The first full-length theatrical trailer for The Great Gatsby has landed online, and it'll make you wonder why Baz Luhrmann is just now making a movie set during the Roaring Twenties.  The art deco opulence of the period is just perfectly suited to the director's indulgent, hyper-detailed style.  Add the dramatic meat of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel and a pretty incredible cast, and this adaptation could be something special.

Synopsis: Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner now living on Long Island, finds himself fascinated by the mysterious past and lavish lifestyle of his neighbor, Jay Gatsby. He is drawn into Gatsby's circle, becoming a witness to obsession and tragedy.

This Christmas Day, there are not one, but two different Leonardo DiCaprio movies hitting theaters.  In the one by a certain Quentin Tarantino, he plays a evil plantation owner in the Antebellum South, but in The Great Gatsby, he plays the titular character in a 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitsgerald's classic novel.  A new still from Baz Luhrmann's lavish take on the novel features DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Amitabh Bachchan.

There's a strong chance you may not have seen Drive in theaters back in September, and if that's the case, then it's too bad.  Drive is one hell of a movie, one that's very different from what the TV spots made it out to be.  As of today, it's available on Blu-ray and DVD, so you can rectify the mistake of not having seen it, but if you're still on the fence about this movie that looked like it could just be Ryan Gosling in a rehash of The Fast and the Furious, the first seven minutes are now available to view online, free of charge. 

We've got more than a year to wait until The Great Gatsby renders F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel in 3D for the first time in theaters, but Warner Bros has gone ahead and released the first two official images from the film.  Over the last few months, photos from the Sydney, Australia set have shown the central characters of Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway, played respectively by Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire in predictably sharp costumes by Catherine Martin, but these stills give a better idea of the film's look,with director Baz Luhrmann cranking up the old school Hollywood glamour on the faces of his exceedingly attractive leads.  Just look at that first image of DiCaprio and Mulligan, with the dramatic lighting, impeccable hairstyles, and promise of melodrama.  This is going to be one handsome movie.

With the 84th Academy Awards only three months away, it’s time to go on record with some Oscar predictions. The race is officially on, with front-runners beginning to take the lead and dark horses waiting in the wings to shake things up. Several movies have still not yet been released, but every film that hopes to qualify for the Oscars will be in theaters by the last day of December. Let's take a look at how the six major categories are taking shape, with the top ten contenders fighting for five coveted slots…

With the gritty, harsh reality of New York City as the backdrop, Fox Searchlight Pictures' film Shame follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a handsome and successful New Yorker, as he navigates recklessly through a life of which he attempts to keep private as he succumbs to his many sexual addictions and obsessions. His inevitably self-destructive path in life is disrupted when his wayward sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), unexpectedly comes into town for an indefinite stay. An emotionally schizophrenic film about a subject rarely discussed, Shame doesn’t leave you even after you’ve left the theatre. His Manhattan apartment, once a haven for him to quench his lusts and desires, is suddenly much too crowded for him to successfully hide his lifestyle. Sex addiction, in its ugliest form, is realistically depicted as the film serves as a voyeuristic metaphor capturing what it is to be a human being in today’s world. The message is quite clear – it isn’t easy, not for any of us.

What is clear is that we all have our demons, some of which seem to have a much crueler grip than others. Though never actually discussed in the film, the unspoken words speak volumes in this case as Brandon and Sissy never talk about their parents. With sparser dialogue than many films, the message is clearly delivered with two of the bravest, raw performances in recent film history by Mulligan and Fassbender. Both excavate the most deeply buried of human truths and the audience is privy to their urges and impulses as well as their failed attempts at normalcy.

Alluded to through the duration of the film, the audience is aware of the fact that these two were not brought up in a home in which anyone would wish. With only one another left in this world to call family, they share a closeness which is at times extremely uncomfortable to watch. Brandon struggles to find human connection, but must fight off his crippling needs for excess. His quest for the numbness only found in random sexual acts is an attempt, which fails, to aid him in an escape from his past as well as his present life.

An original screenplay written by the acclaimed Steve McQueen (Hunger) and Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, The Hour) and directed by McQueen, this provocative and daring drama follows Fassbender as he is forced to navigate through his character’s private world as well as the one he now shares with his sister. McQueen’s vision was to make a film about a subject that few films have explored before. Shame serves as an exploration into the purgatories of both addiction and secrecy. We watch as Brandon suffers feeling trapped by his sister’s neediness and is forced to show his darker side to the one person who knows him best, the only person who knows him well.

In one particular scene, Sissy leaves Brandon a voicemail message in which she says to him that they are not bad people, they just come from a bad place. One can only infer what this bad place entailed for each, but you know instinctively that whatever it was, and one can make a few assumptions, it was very bad.

IAR recently attended a press conference at The Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, CA, for the film where Fassbender and McQueen spoke to the many dark aspects of sexual addictions and childhood abuse.

Synopsis: A successful New York City resident who carefully compartmentalizes his entire life based around his compulsive sex addition begins to lose control when his younger sister with nowhere else to stay moves into his apartment.

Hear ye, hear ye, a new batch of photos from the Sydney, Australia set of The Great Gatsby are now online, and they ably demonstrate what The Aviator, Titanic, J. Edgar, and Gangs of New York made abundantly clear: Leonardo DiCaprio is very good at wearing period costumes.  Last month we saw some set photos of Tobey Maguire in costume as narrator and sidekick Nick Carraway, but these new images give our first look at DiCaprio as title character Jay Gatsby, as well as Carey Mulligan as the object of his inadvisable affections, Daisy Buchanan.  All three actors portraying the central figures in the story (though to be fair, Nick doesn't really do too much) look just as sharp as you'd expect in their costumes designed by the reliably great Catherine Martin, with DiCaprio seeming to capture the stylish arrogance of a showboating Gatsby.

Over the next month leading up to its release, Shame is going to get a whole lot of attention, and probably for all the wrong reasons*.  The film has been tearing it up on the festival circuit over the last several months, earning ridiculous amounts of praise, with leading man Michael Fassbender's performance pretty much unanimously lauded as something truly special.  Fox Searchlight has released the first domestic trailer for the film, which follows a sex-addicted New York whose carefully compartmentalized existence starts to come apart when his sister, played by the amazing Carey Mulligan needs to crash at his place for awhile.  It's a well-put together trailer, promising Shame will be a riveting character portrait that portrays this man's sex addition as a true compulsion on the level of a consumptive drug habit.