The Black Dahlia -- I'm a huge De Palma fan, but I somehow managed to miss this one during its theatrical run. Colleagues who've seen the film assure me to take my time catching up with it. And that makes me sad, kinda. Extras include three featurettes and ... that's it.

The Descent -- The best horror flick of the year finally hits R1 DVD ... even though I've owned the British DVD for about a year now. The good news is that there seems to be all-new goodies on the Lionsgate DVD, which means I'll be dropping another 17 bucks the day after Christmas. Extras include the "unrated" version (which offers the original UK ending), two commentaries, a 45-minute making-of doco, featurettes, outtakes, deleted scenes, etc. If you're a horror fan and you skipped The Descent during its theatrical run, you're forgiven. But buy/rent/borrow this DVD some time soon!

Factotum -- The always-good Matt Dillon goes extra-good in this sobering yet colorful piece of Bukowski-inspired storytelling. Excellent supporting cast boasts strong work from Lili Taylor, Fisher Stevens and Marisa Tomei. Extras include and making-of piece and the theatrical trailer.

Haven -- A bizarrely unsatisfying ensemble piece in which Bill Paxton, Agnes Bruckner, Orlando Bloom, Sarah Carter, Zoe Saldana and Stephen Dillane bounce around the Bahamas, occasionally stopping to pay attention to some stray plot thread. There's one featurette that might help to decipher the confused mess of a movie, but why bother? Oh yeah, Orlando Bloom....

Jackass: Number Two -- More of the same. Some love it, some hate it. The DVD comes with lots of extra footage: unrated stuff, deleted scenes, outtakes, bloopers, commentaries, random craziness, flatulence, etc.

The Last Kiss -- Zach Braff stars in a romantic drama that''s also a remake of an Italian film that's not even five years old. Co-stars include Jacinda Barrett, Rachel Bilson, Marley Shelton and Casey Affleck. Extras include two audio commentaries, four featurettes, deleted scenes, outtakes, and a music video.

Someone get this gal a Delorean, because Scarlett Johannson has been doing a lot of time traveling lately. In Michael Bay's flop, The Island, she was trapped in a frightening vision of the future, but lately she's been dipping into the past with increasing regularity ever since Girl with a Pearl Earring.

She can currently be seen in the 1940s era The Black Dahlia, and will also appear in Christopher Nolan's turn of the century magic thriller, The Prestige. After that she has lined up The Other Boleyn Girl (1500s), Napoleon and Betsy (1800s) and now Mary, Queen of Scots (back to the 1500s), in which the gal will take on the role of Queen Mary of Scotland.

While we support Scarlett's love of the historical pieces, can we please see her out of a hoop skirt and in a t-shirt and jeans sometime soon?

In a display of negativity that we here at Cinematical can't help but applaud, the people at Fametracker (AKA the brilliant minds who came up with The JT Walsh Awards years before we did) have put together a list of their 10 least-anticipated films for the fall. It's a tight race for the top -- so tight, in fact, that The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause can only reach as high as 6.5 -- but in the end it's a star-free, violent epic in a dead language that beats out even Rocky Balboa for first place. Yes, that's right: For what is sure to be the only time, Apocalypto is number one.

Go check out the list and see which film you're most pissed off to see there, and what you think they left off. Me, I'm having a hard time not getting a little annoyed about the inclusion of The Black Dahlia, despite the admittedly troubling fact that it's resting on the mildly unreliable (albeit pretty) backs of Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson.

[via Pop Candy]

Though the full slate doesn't come out until tomorrow, a few of the films that will appear at the Venice Film Festival have been announced, including The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma's eagerly anticipated James Ellroy adaptation, which will have its world premiere at the festival's opening night. This is actually one the four or five films I'm looking forward to most this year, so I'm excited (and also very scared) to see what the critics at the festival will have to say about. Can Josh Hartnett actually carry a serious film? Does De Palma still have it? And will I ever understand why the hell the world loves Scarlett Johansson?

Apart from the opening film, however, the films revealed thus far have a decidedly European flavor. In the Venice Days sidebar alone -- an ostensibly noncompetitive section of the festival that nevertheless offers a couple of cash prizes (there is distribution money available, and first-time films screened in Venice Days are eligible for the festival's new director prize) -- are films from Denmark, Italy, Morocco and Spain.

Check back tomorrow for the festival's full slate, and to find out if David Lynch's Inland Empire will, in fact, finally make its debut.

The Venice Film Festival may be in (rumored) financial trouble, and facing a possible challenge from an upstart fest in Rome but it nevertheless retains the power to draw the big names, both to its jury and its screens. Though its director insist the focus of this year's festival (which will run from August 30-September 9) will be on European films, the group of American projects expected to debut in Venice is pretty darn impressive. According to Variety, David Lynch's Inland Empire (once rumored to be bowing at Cannes) has been confirmed for the festival -- it'll be screening out of competition -- and Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia (YAY!), Woody Allen's Scoop (Have you seen the trailer? Yawn.), Home of the Brave, Children of Men, and World Trade Center are all assumed to be on the slate as well.

In addition to the American products, Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute has been confirmed, and The Golden Door (an Italian film about Ellis Island) and Petites peurs partagées, the latest from the legendary Alain Resnais, are also likely to screen. The festival will also feature a tribute to Roberto Rossellini, who would have turned 100 this year; the tribute will include screenings of newly restored prints of his films (Open City, without flecks of white all over it? Holy awesome.)

After James Ellroy's raves about the film version of his novel The Black Dahlia, the writer's fans allowed themselves a bit of optimism about the Brian De Palma-directed adaptation. Now, though, six lucky viewers who attended an early screening in Sherman Oaks this week have shared their impressions of the film with AICN, and they range from total disgust ("Josh Hartnett shouldn't be paid to carry luggage, let alone a movie.") to breathless praise ("it was one of those moments where I felt pure love & respect for this director.").

I've been looking forward to this movie forever and am still clinging to my hope, despite the few incredibly harsh write-ups. One of the reviewers who liked the film mentioned that, based on a focus group he attended after the screening, many of his fellow audience members just "didn't get it." While that's certainly not encouraging, his subsequent suggestion that the film (in this early stage) was "missed" because of its uncompromising complexity and reliance on noir conventions certainly is. After all, those are the best things about the screen version of L.A. Confidential, and De Palma could certainly do worse than walking in that film's footsteps.

In 1979, James Ellroy wrote an incredibly intense novel based on a brutal murder that took place in LA in 1947; the book was also heavily influenced by the unsolved murder of Ellroy's own mother when he was child. The 1947 killer was also never caught.

For the past nine months, Brian De Palma has been working on a film version of Ellroy's work (called The Black Dahlia, after the nickname the press gave the victim) that stars Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart and, since it's apparently now illegal to make a movie without her, Scarlett Johansson. And, according to informal statements by Ellory this week, De Palma has finished shooting and the film is ready to be edited; there is even a chance it will be ready in time for a Cannes premiere in May. In addition, though Ellroy was initially very unhappy with the movie, he has now come around. Not only did he describe (with typical grace) the three hours of dailies he saw as "fucking gorgeous" and the compositions as "amazing," but he also made a rather bold statement about the film as whole: "the big story coming out of this is...Hartnett, who is a revelation." Whoa.

This is great news for Ellroy fans - his books are outrageously complex, and the task of translating them to the big screen must be unimaginably difficult. (L.A. Confidential is so brilliant partially because of how seamlessly it cut and changed the book, without sacrificing quality or credibility.) It sounds like De Palma and writer Josh Friedman just may have done it - after all, if Ellroy didn't like what he'd seen, he certainly wouldn't be shy about.

[via GreenCine Daily]