Today in highly anticipated films: Venice Film Festival and 'Cloud Atlas'

Today brought news of the lineup for the Venice Film Festival, and the five-minute trailer for Cloud Atlas. The best films in the Venice Film Festival probably won't arrive in U.S. theatres until next year, but Cloud Atlas is coming soon--October 28th in fact. That's on the early side for any Oscar-aspiring films, but the extremely ambitious trailer has excited many commenters.

First up, the Venice Film Festival. There are three films in particular that I'll be closely watching for critical response. Perhaps the most anticipated selection of the bunch still hasn't been confirmed or announced. Still, most people expect that Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, a profile of a fictional enigmatic leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) some have compared to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, will also be in competition.

Beyond, that I'm curious how an adaptation of the compelling, scathing book The Reluctant Fundamentalist will play. I remember the book reading more like a speech, with little narrative, so I think the adaptation will have to take a number of liberties. Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directed, and the cast includes Kate Hudson in one of her first non-rom-com roles in some time. I bet critics will be wary of her performance, since Hudson has become synonymous with terrible rom-coms.

Director Terrence Malick's To The Wonder will be another top pick. Plus, it comes just two years after his previous film--a record. Like The Tree of Life, the movie also has spiritual themes. The story centers on a couple's unraveling after they return from their pilgrimage to a holy site in Italy. Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem star.

Finally, Cloud Atlas will beat the rush of high-caliber films with an October, not Thanksgiving or Christmas, release. The very fact that the trailer needed to last five minutes to even put together a semblance of the story means something. If you can't explain a movie in a thirty-second TV spot these days, it's tough to get a project greenlit. Perhaps the pull of the directors, Matrix creators Lana and Andy Wachowski and Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer, gave Warner Bros. faith in the project. The sweeping sci-fi-spiritual-drama is an adaptation of an extremely ambitious book that weaves together six stories set in different times: think 18th Century schooners and futuristic dystopias, all in one film.

The casting of Tom Hanks, who gives the voiceover in the trailer, feels familiar and safe, and helps ground the out-there work. After all, Hanks is the one who told his life story on a bus stop bench in Forrest Gump, so it makes sense that he can tell stories about his multiple, reincarnated lives across time.

At first, the images don't even look like a typical Wachowski film, until pretty impressive sci-fi sets start overtaking the schooners. The fact that all these images and stories live together in one place has turned off some commenters, but more are intrigued. Plus, there's a two-hour, 44-minute running time to help sort everything out. Releasing in just three months, Cloud Atlas will be one of the first end-of-the-year films vying for an epic, must-see status.

More details emerge about 'Cloud Atlas'

By Sarah Sluis

When I first wrote about Cloud Atlas in April, the project seemed so ambitious, I wasn't sure it could be pulled off. After all, the book the movie is based on follows six seemingly unrelated people across centuries, with each story written using different genre conventions (journal, hard-boiled thriller, sci-fi dystopia). However, the movie, which has a budget rumored to be up to $100 million, will start filming this September in Germany. The project is a collaboration between The Wachowskis (Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). The directors plan to divide up the sequences and shoot them in parallel. Having two directors is extremely rare, and even then they tend to be sibling teams. To pair up a sibling team with a third party may be the rarest breed of them all. I'm sure the Directors Guild freaked out a bit figuring out how the credits would work. I also think that having three directors on a project is a rare show of humility. Cloud Atlas takes place over centuries, and the idea of tackling both period sequences and futuristic ones is daunting. The Hollywood Reporter suggested that Tykwerwould shoot the period sequences while the Wachowskis would take charge of the futuristic ones.

Since the casting of Tom Hanks as one of the leads, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent have joined the cast. I suspect that each of these six actors will be the lead in their story's respective era, since four of the leads are male and two are female. The cast is stellar to be sure, but only three out of these six actors have cachet among mainstream global audiences. (Berry, Sarandon, Hanks). I also don't think Hanks, who was the first to sign on, counts as A-List the same way Leonardo Di Caprio did in Inception. He's not a young dramatic star anymore, and his showing in Larry Crowne this summer really drove that home. Warner Bros., which handled Inception, will release the film stateside here. I definitely think the two movies will be compared with each other, because they both combine disparate surroundings into the same film. Cloud Atlas is planned for a summer 2012 release, and it could be the cerebral popcorn movie that draws in action lovers as well as those who like substance paired with their chase scenes.