That sound you hear is Warner Bros. opening the promotional floodgates for The Dark Knight Rises, which is the summer's biggest impending superhero movie, now that The Avengers has broken so many records and cleared the way for Christopher Nolan's climactic Batman movie.  Today, there are no fewer than six character posters for the sequel, two each for the Caped Crusader, the villainous Bane, and the adaptable Catwoman.

The third official poster for The Dark Knight Rises has appeared online.  As you know, Batman is exceptionally good at brooding and his home city of Gotham is exceptionally good at coming apart at the seams.  Both of these things are happening on the new one-sheet, with Batman a-brooding and Gotham going up in flames.

Lawless, the Prohibition-Era Southern drama from director John Hillcoat, is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which is currently monopolizing the Croisette.  With the film finally getting ready for its debutante ball, The Weinstein Company has unveiled seven character posters from movie formerly titled The Wettest Country in the World and the more concise Wettest Country.

These character posters answer a few questions.  First is the question, "How do we let audiences know that our movie stars Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Jason Clarke, and Mia Wasikowska?"  Answer: character posters.  The second question is, "How do we let audiences know it's a period movie with action?"  Answer: Give most of the cast revolvers and make sure there's a tommy gun in there too.  The third question is, "How awkwardly can we insert Gary Oldman's face onto a poster?"  Answer: Photoshop.

What's kind of like the NBA Playoffs?  The war to control the fictitious Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises, the climactic installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  Both the movie and the playoffs feature a man dressed up as a giant Bat using a high tech arsenal to fight crime, a burglarizing woman dressed like a slinky cat, and a monomaniacal villain who you can bet won't win out in the end.  Okay, so the playoffs don't have those first two, but the inhabitants of Cleveland could persuasively argue that LeBron James fits the bill for the last one.

Paranoia, a thriller with a unique, all-star cast, has found an American distributor and a release date.  Relativity Media has acquired U.S. rights to the film based on the novel by Joseph Finder, and today the studio announced that Paranoia will hit theaters Stateside on September 27, 2013.

Liam Hemsworth, an Australian up-and-comer who last appeared as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games, leads the cast as a regular guy who finds himself blackmailed into a costly game of corporate and technological espionage with unimaginably high stakes.  Also starring in Paranoia are Academy Award nominees Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford, along with Lucas Till, who played Havoc in last summer's X-Men: First Class.

With a certain Marvel Studios superhero team-up making money hand over fist in record-breaking amounts of time, there's been a lot of discussion about the box office fate of the third and final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  All this talk of comparative opening weekends is not only premature, it misses the basic and undeniably happy point that this a summer in which we're treated to both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

If you thought you'd have to wait until your butt was in a seat at The Avengers to see the new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, you were mistaken.  The third trailer for Christopher Nolan's final installment in his Batman trilogy is online in full right here, right now.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dark Knight Rises front as of late.  With Marvel and Disney's orgiastic superhero crossover The Avengers monopolizing our superhero hype attentions, Warner Bros has wisely opted to let Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Thor have their time.  The second full theatrical trailer for The Dark Knight Rises is set to debut with The Avengers this Friday, though, so Batman's about to start getting his hype on all over again.

The very first theatrical trailer for Lawless finally, mercifully, hit the interwebs.  And it was worth the wait.  The film, formerly titled The Wettest Country in the World and Wettest Country, has everything going for it, from an incredible cast to a proven director, a screenwriter with cult bona-fides, and fascinating source material.  And now it has a stellar trailer, too.

While we've been happily inundated with hype-building material from a certain Marvel and Disney joint, the promotional juggernaut for a big, bat-loving DC Comics hero has been quietly getting ready to bombard audiences.  The Dark Knight Rises is arguably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and it's appropriate that a new trailer will precede the other most anticipated movie, The Avengers.  When the final Christopher Nolan-directed Batman adventure arrives, it will boast more than a full hour of footage shot on IMAX cameras.