An unusual number of potential awards movies have yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean studios haven't released some glimpses of "War Horse" and "J. Edgar" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and others.
In fact, the past week brought several such marketing goodies.
The "J. Edgar" poster (left), with its image of Leonardo DiCaprio's J. Edgar Hoover, his face contorted in rage, is one example.
A roundup of the others:
Jason Reitman's "Young Adult" — which bypassed the filmmaker's typical Toronto debut — will be released in December in the same slot that Paramount successfully used last year for "The Fighter."
The film stars Charlize Theron as a successful writer who returns to her hometown to try to win back her now-married high school sweetheart.
Judging from the trailer, Theron's character is unpleasant, Diablo Cody's dialogue is as smart-alecky as ever and Patton Oswalt has the semi-loveable sidekick role.
Steven Spielberg's "War Horse," which sight unseen has topped some Oscar-watchers' polls, released a second trailer — which, like the first, is long on stirring romantic music, sweeping shots and, on occasion, that patented Spielbergian rosy glow, this time suffusing a horse in World War I rather than an alien in suburbia.
Oscar bait? To be sure. Great movie? We'll have to wait before answering that one.
In Europe, Spielberg's other 2011 movie will bow well before "War Horse." "The Adventures of Tintin" will be released in October in the UK, with a new European trailer dropping this past week.
The film, which was made using performance-capture technology — and which is looking to be classified as an animated feature by the Academy — looks like a cartoon at some points in the trailer and an Indiana Jones movie at other points.
The action happens too fast to really ascertain if Spielberg has solved the infamous problem of dead eyes in motion capture characters.
Clint Eastwood's biopic "J. Edgar" released its own trailer a couple of weeks ago, after which pundits hurried to judge DiCaprio's awards worthiness on the basis of a handful of snippets that may or may not accurately capture his entire performance.
Warner Bros. has followed with two posters for the film, above and to the right.
The image in both is the same: a profile shot of DiCaprio as a very angry and thoroughly unpleasant-looking J. Edgar Hoover, with the caption (too small to read in these reproductions) "The most powerful man in the world."
Really? One wonders how hard the film will have to work to justify that hyperbole.
Also in the new-poster camp is Steve McQueen's "Shame," the sexually explicit drama due for a December 2 release from Fox Searchlight.
While the film quickly became famous in festival circles for its full-frontal nudity from stars Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, the poster takes the opposite tack: it doesn't feature any skin at all.
But the implications of its unmade bedsheets are pretty clear, and the image quite striking.
Back on the trailer front, the Weinstein Company provided a first look at Michelle Williams' reputedly Oscar-worthy performance as Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn" just a few days before the film had its premiere at the New York Film Festival.
It's safe to say that everybody in the trailer is overshadowed by Williams — except maybe Judi Dench, who only needs a line or two to be memorable.
Finally, David Fincher's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" got another trailer to follow its initial teaser, and the eight-minute assemblage released almost a month ago. Like its predecessors, the new trailer is cold and stylish and striking.
And as that trailer hit, so did a series of photos of "Dragon Tattoo" star Rooney Mara taken by photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino for the French fashion magazine Le Monde.
