Director Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller Side Effects opens in theaters this Friday, but the filmmaker also has another (possibly final) film set for release in 2013 as well: the Liberace movie Behind the Candelabra.  HBO has now unveiled the first official image from the pic, giving us a look at Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover Scott Thorson.  The story centers on the tempestuous relationship between the two throughout their secretive five-year love affair that began in 1977.  We’ve yet to see a trailer, but I’m inclined to say that Candelabra will be a lot of fun given the talent both onscreen and behind the camera.

Hit the jump to check out the image and an official synopsis, and if you missed any portions of Steve’s recent interview with Soderbergh, click here.  Behind the Candelabra will premiere on HBO in May.

A momentous occasion happened last night on late night television: Matt Damon finally reached a breaking point and hijacked Jimmy Kimmel Live.  Damon has been the brunt of a long-running joke on the show in which Kimmel ends each night’s broadcast by apologizing for bumping Matt Damon when they run out of time.  Damon has appeared in a few sketches here and there that tie-in with the gag, but fresh off Kimmel’s timeslot change that puts him up against Letterman and Leno, Damon hosted the entire show last night as he had “kidnapped” Kimmel.

It was a hilariously fun 90 minutes, as Damon must have picked up the phone and called all his closest friends since the broadcast was filled with the likes of Ben Affleck, Gary Oldman, Nicole Kidman, Robin Williams, Reese Witherspoon, Andy Garcia, Amy Adams, Sheryl Crow, Demi Moore, and plenty others.  Hit the jumps to watch a few highlights from the show.

From director Gus Van Sant, the small town drama Promised Land tells the story of Steve Butler (Matt Damon), a corporate salesman who has been dispatched to the rural town of McKinley with his sales partner (Frances McDormand) to see if the two can get the citizens to sign over the drilling rights to their properties.  But, when an environmental activist (John Krasinski) arrives in town, the residents start to question what’s best for themselves and their community.  For more on Promised Land, here are seven clips and the trailer.

At the film’s press day, actor Matt Damon talked about how quickly they shot the film, having a rough cut done four weeks ahead of schedule, how he came to collaborate on the script with Krasinski, their process for writing together, working with McDormand, what made Van Sant the right director when he decided he wouldn’t be able to take that on himself, and why this was an important story for him to tell.  He also talked about kissing Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra, an HBO movie about the relationship between Liberace and his younger live-in lover, and whether he’d ever consider returning to the role of Jason Bourne.  Check out what he had to say after the jump.

Salesmanship can be more powerful than the truth.  Tell people what they want to hear, and they won’t look too hard for something that might contradict their belief.  Promised Land tries to come off as a Capra-esque story about a man discovering that he might be doing wrong to the heartland by selling environmentally hazardous natural gas.  But fittingly, in a movie about ulterior motives and the easy manipulation of a pliable audience, the makers of Promised Land might have an ulterior motive of their own, which undermines a film that rarely finds any truth.

Opening this weekend in limited release is director Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land.  The film stars Matt Damon and Frances McDormand as natural gas salesmen who try to prey on an economic town in decline only to have their mission complicated by the citizens they encounter and an environmentalist played by John Krasinski.  Damon and Krasinski wrote the screenplay, and the film deals heavily with the consequences of fracking.  The film also stars Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, Scoot McNairy, and Titus Welliver.  For more on Promised Land, here are seven clips and the trailer.

During the recent Los Angeles press day I got to speak with Damon.  He talked about what surprised him when researching fracking, how the issue is very divisive, how lucky he’s been as an actor, and more.  Damon also spoke about his reaction to seeing a rough cut of Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, confirms he’s doing George Clooney’s Monuments Men, and says he was happy to work with Terry Gilliam again on The Zero Theorem, but he only has a very small part.  Hit the jump to watch.

Universal Pictures released the Matt Damon-less fourth entry in the Bourne franchise, The Bourne Legacy, earlier this year to a decidedly mediocre response from critics and audiences.  At $275 million it wasn’t in any way a box office bomb, but against a budget of $125 million (not counting marketing), the film wasn’t a runaway success either.  Though Jeremy Renner was a suitable lead and director Tony Gilroy took the series in an interesting direction (CHEMS!), fans have still been eager to see star Matt Damon return to the franchise.

A couple of months ago, Damon went on record saying that it’s unlikely he’ll play the character again since The Bourne Legacy happens in canon and going forward, he and director Paul Greengrass would have to build off of that story instead of creating something all their own.  Now Damon has talked a bit more about the possibility of returning, revealing that he actually enlisted the help of The Dark Knight screenwriter Jonathan Nolan to try to craft a plausible story that would see Bourne return.  Hit the jump to see what he had to say.

We have an early look at director Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land in seven new clips. Starring Matt Damon and John Krasinski, who also wrote the screenplay, Promised Land centers on a natural gas company executive (Damon) who comes up against homegrown opposition in Dustin Noble (Krasinski) when the corporation tries to buy up a small town’s resource rights.

Also starring Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, Scoot McNairy and Titus Welliver, Promised Land opens in limited release on December 28th before expanding in January. Hit the jump to check out the new clips.

Focus Features has released seven new character images from director Gus Van Sant’s upcoming drama Promised Land.  The film stars Matt Damon and Frances McDormand as corporate salesmen who try to prey on an economic town in decline only to have their mission complicated by the citizens they encounter, particularly a character played by John Krasinski.  Damon and Krasinski wrote the screenplay, and the film deals heavily with the consequences of fracking.  These new images introduce the many characters that inhabit this Frank Capra-esque story.

Hit the jump to check out the images, and click here to watch the trailer.  The film also stars Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, Scoot McNairy, and Titus Welliver.  Promised Land opens in limited release on December 28th before expanding in January.

George Clooney seems committed to putting together one of the most impressive casts in recent memory with his upcoming directorial effort The Monuments Men.  The period drama centers on a group of art experts selected by the U.S. Government to chase down the stolen art of Europe during World War II, and Clooney is already set to star alongside Daniel Craig, Jean Dujardin, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, and Bob Balaban.  Now Deadline reports that friend and frequent collaborator Matt Damon is negotiating to join the cast.

Clooney co-wrote the film with Grant Heslov and will also star and direct.  The premise sounds a bit like Clooney is mounting his own period version of Ocean’s Eleven, and with a cast this spectacular it looks to be one hell of a movie.  Hit the jump to read the synopsis for the novel The Monuments Men.

Neill Blomkamp‘s Elysium was one of the best-looking films I saw at Comic-Con this year.  The film is set in 2159, and two classes of people are divided: the wealthy live on a man-made space station called Elysium, while the rest of the humans inhabit an overpopulated and ruined Earth.  Elysium was on track for a March 2013 release, but then the movie was pushed back to August 2013, and that’s probably the smart decision.  March has become insanely crowded, and Elysium feels like a big summer movie anyway (it’s also coming out the same week as District 9 did back in 2009).  Today, a new image of star Matt Damon has been released.  Damon plays a man who’s forced to become a cyborg and travel to Elysium in order to retrieve a cure that would save his life.

Hit the jump to check out the image.  The film also stars Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, William Fichtner, and Diego Luna.  Elysium opens August 9, 2013.

While his most recent directorial effort, Argo, is beginning to generate well-deserved Oscar buzz, Ben Affleck spoke briefly about some of his upcoming projects that are sure to attract a lot of interest. When last we reported on Affleck collaborating with Matt Damon, it was to shed some light on the details of their Whitey Bulger picture. The rise-and-fall biopic of the Boston-area crime boss is apparently still in development, but Affleck did give a quick comment on it.

A bigger picture is Affleck’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, a long-gestating picture that has fans hoping for some good news. Unfortunately, it’s proving to be an unwieldy bit of source material as Affleck admits to struggling with it. Struggling, not giving up. Hit the jump for more quotes from Affleck. 

Focus Features has released a batch of new images from director Gus Van Sant’s upcoming drama Promised Land.  The pic was written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski and was originally set to mark Damon’s directorial debut, but scheduling issues forced him to step down and subsequently rope in his Good Will Hunting director Van Sant to take the helm.  Damon and Frances McDormand star as corporate salesmen who try to prey on an economic town in decline only to have their mission complicated by the citizens they encounter, particularly a character played by Krasinski.  The story deals with the consequences of fracking but also looks to have a strong, character-centric bent as well, so I’m eager to see how the political issues are balanced with the story elements.

Hit the jump to check out the new images along with the film’s first trailer in case you missed it.  The film also stars Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, Scoot McNairy, and Titus Welliver.  Promised Land opens in limited release on December 28th before expanding in January.

The first images from the set of director Terry Gilliam’s upcoming sci-fi film The Zero Theorem have surfaced, and they’re unsurprisingly a little out there.  The film stars Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, a computer hacker who searches for the meaning of life while being distracted by Management, a shadowy figure from an Orwellian corporation.  We recently learned that Matt Damon would be reteaming with Gilliam for a small role in the pic, and these first set photos give us a look at Damon’s fantastically flamboyant character.  The actor recently revealed that he ran into a bit of trouble when he had to shave his head for Elysium reshoots, but Gilliam decided to take advantage of the look and present Damon in a way he’s never been seen before.

Hit the jump to check out the images, which also include a glimpse of Waltz’s bald lead character.  The film also stars Tilda Swinton.

Put Tom Hanks in a sketch and he’s going to be golden.  I’m surprised Saturday Night Live doesn’t have a constant rotation of Hanks, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin.  Hanks showed up on The Colbert Report for some good Halloween fun…or at least that’s what Stephen Colbert was led to believe.  Instead, we see that kids this year don’t care about dressing up as The Avengers for Halloween.  The kids are all about Tom Hanks’ movies, including Cloud Atlas.  It’s a great sketch with an awesome cameo at the end.

Hit the jump to check it out.  Cloud Atlas opens today, and maybe you should go see it.

Let’s all do the release date shuffle, courtesy of Sony!

• RoboCop, the Jose Padilha-directed remake starring Joel Kinnaman, has been bumped from its August 9th, 2013 spot to February 7th, 2014.
• Taking over the former RoboCop spot will be Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, starring Matt Damon.  The picture moves from March 1st, 2013 to August 9th, 2013. (Fun fact: Blomkamp’s District 9 was released that same week in 2009.)
• Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers will move up from its previous spot of February 7th, 2014 to September 27th, 2013.  The animated feature will land on roughly the same weekend as this year’s hit, Hotel Transylvania.
• Pixels, the Happy Madison production based on an 8-bit French short, is listed as “in development” and won’t make a 2014 release, though it was previously pegged for May 17, 2013.

Hit the jump for more on each of these pictures.