Here’s a rather creepy brand new UK trailer and poster for Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz’s new movie, Dream House. It starts off similar to the US one that we saw earlier in the year but then gives us quite a bit of new footage.

Dream House is directed by Jim Sheridan and also stars Naomi Watts. It’s released here in the UK November 25^th. Find out more about the film on their official website.

Once upon a time, there were two little girls who lived in a house. DANIEL CRAIG (Cowboys & Aliens, upcoming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), NAOMI WATTS (The Ring, Fair Game) and Oscar^® winner RACHEL WEISZ (The Constant Gardener, The Lovely Bones) star in Dream House, a suspense thriller about a family that unknowingly moves into a home where grisly murders were committed…only to uncover even darker mysteries within its walls.  Successful publisher Will Atenton (Craig) quit a high-power job in Manhattan to relocate his wife, Libby (Weisz), and two girls to a quaint New England town.  But as they settle into their new life, they discover their perfect home was the murder scene of a mother and her children.  And the entire city believes it was at the hands of the husband who survived. When Will investigates, he’s not sure if he’s starting to see ghosts or if the tragic story is just hitting too close to home.  His only clues come from Ann Patterson (Watts), a mysterious neighbour who knew those who were lost.  And as Will and Ann piece together the haunting puzzle, they must find out who murdered the family in Will’s dream house before he returns to kill again.

Joining Craig, Watts and Weisz in the film are MARTON CSOKAS (Alice in Wonderland) as Ann’s ex-husband, Jack; ELIAS KOTEAS (The Fourth Kind) as the mysterious stranger Boyce; and JANE ALEXANDER (The Unborn) as Dr. Greeley. James G. Robinson presents a Morgan Creek production and a Bobker/Kruger Films production: Dream House, starring Daniel Craig, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weisz, Marton Csokas, Elias Koteas, Jane Alexander.  Casting for the film is by Avy Kaufman, CSA.  The film’s music supervisor is Dave Jordan; its music is by John Debney.  Dream House is edited by Glen Scantlebury and Barbara Tulliver, ACE.  The costume designer is Delphine White, and the production designer is Carol Spier.  The suspense thriller’s director of photography is Caleb Deschanel, ASC, and its executive producers are Rick Nicita, Mike Drake.  The film is produced by David Robinson, Daniel Bobker and Ehren Kruger.  It is written by David Loucka and produced by James G. Robinson.  Dream House is directed by Jim Sheridan. The film will be released in select territories by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Click the poster to enlarge.

Quick word of warning – if you want to see this film then don’t watch the trailer. To even hint at some of the recent films whose influence is all over this one would be giving away too much.

Unless the film is a huge psychological horror spanning generations then this trailer not only gives the entire set up away but also throws in a few huge twists and a pretty obvious nod to the big reveal at the end.

If you have to watch it then stop after about a minute as the first few moments set up a thoroughly generic tale of ‘new home which might be haunted, oh and children are scary aren’t they etc’ which is something Insidious did very well and it’ll take more than a man in the woods and a face appearing at the window with a orchestra shock to creep the skin from me.

There may be something decent here, Jim Sheridan certainly known his way around a story and though some of his recent choices were a little unusual (Get Rich or Die Tryin’ being a bit of a head scratcher) he’s amassed a decent cast in Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts but this promotion is assembled in such a way as to make it look as if someone has chomped happily on the last thirty years of horror films and vommed into a bucket from which the last scrapings came together to make this trailer.

And yes – it is only a trailer. The film may be excellent and I’m still looking forward to being convinced but whoever sanctioned this either has no idea of subtlety or no imagination (or, worse, no faith in the film) but they have done a fine job in pulling together a pretty terrible first look. Just keep telling yourself – It’s only a trailer, it’s only a trailer.

Anyway – here’s the new trailer! Enjoy!

And a poster! Hurrah!

Apple had em both.

• Universal Pictures have released the first teaser poster for Morgan Creek Production’s mystery-thriller Dream House, and it certainly leaves a lot to be desired.

Directed by Jim Sheridan (Brothers), Dream House stars Daniel Craig (Casino Royale), Rachel Weisz (The Fountain), Naomi Watts (Fair Game), Marton Csokas (The Debt), Sarah Gadon (Charlie Bartlett) and Elias Koteas (Shutter Island).

Successful publisher Will Atenton (Craig) quit a high power job in Manhattan to relocate his wife, Libby (Weisz), and two girls to a quaint New England town. But as they settle into their new life, they discover their perfect home was the murder scene of a mother and her children. And the entire city believes it was at the hands of the husband who survived.

When Will investigates, he’s not sure if he’s starting to see ghosts or if the tragic story is just hitting too close to home. His only clues come from Ann Paterson (Watts), a mysterious neighbour who knew those who were shot. And as Will and Ann piece together the haunting puzzle, they must find out who murdered the family in Will’s dream house before he returns to kill again.

After being plagued by re-shoots and release date switcheroos, Dream House will finally see the light of day when it hits cinema screens on September 30.

Check out the quite dreadful poster below:

Source: Recent Movie Posters

Been a while since we saw anything new for Helen Mirren’s new movie, The Debt so I thought I’d take the opportunity to place this new poster. The Debt is directed by John Madden and also stars Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Jessica Chastain and Marton Csokas.

Synopsis: In 1965, three young Israeli Mossad agents on a secret mission capture and kill a notorious Nazi war criminal. Now, thirty years later, a man claiming to be the Nazi has surfaced in Ukraine and one of the former agents must go back undercover to seek out the truth.

We’ve had a trailer for The Debt a while ago which shows Sam Worthington with a rather dodgy hair cut. You can have a watch here or scroll down to view the new poster.

Source: IMPA

The early word of mouth on Disney’s latest, the live action Tim Burton directed Alice in Wonderland, was not overwhelmingly positive, and the curious news cycle of a possible cinema boycott in the UK and the US may have kept Alice in the news in the weeks running up to the film’s release yesterday, but the reports coming out of the US this morning of the film’s huge box office projections must be music to Disney’s big ears.

We’ve been all over Alice in the last few months and you can see our coverage here, but nothing we saw indicated that Tim Burton’s dark, adapted Alice would do so well.

Variety are putting the box office take so far at $30 million and Deadline Hollywood have $41 milion as the figure, with both predicting a $100 million weekend result.  Such a strong opening will have several consequences, not least it will add weight to the 3D advocates, as a post production conversion into the third dimension must have made a difference to the takings. Maybe people are hungry for another 3D offering after Avatar, or maybe it’s the combined forces of Disney and Burton fans racing to see how this film turned out.

Whatever happens in the next few days this is a dream start for the film, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues here in the UK. Also the drop off may be severe next week but this will not be too worrisome for Disney as the DVD will be out soon anyway…

This Friday, Alice in Wonderland will be available to watch in all chains of cinemas throughout the UK! Yay!! In the meantime, here’s a great behind the scenes look at how Tim Burton’s new movie was made. It’s rather an odd experience watching the likes of Anne Hathaway & Johnny Depp with giant green screens behind them while in full makeup.

Alice in Wonderland has an awesome cast which includes Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, Matt Lucas and Mia Wasikowska as Alice.

HeyUGuys’ coverage of Alice in Wonderland is rather extensive and you can check it out here and Jon’s review here.

Those expecting a straight up adaptation of the Wonderland novel will be disappointed, instead the trick here is to make this film a sequel of sorts and Burton has Alice on the verge of womanhood with only a few illusive memories of a place of talking caterpillars and floating cats, bolting at the first sign of a highly dubious marriage proposal and finding herself down a familiar rabbit hole.

Much of the early part of the film is ostensibly a retelling of the classic tale with rabbits and waistcoats and tiny doors in rooms with tables, upon which lie bottles with Drink Me labels, whose telescopic effects are seared into our collective consciousness; it is a well re-told tale and in the beginning is far more Disney than Burton.

It is only when Alice opens the tiny door and enters Wonderland proper that Burton shows his hand, with an orchard of charred trees straight out of the haunted woods of Sleepy Hollow and the colourful scenes shown in the trailer and posters are covered in shadows and into this Underland Alice steps and stumbles across the Wonderland regulars.

Matt Lucas’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee are Weebles come to life, and bicker in distinct Carrollian quarrells, the Dormouse, voiced by Barbara Windsor is a short, sharp distrusting presence and Michael Sheen’s White Rabbit is perfectly pitched and redolent of a nervous civil servant – in short, the British troupe are all well cast and their characters brought to the screen with great panache by Burton’s team of technical wizards.

Two other characters deserve a mention here, Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen with her outsized head is channeling Miranda Richardson’s Queenie from Blackadder II, and is great fun to see, though a little diluted through caricature, and modeling the behaviour of the irritant Queen on her two year old toddler is a nice touch from Bonham Carter. The CG work undertaken to make her head enlarged is a startlingly well done piece of work, sadly the same cannot be said of Crispin Glover who, as the Knave of Hearts, is undone by the patchy CG integration of his head on a fake, elongated body. It rarely works well and does distract from his scenes.

In the mercurial hands of Johnny Depp the Mad Hatter sweeps across his scenes, becoming a roman candle of personalities and oddities and adding a well needed charge to the proceedings, indeed his recounting of the scorching of Wonderland at the hands of the Red Queen is a very nice moment. While he may tip the scales for some, and claims of indulgence laid at the hands of Depp and his regular directing cohort, the beauty of Wonderland is the characters, who always orbit their own centre of logic and morality, and Depp’s Hatter is a well drawn wanderer of Wonderland and brings a sense of the ridiculous to the world.

Sadly the character of Alice, played with fervor by Defiance’s Mia Wasikowska, is relegated to a series of reactions based on the notion that she may or may not be the ‘real’ Alice who came to Wonderland all those years ago, and I couldn’t engage with her journey from put upon dreamer to Vorpal sword wielding Champion of Wonderland, donning a suit of armour to go off to attempt to slay the Jabberwocky at the end of the film. Wasikowska is a decent actress but isn’t given the opportunity to engage on an emotional level; she doesn’t have the confused curiosity or assertive nature of the Alice in Carroll’s books and as our avatar in Wonderland this role is crucial – otherwise it is only a dream.

The story which unfolds is something akin to a collection of Lewis Carroll’s greatest hits, with a nice Burtonesque twist to the Wonderland/Underland landscape, but it missed the charm and replaced it with a quirky, haunting facade through which the promise of a Tim Burton directed Alice in Wonderland story is occasionally glimpsed. Burton deals best with outsiders and the extremes of character and conflict, and in bringing a more mature Alice to Wonderland there was a chance to engage with the ultimate outsider, not only with a character rooted in society’s rigid structure traveling to a strange, unruly place but also in bringing an adult perspective to a world, familiar to us all since childhood. It is a chance which it never fully taken, and in the undying obedience to the plot of this film the characters play their parts and utter their catchphrases, never freeing themselves of the shackles which a passionate love for the source material engenders.

A word about the 3D. Unnecessary.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories are timeless and the team of Disney and Burton have created a film which is both respectful and evocative of the source but which never decides how to make best use of the talents involved. In the press conference Burton stated clearly that this is ‘a Disney film’ and no other studio has the cultural legacy this statement implies. Burton’s earlier films, and some of his later works, are noticeable Burtonesque, content to revel in the dark side of the world and it is the fusion of the two ‘house styles’ which undo the cohesion of the film. Too many legacies come into play here – Carroll’s complexities and Burton’s darkness compete with Disney’s fairy tale staples to arrive on the screen like the group of sycophants at the side of Bonham Carter’s Red Queen – their distortions and eccentricities are false and are present to comply with a strict sense of propriety.

I am a huge fan of Tim Burton and I’m pleased we had the chance to see his version of Alice, the ‘vacuum’ of shooting almost entirely on green screen may have resulted in a detatched feel permeating the film, but Burton’s designs of a dark Wonderland are beautiful and haunting. It is a curious mix of a few great performances with a smattering of exceptional touches, but as a whole it is devoid of the magic which is inherent in the stories and which the sterling cast and crew are more than capable.

Well, we’ve seen the film now, and each week for the past month or so Disney have taken us deeper into the rabbit hole, giving us glimpses of what to expect when the film opens on the 5th of March.

While most of the Alice news this week has been around the hoopla of cinema chains boycotting (or not) the screening it’s good to get back to the business in hand, and Disney haven’t disappointed with this week’s goods. There’s another new video available below.

We’ll be at the press conference and on the red carpet at the royal premiere tomorrow, and our review of the film will be up on Friday morning. Tonight there’s an excellent event at the British Library in London, the highlight of which will be readings from the Alice books by stars of the films Christopher Lee, Matt Lucas and Michael Sheen (I’m posting this from the event and have just seen Sir Christopher Lee)

We’ll bring you news and pictures from all of these events and there’s lots to look forward to from Tim Burton’s Alice.

Sitting in the Empire Leicester in London last night there was a tangible sense of anticipation for Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland for Disney.

I’m under the embargo blanket until the 26th and I have a lot to say about this film, what it does well and what it doesn’t, but I stand by my tweet after the event, which went along the lines of ‘If you’re looking forward to this film, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it’.

It was a dizzying spectacle and great to see the multifarious marketing images and trailers coming together as a whole, and now there’s a new clip which MTV (via Latino Review) have hoisted online for us all to enjoy.

Set in the courtyard of the Castle of the Red Queen Alice and the Maroon Monarch come face to face for the first time. It’s a great scene although I realise now that much of the marketing plays heavily upon our collective consciousness surrounding Alice, and this is an obvious thing to do, but there’s a lot more Wonderland in Burton’s film.

Our review will be up on the 26th of February, here’s the clip…

Trailer Park Movies | MySpace Video

Roll up, roll up for another wonderful Wonderland Wednesday and among the choice offerings this week are a couple of videos, one taking a look at the world of Wonderland and a look at the Avril Lavigne music video.

With only a couple of weeks until Tim Burton’s take on the classic Lewis Carroll tale unfurls like a psychotic butterfly onto the big screen we’ll be bringing you all the news from the rabbit hole, they’ll be our review of the film as well as coverage of the Royal Premiere and we’re hoping to sit down with Tim Burton himself and the rest of the cast for some exclusive interviews.

Alice in Wonderland also stars Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Marton Csokas, Tim Pigott-Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Geraldine James, Leo Bill, Jemma Powell, Mairi Ella Challen and Mia Wasikowska as Alice and is released 5th March.

Enjoy the videos below.

With the release date of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland drawing ever nearer every little step down the rabbit hole reveals new wonders and the two new characters posters we’ve got for you here show off two Wonderland favourites.

Voicing the Cheshire Cat is one Stephen Fry, a Grade 2 listed national treasure and a man with a voice so silky smooth you imagine him dining on velvet truffles all day long, and while there’s something decidedly sinister about the fixed grin of the enormous feline, you can’t argue with the other character on offer here. The White Rabbit, whose tardiness and pink eyes also have something of the disquiet about them, has another epic British talent providing vocals, the one and only Michael Sheen.

MTV had these first, and you can click on them below to get all excited..

It’s Wednesday and you know what that means! Even more Alice in Wonderland goodies to enjoy! You can catch up with the first two parts of Wonderland Wednesday here and here.

We hope you enjoy it all as much as we do. Alice in Wonderland is directed by Tim Burton and stars Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Marton Csokas, Tim Pigott-Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Geraldine James, Leo Bill, Jemma Powell, Mairi Ella Challen and Mia Wasikowska as Alice and features voices from Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee, Paul Whitehouse and Barbara Windsor. It’s out in cinemas 5th March.

Today we have a real treat which includes:

• An Alice Featurette Video including an interviews with Mia Wasikowska
• Character descriptions for The White Queen, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, The Bandersnatch, The Bloodhound and the Dodo
• More Concept Art (click them all to enlarge)

MIRANA, THE WHITE QUEEN (Anne Hathaway) is the younger sister of the Red Queen, and while she appears to be all sweetness and light, beneath the surface there’s a hint of darkness to her character. “She comes from the same gene pool as the Red Queen,” says Hathaway. “She really likes the dark side, but she’s so scared of going too far into it that she’s made everything appear very light and happy. But she’s living in that place out of fear that she won’t be able to control herself.” When Alice returns to Underland, the White Queen takes her under her wing, offering her protection, although her motives aren’t completely altruistic.

TWEEDLEDEE and TWEEDLEDUM (Matt Lucas) are rotund twin brothers who constantly disagree with each other and whose confusing chatter makes little sense to anyone but them. When Alice arrives in Underland, she looks to the Tweedles for guidance. Innocent and infantile, adorable and sweet, they mean well but are of little real help since they speak in weird rhythms and riddles. “I imagine them as naughty Victorian children, with their hand in the honey jar,” says Lucas, the British comedian and actor who plays them both. “And so I have made them quite child-like, which does come naturally to me, because I’m a big kid anyway.”

THE BANDERSNATCH is a disgusting, drooling, foul-smelling creature with a big filthy body and the squashed, teeth-baring face of a rabid bulldog. A swipe of his long claws leaves Alice with a rather painful reminder of the Red Queen’s horrible reign.

BAYARD THE BLOODHOUND (voice of Timothy Spall) is an unwilling accomplice to the Red Queen’s forces, fearful that his imprisoned wife and pups will be injured if he doesn’t do Stayne’s bidding. He proves to be secretively loyal to the Underland Underground resistance, becoming both Alice’s ally and a rather convenient transportation system.

THE DODO (voice of Michael Gough) is one of the first residents of Underland Alice sees upon entering the fantastical world. One of the oldest Underland inhabitants, the Dodo wears eye-glasses and carries a walking stick. Both quiet and wise, he stops his friends bickering over Alice’s true identity by suggesting they bring her to the even wiser Absolem.

Here’s a couple of wonderful new posters for Alice in Wonderland to accompany the 1st one released by The Mad Hatter’s Facebook group last week. The first is of Alice and the second of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) himself!

The new version of the movie is brought to us in Disney 3d, is directed by Tim Burton and also stars Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Marton Csokas and Mia Wasikowska as Alice. We can expect to see it 5th March 2010.

Click the posters below to enlarge.