Coming Soon...
Trailers, advance clips, stills and posters — sometimes the best thing about a movie is the pre-release hype. There will be a lot around this year, as the site First Showing explains in “Why 2007 will be a Great Year for Movies”. Look forward to David Fincher’s Zodiac (“an astounding novel-like piece”) and Hot Fuzz (“the next great British comedy”, pictured above). But even First Showing cannot compare with the Future Films section provided by Empire magazine’s online arm. With its news, database, trailer links, and interactivity, it leads the field.
www.firstshowing.net
www.empireonline.com/futurefilms/

Advance Info
Those music fans still sifting through the end-of-year lists to catch up on classics they somehow missed may wilt at the prospect of a site detailing some of the thousands of CDs due to be unleashed in 2007. But for the rest of us, these are a handy resource. One of the best is to be found on Metacritic, and though it is US-biased and stretches only to the May 8 release of the former Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan’s Are You Listening?, it does have a huge list of expected releases, among them REM, Coldplay and the Cure. For a British release calendar, try the regularly updated equivalent on Albumvote. However, you may be distracted by its nifty The No 1 on the Day You Were Born feature. Enter your date of birth to find out who topped the charts in the US, UK and Australia that day (this correspondent was blessed with Mary’s Boy Child by Boney M).
www.metacritic.com
www.albumvote.co.uk

Blog of the week
Already film fanatics are getting twitchy about who will bag an Oscar on February 25. The web is crammed with blogs obsessively devoted to the gongs, not least And the Oscar Goes To . . . , which places its primary predictions into pages and then divides further contenders with nary a hope of winning into first-tier and second-tier sections. But it’s not all charts and stats; the writing is enthusiastic and well informed.
www.atogt.co.nr

Podcast of the week
Words in all their dizzying variety — their meaning, use, and a whole lot more — are explored by the Word Nerds in a series of more than 100 podcasts. The Word Nerd trio (and guests) entertainingly cover such subjects as the specialist vocabulary of the theatre, racial epithets and the boundaries of acceptability, and “non-verbal communication in romance, sports, and the classroom”.
thewordnerds.org