New images from three highly anticipated fall films have landed online.  Briefly:

  • The Monuments Men – The first official image from George Clooney’s latest directorial effort highlights the swell ensemble cast of the WWII heist movie, featuring Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman, and Bob Balaban.  The film opens in theaters on December 18th.
  • American Hustle – Another new image from Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell’s next film shows off even more of the early 1980s fashions donned by Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Bradley Cooper.  The film opens wide on December 25th.
  • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – A new image from the second film in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy takes a break from the dwarves as we get another look at Orlando Bloom’s Legolas and Evangeline Lily’s Tauriel.  The film opens on December 13th.

Hit the jump to take a look at the images. [Update: We've added a batch of more images from The Monuments Men, including a first look at Cate Blanchett's character.]

Images courtesy of EW and USA Today.

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Image via Columbia Pictures

Here’s the official synopsis for The Monuments Men:

Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, The Monuments Men is an action-thriller focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners.  It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys – seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 – possibly hope to succeed?  But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind’s greatest achievements.

 

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Here’s the official synopsis for American Hustle:

A fictional film set in the alluring world of one of the most stunning scandals to rock our nation, American Hustle tells the story of brilliant con man Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), who along with his equally cunning and seductive British partner Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) is forced to work for a wild FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper).  DiMaso pushes them into a world of Jersey powerbrokers and mafia that’s as dangerous as it is enchanting.  Jeremy Renner is Carmine Polito, the passionate, volatile, New Jersey political operator caught between the con-artists and Feds. Irving’s unpredictable wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) could be the one to pull the thread that brings the entire world crashing down. Like David O. Russell’s previous films, American Hustle defies genre, hinging on raw emotion, and life and death stakes.

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Here’s the official synopsis for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug:

The second in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug continues the adventure of the title character Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) as he journeys with the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and thirteen Dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) on an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor.