35 Movies We Can't Wait to See

George Clooney is earning Oscar buzz for his performance as a Hawaiian landowner and father of two whose life goes off the rails after he learns that his wife (Patricia Hastie), who lies in a coma, had been having an affair. But the actor argues that the dramedy?s true star is director/co-writer Alexander Payne, who returns to the big screen seven years after his Oscar-nominated indie hit Sideways. ''He's such a talented director, and he's only done four movies,'' says Clooney (pictured with Shailene Woodley). ''I tell him all the time, 'Make more movies!'''

Mumble (Elijah Wood), the tap-dancing penguin, now has a son named Erik (Elizabeth Daily), but the little puffball doesn't share his father's love of hoofing. Erik runs away and encounters the Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria), an impressive flying penguin.

An awful lot happens in Breaking Dawn — Part 1, from the long-awaited wedding of Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) to the pillow-busting honeymoon. But the most challenging scene to shoot was definitely — spoiler alert! — the gruesome birth of Bella's half-vampire child. Director Bill Condon compares that action-packed sequence to opera. ''There's hardly any dialogue,'' he says. ''It's 15 lines in 20 minutes... that's pretty good for Twilight, right?'' Adds Stewart, ''Usually we're pretty talky.''

Someone get these shrinks a shrink! Famed psychiatrists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) have a falling-out when Jung gets involved with a disturbed Russian patient, Sabina (Keira Knightley).

How does Santa deliver all those presents in just one night? According to the animators behind motion-capture gem Wallace & Gromit, it's a complicated, high-tech process. But when the gadgets go awry, Santa's son Arthur (James McAvoy) must rush to save Christmas.

A young boy (Asa Butterfield) living in a train station in 1930s Paris shares his late father's fixation on a mysterious automaton.

In a screenplay co-written by star Jason Segel, the Muppets reunite to save their old theater from a greedy oil tycoon (Chris Cooper).

Michelle Williams (pictured here with Dougray Scott) plays Marilyn Monroe as she arrives in London to shoot 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).

A Vietnam veteran-turned-L.A. cop (Woody Harrelson) gets caught on tape brutally beating a citizen, causing years of repressed guilt, anger, and judgments to roar to the surface.

A French black-and-white silent film that follows a 1920s actor (Jean Dujardin) falling for an aspiring starlet (Bérénice Bejo), with an American supporting cast that includes John Goodman and Penelope Ann Miller as Dujardin?s studio head and unhappy wife, respectively.

Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict forced to confront his past when his younger sister (Carey Mulligan) moves in with him. Or, that movie in which Michael Fassbender gets naked a lot.

When an unsettlingly passive student (Emily Browning) takes a job as a waitress at an elite gentlemen's club, she becomes entangled in a world where older male clients sedate her and have their way with her sleeping body.

A bawdy comedy directed by Pineapple Express' David Gordon Green, the film stars pre-weight-loss Jonah Hill as the world's laziest, most irresponsible babysitter, attempting to care for a trio of rambunctious children during a night in New York City.

Madonna's directorial effort follows a modern New York woman (Abbie Cornish) who becomes obsessed with the love story of England's King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy) and American divorcée Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), whom he left the throne to marry.

When her teenage son (Ezra Miller) goes on a killing spree, Eva (Tilda Swinton) attempts to understand how she and her estranged husband (John C. Reilly) raised such an evil child.

So long as movies like Valentine's Day earn $110 million at the box office, there will be holiday-themed love stories with gigantic A-list ensembles. New Year's Eve features stars such as Lea Michele and Jon Bon Jovi (who both sing), Halle Berry, and Katherine Heigl (pictured here with Sofia Vergara) looking for love in the Big Apple before the ball drops in Times Square. ''On New Year's Eve, you reflect how the year went,'' says director Garry Marshall, ''but it still comes down to who you're going to kiss!''

A teen-lit writer (Charlize Theron) returns to her Minnesota hometown to try to win back her high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson), who?s already married to someone else.

After veteran spy George Smiley (Gary Oldman) retires from Britain's MI6, he takes steps to expose a mole within the organization. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's new big-screen adaptation of John le Carré's Cold War-set novel also stars Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, and Toby Jones.

For the sequel to 2009's Sherlock Holmes, director Guy Ritchie wanted to pit Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective (Robert Downey Jr., pictured here with Jude Law) against his greatest adversary: Professor Moriarty (Mad Men's Jared Harris). ''This is their first encounter,'' says Ritchie. ''Sherlock is utterly fixated on destroying him.'' The mathematician's malevolent plan involves the assassination of the crown prince of Austria, and a gypsy played by the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace. ''This Moriarty is Holmes' equal intellectually,'' says Harris, ''but has none of the moral limits that Holmes puts on himself.''

The third installment of Fox's lucrative franchise finds the Chipmunks and Chipettes relaxing on a luxury cruise — until they get marooned on a not-quite-deserted island.

Director Roman Polanski depicts an upscale couple (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) meeting with a more middle-class Brooklyn duo (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster) to discuss — and argue about — their sons' schoolyard fight.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and a new team of stealth spies (including Precious' Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, and Jeremy Renner) go rogue after their covert organization is accused of bombing the Kremlin.

Steven Spielberg dives even further into the 3-D motion-capture pond with a big-budget adaptation of the popular comic-book series. Jamie Bell voices the young reporter Tintin, who's racing Russian villain Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig) to find missing treasure.

Glenn Close plays a woman who disguises herself as a man named Albert Nobbs in order to find work in 19th-century Ireland. After spending decades as Albert, she finds herself stuck in her illusory identity.

Rooney Mara stars as everyone's favorite goth hacker in director David Fincher's version of Stieg Larsson's mega-best-seller, with its depictions of rape and torture and Nazis. Daniel Craig plays the moral-crusader journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Angelina Jolie directs this drama (which she also wrote) about a fledgling love affair set during the civil war in 1990s Bosnia.

Matt Damon plays a grieving widower who purchases a run-down zoo and moves his young family there. Cameron Crowe directs.

Steven Spielberg directs a screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 children's novel about a horse sent into battle during World War I. Jeremy Irvine plays the young British farm lad determined to find his steed.

Based on Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel, an eccentric boy (newcomer Thomas Horn) endeavors to figure out why his father (Tom Hanks), who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, left him a mysterious key.

Meryl Streep undergoes her latest transformation, this time embodying Margaret Thatcher (pictured here with Jim Broadbent), the tough-?as-nails British prime minister.

Disney's 3-D Lion King re-release earned $93 million, so it was inevitable that talking teacups would get an added dimension. Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and The Little Mermaid will come next.

Producing his first film in 18 years without Star Wars or Indiana Jones in the title, George Lucas retells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the legendary African-American fighter pilots who battled Nazis during WWII. Lucas and director Anthony Hemingway (The Wire) opted to focus on aerial combat rather than the discrimination faced by the pilots on the ground (from left, Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker, and Kevin Phillips). ''We wanted to show the airmen as heroes, not victims,'' says co-writer Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks). ''I just kept going back to Star Wars for the tone we wanted to set.''

Fast on the heels of Contagion, director Steven Soderbergh unleashes a thriller starring real-life mixed martial artist Gina Carano as a former black-ops soldier out for revenge.

After sitting out the third film in the vampires-vs.-werewolves franchise, Kate Beckinsale returns as butt-kicking vampire Selene. This time, the bloodsuckers face a threat that may be more treacherous than any supernatural species: humans.

Rom-com mystery based on Janet Evanovich's popular novel series stars Katherine Heigl as bounty hunter Stephanie Plum (pictured here with Daniel Sunjata), hired to track down a guy (Jason O'Mara) who just happens to be her ex-boyfriend.