Lionsgate has released a new trailer for director Justin Zackham’s ensemble romantic comedy The Big Wedding.  The film centers on a divorced couple (Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton) who are forced to pretend like they’re still married when their adopted son’s (Ben Barnes) deeply religious biological mother comes to town for his wedding.  Though the cast boasts some actual talent, the way the movie is framed in this recent trailer almost plays like a parody, complete with cheesy voiceover, zany physical comedy, and The Romantics’ “What I Like About You.”  The pic was previously scheduled for release last October before Lionsgate decided to push it to this spring.

Hit the jump to take a look at the new trailer.  The film also stars Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried, Susan Sarandon, Topher Grace, and Robin Williams.  The Big Wedding opens on October 26th.

Today’s casting updates include:

• Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding) joins Nick Jonas, of Jonas Brothers fame, and Isabel Lucas (Immortals) in Careful What You Wish For.  Elizabeth Allen (Aquamarine) will be directing from a script by Chris Frisina and Gregg Hurwitz.

• Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) has been added to the already stellar cast of David O. Russell’s untitled Abscam movie.  The rest of the cast includes Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, and Louis CK.

• Katherine Heigl and Patrick Wilson are set to headline the dark comedy North of Hell. Anthony Burns (Skateland) will be writing and directing.

Hit the jump for more on each casting.

As we await the 85th Academy Award nominations announcement on Thursday morning, we now have a look at the opposite end of the 2012 film spectrum.  The 33rd Golden Raspberry Award nominations have been announced, celebrating the very worst of what 2012′s movie slate had to offer.  Leading the pack is The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 with 10 nominations, as the film landed a nomination in every single category.  The Twilight closer will go head-to-head with Battleship, A Thousand Words, That’s My Boy, and The Oogieloves in Big Balloon Adventure for the Worst Picture title.

It’s easy to beat up on the Twilight franchise, and even though I wouldn’t go so far as to call Breaking Dawn – Part 2 a good movie, it’s in no way the worst movie of the year.  The sheer amount of beheadings alone in director Bill Condon’s climactic fight sequence is enough to make the movie worth watching.  Anyway, hit the jump to check out the full list of Razzie Awards nominations.

Director Peter Lepeniotis has landed a solid voice cast for his upcoming animated feature, The Nut Job. Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy), Will Arnett (Arrested Development) and Brendan Fraser (The Mummy) are among the actors that will lend their voices to characters in the film. The Nut Job will be based on Lepeniotis’ 2005 short film, Surly Squirrel. Disney veteran Lorne Cameron (Over the Hedge) scripted the film, “an action-packed comedy set in the late 1950s in fictional Oakton [that] follows the travails of the mischievous squirrel Surly and his rat pal Buddy as they plan a nut store heist that gets out of hand.” Hit the jump to see who else is joining the picture’s voice cast and to check out Surly Squirrel. 

The first trailer and poster for the ensemble romantic comedy The Big Wedding have been released.  The film centers on a divorced couple (Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton) who are forced to pretend like they’re still married when their adopted son’s (Ben Barnes) deeply religious biological mother comes to town for his wedding.  Zaniness ensues.  Though the involvement of Katherine Heigl puts this one immediately on iffy ground, the highlight of the trailer is the chemistry between De Niro and Keaton. If the film focuses mainly on their relationship, we might be in for a fairly amusing rom-com.  That said, the clip definitely plays up the farcical tone and “wacky antics” that occur when everything goes awry, so I’m not exactly holding my breath.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  Directed by Justin Zackham, the film also stars Amanda Seyfried, Susan Sarandon, Topher Grace, and Robin Williams.  The Big Wedding opens on October 26th.

Emboldened by the success of Valentine’s Day, Garry Marshall took another crack at the holiday-based all-star anthology in 2011, with similarly repulsive results. This time, though, movie-goers commendably ignored him (and hopefully quashed plans for Columbus Day or whatever the hell was coming next). Of course, it’s never a good idea to interpret the commercial failure of a terrible movie as anything more than an aberration. But in this case, there was an encouraging sense that the world had finally revolted against a sub-genre populated by cynical, bald-faced cash-grabs.

And indeed, New Year’s Eve is the romantic comedy distilled to its basest form; a film that trots out a dizzying array of A-listers and expects applause, while abandoning time-consuming chores like character, story and dialogue. Hit the jump for the full review.

Isabel Coixet has signed on to direct The Age of Adaline for Lakeshore Entertainment, Sydney Kimmel Entertainment, and Anonymous Content.  The fantasy romance centers on a beautiful young woman born at the turn of the 20th century.  She hasn’t aged in a hundred years following an unspecified accent, but “after years of a solitary life, she meets a man who might be worth losing her immortality.”  Katherine Heigl was set to star, matched with Andy Tennant (The Bounty Hunter) as director.  That would have been waste of a perfectly good premise, but THR says Heigl is no longer attached.

I know the Spaniard best as the director behind the touching drama My Life Without Me—I’d love to see Coixet reunite with Sarah Polley (the anti-Heigl) here.  Of course Penelope Cruz, the star of Coixet’s Elegy, could also pull off Ageless Beauty.  I mean, sorry to add to the hate, but I am excited by the possibilities now that Heigl is off the project.

We’ve got some casting news concerning two upcoming “kids” movies to share with you this afternoon. First up, Katherine Heigl is in talks to star in the film noir puppet comedy The Happytime Murders. You read that right, a film noir puppet comedy. The film comes from director Brian Henson (son of puppet pioneer Jim Henson) and has been in development at the Henson Company for quite some time. The pic takes place in a world inhabited by both humans and puppets, but puppets are viewed as second-class citizens. The logline goes like this:

“When the puppet cast of an 1980s kids TV show gets murdered one by one, a disgraced detective-turned-private eye puppet takes on the case.”

Hit the jump for more on this decidedly dark puppet tale, as well as news concerning Al Pacino in Despicable Me 2.

Fear not, Katherine Heigl fans! Though it’s sad that the opening weekend of One for the Money has already come and gone, leaving us with many Heigl-less moviegoing weekends to come, the 27 Dresses star won’t be absent from theaters for long. Deadline reports that Heigl is set to star in an independent thriller called Face Blind. If you’re thinking to yourself “That’s a terrible title,” I point your attention to the film’s arguably more terrible logline: Hegl stars as “a psychologist struck with a rare affliction that makes it impossible to distinguish people by their faces. When a man who terrorized her most vulnerable patient stalks her, the psychologist can’t recognize him, and her husband thinks she’s the one who is going crazy.” Sure.

It appears that Heigl’s attempting to go the “serious dramatic route” after languishing in romantic comedy hell for the past few years, but she’s chosen a seriously awful premise with which to stretch whatever dramatic chops she may possess. In addition to starring, Heigl will also produce Face Blind (I sincerely hope they keep this title). The actress most recently starred in the aptly named One for the Money, and will next be seen in the star-packed romantic comedy The Wedding.

With the holiday movie season upon us, a few new images from some of the upcoming Oscar contenders have been unveiled. We’ve got a new look at Michael Fassbender in the extremely well-received drama Shame. Fassbender plays a sex-addict opposite Carey Mulligan, and our own Matt Goldberg loved the flick. There’s also a new image of Rooney Mara from David Fincher’s highly anticipated adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another look at Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, and an ominous image of Gary Oldman from the spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Additionally, we’ve got another look at Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and an image of Sandra Bullock and Thomas Horn in the adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

But that’s not all! We’ve also got new images from We Bought a Zoo, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Haywire, Underworld: Awakening, In the Land of Blood and Honey, New Year’s Eve, and One for the Money. Hit the jump to check them out.

New posters have been released for The Rum Diary and New Year’s Eve.  The former is kind of cute and almost makes the film look like a light comic spin on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is appropriate considering that Hunter S. Thompson was the author of both novels.  As for the New Year’s Eve poster, it perfectly encapsulates the cynical, greedy reason for the movie’s existence.  The point isn’t to convey a plot, but to jam as many stars into the film as possible in the hopes that you’ll like one or two of them enough to see the movie.  However, the stars you like will most likely be in the film for probably less than ten minutes total.  If you think watching a star you like play a poorly defined character is worth a dollar a minute, then you like wasting money.

Hit the jump to check out the posters.  The Rum Diary opens October 28th.  New Year’s Eve opens December 9th.

Lionsgate has released the first trailer for One for the Money, the feature debut of the Stephanie Plum character created by Janet Evanovich.  Katherine Heigl plays Plum: “Desperate for some fast cash, Stephanie turns to her last resort: convincing her sleazy cousin to give her a job at his bail bonding company… as a recovery agent.”  It’s not my cup of tea, but it doesn’t appear completely charmless if you’re one of those mythical viewers who can tolerate Katherine Heigl.  And hey, Jason O’Mara looks like he’s having fun.  Faint praise!

Daniel Sunjata, John Leguiziamo, Debbie Reynolds, and Debra Monk also star in the January 27, 2012 release, directed by Julie Anne Robinson.  Watch the trailer after the jump.

Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigl, and Amanda Seyfried are set to star in the indie comedy Gently Down the Stream for writer-director Justin Zackham (The Bucket List).  According to Variety, “De Niro and Keaton play a long-divorced couple who, for the sake of their adopted son’s wedding and his biological mother, pretend they are still married. They quickly learn that acting the part isn’t easy, especially when their past, present and future unravel for all to see.”  While all these actors have done good work (and in De Niro and Keaton’s case, unforgettable work) in the past, these days the presence of De Niro and Heigl is like putting a giant “Warning: This Movie Will Likely Be Terrible” sign on the poster.  You can dismiss my negativity, but how many terrible films do you need to see them in before you say “I see a disturbing pattern developing.”

But hey, maybe this will break the streak.  Now Lucy, get ready for me to kick that football.  Production begins this July in Greenwich, Connecticut.

For those who like to plan in far in advance, we have some release date news for you this morning.  First up, Fox Searchlight has set Alexander Payne’s The Descendants for December 16th.  The film stars George Clooney as a wealthy landowner who tries to re-connect with his daughters.  While the release date puts it in prime position for awards season, it will have to contend with three blockbusters getting released the same day: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.  Presumably, Searchlight is going to start out with a limited release and then expand the film since releasing it wide as counter-programming would be incredibly risky.  I’m also going to assume that The Descendants will make the rounds at various fall film festivals because if you make a modestly-budgeted film starring George Clooney, federal law requires that you show it at Toronto and/or Telluride.

Hit the jump for news on the release date for One for the Money starring Katherine Heigl.

What’s wrong with Katherine Heigl? The former TV star destroyed her Grey’s Anatomy career last season (seriously, what was the point of having Izzy survive cancer?), and bit by bit is ruining her chances at cinema stardom. A talented actress, Heigl has dissolved into the female equivalent of Matthew McConaughey, starring in dumb, predictable rom coms that offer little more than a few moments pleasure for bored housewives attempting to relive the “glory days” of falling in love.

Since her breakout hit, 2007’s Knocked Up, Heigl has starred in 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth, Killers and now Life as We Know It. I’m cheering for the actress, I truly am; but her resume gives me little, if any, hope for the future, as each of her films has swiftly decreased in quality.  My review after the jump: