch. This movie isn’t just part of a potential spate of fantasy movies though, it’s also one of a number of Snow White movies that will be hitting theaters in the coming years. And it has the honor of being the first out of that group. So, when all is said and done, what will this film be remembered as? Another attempted Lord of the Rings copycat or the creator of the Snow White craze? After seeing the first trailer for the film, I would guess copycat. If you listen to the dialogue, you can tell that this is a telling of [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Sometimes writing about movies on the internet has some benefits. I mean, we get all the crappy straight to DVD movies you can think of and sometimes free popcorn. We make next to no money, but in return we get to see movies early and sometimes, just sometimes, we get to see bits of movies before they’re ready. Such was the case recently when I, along with a few other journalists, got a chance to see about twenty minutes of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol projected in a true IMAX theater. If my description, reaction, and thoughts isn’t enough to get you wet with excitement, we’ve also got the new trailer for you, so come on in and read some more.

The first trailer for Mark Wahlberg’s upcoming team-up with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, Contraband, has hit, and it packs just about every action movie trope that you can think of into two and a half minutes. First off, Wahlberg plays a former criminal, who “got out of the life” and started a family. Then there’s the matter of a trouble-making brother (or in this case brother-in-law) who does something stupid and draws the protagonist back into doing “one last job.” We get the development of the wife and family being kidnapped, and even a Mexican stand-off with everybody pointing guns at each other. Pretty much this movie has everything an action fan could want. Check out the first trailer after the break.

Director Michel Hazanavicius’s newest film The Artist made a big splash at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Not only did it walk away with some decent praise from critics to plaster on its ads, it also earned the film’s star Jean Dujardin the Cannes award for Best Actor. That’s nothing to sneeze at. And also nothing to sneeze at is the visual ecstasy that is the new US trailer for this French film. The Artist is shot in black and white, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. The story takes place in late 20s Hollywood, and it tells the tale of a romance between a big star who is entering the twilight of his career and a bright young starlet who is just coming into the prime of hers, as the movie industry in general transitions from silent films to talkies. Not only is it set in old Hollywood, it’s made like a film would have been in old Hollywood, complete with no sound and including all of the old school, broad stage acting that one would have expected from silent films of the time. So why it would need a trailer specifically for the US is beyond me, but let’s continue.

When I heard that Alexander Payne’s next film was going to be starring George Clooney, what I was picturing didn’t look anything at all like what we get in the new trailer for The Descendants. Payne is a director who finds inspiration in the mundane. He casts regular looking people and shoots them in real life settings. There is always a relatably human element to the way he presents his characters, but there’s a sort of mocking, exploitive undercurrent as well. His films can be funny, but the humor is dark, it comes from exploring the baser nature of the human animal. Whether it’s an alcoholic Paul Giamatti drinking the spit bucket at a wine tasting in Sideways, a thrifty Jack Nicholson cutting corners on his wife’s funeral in About Schmidt, or a perverted Mark Harelik seducing a teenage girl with a Diet Mug Rootbeer in Election, Payne has always presented us with characters that you couldn’t 100% sympathize with.