46 Movies We Can't Wait to See

In this dark dramedy, Saturday Night Live alums (and real-life friends) Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader play estranged siblings Maggie and Milo, who are brought back together when he’s hospitalized after attempting suicide. Hader says that his familiarity with Wiig helped during the film’s heavier moments. ”We’ve both really been there for each other,” says the actor. ”So I felt very comfortable being vulnerable around her.” But the film has its share of humor, including an epic lip-synch to the Starship anthem ”Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” ”Kristen and I could have shot it for two weeks,” he says. ”We were laughing so hard and we never got tired.” No doubt. Who doesn’t love the theme from Mannequin? —Tim Stack

Pouring rain. A knock at the door. A stranger asks to use the phone: Car trouble, he explains. What could go wrong? In traditional thriller fashion, everything. Or so Terri (Taraji P. Henson), a wife and mother of two, discovers when she offers aid to an escaped convict (Idris Elba) who enters her home and soon terrorizes her family. Playing the villain is a welcome change for Elba, who was last seen starring in the 2013 biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. ”It’s nice to have a contrast in your career,” he says. ”I’ve got a very loyal following, and I just like to keep them guessing as to what I’m going to do next.” —C. Molly Smith

There are two sides to every relationship. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby tries to tell one event—the dissolution of a marriage—from the perspective of both enigmatic Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) and her restaurateur hubby, Conor (James McAvoy). It was originally shot as two films subtitled Him and Her, but audiences will first see a combined edit dubbed Them. (The 201-minute Him/Her is out Oct. 10.) ”It was like I played two different characters,” says Chastain, who also produced. ”In Conor’s film I play his perception of Eleanor, and in my film I play Eleanor.” While the two-hour Them stands on its own, she says, ”if you want to go deeper, you have that chance.” —Lindsey Bahr

On its surface, the Glade looks like the best summer camp ever, with sky-high trees, makeshift huts, and gardens galore. But in The Maze Runner, it’s home to a motley crew of teenage boys imprisoned by the 150-foot concrete walls of a seemingly impossible-to-crack maze that’s teeming with hostile Alien-like creatures called Grievers. The guys, who welcome a new fellow prisoner every month, have created a tenuously stable society. When the rebellious Thomas (Teen Wolf‘s Dylan O’Brien) arrives, however, the once-predictable maze starts behaving erratically. To adapt James Dashner’s hugely popular book trilogy, first-time director Wes Ball hoped to avoid the trappings of the standard YA dystopia—even if one Fox exec told him in no uncertain terms that the studio desired another Hunger Games. ”It’s more Lord of the Flies, especially in tone,” says Ball. ”We wanted to make it anti-young adult.” —Lindsey Bahr

In Shawn Levy’s adaptation of the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, Girls star Adam Driver plays Phillip, the youngest and most freewheeling of four Altman kids, who reluctantly reunite for their father’s funeral at the behest of their pushy, touchy-feely mother (Jane Fonda). Phillip brings his cougarish girlfriend (Connie Britton) and reopens old wounds with his bickering siblings: the down-on-his-luck Judd (Jason Bateman), the well-off but lonely mom of two Wendy (Tina Fey), and the hard-bitten, dependable eldest, Paul (Corey Stoll). In a family full of pent-up animosity, Phillip is the emotional blasting cap—and Driver served the same function on set, firing up his veteran costars with offbeat energy. ”He is frenetic, and he is moment-to-moment,” Levy says. ”When you say ‘Cut!’ he will not stay in the chair.” —Anthony Breznican

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a kidnapping thriller starring Liam Neeson. Sound familiar? It certainly did to the Taken star. ”I was a wee bit hesitant,” Neeson says. ”I thought, ‘Telephone calls to kidnappers?’ It’s old f—ing territory.” The noir-loving actor was ultimately won over by director Scott Frank’s script, which is faithful to the hard-boiled nature of writer Lawrence Block’s original 1992 novel. Neeson plays Matthew Scudder, a private detective and recovering alcoholic who’s hired by a high-end drug dealer (Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens) to find the people responsible for abducting and murdering his wife. ”It’s not Taken,” says Frank, a successful screenwriter (Get Shorty, The Wolverine) who made his directorial debut with 2007’s The Lookout. ”It’s not an action movie—it’s a very different sort of thing.” —Clark Collis

In 1977, a young Australian woman, desperate to strip away the noise and artifice of life, set out on a 1,700-mile trek across the Australian desert with just four camels and her beloved dog for company. Robyn Davidson would go on to chronicle her emotional adventure in the best-selling 1980 memoir Tracks, forever cementing her status as a national treasure. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to translate Davidson’s quest to film, with heavyweights like Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman circling the project at various points. Almost 35 years later, anchored by a near-solo performance by Mia Wasikowska, Tracks has finally completed its own epic journey to the big screen. Director John Curran also cast a non-English-speaking aboriginal elder playing Davidson’s guide for a brief stretch of her trip and tapped Adam Driver (Girls) as Rick Smolan, the National Geographic photographer hired to shoot milestones on her expedition. According to Curran, the movie is a reminder that sometimes a person can discover pieces of herself only when she steps outside her everyday existence. —Karen Valby

During the British coal miners’ yearlong strike against Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1984, one Welsh mining town got financial support from a surprising source: a London-based group of gays and lesbians who seemed to share little more than a mutual enmity toward the Iron Lady. Well, that and music. In the film, Dominic West’s gay activist leads a rousing disco routine that gets the locals (including Imelda Staunton) on their feet. Director Matthew Warchus, veteran of stage hits like Matilda, grew up in a northern England mining community but admits he wasn’t familiar with the true-life story until he read Stephen Beresford’s script. ”There was a sense of disbelief and wonder,” he says. ”How did we not know about it?” —Jake Perlman

Fans of the ’80s TV series The Equalizer probably won’t even recognize Denzel Washington’s take on vigilante justice-seeker Robert McCall. Remove the slick Jaguar and add a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, for starters. The movie version of McCall—a mysteriously agile home-store employee who takes it upon himself to rescue a young prostitute (Chloë Grace Moretz) from Russian mobsters—was tailored to suit Washington. Director Antoine Fuqua (Olympus Has Fallen), who first worked with Washington in his Oscar-winning turn as LAPD Det. Alonzo Harris in 2001’s Training Day, knows the actor well. ”It’s always character, character, character [with him]. Then you build your action and drama around that.” Discussing this film, Fuqua says, ”Denzel had mentioned something about OCD—it was personal to him, a relative or something—and we started riffing off of that.” The actor and director, now friends, share a boxing coach, which came in handy for the intensely violent hand-to-hand combat scenes. Washington’s McCall favors table legs and corkscrews over guns and knives. ”He hasn’t missed a beat,” says Fuqua of his 59-year-old star. ”He’s still in there training every day, going six or seven rounds.” —Stephan Lee

Writer-director John Ridley’s biopic of guitar great Jimi Hendrix eschews the typical cradle-to-grave format, focusing on the year leading up to Hendrix’s breakout performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. ”The excitement was in avoiding what was expected,” says Ridley, who cast André Benjamin in the role despite the OutKast frontman’s limited acting experience. ”André had so many traits of Jimi—humble, thoughtful, introspective,” says Ridley, an Oscar winner for his 12 Years a Slave script. ”The way he embodies Jimi is unbelievable.” —Nina Terrero

Families come in all shapes and sizes—sometimes even in the shape of trolls dressed in crumpled cardboard boxes. In this stop-motion animated film, based on the 2005 illustrated novel Here Be Monsters!, an infant boy named Eggs (Game of Thrones‘ Isaac Hempstead Wright) is discovered by the boxtrolls, impish creatures who dwell below the winding streets of Cheesebridge. They adopt him and raise him as their own, and Eggs grows up never knowing that he’s human. As he reaches adolescence, though, the boxtrolls are facing a major PR problem: The fromage-fixated villagers believe that they kidnap children and steal cheese by night. The villainous Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) plans to exterminate them, so Eggs turns to haughty heiress Winnie (Elle Fanning) to save his adoptive family. —Nina Terrero

There’s plenty of body horror going on in L.A.’s cosmetic-surgery wards, but David Cronenberg’s latest film is more concerned with the city’s mentally disfigured. Julianne Moore stars as a monstrous fading star who makes Norma Desmond and Baby Jane look rational, while Robert Pattinson, John Cusack, and Mia Wasikowska round out a cast of showbiz grotesques. For a proud Canadian like Cronenberg, Hollywood can pose a philosophical quandary. ”There, it’s not enough to physically exist,” says the director, who debuted the film at May’s Cannes Film Festival. ”You need a career, otherwise you can die a pre-death.” Is any phrase more fraught than ”You’re a nobody”? —Keith Staskiewicz

Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel burst into the public consciousness in 2012, polarizing readers with its bleak view of modern love and America’s criminal justice system, as well as its jaw-dropping third-act reveal. The film, directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), presents the story as dueling narratives: a clammy crime procedural mixed with flashback scenes of a marriage going straight to hell. Fincher hired Flynn to write her first screenplay for his film, which stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (Jack Reacher). As preparation, the two discussed the Stanley Kubrick classics Lolita and A Clockwork Orange as touchstones for the mixture of substance and scabrousness they wanted to inject into the script. ”Those films are extremely dark but have weird, surprising moments of creepy humor to them,” says Flynn, a former EW writer. ”Fincher and I talked about how much we like that kind of feeling where the audience is looking around, going, ‘Am I supposed to laugh here?”’ Fincher adds, ”I liken it to a National Lampoon record that was put out in the mid-’70s called That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick,” Fincher says. ”That’s the tone! You have to kind of be going, ‘It isn’t funny—but it is.”’ —Chris Lee

After making a big impression in the opening scene of last year’s horror hit The Conjuring, a pretty doll named Annabelle has scared up her own self-titled origin story. Set before The Conjuring, director John R. Leonetti’s film focuses on a young woman (played by The Tudors‘ Annabelle Wallis—yes, that’s her real name) whose life is upended after she receives the doll as a gift. Despite using animatronics on the Saw films, director James Wan didn’t employ any for Annabelle: ”We wanted to not give her that much life, or rather, to let her be what she is, an inanimate object.” Unlike Chucky in Child’s Play, he says, ”she’s not going to walk around with a knife in her hands.” —Jake Perlman

Damien Chazelle’s out-of-nowhere indie darling that snagged top honors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival immerses you in the gritty, full-throttle world of a competitive jazz band. That sounds like a joke, but the film, shot in 20 days, delivers genuine electricity. ”I wanted the music sequences to feel like action scenes,” says Chazelle. ”Big and intense and swirling and epic.” Miles Teller (Divergent) plays Andrew Neiman, a laser-focused drumming prodigy who comes under the tutelage of a fearsome, tyrannical conductor (J.K. Simmons) at the country’s top music conservatory. The student/sensei dynamic gets explosive—even escalating to chair hurling and multiple face slaps. To film the virtuosic drum riffs, Teller had to train almost as hard as his character, to the point that he was actually bleeding from his hands. But the result—a ferocious blur of sticks, sweat, and ruptured blisters—could be a star-making moment. —Stephan Lee

Sometimes life just gives you a wad of gum in your hair. In director Miguel Arteta’s adaptation of Judith Viorst’s classic 1972 kids’ book, not only do things go badly for 11-year-old Alexander (newcomer Ed Oxenbould), but his family gets a rotten day all their own. The shoot was similarly chaotic. ”There was fire, things falling off of cars, fake vomit, crocodiles, and pee,” says Steve Carell, who stars as Alexander’s job-seeking dad. But on-set mayhem proved necessary for the cast. Says Jennifer Garner, who plays the harried bread winning mom, ”It wasn’t till we had our first day together in the hot, hot sun doing the same scene over and over that we felt like a family.” —Lindsey Bahr

Robert Downey Jr. stars in David Dobkin’s (Wedding Crashers father-and-son legal drama as a big-city criminal-defense attorney who returns to his small-town home for his mother’s funeral after decades of estrangement from his father, a stern judge played by Robert Duvall. Both men have dedicated their lives to the law, but see themselves on opposite sides—until the old man is accused of a deadly hit-and-run. It’s the first feature-length production for the actor, who’s co-producing The Judge with his wife, Susan, via their production company Team Downey, and the film’s father-son conflict has taken a toll. ”How many times a week do I cry?” he asks Susan. ”I don’t know,” she says with a shrug. ”It depends how many times you talk about it…then multiply that times three.” That earns her a laugh and a ”touché” nod from the emotional anti-Iron Man. —Anthony Breznican

Jeremy Renner takes a break from kicking butt in the Avengers films for a much more sedentary role. He plays real-life San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, who in 1996 wrote a series of explosive articles alleging the CIA’s complicity in cocaine smuggling from Nicaragua into the U.S. The ensuing controversy cost him everything. ”He’s brave, but that doesn’t make him heroic,” says Renner of Webb, who died in 2004 of two self-inflicted gunshots to the head. ”He ruffled feathers, and felt like he wasn’t doing his job if he wasn’t ruffling feathers.” Webb was a whistle-blower to some and a shoddy journalist to others, but Renner, who took on the role of an infamous serial killer earlier in his career, isn’t choosing a side. ”Even when I was playing Jeffrey Dahmer, I couldn’t judge…. I had to make sense of things.” —Stephan Lee

Most directors try to prevent actors from fighting. But while shooting the fictional WWII tank movie Fury, David Ayer had his five stars—Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Bernthal, and Michael Peña—start each day by attempting to beat the crap out of one another. ”We put them through martial-arts training and physical combat classes,” says Ayer (End of Watch). ”It’s a great icebreaker for actors. There’s something very honest about being punched in the face.” Despite all the famous—and hopefully undamaged—faces in the cast, producer John Lesher says the real star is Fury itself, a 30-ton gun-on-tracks ”played” by an antique Sherman tank. ”It has such personality,” he says. ”It’s just this beast.” —Clark Collis

In Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dark comedy, Michael Keaton is Riggan Thomson, a former A-lister best known for playing the superhero Birdman. Hoping to recapture some of his earlier glory, Riggan writes, directs, and stars in a Broadway play—then suffers a breakdown in the process. In the film’s mysterious trailer, he can be seen jumping off a tall building, sprouting Black Swan-like wings, and walking through Times Square in tighty-whities. Keaton admits he was worn out by the shoot, which included intense choreography and a long rehearsal period. ”My guess is that there are some actors who don’t like that,” he says. ”Alejandro is a perfectionist and detail-oriented and constantly striving for more.” —Sara Vilkomerson

When she read the script for first-time feature director Justin Simien’s campus satire Dear White People, Tessa Thompson (For Colored Girls) was convinced that only she could play Sam White, the fiery DJ of a radio station at a fictional Ivy League college. Submitting her audition tape for the film, a breakout at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival, she included not only the requested scenes but all of Sam’s barbed on-air segments, which tweak the supposedly PC, mostly white student body. The actress was particularly drawn to Simien’s one-liners, some of which he’d tested out on Twitter. Her favorite: ”Dear White People Using Instagram, you have an iPhone and you go on hikes, I get it.” —Nicole Sperling

When embarking on his feature writing and directing debut, longtime commercial director Theodore Melfi spent months cold-calling Bill Murray in hope the actor would take on the title role: a cantankerous old-timer in Brooklyn named Vincent Canatella who drinks too much, smokes too much, gambles too much, and owes too much (to both legitimate businesses, like his bank, and not-so-legitimate ones, like the shady loan shark who’s been threatening him for repayment). Over the course of Melfi’s bittersweet indie comedy, Vincent unexpectedly softens after bonding with his new next-door neighbors, a single mom, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), and particularly her 12-year-old son, Oliver (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher). Rounding out the cast, Chris O’Dowd plays a friendly priest at Oliver’s Catholic elementary school, Terrence Howard is a debt collector, and Naomi Watts steps in as Vincent’s pregnant Russian prostitute/girlfriend. —Anthony Breznican

In Laggies, 17-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz portrays a believably eye-rolling adolescent who lives with her single dad (Sam Rockwell) and befriends a woman in her late 20s fleeing her grown-up responsibilities (Keira Knightley). ”It was one of the chillest sets I’ve ever been on,” she says. ”Sometimes we filmed. Other times we were just talking.” Moretz loved the low-budget aesthetic of director Lynn Shelton (Your Sister’s Sister). She also leaped at the chance to work with Knightley, one of her screen idols. ”My brother and I were always raving to her about how obsessed we’ve always been,” she says, adding that she’s seen Pride & Prejudice roughly ”one billion times.” —Sara Vilkomerson

Jason Reitman’s comedy of sexual angst in the Internet age boasts an ensemble cast including Adam Sandler as an online-porn-addicted suburban dad and Ansel Elgort as a glum teen adrift in World of Warcraft. The movie itself was constructed to match our constantly darting eyes. ”We wanted to treat the film as if it were your computer desktop,” says Reitman, ”so the movie is the background image and any window or icon can move on top of it.” Even more high-tech are the opening and closing scenes, set in outer space (courtesy of the F/X team behind Gravity) and narrated by Emma Thompson. Sound unusual? ”Yeah,” Reitman laughs, ”but it’ll make more sense when you see it.” —Joe McGovern

Christopher Nolan, the director who made Batman soar to arty heights and turned Leonardo DiCaprio into a top-spinning dream thief, is launching a cinematic space odyssey. As with every Nolan production, Interstellar is shrouded in secrecy that is either alluring or irritating, depending on your perspective. The story is set in a near future when Earth can no longer produce enough food to support the population. Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, a widower and engineer who leaves his two young kids to join a group of spacefaring scientists (including Anne Hathaway) to travel to planets beyond the solar system in search of solutions, if not a new home for humankind. ”It’s a thrilling interaction between grand spectacle and intimate, intense relationships,” says John Lithgow, who plays Cooper’s father-in-law. (The star-studded cast also includes Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, and possibly even Matt Damon in a cameo.) ”More so than many films of this genre, Chris found a way to make fantastic drama out of cosmic ideas and current human anxieties.” —Jeff Jensen

Les Misérables star Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking in a film that tracks the famed theoretical physicist’s relationship with his first wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), and the struggles they faced after he was diagnosed with the crippling degenerative illness ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). ”At age 21, he was a vibrant, funny young man and he fell deeply in love with this woman,” says Redmayne. ”Our film is about how they defied all the odds.” To prepare for the role, the actor met with Hawking himself. ”Even now, when he’s unable to move,” the actor says, ”you can still see such effervescence in his eyes.” —Clark Collis

Jon Stewart’s directing debut is not a comedy. In fact, it’s about as far from funny as he could get. The Daily Show host adapted Rosewater from the 2011 memoir of Iranian-born journalist Maziar Bahari, who was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for 118 days following Iran’s highly contested 2009 presidential election. While it might seem like odd source material for a comedian, Stewart has a personal connection to the story: Bahari had appeared in a 2009 Daily Show segment with Jason Jones. Bahari’s interrogators later used that sketch against him as evidence that he was a Western collaborator. Still, says Stewart, ” Maziar is an incredibly warm, intelligent, and sort of sparkly fella who has an ability to maintain his sense of humor. ” That very quality led the director to cast Mexican-born actor Gael García Bernal as his lead. ”He’s got an elfin quality of mischief that Gael, when he read for the role, really captured. It’s difficult to retain a sense of that while in solitary confinement.” He recalls, ”I asked Maziar, ‘How would you feel about Gael playing you?’ [Imitates Bahari] ‘I do not know if he’s handsome enough to play me.”’ —Sara Vilkomerson

Huggable is not generally a word one associates with robots. So when filmmakers Don Hall and Chris Williams kept hearing it come up in brainstorming sessions for a story inspired by the little-known Marvel comic Big Hero 6, which featured a bodyguard robot named Baymax, they knew creating their mechanical protagonist would be a challenge. A research trip took them to MIT, Harvard, and finally Carnegie Mellon, where they met a scientist who was working on an inflatable vinyl robotic arm. ”Baymax’s entire personality came out of that trip: the idea of him being a compassionate nurse robot,” says Hall. Scott Adsit, best known as the perpetually flustered Pete Hornberger on 30 Rock, provides the friendly medic’s soothing voice. ”Scott found nuance in Baymax’s lines and made it funny and emotional,” adds Hall. But caretaking is truly all Baymax can do, which presents a bit of a problem when the masked villain Yokai attacks the mythical city San Fransokyo. Luckily, 14-year-old robotics prodigy Hiro (Supah Ninjas‘ Ryan Potter) devises a plan. ”Hiro gets the idea that maybe he can turn this robot that’s designed to heal into a warrior,” says Williams. Just a totally cuddly one. —Lindsey Bahr

Capote director Bennett Miller likes to blend fact with fiction and find the buried truth that lies in between. In Foxcatcher, which debuted to raves at May’s Cannes Film Festival, he investigates another infamous murder, the bizarre 1996 shooting of an Olympic wrestler by blue-blooded benefactor John du Pont. ”There’s something about it that’s mysterious, a story that seemed on the surface sensational and at times absurd and funny, but had a very dark undercurrent to it,” Miller says. Steve Carell plays against type as the eccentric and erratic du Pont, who turned his Pennsylvania horse farm into an Olympic training facility for champion wrestling brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo). Miller saw an advantage in playing with Carell’s public persona. ”That it’s not obvious was part of the reason why it was right,” Miller says, ”because who we think [du Pont] is and who he turns out to be are very different things.” —Jeff Labrecque

Too stupid to live, but too beloved to die. Harry and Lloyd, the dim-witted stooges running on a fistful of neurons in 1994’s Dumb and Dumber, are back. Even after two decades, returning costars Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey found it easy to slip into that empty headspace again. ”From the minute we started filming, it was like we went back in time,” says codirector Peter Farrelly. When the pair learn that Harry (Daniels) may have fathered a daughter, they set out to find her in hopes that she might donate a needed kidney. Of course, what he could really use is a brain transplant. ”It’s very freeing to be that stupid, very Zen,” says Daniels. ”I’d highly recommend it.” —Keith Staskiewicz

Gugu Mbatha-Raw felt more comfortable in her corsets for the colonial drama Belle than with the artificial nails she put on to play a pop star in writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights. ”I broke so many nails—they were always lying all over the place,” she recalls, laughing. But starring as Noni—a songstress torn between her calculating momager (Minnie Driver) and her attraction to a sweet security guard (Nate Parker)—required more than multiple trips to the manicurist. The British actress spent hours in the recording studio (”I sing on every track,” she says), learned numerous dance routines, and even took notes backstage at the 2012 Grammy Awards. —Nina Terrero

Over the course of two Hunger Games films, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has been unflinchingly confident. But in Mockingjay—Part 1, the teen heroine suffers a bout of age-appropriate angst as she reluctantly becomes a rebel leader. ”It’s a very confusing, conflicted, complicated time for Katniss,” says Francis Lawrence, who also directed 2013’s Catching Fire. ”She’s distraught, confused, angry.” He won’t reveal how he’s divided the final book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, but expect the addition of power-hungry President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) to keep tensions high. ”There’s more of her than in the book,” he notes. —Nina Terrero

From Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, we’ve seen our share of Silicon Valley biopics. Now Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who arguably paved the way for modern tech titans, gets his moment of prestige-pic glory. The Imitation Game is partly set during WWII as Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his team of proto-hackers race to break the Nazis’ Enigma code. But it also traces Turing’s repressed boarding-school years as well as his final days in the 1950s facing prosecution for homosexuality. Cumberbatch admittedly became fixated on Turing. The Sherlock star replicated the math whiz’s stutter, attempted to learn how the elaborate code-breaking machine worked—”I tried my hardest, but it’s friggin’ hard,” he says—and even began running like Turing, a world-class marathoner. ”Running in period shoes!” he exclaims. ”That’s the only thing I had actor grumbles about.” Arch support may have been a tougher puzzle to solve than Enigma. —Stephan Lee

The three hapless employees played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day in 2011’s Horrible Bosses are still grappling with beastly supervisors, but there’s a twist: Now they’re self-employed. After inventing a Shower Buddy gadget they think will make them millionaires, the trio end up in a kidnap/ransom scheme targeting the father-son investors (Christoph Waltz and Chris Pine) who ripped them off. ”That obviously goes sideways pretty quickly,” Bateman says. ”We are forced into another situation that smarter guys probably wouldn’t find themselves in.” Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Jamie Foxx also return, but Seth Gordon—who directed the first film—has handed the helm to That’s My Boy‘s Sean Anders, so there is a new boss after all. —Anthony Breznican

In the new spy-thriller spin-off to the Madagascar series, the flightless waterfowl leave the circus where Madagascar 3 ended to join the North Wind, an undercover animal-rescue group led by a Bond-like wolf named Agent Classified (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch). They soon run into an old nemesis, an octopus named Dave (John Malkovich) who ”holds a great resentment to the penguins because he would be upstaged by [them] at the zoo,” codirector Eric Darnell says. While recording his lines early in the production, Malkovich got so into character that he would wave his arms around like tentacles without even realizing it. Fortunately, the filmmakers videotaped the star’s over-the-top antics to inspire Dave’s cephalopodian movements. ”Once you have that performance, it is much easier to take that to the animator,” says codirector Simon J. Smith. Hmmm…perhaps Octopus of Madagascar will be next. —Jake Perlman

The star of bubbly hits Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama doesn’t seem like the obvious choice to play a grieving, heroin-shooting, sexually promiscuous woman who treks 1,000-plus miles by herself across the American Northwest. But Reese Witherspoon was captivated by Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, Wild, which details the author’s grueling, transformative hike on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother. Optioning Strayed’s book with her own money and developing the project independently, Witherspoon and director Jean-Marc Vallée worked from a script by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) during a tight 35 days on location in Oregon and California. ”It’s the hardest film I’ve ever made on many different levels: emotionally, physically,” Witherspoon says. ”Honestly, nothing prepares you for carrying a 40-pound backpack up and down mountains and snow.” Given the Oscar buzz that Wild is generating, she could be adding another 8.5 pounds to that backpack in 2015. —Tim Stack

”He’s one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever studied,” says Christian Bale of Moses, the Old Testament prophet he plays in Exodus: Gods and Kings. ”All of his trials, his troubled life and his doubts, his rages and his extremes.” Exodus aims to present a more rounded portrait of the man many know only from Sunday school. That process began with director Ridley Scott. ”As a filmmaker I’m always attracted by who the central character is and what they face,” says Scott, who calls Moses’ life one of the greatest adventures and spiritual experiences of all time. ”I was knocked out by who he was…and the actual basics of the story.” Scott also knew that Bale, with whom he was friendly but had never worked, would be perfect for the role. Says the director, ”I wanted to save something special for him.” —Sara Vilkomerson