Playing in theaters before Ratatouille, this trailer for Pixar's next animation classic-to-be is a teaser in more ways than one. The animation looks stunning and the character design is full of charm -- but this is still only the barest glimpse of a plucky little robot's quest for something bigger and better.

The rest of the teaser is devoted to a retrospective of Pixar's greatest hits, implying that Wall-E is cut from the same cloth as Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. From any other company, such parading of past hits might seem grandious. But if any company has earned the right to brag in this fashion, it's Pixar. I'm looking forward to watching this teaser again this weekend -- on the big screen.

I wasn't completely sold on Paul Thomas Anderson until I saw Punch-Drunk Love at the New York Film Festival in 2001. (The screening was interrupted when a woman in the audience had a seizure, which may or not have been caused by Anderson's experimental editing and jarring sound design.) But that masterful art-film take on the romantic comedy got me seriously hooked -- not just on the young director's talent (which even the most diehard PTA hater must admit he's got in spades), but on his genuine desire to challenge himself and his audience with difficult material (and not just beautifully-executed pop).

Six years later, Anderson's legion of diehard fans will finally get another fix with the release of There Will Be Blood. Adapted from a novel by Upton Sinclair and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, the film tells the story of battling oil prospectors in 1920s California. While the film won't hit screens until August, a tantalizing trailer hit the Net last week. This clip is about as oblique as it gets for a major-studio offering, but it certainly makes me want to see more. Check it out.

Why does it seem like the most interesting documentaries are always about people that I would probably hate if I met? The King of Kong is no exception: the movie centers on the conflict between Billy Mitchell, the best arcade game player in history, and Steve Wiebe, a middle school science teacher who has designs on breaking Mitchell’s twenty-year-old Donkey Kong record.

The trailer is so good I don’t even really have anything to add except to say that if you’re curious, you should head to the Billy Mitchell page on Wikipedia (the gamer, not to be confused with the American General from WWI) and check out his “notable scores.” I don’t know what getting a 3,333,360 on Pac-Man means, but I’m sure it’s really impressive.

Anyway, I’ll definitely be seeing this movie in all its nerdy glory. To that end, I found a quote from an IMDB user that made me even more excited: “[Mitchell and Sanders] are some of the strongest characters I’ve seen in a movie since STAR WARS.” Indeed!

What do you get when you combine two bickering slacker buddies, a one-room apartment, and the end of the world? Why, "Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse," of course.

Not much is known yet about this comedy-horror short, other than that it comes to us from Knocked Up stars Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel and producer Evan Goldberg. What we do have is this romp of a trailer, in which Rogan and Baruchel are holed up together, hiding from certain death and getting mighty cranky about it while Randy Newman's "You've Got a Friend in Me" plays jauntily in the background. It's pretty enjoyable.

I, for one, will be keeping an eye out for it... and maybe giving some thought to just who I'd like to be spending my apocalypse with.