At one end of his career, Neil LaBute was an up-and-coming talent to be reckoned with. He earned a reputation as intelligent Mamet-like artist of uncompromising vision with movies like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, harsh, cynical films that looked under the rock of humanity and found icky, squirmy things. At the other end, there's The Wicker Man, a genuine, "what was he thinking?" movie, and the curious dud The Shape of Things, which couldn't quite reconcile LaBute's stage hat with his cinema hat. In the middle we have Nurse Betty and Possession, two exceptional Hollywood entertainments with gleaming surfaces and dark souls. As with David Gordon Green and his delightful, mainstream comedy Pineapple Express, this type of "compromise" may represent LaBute's real calling.

With his seventh feature Lakeview Terrace, LaBute has once again managed to take a surface thriller and use it to work through some of humanity's ugliest and most hateful issues. It begins with a picture of suburbia, USA. Single father Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) struggles to get his kids up in the morning and off to school, but struggles even harder in relating to them. He knows how to boss them around, but doesn't understand them. (He makes his son change basketball jerseys to reflect "their" favorite team.) Later, he peers out the window and watches the new neighbors move in. He's clearly perturbed that it's a clean-cut white guy, Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson), married to a beautiful black girl, Lisa (Kerry Washington). We eventually learn that he has his reasons, his own emotional wounds, to explain why and how his buttons have been pushed, but it launches an all-out battle of wills.

For quite some time, the supernatural thriller Passengers -- starring Anne Hathaway as a grief counselor working with survivors of a plane crash (among them, Patrick Wilson) who begin to vanish -- had been quietly set on opening this Friday, September 5th.

However, as the date neared without any sign of a poster, a trailer, anything, I began rooting around the IMDb message boards and was about to post a Spanish-language trailer, complete with accompanying amateur translation, when along came a legit trailer (by way of Reelz Channel), a real poster (courtesy of IMP Awards), and a new date of October... well, just October for now.

Given his knack for ensemble dramas such as Nine Lives and Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, director Rodrigo Garcia seems to be a curious pick for the material, as the focus is less on what's happened to the group as a whole and more on Hathaway and Wilson investigating one another. Otherwise, the vibe I'm getting here is the one I had from 2004's The Forgotten: it has just enough of a hook to get me to watch it, but I doubt that the pay-off will live up to it.

What do you guys think? Will September's Lakeview Terrace and October's Rachel Getting Married satisfy your Wilson and Hathaway jones, respectively? And facing this Halloween's mainstream horror fare, is Sony, under the Tri-Star banner, about to dump this in a limited amount of theaters as they had with, say, Wind Chill, which just happened to star Prada pal Emily Blunt?

Cinematical has received these exclusive photos from the new flick Lakeview Terrace, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, and Kerry Washington. The film is a thriller about an interracial couple (Wilson and Washington) who move into their dream home in California; their California dreamin' becomes a nightmare when their next door neighbor, a high-strung cop (Jackson), takes issue with having an interracial couple in the neighborhood. Jackson, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman, increasingly (and intensely, if we know Jackson) harasses them, until the newlyweds decide to fight back.

Take a look at the pics, and let us know what you think about Jackson getting his mean-and-scary on in the flick.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Lakeview Terrace, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, and Patrick Wilson. Oh, the watchful eye of Jackson. This time around, he plays one of the creepiest types of bad guys -- a cop who can't be stopped. While a neighborhood like Lakeview Terrace sounds great and all, it becomes anything but when an interracial couple (Washington and Wilson) move next door to Jackson's racist cop. The man in blue starts off subtly -- an annoying light here, an awkward scare there, and then goes into full-on creepy neighbor to get the couple to hit the road. But Wilson will have none of that and crazily decides to take on the imbalanced cop.

Lakeview Terrace will hit theaters on September 19.

The rumors surrounding Watchmen began even before shooting did, most of which centered on what might become of the book's ending. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it for you (though you need to go out and buy a copy right now), but suffice to say, it's pretty dark. It's so dark that every fan is convinced it's unfilmable -- and certainly, the leaked scripts suggested that many scriptwriters felt the same way.

The rumors persist despite several reports to the contrary (including one from an extra that leaked months ago), but now Patrick Wilson is setting the record straight. He talked to the MTV Movies Blog and literally laughed off rumors that the film has a happy ending. "Ha! I have to say, if you know how much Zack believes in it, you wouldn't believe he would go that far from the graphic novel. I don't know how those rumors start, but that'd be a stretch!"

The only scary part is that it is up to the studio to decide what to cut out of the film -- but even if crucial character bits land on the cutting room floor, Wilson explains that they tried to smash the detail in wherever they could. They've added "little lines here and there" to flesh out the character's backstories, as things have been cut by sheer necessity. And hey, the little details are what the book is for. It's the essentials, like that jaw-dropper of an ending, that have to stick to the page.

Watchmen opens March 6th, 2009.

Prior to her film's premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, writer-director Tracey Hecht found time to answer a few questions about her film and her process for Cinematical. Life in Flight stars Patrick Wilson as a successful architect with the "perfect family" who, after a chance encounter with a young urban designer (Lynn Collins), begins to second guess his entire life. We published our review of Life in Flight this morning, where Joel had the following to say regarding Hecht's direction: "Hecht does a nice job invoking a sense of place in Life in Flight; she must know New York well, because she shows or mentions aspects of it that most visitors just never see, like the birds that fly out over the BQE. The visuals suggest a filmmaker who not only is in love with New York, but insisted on making sure there was no doubt that the film was made there instead of somewhere in Toronto."

Cinematical: You previously said you wanted to make a film about fear. Seeing as this is your feature debut as a director, I imagine making this film brought about a certain fear from within you?

Tracey Hecht: Yes, definitely. But I'm less afraid when I'm doing something than when I'm waiting to do it. So I think the leading up to making the movie was worse for me. Once I was actually in there, I really had a amazing time.

Cinematical: What do you think people are most afraid of these days?

TH: Oh, wow, I have no idea. I imagine that list is long. But I think the trick is to really find and know what it is inside of you that makes you afraid, and not let yourself just project your fears out onto other things.

Life in Flight should prove to any aspiring screenwriter that you don't necessarily have to have an original story in order to get a screenplay made. In the film, which debuted at Tribeca on Sunday, first-time writer / director Tracey Hecht tells the tale of a man who's supposedly living the good life, but it's not the one he wants. And it takes meeting a young, vivacious woman for him to fully realize it.

Heard that story before? Sure you have, probably dozens of times. You've seen it in goofy romantic comedies from The Seven-Year Itch to Joe Versus the Volcano as well as "indie" dramas like Garden State. But good writing and acting always trumps originality of story, and Life in Flight has both, though there's still room for improvement.