George Clooney

Ubiquitous though they are these days, cast reunions aren’t always so easy to put together. Jimmy Kimmel and George Clooney learned this the hard way, trying to reunite the cast of ER for a new sketch, but hey, there’s always the time Doug Ross met Dr. House! That happened, right? I don’t watch TV. Yes, I appreciate the irony.

Over the course of their 30-year careers, the Coen brothers have made a lot of different kinds of movies; madcap comedies, period dramas, detective mysteries, bouncy musicals, thrilling Westerns, and biting satires. Hail, Caesar! is the first time they’ve made all those different kinds of movies simultaneously. Though it has an overarching story — a movie star gets kidnapped in the middle of a major production — Hail, Caesar!’s Hollywood studio setting offers the Coens the opportunity for a series of delightful digressions. As its protagonist, studio boss Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), wanders the Capitol Pictures backlot, the Coens’ wander through every imaginable style and genre from the American film industry’s Golden Age. Hail, Caesar! features so many different styles and genres, in fact, that it almost qualifies as an anthology film, one that finds the Coens at their most versatile and playful.

The first trailer for Money Monster has arrived online, promising a tense thriller unfolding in real time starring George Clooney as a financial expert / TV personality who is taken hostage — live, on the air — by Jack O’Connell, while the whole world watches. The film definitely looks like a promising follow-up from director Jodie Foster, who previously helmed the Mel Gibson dramedy The Beaver and, more recently, episodes of Orange Is the New Black.

With the increase in superhero films in recent years, you can practically measure time by each new comic book blockbuster — a superhero film (or two…or three…) for every season. But amid all of 2016's exciting super-offerings, let’s not forget a few of those other highly-anticipated, non-superhero movies, like the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar, the pair’s first new film since Inside Llewyn Davis…which already feels like a lifetime ago. Insert somber guitar strum.

Don’t play with our hearts like this, Clooney. Academy Award-winning actor and director George Clooney has begun making moves to get a production by the name of Suburbicon up and running, an exciting prospect for movie-industry observers...

We won’t have to wait long into December for Bill Murray’s upcoming Netflix Christmas special, the aptly-titled A Very Murray Christmas, but it’s never too early for holiday cheer (especially for franchise coffee). In any case, the full star-studded trailer has arrived, including Clooney, Poehler and more, but not Pope Francis, apparently.

Riding the crest of this new wave of female-led studio vehicles comes a reboot/remake/reimagining/rework/revision of Ocean’s 11 with an all-lady cast of charismatic robbers.

The Coen Brothers’ screenplay for Suburbicon has been in various levels of gestation for a little over a decade now, with George Clooney first voicing his interest in directing the project 10 years ago. Clooney’s had a great track record with the Coens, and if there were anyone whose last name isn’t Coen cut out to direct one of their screenplays, it’s most definitely Clooney, who is once again circling the project.

We know, we know. A few weeks out from Halloween, and already Christmas specials are making their presence known. Still, we’re not ones to question Bill Murray, especially if the first promo for his star-studded, Sofia Coppola-directed Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas lives up to its promise.

Can I buy tickets to Hail, Caesar! yet? Can I preorder the Blu-ray? Too early to add it to my top ten list of the year?