PLANET movies

If there is one thing that I love about the coming of the cold and the snow in the late fall here in Ohio, it is that it reminds me that the Sundance Film Festival is just around the corner. Time to break out the winter jacket and pickup my plane tickets as a week in Park City is just what the doctor will be ordering following the Holiday season. This week the Sundance Institute announced that Adam Eliot’s clay animation film Mary and Max, which features the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, will open the festival on January 15th.

It’s one of the most buzzed-about films of the season, and a surefire Oscar contender. She’s an accomplished musician who made a commercial breakthrough with “Paper Planes,” one of the year’s biggest sleeper hits. Now, MTV has the exclusive scoop on the soundtrack that will bring M.I.A. and “Slumdog Millionaire” together for your listening enjoyment.

Renowned composer A.R. Rahman will release his critically beloved “Slumdog Millionaire” soundtrack online next week – and in stores next month – giving moviegoers the chance to take home his unique musical pastiche of what it feels like to grow up on the mean streets of Mumbai, India. In many early reviews of the recently opened Danny Boyle flick, critics (such as our own Kurt Loder) have praised the groundbreaking efforts of the music, which mixes the disparate worlds of Bollywood and hip-hop.

USA Today has posted some first look photos from Night at the Museum 2, the family friendly follow-up to the hit 2006 film directed by Shawn Levy. The sequel will see the return of Ben Stiller as Larry Daley, a museum security guard who comes face to face with history when all of the museum’s displays come to life. The story will follow Larry to the Smithsonian, where he meets a host of new characters including Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams), General George Armstrong Custer (Bill Hader) and The Office’s Craig Robinson as one of the Tuskegee Airmen. It will also see the return of Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan as  Jedediah and Octavius respectively.

It is likely that you’ve read Cole Abaius’ review of Special, starring Michael Rapaport. If not, I would recommend checking it out here. In support of the film’s release, Magnolia Pictures has provided us with an exclusive clip from the film. In this clip Rapaport’s character Les is being pursued by a pair of men from a drug company whose meds have given him the sensation of having super powers. Check out the clip, as well as the full synopsis below.

“Were the World Mine,” an indie alternative to Disney’s “High School Musical” franchise, is a small, endearing film.

“Bolt” is at once a knowing, satirical sendup of the Hollywood fame-and-fantasy machinery and a sleek product of the Disney-Pixar industrial complex.

It’s love at first look instead of first bite in “Twilight,” a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set.

Earlier today the folks at Total Film posted a series of rumor-killing facts about the upcoming film Terminator Salvation. The rumors have all been festering on the internet over the past few months, but have not been confirmed nor denied by director McG. And when Total Film had a chance to sit down with McG this past week, they ran all of the rumors by him. The result was four interesting revelations about the next Terminator movie.

“Twilight” has consumed both your lives and ours, and now the day we’ve all been waiting for is nearly here. In just a number of hours, screaming Twilighters around the country will be getting their first of probably many viewings of the movie on the big-screen.

So we want to remind you…get those webcams ready! As soon as you get back home from watching the movie, head on over to YouRHere.MTV.com and upload your webcam reaction to seeing “Twilight”! How many times did you shriek when RPattz walked into the room? Did you faint during the spider-monkey scene? We want to know, and we’ll be running some of the best (make sure to tag your video as “Twilight” so we can find it).

Until then, join us as we look back at an entire year of “Twilight” mania here at MTV.

An animal actor, convinced his TV-show superpowers are real, scrambles to find his way from New York back to Hollywood. Kids will have a fine time, says critic Mark Jenkins, but adults might develop an allergy.

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How's a much-bullied gay teen to get his revenge? Well, if he's starring in a musicalized A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he stumbles upon a working formula for Puck's love potion ...

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Let’s pretend a world exists where the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas created a cinematic vision of a Neil Gaiman novel where a girl discovers an all-too-perfect parallel dimension from a secret door in her house. How ridiculously awesome would that be?

The first teaser trailer for Summit Entertainment’s Astro Boy has hit the web with a flash of cool CG-animation. The project is being developed by IMAGi Studios, the folks that brought us the CG-animated TMNT movie in 2007. Like many of you, I was a big fan of the look and feel of TMNT, but would have liked to see it be less of a cartoon (in story) and more like the original TMNT films. Alas, it was still a pretty cool movie — and Astro Boy appears to be cut from the same fabric. Have a look for yourself below.

There has already been a host of rumors and statements made about the upcoming film, Jonah Hex. There have been talks about casting since we posted a picture of Thomas Jane in full makeup. Rumor now has it that Josh Brolin is going to be the supernatural cowboy. None if this is hot news however. The news today is that screenwriters Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine are no longer directing the film.

The new teaser trailer for Astro Boy and trailer for Coraline are now online!

By Dave Harrison

Has the “Twilight” backlash already begun mere hours away from the film’s release? For those of you who missed it, the notoriously animated Twilighter community have an entirely new reason to get, well, animated. “South Park” (which airs on our sister network Comedy Central), like it or not, has become a leader in the realm of social commentary, and last night the show took aim at the vampire phenomenon in an episode titled “The Ungroundable.”

Of course, in true “South Park” style, the writers showed no mercy on “those vampire kids,” who they depict as wannabe Goths that have transitioned from Abercrombie to Hot Topic in an attempt to follow the latest trend.

Lionsgate has provided us with a look at the final poster for writer/director Frank Miller's The Spirit , opening in theaters on December 25. The adaptation of Will Eisner's comic book series stars Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson, Eva Mendes, Dan Lauria, Paz Vega, Jaime King, Scarlett Johansson, Louis Lombardi and Stana Katic.

New Video: 'Twilight''s Bad Guy Speaks!