We saw the first two clips from writer/director Jeff Nichols’ Mud back in May of last year, but now the first trailer has been made available.  Starring Matthew McConaughey (Magic Mike) as a fugitive drifter who finds safe harbor on an island in the Mississippi River, but is discovered and befriended by two teenage boys (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland).  The trailer gives a great sense of the tension that builds over the course of the picture and hints at the dangerous situation the boys unwittingly become involved in.  Also starring Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepherd, Michael Shannon and Sarah Paulson, Mud opens in limited release on April 26th.  Hit the jump to watch the trailer.

Is Days of Heaven a masterpiece? It has been canonized, codified, frozen in amber as such. That’s what happens when you’re Terrence Malick. When you make Badlands – one of the greatest debut features ever made – and then Days of Heaven a couple years later and then fall off the radar for a good twenty years, hell, it’s easy to see why the legend of Terry Mailck is so hard to deal with. Here he casts Richard Gere, Linda Manz and Brooke Adams as tramps that settle on a farm, and come to see Sam Shepherd’s character as a mark they can graft. But the film is so much more than that. My review of The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray of Days of Heaven after the jump.

You would think that the ending to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would make sequels fairly difficult unless they involved supernatural resurrection or the revelation that the banditos were impervious to the weapons of the Mexican army.  But The Independent reports [via The AV Club] that a sequel called Blackthorn is underway and somehow Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) managed to survive hundreds of bullets but the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) was not as fortunate.

Now, Cassidy (who will be played by Sam Shepherd) is doing what all old criminals do: go in for one last heist.  Of course, in the original, Butch and Sundance didn’t stage heists as much as they either blew stuff up or just robbed tellers at point blank.  Oscar-winning writer Mateo Gil (The Sea Inside) will make his directorial debut from his own script.  Gil describes Cassidy as, “that tired and lonely old man who, for an instant, recovers all his energy and dreams due to someone who seems to reincarnate the past, his old friends and ideals”.”  You mean Up?  Because that was an adventure movie that kind of already did that and did so by not glomming on to a classic movie.

Hit the jump for more on what Gil had to say (and not say) about Blackthorn.