Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. Though we took a week off for the holidays, the pre-Christmas trailer flood has slowed to a trickle; that said, we’ve managed to rustle up six new films for you. Check ‘em all out after the jump.

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For all the remakes and reboots and 3-D blockbusters, 2011 was a great year for film actors, with a wealth of terrific performances for us to choose from. What’s more, in sharp contrast to most years in recent memory, there was a bumper crop of terrific roles for great actresses — a trend that we’d like to see stick around for a while. After the jump, we’ll tell you about some of the best performances we saw this year, and why we’re still talking about them. Read More »

Polaroids have been immortalizing actors on the sets of their latest project for decades now. The retro form of photography is generally utilized for makeup or continuity purposes, and on occasion, serves as a catalogue for on-set shenanigans. Actors such as Johnny Depp, Audrey Hepburn, and Jason Schwartzman have all mugged for (or in some cases, ignored) the camera in between takes, blurring the line between their fictional characters and reality. We’ve unearthed photographs from a few cinematic gems, both old and new, that provide an intimate glimpse at life on set of projects like Taxi Driver, The Office, and more. Venture behind-the-scenes with a collection of our favorite shots after the jump. Read More »

Whine, if you like, about REM announcing their break-up and then slowly rolling out a final single, news of a career-spanning compilation, and now a pair of videos for that song, “We All Go Back to Where We Belong”; we think the band has more than earned its long good-bye. The just-released clips, directed by Michael Stipe and filmmaker Dominic DeJoseph, are simple, black-and-white shots of Kirsten Dunst and artist/activist John Giorno that serve as visual portraits and recall Andy Warhol’s screen tests. Watch them after the jump and let us know if you’re satisfied with what may be the last REM videos we’ll ever see.

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The 49th annual New York Film Festival drew to a close last night with screenings of The Descendants, the new (and rather wonderful) comedy/drama from director Alexander Payne (Sideways, Election, About Schmidt). Its centerpiece performance is a magnificent, nuanced turn by George Clooney, but there’s another one well worth mentioning: that of Shailene Woodley, the heretofore-unknown-to-your-author actor (she apparently co-stars on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, whatever the hell that is) who plays his 17-year-old daughter Alexandra. Woodley appears in nearly as much of the picture as Clooney, in a role just a complicated and difficult as his, and in scene after scene, she just nails it. Woodley’s complex (and relatively unsung, thus far anyway) performance puts a final spotlight on perhaps the most encouraging trend at this year’s NYFF: a rich assortment of extraordinary female performances.

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Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of their favorite looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!

This week, on Go Fug Yourself, celebrated the hotness of Josh Charles. We took a look at the train wreck interview ensembles of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. We treated you to an up-close gander at Kanye’s new clothing line. We wondered what Michelle Monaghan did to her face — it can’t just be the bangs. We worried about why Jared Leto could possibly be wearing a mesh shirt (there is no good reason, unless you’re in a Right Said Fred tribute band). We gave props to Kirsten Dunst, and some help to Emma Stone. We wondered what the heck Natalia Vodianova was thinking when she got dressed in Paris this week. And, finally, we came up with a new role for Katie Holmes.

Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got seven new chunks of varyingly interesting fall fare; check ‘em all out after the jump.

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We’ve been excited about Hesher ever since we first heard about the film, which debuted at Sundance last year. So we’re definitely planning to see it when it makes its theatrical debut this weekend. But despite our anticipation, we do have one worry: that we’ll never be able to look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt the same way again. You see, he plays Hesher‘s title character, a greasy, ratty-haired, tattooed metal guy with bad teeth and penchant for farting. Thankfully, Gordon-Levitt is hardly the first actor to sacrifice beauty or likability for a good role. After the jump, we recall ten more roles that killed our crushes, on everyone from Charlize Theron to Christian Bale.

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As we may have mentioned a few hundred times in the past few weeks, we loved Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. But we have to admit that something was missing from the last two episodes, which aired Sunday: Morgan Turner. You may not know her by name, but the 11-year-old actress dominated every scene she appeared in as Mildred’s haughty, spoiled daughter Veda — a character so vile she earned a place in our roundup of literature’s most evil children. Although Evan Rachel Wood’s portrayal of a grown-up Veda was fine, as far as we’re concerned the character belongs to Turner. That got us thinking of other instances of relatively unknown child actors stealing the show from their big-name co-stars. Ten of our favorites are after the jump.

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So, this is an odd pairing: Kirsten Dunst — the sunny, faintly bratty, baby-faced star we’ll always remember as Marie Antoinette, Torrance from Bring It On, and Claudia from Interview with the Vampire – and Lars von Trier, the director most recently known for that scene in Antichrist where Charlotte Gainsbourg… well, if you don’t know yet, we’ll spare you the Friday morning spit take. Von Trier’s latest is called Melancholia, and it bears the tag line “a beautiful movie about the end of the world.” The trailer kicks off at Dunst’s character’s elaborate wedding and foreshadows some kind of space apocalypse (our best guess from the last shot is that Earth gets butt-bumped to oblivion by a much larger planet). Melancholia looks gorgeous, thrilling, and over-the-top in equal measure, which seems about right for the follow-up to Antichrist. The all-star cast also includes Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, and Alexander Skarsgård. Tell us whether the film, which premieres next month at Cannes, is on your must-see list after the jump.

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