You've seen the two short teasers. Now, finally, you can watch an official trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” The movie, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, is Thomas’s already controversial look at a religion that in no way whatsoever is meant to resemble Scientology. If the hubbub surrounding the film or the talent involved weren’t reason enough reason to be excited, the new footage (some but not too much of which appeared in the teasers) would be enough to hook anyone who cares about important cinema.

Though there’ve been hints at the film’s story, this trailer is more explicit: Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is a haggard man adrift in postwar America and unable to escape his painful past. Until, that is, he meets Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, a writer/doctor/nuclear physicist/theoretical philosopher who in no way whatsoever resembles L. Ron Hubbard. The two men apparently become obsessed with one another, locked in a love/hate relationship which culminates in the two riding motorcycles into each other in the desert. That’s how it’s looking, at least.

Another nice treat, for “Friday Night Lights” fans at least, the presence of Jesse Plemons, a.k.a. Landry “Lance” Clarke, Dodd’s son, who’s got no problem calling his father out: “He’s making this up as he goes along. Don’t you see that?” That, along with another, unnamed character's opinion that, “Good science, by definition, allows for more than one opinion, otherwise you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of a cult,” makes it seem as if Anderson & Co. aren’t big fans of the obviously fictional religion at the center of their movie.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, NY — There's something about the air on the eastern tip of Long Island that makes even the most hardcore New Yorkers relax just a little bit.  

"It's like camp," a hungry fairgoer noted as we waited in an interminable line to pick up some messy barbecue. Indeed, it did end up feeling something like that, as we sat down to eat at a communal table on the lawn of the Bridgehampton Historical Society during last night's opening preview of ArtMRKT Hamptons, the second art fair of the season targeting the rich of the New York vacation spot (the first being last weekend's ArtHamptons). Something about the summer air and finger food lent itself to mingling with the various artists, collectors, and dealers that had gathered — and before we knew it we were making new friends and debating whether or not putting an artists work on Pinterest is a copyright violation, just like we would have at (art-law nerd) summer camp.  

As the night wore on, things became more typical of an art fair party. Hundreds of people packed into the fair tent, swarming the booths of the 35 participating galleries, champagne in hand. The organizers estimated that turnout will double this year, and, indeed, it was a much different vibe from the sleepy, almost empty rooms of the inaugural 2011 event.

There was an aura of see-and-be-seen, as crowds filled the aisles and dealers chatted one another up. The exhibitor list includes many local Long Island galleries, and a number of smaller outfits based in Manhattan. Bigger names and more exotic dealers are New York's PPOW, Florida's Mindy Solomon Gallery, and Arte Nova, all the way from Florence, Italy. Despite the very apparent preference for the bar over the art (it is the Hamptons in July, after all), everyone was in good spirits.

"I think it's terrific," said dealer Nancy Margolis, who is participating for the first time this year. "It is well organized, the space is open and airy, the booths are well set up, and I like the smallness of it. The large fairs are overwhelming for people." She did admit that it wasn't a sales-heavy evening, but she expected quite a few people to come back in the later days of the fair.

(Art)Amalgamated's Gary Krimershmoys — who is showing, among other things, Frances Goodman's series of vajazzling photos (look it up if you don't know what that is) — remarked that he had put several works on hold, and expected people back over the weekend with their spouses. While it's no Art Basel Miami Beach, where collectors reach for their wallets within minutes of the opening, how does it compare with the more geographically and seasonally analogous ArtHamptons? One observer noted that artMRKT seemed younger and edgier, with more of a focus on emerging artists.

Max Fishko, artMRKT's co-founder and managing partner, took issue with the word "edgy," preferring the word "fresh." In the very process of choosing galleries, Fishko said that he and his partner, Jeffrey Wainhause, tried to come up with a fair that was small, very contemporary, and "gave people a few reasons to say 'Shit, there's some good stuff here.'" In that way, the pair definitely succeeded. As ARTINFO stood waiting for food, with a little over two hours left in the evening preview, one bottle blonde turned to another and asked how long the tent would be up. "I would really like to come back and look at the art," she said.  

To see images from the 2012 ArtMRKT Hamptons, click on the slide show.

Are you outfitting a dorm room? Do you have a fanatic crush on Michael Phelps? Did you lose your signed pair of Usain Bolt's running shorts and are in dire need of new memorobilia to take its place? If one or all of these is the case, the Internet has a remedy for what's ailing you.

To recoup some of the $15 billion London will have spent on the 2012 Olympics, the city is unrolling "Remains of the Games," a massive online estate sale of all the wares used in the Olympic Village. Before the 11,000 or so athletes have even broken them in, you can lay claim to one of their beds, bean bags, or outdoor folding tables, stamped with an official seal of authenticity. Entire bedroom sets, including the bed, mattress, nightstand, and lamp Jordyn Weiber may or may not have used are going for £99 ($155), and a delightfully tacky purple chaise longue under the site's "Conversation Pieces" section is up for grabs for £199 ($312). Other Bed Bath & Beyond-type swag includes 14,872 LED lamps, 6,326 cushions, 7,496 clothes drying racks, and 17,978 folding chairs for £8 each ($12.50), according to the Guardian.

This gold-medal deal comes with a few catches: For starters, despite the star status of an Olympic athlete, he or she gets put up in an Ikea-style dorm room for the two-week duration of the games. "It is a bit difficult for me to lie down," said Sierra Leone sprinter Ibrahim Turay of his pint-sized bed.

And before you go off bragging that you’ve got Carmelo Anthony's dresser, you should know that you don’t get to verify the goods' previous owner. While he or she could've been a star sprinter, there's also the possibility he or she was an organizer or member of the media — or, worse yet, a lowly canoe sprinter. "Who actually used each item? Their new owners will never know," Paul Levin, marketing executive for official supplier Ramler Furniture, told the Telegraph. "But there is definitely a fun factor in speculating who slept on the bed, or which athlete pressed the switch on their lamp as they turned off the light the night before the most important day of their life."

So did Phelps rest his heels on your new ottoman? Or did a pair of Chinese badminton players get it on in your new twin bed (the Olympic Village is reportedly like college dorms in that respect, too)? It's all up to speculation, but you've got nothing to lose by spending $12 for a new folding chair. Order now and receive your item at Paralympic Games' end.

To see gymnast and London Olympics ambassador Louis Smith tour the Ramler Furniture warehouse, watch the video clip below.

Archeologists working in Florence reported to AFP the discovery of the final resting place of Lisa Gherardini this week, potentially confirming a crucial fragment in the biography of one of the most recognizable personages in Western culture and art history. As the purported model for Leonardo da Vinci's "Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo," more popularly known as "La Gioconda" or the "Mona Lisa," Signora Gherardini has been a object of incessant speculation and wonder for five centuries; as with any international celebrity, even the most minor detail that might explain her poise, her countenance, or her uniquely cryptic and subtle simper has posed an unquestionable draw on the world's attention over the years.

And the discovery of the model's bones is far from minor. Historians renewed their focus on the life of Lisa Gherardini in 2008 when experts from the Hedelberg University Library announced they had found a description from the notebook of city official Agostino Vespucci of three works-in-progress by Leonardo, including a portrait of the fair wife of the Florentine textile merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo. "All doubts about the identity of the 'Mona Lisa' have been eliminated," the university said at the time in a statement to Discovery News.

Researchers lead by Silvano Vinceti were further confident that they had found the tomb of Leonardo's model after finding a 15th-century base in the the Convent of St. Orsola. "After 1500, only two women were buried here: Mona Lisa Gherardini, in 1542, and another noblewoman, Maria del Riccio," the team told ANSA, later announcing that the other skeleton that had been exhumed did not belong to Lisa Gherardini.

When they announced plans to disinter the remains of Lisa Gherardini in April of last year, the proceedings were met by a wave of international attention — not all of it approving. Natalia Guicciardini Strozzi, an actress and bona fide descendant of Leonardo's muse, called the excavation "a sacrilegious act." "My ancestor's remains should be left to rest in peace," she told the Telegraph. "What difference would finding her remains make to the allure of Leonardo's painting?" 

Natalia's sense of propriety is to be expected for an heir to both the Gherardini and Strozzi titles, both of which were prominent art patrons in Renaissance Tuscany. But her objections ultimately failed to prevent Vinceti and his colleagues from reconstructing fragments of Gherardini's skull for comparison with the face in the iconic painting. The skeleton will also be the subject of delicate extraction of genetic, Vinceti told ABC News, which he plans to test "at the University of Bologna for DNA matches to the bones of Mona Lisa’s two sons." 

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, July 16-20, 2012:

ART

— Ben Davis drew some parallels between the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's recent woes and the country's ongoing economic woes.

— In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter's controversial article in the Atlantic, Alanna Martinez asked women in the art world whether or not it's possible to "have it all."

— Painter and "Girls" co-star Jemima Kirke talked about painting Lena Dunham naked, and the influence of Alice Neel.

— Neo-Nazis wreaked havoc at the opening of a painting exhibition at Kunsthaus Erfurt.

— Shane Ferro speculated on the possible effects of Christie's increasing number of private sales on galleries' business.

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

— Janelle Zara sized up the Space Shuttle Enterprise as an emblem of '70s design on the occasion of its unveiling at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

— Ron Arad revealed details of a temporary suspended pavilion and film screen he will install at the Israel Museum next month.

— The organizers of the London Olympics started to sell off furnishings from the Olympic Village before the sports super-event even began.

— Cartier announced a new limited-edition luxury timepiece, the Astrotourbillon Carbon Crystal, which will premiere at next year's Salon International Haute Horlogerie in Geneva.

— Nicholas Forrest spoke to head of exhibitions Conrad Bodman about the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's new video game design exhibition.

FASHION & STYLE

— Isabella Rossellini returned to the spotlight with an HBO series and a new Bulgari ad, reigniting discussion of the entertainment industry's age bias.

— Nate Freeman spoke to Tumblr-beloved model Charlotte Free during her visit to the tech company's New York offices.

— Berlin's CWC Gallery opened an exhibition devoted to the bizarre, beautiful work of fashion photographer Steven Klein.

— Ann Binlot looked back on a half-century of fashion designs by Yayoi Kusama on the occasion of her Whitney retrospective and Louis Vuitton collaboration.

— Ahead of his first solo show in the U.K., Banksy wannabe Mr. Brainwash painted a mural-sized image of supermodel Kate Moss.

PERFORMING ARTS

— J. Hoberman extracted class war subtext from "The Dark Knight Rises," while popular movie Web site Rotten Tomatoes temporarily pulled Marshall Fine's largely negative review after commenters made death threats.

— Visionary British director Peter Greenaway revealed details of his forthcoming film on legendary Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's time in Mexico.

— South Korean action auteur Bong Joon-ho finished filming his forthcoming adaptation of the apocalyptic train adventure "Snow Piercer."

— Hulu and BBC announced plans to bring a new season of the beloved British political satire "The Thick of It" to the U.S.

— Graham Fuller looked back at the many screen adaptations of Marcel Pagnol novels on the occasion of Daniel Auteuil's new remake of "The Well-Digger's Daughter."

VIDEO

— Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall discussed his work in his studio

Zaha Hadid rarely does residential projects, but her name is about to blow up on the house scene. Roger Sanchez, the former Pratt architecture student now better known as a DJ, named his latest track after the architect who brought you Rome's troubled MAXXI Museum and mega-dealer Kenny Shachter's Boatmobile. 

The pulsing, bouncy single is a musical interpretation of Hadid's deconstructivist aesthetic, driven by a relentless electronic bassline. "It's tech-house, futuristic, minimal but with lots of varying elements that are opposing but work together beautifully," Sanchez told Building Design UK. "It has an angular high at the end which conforms to the form of her designs and there’s a crescendo in the middle that reminds me of her focal points." It's poppier than the reserved demeanor we imagine when we hear Hadid's name, so the song is probably the only time we'll encounter "Zaha Hadid" on a dance floor. 

This is only the first track from Sanchez's forthcoming architecturally-inspired album; he's promised songs devoted to the work of Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, and Antoni Gaudí, whose surreal exteriors would lend themselves well to to dancey house music. We're nervous about how his Frank Lloyd Wright and Tadao Ando tracks are going to be received, however — country music and zen-like silence don't usually do so well on the dance floor.

Listen to Roger Sanchez's song "Zaha Hadid":

— Pussy Riot's Jail Sentence Extended, Again: The three jailed members of anti-Vladimir Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich — were handed a six-month extension to their jail sentence Friday. (The group, of course, is a female-centric spinoff of the award-winning anarchist art group Voina.) Each member of the trio, arrested nearly five months ago, faces up to seven years in prison for a performance at a Moscow cathedral where they asked the Virgin Mary to remove Putin. [Reuters]

— Roberta Smith Tells MOCA to Make it Work: After a few weeks of little to no coverage on the mess at L.A. MOCA, the New York Times gives Roberta Smith some column inches in which to assess the museum's shrinking reputation. A solution will only come, she writes, after board members step up to the plate and give enough money to counterbalance Eli Broad's contributions and views: "You can't have a one-person board any more than you can have a one-person museum." [NYT]

— High Line Terminus Gets Moving: The third and final portion of the High Line, an elevated park in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, has been donated to the city. CSX Transportation, which owned the 0.58-mile portion north of West 30th Street, turned the section over on July 11, clearing the way for the city to license it to Friends of the High Line. [NYPost]

— RIP Herbert Vogel, Middle-Class Collector, 89: The art collector Herbert Vogel, who amassed a formidable collection of more than 5,000 pieces despite his modest means, died on Sunday in New York from natural causes. Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery already has 900 works from the Vogel Collection — which was the subject of major exhibitions there in 1994 and 2001 — and has been promised 300 more. "The National Gallery doesn’t sell works they acquire," Vogel said in a 1992 interview, explaining the donation. "They’ll keep the collection together. And they don’t charge admission." [WaPo, AP]

— Joe Paterno Statue Removed from Penn State: Shortly before news broke this morning that Penn State would be fined $60 million and stripped of its winning record from 1998 to 2011, the university decided to remove a statue of legendary coach Joe Paterno from its grounds. University leaders acknowledged that the 7-foot statue had become "a source of division and an obstace to healing" at the school after Paterno's role in covering up assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's serial sexual abuse came to light last month. The school's Paterno Library will retain its name. [Reuters]

— I'll See Your Hirst and Raise You a Hambling: Anish Kapoor, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst were among the 52 artists commissioned to design playing cards that are now on view at London's A&D Gallery. The two limited-edition decks were made in 1979 and 2005. "I like making things available that are affordable but really high-quality art," said Daniel Brant, the exhibition's curator. [Guardian]

— Inside Geneva's Freeport, and its Forthcoming Competitors: The invaluable trove of luxury goods and art being held in the Geneva Freeport warehouses — a tax- and duty-free storage complex that, according to AXA Art Insurance underwriting director Nicholas Brett, is worth "a huge but unknown number" — is attracting the attention of other countries. Luxembourg's new freeport will open in 2014, and one in Beijing just began construction in March, while Singapore is planning to double the size of its two-year-old freeport near Changi Airport. [NYT]

To see Page 2 of the Daily Checklist, click below.

— Nigeria Demands Artifacts Back from Boston: Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments has requested the return of 32 artifacts recently acquired by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, mainly bronze and ivory sculptures, which were looted by the British during 1897's Benin Massacre. The pieces were given to the MFA last month by New York collector Robert Owen Lehman, who bought the pieces in the 1950s and '70s. "These artworks are heirlooms of the great people of the Benin Kingdom and Nigeria generally," said Commission director-general Yusuf Abdallah Usman. "The gap created by this senseless exploitation is causing our people, untold anguish, discomfort and disillusionment." [HuffPo]

— William Morris House Reopening as Museum: The Lloyd Park home of Arts & Crafts movement leader William Morris, which was nearly demolished in 2007 after it fell into disrepair, will reopen to the public following a £1.5 million ($2.3 million) grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a £10 million ($15.5 million) refurbishment of its interiors, artifacts, and gardens. The renovated home, which reopens August 2, will include a museum and a gallery for contemporary exhibits, whose new programing will launch with a Grayson Perry tapestry. [Guardian]

— Ronald Reagan Library Teams Up With Disney: In an effort to attract a younger audience, the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California has fully financed an exhibition in its grounds of Walt Disney memorabilia, half of which has never been removed from the entertainment company's archives. A full reproduction of Walt Disney's office now sits down the hall from the recreation of Reagan's Oval Office. [NYT]

— China Launches Art Research Committee: The Communist nation has formed a research committee dedicated to promoting the country's rapidly-growing contemporary art scene. The group, which is overseen by the Ministry of Culture, has 200 artist members. We think it's safe to assume Ai Weiwei wasn't invited. [China.org]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Clip from "Herb & Dorothy," about the art collecting of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel 

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Until June I had never ordered a bottle of lambrusco in Italy. With memories of those sweet, fizzy, soda-like imports of the 1970s like Riunite Lambrusco (“Riunite on ice -- so nice!”), I had no interest in revisiting such wines, even in Emilia-Romagna...

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We all love adding a little color to our Sunday slumber, and making those Monday blues just a little more pink. For some reason, starting the week with a pop of color at the end of our fingertips makes Mondays that little bit brighter. It’s not just us...

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When Yves Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane announced in June that he would reinvent the brand’s identity by dropping the “Yves” from its name, the fashion world was divided in its reaction to the news.

Now, the first images of the redesign are starting to pop up, reports the Telegraph. One comes via Instagram from LOVE magazine editor Katie Grand. The photo shows the new typography of the fashion house’s revamped name in ivory, tilted diagonally with “Opening Soon” and “YSL.com” underneath. It is set against an eggplant-hued background. Comments about the photo on Grand’s Instagram feed ranged from “BORING!!” to “Can I press DISLIKE?” to “I think it’s so chic!”

The other sneak peek surfaced in a photo that was Tweeted by Slimane on July 20 and also featured in the August issue of Vogue Paris. The image reveals what appears to be a packaging redesign — a black box with the words “Saint Laurent” and “Paris” in white type, set neatly at its center.

Yves Saint Laurent has yet to officially unveil its logo. The rebranding will only affect the ready-to-wear line – all other products from the fashion house will still carry the iconic YSL logo designed by Cassandre in 1963.

Slimane presented his first collection for Yves Saint Laurent to a select group of buyers earlier this month at a secret presentation. Sadly, press was banned from the event.

The entire Saint Laurent rebranding efforts are set to be released in several months, when the fashion house’s spring collection rolls out in stores. So far, commenters are just as torn over the Slimane’s realization of the logo facelift as they are over the name switch. We understand that change is hard – perhaps this just will just take some getting used to.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news.

MOSCOW — The III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art opened earlier this month, with its main exhibition on view at the Central House of Artists, while special projects are housed at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA) and National Centre for contemporary Arts (NCCA). Known by many as “the Kids’ Biennale,” this year's presentation features a truly international set of artists for the first time. Curator Kathrin Becker, the head of the Video-Forum at Berlin's Neuer Berliner Kunstverein — who has curated group shows in Berlin, New York, Barcelona, and Prague, and solo exhibitions by Louise Bourgeois, Maryam Jafri, Matthias Muller, Arthur Zmievski, and famous Russian artists Andrey Monastyrsky and Dmitry Prigov — can be credited for the Biennale's unprecedented internationalization.

The Moscow Biennale's main exhibition, titled “Under A Tinsel Sun,” is on view at the Central House of Artists, and features works by 80 artists from 33 countries — including 11 Russian artists, 7 from Germany, and 6 from the U.S. and Austria. After the opening earlier this month, Becker met ARTINFO Russia to talk about her work and the Biennale.  

What are your impressions after the opening of the project?

In general, the exhibition looks like we intended it to be. The Central House of Artists is a complexly structured space. Certain things were not quite a success: I was unhappy with the quality of some video installations, although that was inevitable with such an ambitious approach. But I’m perfectly content with almost all of it.

How did you select the young artists for the show?

Finding young talent was not easy, so the selection procedure was helpful. On the other hand, we invited certain artists with some known works to participate in the exhibition — although they had to undergo the same competitive process as well. More than a half of the artists in the group of 80 came to the Biennale by invitation. Many ask me why there are so few Russian artists, when in face there are more Russian artists — 11 of them — than any other nationality. The U.S., Germany, and Austria are the next most represented. I believe that if the Biennale does not rise to an international level while remaining a local event, the Russian artists will be the first to lose this opportunity to show their work in an international context.

That said, the West has not demonstrated much interest in contemporary Russian art. The older generation belongs to the international context — Yuri Albert, Vadim Zakharov, or Yuri Lejderman — but for young artists the situation is more difficult. That is why they have to promote themselves, and the Biennale for Young Art's selection process seems to offer the right strategy.

How did you define whether or not an artist is young? Age requirements don't seem to be a useful metric.

After thinking it over many times, I would agree that age is not the best way to determine this, but we felt justified due to the non-existence of support systems for young artists. Of course, the age-based selection is a disputable strategy: 35-year-old artists are eligible for the show, but 36-year-old artists are not.

Why did you agree to curate the Biennale?

I was wondering what united young artists, and if they had anything in common. Everybody keeps asking what it’s all about, what are the tendencies and themes that interest young artists. At the same time, it’s clear that young art is not heterogeneous and it’s hard to say which trends it follows. But it was interesting to find what really were the unifying factors, especially when we started to talk about very different countries.

The unifying factors tended to be artists' living conditions and their world views. This generation has been raised in a virtual epoch with constant access to the Web, and that undoubtedly affects the structure of their identity. On the iInternet one may take on several personalities at the same time, which also triggers some psychological changes. The Internet became available in the '90s, and our artists were born from 1975-1985, so this is the first generation of artists to have grown up with the Web. However, I did not pick any projects made in the virtual world — I preferred to focus on how the virtual world reacts to perceptions of the real.

III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art will continue through August 10. The see works from the exhibition, click the slide show.

This article also appears on ARTINFO Russia.

The British actor Sam Riley has been cast as Wilfred of Ivanhoe in director Iain Softley’s upcoming adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel about the troubles and victories of the disinherited Crusader knight in England after his return from the Holy Land. Riley is best known for his portrayal of the doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in “Control.” He will shortly be seen as Sal Paradise, the narrator of “On the Road” in Walter Salles’s Kerouac adaptation.

“Ivanhoe,” reports Screen International, is a German-Spanish co-production with British and Belgian involvement. Written by John Brownlow and James Jacks, it will be filmed in 65mm, enabling higher resolution than 35mm.

The shooting of “Ivanhoe” will coincide with the centenary of the earliest films based on Scott’s romance. Herbert Brenon’s 1913 “Ivanhoe,” filmed in Wales, starred King Baggot, Hollywood’s first internationally famous American leading man and himself a writer and director. The long forgotten British stage and film actor Lauderdale Maitland played Ivanhoe in “Rebecca the Jewess,” released the same year.

Scott’s novel, published in 1820, predated the campaign for the emancipation of Jews in Britain. Although the moneylender Isaac is a stereotypically Shylockian figure, his daughter Rebecca, a gifted healer unrequitedly in love with Ivanhoe, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the book. In the 1952 Hollywood version, directed by Richard Thorpe, she was played by Elizabeth Taylor. Robert Taylor was Ivanhoe and Joan Fontaine was Rowena, the Saxon Ivanhoe loves – and the chivalric ideal of the virtuous lady.

Although it was MGM’s top earner of the year, Thorpe’s film shares the woodenness of many costume adventure films of the fifties. Equally weak was the 1958-59 British-made TV series starring Roger Moore, which despite its bigger budget paled in comparison with the contemporaneous “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” the legendary long-running series that made a star of Richard Greene.

The 1982 television film starring Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe, James Mason as Isaac, and Sam Neill as the villainous Templar knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert was an advance on any previous versions; it was particularly impressive in its depiction of the tournament in which the mysterious Black Knight comes to Ivanhoe’s rescue and for David Robb’s drily humorous Robin Hood.

In 1997, Steven Waddington, the beefiest Ivanhoe yet, starred in the superior BBC miniseries – muddier, bloodier, and more grimly realistic than any previous adaptation. Iain Softley’s film promises to be the first epic “Ivanhoe” – as medieval tales go, it can hardly fail to be better than Ridley Scott’s rote and pointless “Robin Hood.”  

With the final part of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy arriving in theaters last Friday, Warner Brother is already readying their next attempt at a superhero cash cow for next summer. Accompanying “The Dark Knight Rises” was the first trailer for Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” the studio's second attempt at relaunching the Superman franchise.

Nolan, who will be the film’s executive producer (and co-plotter), has set a high bar for superhero films, showing that movies featuring costumed heroes doing ridiculous things could still feel both epic and serious. Based on this trailer, that’s clearly what Snyder will be going for with Superman. Always a strong visualist, sometimes to a fault, the director seems to have been absorbing a lot of Terrence Malick's aesthetic. The trailer's handful of images -- a boy wearing a cape, a butterfly hanging out on a swing set, shots of the harsh fisherman life, and, finally, Superman (from a very far distance) bursting through the layers of earth’s atmosphere -- have a serious “Tree of Life” vibe. It’s hard not to get caught up in the beauty of it all.

We don’t get a clear shot of Henry Cavill in Superman's iconic costume, and nor do we get much of an idea of the story. It does seem as if there will be a focus on Clark Kent's alienation, which makes sense. We’d imagine being an, um, alien, plus the most powerful man on earth, might make anyone lonely. We're also guessing that young Kent’s search for belonging will be a bit of a struggle.

Surprisingly, Warner Brothers actually released two “Man of Steel" trailers. Though shot-by-shot duplicates, they both feature different voiceovers -- one from each of Superman’s fathers. The first features Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent, Superman’s adopted earth father, expressing a sense of uncertainty about his son, but also hope that he will chose to do the right thing with his power. The second, featuring the voice of Russell Crowe, takes a completely different tact. Speaking as Superman’s biological father, Jor-El, he tells his son that while it will be difficult, he will help the people of earth. It seems that just like Nolan’s Batman films, Snyder’s will focus on what it means to be Superman, not just the character's exploits. Considering how the approach worked for the Caped Crusader, it sounds like a pretty solid plan.

Kevin Costner Version

Russell Crowe Version