It's 2012, and while most of the year's movie-based anticipation is centered on a Batman rising and a bunch of Marvel superheroes working together, there are also plenty of other new hotness on the way.  Among the movies about which audiences will find themselves all excited this year are Gangster Squad, Men in Black III, The Hunger Games, and This Is Forty.  Luckily, all four movies are featured in a 2012 preview from the LA Times, meaning that we now have new images from each, starting with the Ruben Fleischer-directed tale of 1950's criminality in Los Angeles and ending with the first official still from Judd Apatow's third movie.

Hey look, everybody, it's three more stills from The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  Summit Entertainment scored a massive franchise adapting a novel series about vampires and sexual repression, but this take on a youth-oriented book is a whole different bag.  Stephen Chbosky's epistolary novel, first published in 1999, has a very passionate fanbase for whom the story of high school alienation and longing struck a profoundly resonant chord, but there is nary a werewolf to be found.  Instead, the story follows an introverted freshman who, in the wake of his best friend's suicide, struggles to find his social scene and, of course, falls helplessly in love in the midst of his confusion and angst.

Since its first publication in 1999, Stephen Chbosky's novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower has built an incredibly passionate fanbase of young readers not unlike that of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, which is an acknowledged influence on Wallflower.  While a movie version of Salinger's classic adolescent tale has never happened, Chbosky is writing and directing a film version of his novel for Summit Entertainment, with Logan Lerman starring as an introverted high school freshman grappling with mental illness, first love, and his social life, all in the wake of his best friend's suicide.  Summit has released the first two official images from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, both of which include Lerman and Emma Watson, the erstwhile Hermione of the Harry Potter  franchise.

Writer-director-producer Judd Apatow essentially brought Seth Rogan to the world.  When he was just an underage smartass, Rogen played a caustic supporting character on the Apatow-executive produced series Freaks and Geeks, which was canceled after one season.  He next appeared on Apatow's similarly short-lived collegiate comedy Undeclared.  Following his scene-stealing turn in The 40 Year Old Virgin, Apatow cast him as the lead in Knocked Up, and Rogen's been a ubiquitous comedic presence ever since.  If you've been wondering whether Rogen will appear in Apatow's new film or whether his directorial debut Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse will ever happen, the answers are apparently "No" and "Yes."

August is giving way to September, and as kids stock up on school supplies and college freshmen wary eye their new roommates, there's no doubt that the blockbuster movie season has come to a close.  Gone for the moment are those hot days of record-breaking openings and overblown 3D spectacle, and here are the days of less ostentatious movie-going.  Once again this weekend, new releases underperformed, and with much of the East Coast battening down the hatches for Hurricane Irene, the surprise late-summer hit The Help dominated the box office for the second consecutive weekend. 

Synopsis: Every family has one: the sibling who is always just a little bit behind the curve when it comes to getting his life together. For sisters Liz (Emily Mortimer), Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), that person is their perennially upbeat brother Ned (Paul Rudd), an erstwhile organic farmer whose willingness to rely on the honesty of mankind is a less-than-optimum strategy for a tidy, trouble-free existence. Ned may be utterly lacking in common sense, but he is their brother and so, after his girlfriend dumps him and boots him off the farm, his sisters once again come to his rescue. As Liz, Miranda and Natalie each take a turn at housing Ned, their brother's unfailing commitment to honesty creates more than a few messes in their comfortable routines. But as each of their lives begins to unravel, Ned's family comes to realize that maybe, in believing and trusting the people around him; Ned isn't such an idiot after all.

Harvey Weinstein, formerly of Miramax and currently of The Weinstein Company, has a reputation that includes a tyrannical management style and a short-fuse temper, both of which make it all the more amusing that he appears as the straight man to Paul Rudd in a new Funny or Die video promoting Our Idiot Brother, the comedy-drama acquired by Weinstein at Sundance.  Rudd, a fixture in such videos, trots out a procession of imbecilic and absurd ideas that include Rudd personally speaking to every single person on the planet "for at least five to ten minutes" and retitling the film Paul Rudd Presents Our Idiot Brother: The Hangover, Borat.  If you're generally charmed/amused by Rudd and have three minutes, use all three of them watching this video.

You're no doubt familiar with the cinematic archetype of the dogged narcotics cop utterly determined to bring down a drug operation, usually run by a merciless  villain.  If you're unfamiliar, you can brush up on a few right here.  The first clip from this summer's comedy-drama Our Idiot Brother introduces a beat cop who does not quite fit in the same mold as Popeye Doyle or the bad boys of Bad Boys, but he does play on the naive stupidity of organic produce-purveyor Ned, played by Paul Rudd.

The clip covers the film's inciting incident, which lands Ned in jail and eventually, on probation.  Ned seems to be an effective comedic lead not simply because he's a bit of an moron, but because he's so well meaning and trusting.  These qualities are very much on display in the Our Idiot Brother trailer, as well.

It is my firmly held belief that, like Batman, James Bond, or the crew of USS Enterprise, the character of Pee-wee Herman could capably support a seemingly endless franchise of cinematic adventures.  After two films, the character laid dormant for years, but Pee-wee creator Paul Reubens recently dusted off his red bowtie and white shoes for a popular Broadway revival of Pee-wee's Playhouse that was also broadcast on HBO.  None other than comedic uber-producer Judd Apatow is attached to produce a new Pee-wee film, and today Paul Reubens himself provided some news on the project, saying he and his co-writer just handed in a new draft of the screenplay.

Last week, The Weinstein Company dropped a pretty fantastic new trailer for Our Idiot Brother (formerly titled My Idiot Brother), which stars Paul Rudd as Ned, a good-natured imbecile who is on probation after giving marijuana to a uniformed cop free of charge.  As the title suggests, Ned then becomes an imposition on his three sisters, played by the lovely trio of Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, and Zooey Deschanel.  Today, the Brothers Weinstein provided ComingSoon with a brand new poster for the film.  The one sheet nicely conveys the blissful ignorance in which Ned lives, while also whipping out the criminally underutilized "is" credit, as in "Paul Rudd is Our Idiot Brother."