10 Movies We're Excited About in 2012
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Wes Anderson's first live-action film since The Darjeeling Limited, and his first period piece ever, Moonrise Kingdom stars newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman as two 12-year-olds who fall in love and run away together. Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand play some of the adults flummoxed by the young pair's disappearance. Though no U.S. premiere date has been set yet (Focus Features is releasing), the film is scheduled to open in mid-May in France, so a Cannes slot seems like a good possibility.
The Master 
Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up to There Will Be Blood stars PTA regular Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, a spiritual guru said to be inspired by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Joaquin Phoenix co-stars as a Dodd follower, in his first post-I'm Still Here role. When the original financiers backed out of this long-percolating movie in 2010, the film was saved by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison's daughter Megan Ellison, who has become a new Hollywood player, also investing in True Grit, Bridesmaids and upcoming films from Wong Kar Wai and Kathryn Bigelow. No specific release date has been set for Master, but a Weinstein Company spokesperson told us we can expect to see it in the fall of 2012. And speaking of Ellison and Bigelow ...
Untitled Kathryn Bigelow Osama Bin Laden project
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker was not just the first film directed by a woman to win the Best Picture Oscar but one of the lowest-grossing movies to do so in history -- making it perhaps the only true underdog victor of the Hollywood popularity contest in decades. There's a cloud of secrecy around Bigelow's follow-up; its IMDb cast list is qualified as "rumored," and even its temporary working title is in dispute. What we do know is that the movie, apparently at one point titled Kill Bin Laden, has something to do with the hunt to find and kill the al-Qaida leader; that it's Bigelow's second collaboration with Hurt Locker writer-producer Mark Boal; and that the release date has already been bumped from Oct. 12, allegedly due to the filmmakers not wanting to be perceived as trying to influence the presidential elections. The film now is scheduled for release on Dec. 19, 2012. Maybe.
This Is Forty 
Pete and Debbie from Knocked Up
Another not-quite-a-sequel, Judd Apatow's fourth directorial effort focuses on the marriage of Pete and Debbie, the characters played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in Knocked Up. While a few actors from Apatow's 2007 hit are returning -- including Charlyne Yi, Jason Segel and Apatow-Mann daughters Iris and Maude -- the film also features a few high-profile newcomers to Apatovia, including Melissa McCarthy, Megan Fox, and Albert Brooks, playing Rudd's dad. Originally scheduled for a summer 2012 release, Universal pushed Forty to Dec. 21 so that the studio's Snow White and the Hunstman can beat that other Snow White movie, the Tarsem-directed Mirror, Mirror, to market by a month.
Computer Chess 
Artist rendering of Computer Chess
Andrew Bujalski, American indie film's most stalwart advocate for celluloid (he cut each of his previous, 16mm-shot features, Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, on an outdated flatbed machine), is pulling a 180 with his next film. Computer Chess, a period piece set in 1980, was shot in Austin in September on modified video cameras from that era. Having partially crowdsourced his financing through UnitedStatesArtists.org, Bujalski has been editing Chess this fall (yes, on a computer) with an eye toward a festival premiere in 2012.
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