The first official image from director Alexander Payne’s upcoming film Nebraska has landed online.  The film marks Payne’s follow-up to 2011’s The Descendants and centers on an aging alcoholic father who decides to take a road trip from Montana to Nebraska to collect what he believes to be a million dollar Publisher’s Clearing House prize.  His estranged son reluctantly agrees to accompany his father in order to keep him out of trouble.  Bruce Dern and Will Forte star as father and son in the black-and-white road trip film, and Payne shot the entire pic on the road in Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota—where the film’s story takes place.

Hit the jump to check out the debut image.  Nebraska will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival later this month and is slated to open in limited release on November 22nd.

Back in August, we brought you the trailer for Studio Ghibli’s From Up on Poppy Hill, written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro Miyazaki.  Now, we have word that the English version has a planned theatrical release of March 15th, 2013.  Lending their voices to that version will be such top talent as Gillian Anderson, Ron Howard, Christina Hendricks, Jamie Lee Curtis and Beau Bridges, among others.  Hit the jump to see who else is joining the party, along with the synopsis for From Up on Poppy Hill.

It looks like horror-master Joe Dante (Gremlins) finally has a theatrical release date for The Hole, a thriller centering on a family who discovers a padlocked door in their basement that covers a bottomless hole.  Obviously, nothing good can come of this as the hole seems to be a portal to Hell which houses the family members’ deepest fears.  You can get a better look at the film in this newly released theatrical trailer.

The Hole, starring Teri Polo, Bruce Dern, Chris Massoglia, Haley Bennett and Nathan Gamble opens in theaters September 28th.  Hit the jump to check out the synopsis, trailer and poster.

Following a bit of a bumpy road, director Alexander Payne’s drama Nebraska is now firmly on track and headed towards a production start.  The film centers on an aging alcoholic father who decides to take a road trip from Montana to Nebraska to collect what he believes to be a million dollar Publisher’s Clearing House prize. His estranged son decides to accompany his father in order to keep him out of trouble.  Payne was considering a number of esteemed actors for the lead and tried hard to coax Gene Hackman out of retirement, but we heard in May that Payne had his eye on Bruce Dern for the father role and Will Forte for the son.

Now Deadline reports that deals are being closed with Dern and Forte for the $13 million black-and-white film as Payne finally has the greenlight from Paramount.  The Descendants was a swell entry to Payne’s oeuvre, but I’m highly intrigued by this small-scale yet ambitious drama.  Forte is an immensely talented comedic actor and I have no doubt that he’ll nail Payne’s balance of drama and comedy. With deals closing and the picture a go, production begins this October for an awards season 2013 release.

Having racked up awards buzz and a rather tidy box office sum with The Descendants, director Alexander Payne is set to ease back into his road-movie wheelhouse with Nebraska. Production on the project has been delayed a couple times in the past months, as Payne worked on the script and searched for the right leads. After names like Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson and Robert Forster were bandied about, now comes news that the helmer has set his sights on Bruce Dern to play a cantankerous alcoholic and SNL alum Will Forte to occupy the role of his estranged son. The dramedy will see the two taking a car trip to collect on the father’s apparent sweepstakes win. At the moment, offers have not been made to either actor. Hit the jump for more on Nebraska.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt wants to take pot shots at every kind of horror story by working under the guise of being a bad horror movie.  Coppola mocks Edgar Allan Poe, Steven King, vampire stories, and 3D but his criticism is rarely playful.  Twixt wants to keep things silly and fun in the “real” half of the story but then wants act superior when it comes to the ethereal aspects of its tale.  The result is a film that’s always campy, somewhat lazy, and more than a little tiresome.

We’ve raved about the Twixt presentation we saw at Comic-Con and a similar version of the promo trailer we saw has gone online.  During the presentation, the promo trailer was reedited multiple times with different music, and this is yet a new cut, but it still conveys the gist of what we saw.  You can see that the movie looks all over the place but all those places look interesting and it’s one of the many reasons why Twixt has me intrigued.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The film stars Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Elle Fanning, and Ben Chaplin.  Twixt will play at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Every time I write about Twixt, I’m probably going to rave about the film’s presentation at Comic-Con.  I would sit through five Total Recall presentations just to get something as interesting and as fun as Twixt.  I have no idea if the movie will be any good or not or even what the movie will be.  Due to the way it will be “performed”, the version you see of Twixt (which will be partially in 3D) may be different than the version someone else sees.  It’s a fascinating experiment but it also looks like it could be damn entertaining.  If I make it up to Toronto for this year’s film festival, there are plenty of films I want to see and Twixt is near the top of the list.

New images from the film have gone online along with a few new set photos.  Hit the jump to check them out.  Twixt stars Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Ben Chaplin, and Elle Fanning.

If you’re a movie fan, today is a great day.  That’s because thanks to the Toronto International Film festival announcing some of their 2011 schedule, we’ve been inundated with a tremendous amount of new movie images for some of the biggest films arriving later this year.  And continuing our coverage, after the jump you can check out the first images from Derick Martini’s Hick (which stars Blake Lively, Chloe Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Juliette Lewis, Eddie Redmayne and Rory Culkin), Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass Jeff, Who Lives at Home (which stars Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer and Susan Sarandon) Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (starring Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Elle Fanning and Ben Chaplin) and the first clip and images from Killer Joe (which stars Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon).

Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t been to the San Diego Comic-Con since 1991 when he was promoting his adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  However, this year he’ll be making his return to the festival to promote his upcoming film Twixt.  While we can argue over the quality of Coppola’s output over the last couple of decades, the fact of the matter is that a legend of American cinema will be on the stage of Hall H and I find that prospect as exciting as Amazing Spider-Man footage if not moreso.

Coppola describes Twixt as “one part Gothic romance, one part personal film, and one part the kind of horror film that began my career.”  The film stars Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Elle Fanning, and Ben Chaplin.  Hit the jump for the full press release.  The Twixt panel will be on Saturday, July 23rd.

Roger Corman is perhaps the most prolific and influential Hollywood filmmaker mainstream America has never heard of.  Alex Stapleton’s documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel attempts to rectify that injustice by not only examining Corman and his filmography, but also by attempting to explain why the writer-director-producer is more than just a low-budget schlockmeister.  Yes, the majority of Corman’s filmography is populated by cheap exploitation flicks, but through Stapleton’s documentary, we get a clearer picture of Corman’s contribution to American cinema.  Corman’s World is a great primer on Roger Corman’s filmography and an uplifting celebration of an unknown Hollywood legend.

This pairing may have excited the masses more in, say, 1986.  But present day me is hooked.  Francis Ford Coppola has quietly started shooting his next film, Twixt Now and Sunrise, with Val Kilmer at the lead.  Elle Fanning (Somewhere) and Bruce Dern (Big Love) co-star.  According to Deadline, Sunrise is “a thriller with horror overtones” based on a short story by Coppoola.  Kilmer plays a horror novelist in the Napa-based production.

As the news of a Top Gun sequel permeates the internet, the focus has been on a possible Tom Cruise return.  But surely once that’s settled, Kilmer is next in line for rumorous scrutiny.  Glad to see him shoring up his resume with a director as fine as Coppola.  Whether or not his best days are behind him, Coppola seems rejuvenated by his decade away from the director’s chair following 1997′s The Rainmaker.  I’m sure we can expect Twixt sometime in 2011, which makes an indie film every two years after Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (2007) and Tetro (2009).  I’m excited to hear more details on this one, and I hope by the time we report on it again there is a less atrocious title attached.

When Joe Dante (“Gremlins”, “Piranha”, “The Howling”) said he was going to direct “The Hole”, you could feel the positive energy from every horror fan. And with the film premiering at the Toronto Film Festival next month, they’re that much closer to seeing it for themselves. But while fans will have to wait a bit longer to see the film, I’ve got a few new images from “The Hole” and they’re after the jump – along with the synopsis: