This past week presented me with a couple of unique moviegoing opportunities. In addition to the ParaNorman showing I previewed the last time we met, I was also able to check out one of my all-time favorites, Jaws, on the big screen thanks to Cinemark’s “Fall Classic Series”. For as much as I enjoyed the pic long before this week’s showing, I have to say that viewing it as an audience member in a packed theater for the first time opened my eyes to a whole new appreciation. Not only was I genuinely startled in a few scenes that repeat television and DVD viewings had long left me numb to, but I also came to respect Robert Shaw’s timeless turn as Quint even more than I previously had. In short, my adoration for Spielberg‘s masterpiece was not only reaffirmed, it somehow found a way to expand.

But enough about my love of all things Jaws related. This week’s Top 5 includes the news that James Gunn is in talks to direct Marvel’s intergalactic tale, Guardians of the Galaxy, Sight & Sound’s personal Top 10 lists from some of cinema’s most revered directors (Spoiler Alert: that shark movie I drooled about in the opening paragraph appears on Tarantino‘s), a new red-band trailer for John Hillcoat‘s Lawless, Disney’s plans to reboot The Rocketeer, and an animated look at how The Dark Knight Rises should have ended. A brief recap and link to each can be found after the jump.

Earlier this month, a new “official” best film of all time was announced with the unveiling of the results of Sight & Sound’s most recent poll.  Every ten years, the film magazine polls a number of critics, academics, and professionals and then tallies up the results for an ultimate list.  The magazine also has a poll of directors for a second Top 10 list, and now they’ve unveiled the individual directors’ lists in an effort to occupy all the free time you have today.

After the jump you can peruse personal Top 10 lists from the likes of Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Woody Allen, David O’Russell, Sam Mendes, Matthew Vaughn, Francis Ford Coppola, Marc Webb and more.  Hit the jump to take a look.

Although Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road was published more than fifty years ago, there has never been a film adaptation of it. All that changed when producer Francis Ford Coppola and The Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles signed on, adding Garret Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) as the starring role of Dean Moriarty. Now we have a look at the first trailer from the film, which is set to open in France this May with a possible domestic distribution pick up if and when the film premiers at Cannes (May 16th – May 27th). The Beat generation road trip film also stars Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga and Elisabeth Moss. Hit the jump to check out the trailer.

Gary Oldman wrapped up his 3-day, 7-film retrospective at New York’s Landmark Sunshine Cinema with a fun, extended Q&A after Wednesday night’s screening of his Oscar-nominated performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The first time Academy Award nominee fielded questions from a theater filled with hundreds of his fans with nearly an hour.  Oldman also hung around for autographs, pictures and additional questions.  Hit the jump for stories from the set of The Dark Knight Rises, his paralyzing doubt on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and what he thought while watching Heath Ledger as The Joker.

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 were around these parts during Comic-Con, you may have already read about writer/director Francis Ford Coppola’s highly engaging Hall H panel for his new film Twixt. While I was off doing interviews somewhere with someone, the five-time Oscar winner was entertaining audience members with a live-cut of the film with the help of his iPad and musician Dan Deacon. It was also then that he revealed his plan to tour with the pic and essentially DJ the film via on-the-spot editing to be determined by audience reaction. Take that, 3D…

With all of this experimentation in mind, four promotional posters for Twixt have now landed online and can be viewed in all of their bloody glory after the jump. Starring Val Kilmer, Elle Fanning, Bruce Dern, and Ben Chaplin, the film will tell the story (in one way or another) of a declining writer (Kilmer) who becomes caught up in a small town murder mystery while on his book tour. The film will premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival which runs from September 8th – 18th.

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).

When most people think of Comic-Con, big-budget comic-book movies and flashy genre pictures come to mind. However, this year’s Comic-Con has already been host to two Academy Award-winning directors—Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson for The Adventures of Tintin—and today Hall H was host to one more: Francis Ford Coppola. The Godfather director was front and center for his latest film as a writer/director, the Gothic horror film Twixt. The cast includes Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, and Elle Fanning, and centers on a a hack horror novelist who has ghostly visions that lead him to investigate a young girl’s murder.

Coppola presented the film today alongside musician Dan Deacon and star Val Kilmer, and what followed was one of the most bizarre, surreal, and wildly entertaining things I’ve seen. Coppola revealed his plan to tour with the film, literally performing like a conductor by editing and changing the movie based on the audience reaction throughout the duration of the film. We were given a demonstration, and it was a bit insane. Hit the jump for my full recap of the Twixt panel.

There’s plenty of good stuff to see at this year’s Comic-Con.  There’s too much good stuff.  You could clone yourself seven times and you and your many selves still probably couldn’t see everything worth seeing.   I am without a cloning machine (damn you, lazy scientists) and I will be covering only Hall H this year.  After the jump, I’ve listed the five panels I’m most interested in seeing in Hall H as well as the five panels I wish I could attend outside of Comic-Con’s biggest room.

The first image has been released from Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming Gothic film Twixt. Rather surprisingly, fans will get their first look at the film at this week’s Comic-Con in San Diego, as Coppola will be present for a Twixt panel in Hall H. The image gives us a look at Coppola and star Elle Fanning on set. The film focuses on a hack horror novelist who has ghostly visions that lead him to explore a young girl’s ghostly murder.  The film stars Fanning, Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, and Ben Chaplin.

Hit the jump to check out the image, and be sure to check back here this week for our full-scale coverage from Comic-Con 2011.

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.

Finally, the definitive Apocalypse Now! Francis Ford Coppola’s mess of a masterpiece is one of those films worth poring over, examining and dissecting, and this format and new supplements make for a heady package. Martin Sheen stars as Captain Benjamin Willard, who along with a boatload of soldiers (Albert Hall, Laurence Fishburne, Sam Bottoms, and Fredrick Forrest) traverse Vietnam on the hunt for Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who’s gone native and Willard’s mission states that they don’t really want him bringing Kurtz back alive. Along the way, they meet a number of different people, including Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), Playboy bunnies (including Colleen Camp), and other assorted characters, more so in the Redux version, which includes the famously deleted French colonists. My review of the Apocalypse Now Full Disclosure edition on Blu-ray follows after the jump.

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.