Alex Pettyfer

It's only May, but the trailer for Lee Daniels's The Butler already has me thinking about award season. The drama stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a butler who serves eight US presidents over the course of his three decades at the White House. Working through particularly volatile moments in the country's history, he gains a unique perspective on the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and more. Oprah Winfrey plays Cecil's wife, marking the first time she's been on screen playing a character other than herself since 1998's Beloved.

Whitaker and Winfrey aren't the only big names in the movie. The laundry list of stars playing presidents is fascinating: Robin Williams is Dwight Eisenhower, James Marsden is John F. Kennedy (with Minka Kelly as Jackie Kennedy!), Liev Schreiber is Lyndon Johnson, John Cusack is Richard Nixon, and Alan Rickman is Ronald Reagan. Not all the actors resemble their presidential counterparts, so I'm curious to see how this pans out. The film opens Oct. 18, and you can see the trailer after the jump.

I wish I could say that I wanted to see Magic Mike because I was hoping the Steven Soderbergh film would show me the serious side of male stripping, that I wanted the venerable director of films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic to show me how very challenging it is to make exotic dancing a career. But who are we kidding? I wanted to see Magic Mike for its simple hook: a cast of very good-looking men in minimal clothing. Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, and Matthew McConaughey play Tampa's hottest strippers, and they take it all off while exposing us to their lifestyle and integrating a new dancer, played by Alex Pettyfer. The movie is a lot of scandalous fun — but only when the guys are on stage.

We're introduced to the world of male stripping through Mike (Tatum), and though "Magic Mike" (as he's known on stage) is a star at the club Xquisite, he has bigger aspirations than shaking his moneymaker. He wants to start a furniture business, and he has a heart under all those muscles, which we see via two new relationships: a friendship with Adam (Pettyfer) and a flirtation with Adam's sister, Brooke (Cody Horn). Adam loves Xquisite's spotlight a bit too much, and he soon develops a few bad habits, but Soderbergh's attempt to show us the seedy side of the dancing life is undeveloped and uneven. The dark undertones of the plot feel out of place and, worse, boring, especially compared to the movie's jaw-dropping stripping scenes. To find out what else I thought, just keep reading.

We've been counting the days (literally) until Magic Mike's release, and today we got a peek at the ab-tastic new poster for Steven Soderbergh's new male stripper flick. The stars of the film, Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, and Alex Pettyfer, are all suited up and looking fiiine atop the movie's title and tagline, "Work all day. Work it all night." It's very much reminiscent of The Village People, only much better. We already have the scandalous trailer playing on loop, but we'll have to wait until June 29 to see the whole movie.

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I thought the day the first trailer for Magic Mike premiered was the best day of my life — until now. An even better trailer just dropped for the flick, which stars Channing Tatum as the titular buff character. This preview starts out the same as the first one, with the old stripper cop routine at a bachelorette party, but then goes on to explore some different relationships. And there's way more dudes taking it all off (including Matt Bomer!).

This trailer actually makes me more jazzed about the movie than the first one. We already know there's going to be a romance between Mike and Paige (Cody Horn), but now we get a little bit of the mentor/protégé relationship he has with Alex Pettyfer's character. See guys — this movie isn't just for ladies! There's male bonding, too! Look for Magic Mike to hit theaters June 29, and check out the trailer (I swear you won't regret it) after the jump