The trailer for The Road (which now has a release date of October 16) has hit the net courtesy of Yahoo! Movies but we've got an embed here thanks to Trailer Addict. For those who read the Cormac McCarthy book (and I haven't, but I was told the entire thing by a "helpful" friend), you're going to notice what looks like a lot of changes to the story. The mysterious disaster is made explicit, Charlize Theron is given a lot more screen time than the wife ever had in the book, and the action is upped ten times over.

However, this trailer has caused a lot of controversy already with people who have seen the film. Esquire just published a review this week, and noted that the Weinstein Company was falling prey to the temptation to cut a trailer that looked like a post-apocalyptic action movie. According to Esquire, John Hillcoat's film is (and other reviews have borne this out) as quiet, harrowing, and bleak as the novel is, and may just be "the most important film of the year". Unfortunately, the Weinsteins feel no one will see it unless there's an "explanation" and a hook of kick ass action, even if the film itself lacks the things the trailer sells.

But at least you get a glimpse of the real film underneath, which is enough to cause you to choke up. I think we're promised one hell of a gut-wrenching performance from Viggo Mortensen. Just look at his eyes.

He was once the hottest thing on the planet; she was most recently a secret selling point of a summer blockbuster. Will a first-time teaming of Tom Cruise and Charlize Theron melt the universe? If negotiations get finalized, they'll be united in awesomeness in the upcoming thriller The Tourist, according to Variety.

Cruise is set to play the titular role of an American vacationer who gets sucked into a dark world of espionage when an Interpol agent taps him to help her catch a sneaky bad guy. Don't you hate when that happens? If only I could count the number of times I've been recruited while on vacation to assist a gorgeous, highly-trained government agent do her job. Theron would play the agent, a woman with a past romantic history with the wily master criminal. I must ask again: why do all the beautiful ladies always fall for the irredeemably corrupt yet charming bad boys?

My guess is that Theron uses Cruise to make her old boyfriend jealous, but I haven't seen Anthony Zimmer, the French original that serves as the basis for The Tourist. Maybe that doesn't matter, because the original's plot has evidently been changed around. In Anthony Zimmer, the female lead was not a law-enforcement officer but instead the criminal's current mistress.

Will Tom have hidden talents that blossom only when forced into the role of a reluctant warrior? Will Charlize fall for a typical American tourist dressed in Bermuda shorts and black socks? Will sparks fly between Tom and Charlize? Time will tell; production is slated to begin by next March under the helm of director Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day).

Mr. Eric D. Snider saw and reviewed Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle when it played at the South By Southwest Film Festival last March. As the film is opening tomorrow in limited release, we offer a reprint of that review.

Watching Battle in Seattle is like being jabbed in the belly with a police baton, and not in a good way. Written and directed rather ambitiously by the actor Stuart Townsend, who has never written or directed anything before, it uses fictional characters to tell a true story but gives us no reason to care about the people, their lives, or their political causes. The riots that occurred at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 may well have been historically significant -- but you wouldn't know it from watching Battle in Seattle, which insists on telling us how important the issues are rather than showing us.

Townsend gives a cursory explanation of what the WTO is and tells us that many oppose it for its lax policies on human rights and labor standards. The details aren't important to him, though. He seems to take it as a given that we already dislike the WTO, even though most viewers' response to WTO is "WTF?" It's a massive, complicated international organization that deals with stodgy, unsexy issues like trade and commerce, and I guarantee the vast majority of the audience isn't nearly as interested in it as Townsend is. And if the point is that we should be interested in it, he fails to explain why.

Cinematical has just received this exciting exclusive clip from Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart Townsend. In theaters this weekend, Battle in Seattle tells the true story of what happened when tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization. Starring folks like Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, André Benjamin and Michelle Rodriguez, the film follows several different points of view -- from protesters and police to delegates and doctors. In the clip, Woody Harrelson plays a SWAT officer who begins to take the taunting of protesters a little too personally. Check it out after the jump...

Warning: The following clip contains foul language.

Award-winning screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga uses a convoluted narrative structure to tell a tale of love, betrayal and regret in The Burning Plain, his directorial debut. Arriaga opens the film with a shot of an old trailer in the middle of the desert burning to the ground, and he then proceeds to bounce around among several seemingly disparate characters, Babel-style, before finally bringing it all together in the film's final act.

The film stars Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a composed-but-icy manager of a fancy Portland, Oregon-area restaurant who spends her spare time having empty, emotionless sex with a wide array of men. Arriaga takes us back and forth from gray, rainy Portland, where Sylvia lives, to the New Mexico desert; early on we learn that the burning trailer, when it exploded into flames, was occupied by Gina (Kim Basinger), a white married housewife with four kids, and Nick (Joaquim De Almeida), a Mexican-American man, also married with kids.

Gina's daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick's son Santiago (J.D. Pardo) are drawn together as they struggle to deal with their parents' infidelity and death, much to the consternation of their respective families. Also tossed into the mix are a crop-duster pilot, his best friend, and his young daughter, whose lives are thrown into disarray when the pilot's plane crashes.

Occasionally Hollywood cobbles together random members of the A-list to play family members on film, even if their genes obviously come from opposite ends of the earth. If the actors are good enough or if the chemistry is there, sometimes the combo can work, such as Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Cassandra's Dream. Other times, it stretches credibility, such as Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited. My all-time favorite oddball casting is in Sidney Lumet's Family Business (1989), with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick playing grandfather, father and son. (Huh?) At the same time, there are actor combos out there who just scream to be paired up in a family capacity. Remember Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick in Something to Talk About? Well, neither do I, but that pairing was perfect. Here are a few others that could work:

1. Helen Hunt & Leelee Sobieski

They're so similar it's spooky, from their hair and foreheads, right down to the tonal quality of their voices. Anybody check the hospital records for mixed-up babies? (Helen is about 20 years older.) Not too long ago, both careers hit a peak: Helen won an Oscar while Leelee was working with Stanley Kubrick and playing Joan of Arc on TV. Now they're both in decline. For some reason, whenever Helen's name comes up, I hear "I HATE Helen Hunt!" And Leelee's last movie was for Uwe Boll. Now would be the perfect time for these two to team up in a mother-daughter drama. If they cooked up something along the lines of Terms of Endearment, with a good, solid writer and/or director, it could be interesting. Or better yet, how about something really strange and kooky with Spike Jonze or Harmony Korine? (Note: apparently the two once went head-to-head on "Celebrity Death Match.")

Gallery: Actors who could play relatives

Well here's something you don't see every day: A big, flashy summertime "tentpole" movie that A) takes chances, B) bucks convention, and C) takes some real risks with its subject material. Obviously the safe approach is for Will Smith to do (yet another) easily-digestible (if somewhat mindless) blockbuster like I, Robot or I Am Legend or Independence Day -- but this time the endlessly profitable Will Smith is working with a rather distinctive director who refuses to cater to formula. That director would be Peter Berg, and this guy has yet to make a bad film.

Unfortunately the production history on Hancock is not a fantastic one. There was a revolving door of directors and script polishers before Columbia finally started production -- but there were still marketing issues, last-minute reshoots, and MPAA miseries to deal with. And yet, despite all that, Hancock arrives like a breath of weirdly fresh air for moviegoers who like a little heart and soul mixed in with their hyper-kinetic action mayhem. Toss some sharp wit and an impressive display of edge into the mix, and I think you may have one of my favorite movies of the summer. (Although one can plainly tell that there was some late cutting done to the flick, all in the name of the almighty PG-13 rating, of course.)

I wanted to go into Hancock knowing as little as possible, so I deliberately avoided reading anything about it -- at least, as much as that was possible given the amount of movie blog reading I do on a daily basis. Nonetheless, it was hard to miss that early reviews trickling in from places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter were not, shall we say, overly positive. On the other hand, several of those reviews were written by people who often seem to have cinematic tastes directly opposite mine, so I wasn't too dissuaded.

And I'm glad I wasn't, because I'm here to tell you Hancock is both an enjoyable film and one of Will Smith's best performances ever, even if it is a bit schizophrenic in its execution. The film starts out as one thing -- all we know is we're getting a film about a grumpy, alcoholic guy with super powers who's awfully deficient in the social skills department. The film opens on a scene right out of COPS: three bad guys leading police on a chase down an LA freeway, firing away on police and other cars. In between shots of the action, we see a disheveled guy snoozing drunkenly on a park bench.

Although Will Smith plays an emotionally fragile superhero in Hancock, as a movie star he's practically invincible. By industry standards, the last genuine Smith dud was The Legend of Bagger Vance, but the actor's standing among many audiences has remained decidedly rocky. As a result, he occupies a unique corner of the Hollywood marketplace where quality and taste don't necessarily match up. Unlike, say, The Dark Knight, not many people eagerly await the latest Smith offering -- which currently has a 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes -- but they'll see it anyway. Hancock is tracking well, thanks to a poster exclusively dominated by Smith's unshaven mug, and that pretty much seals its potent box office fate. Just as Smith's slapdash onscreen persona is bullet-proof, Smith himself is steadfastly critic-proof.

Which places movie in an interesting quagmire: After pulling in waves of cash, it will probably get relegated to the void of forgettable Smith fare, where spectacles offer passing amusement before scampering off forever. Hancock, however, deserves better than a fleeting moment in the limelight and a crash landing in the bargain bin. It's part of a genre that speaks directly to the modern state of blockbuster cinema: The superhero satire.