STARRING John Cusack, Amanda Peet
WRITTEN BY Harald Kloser, Roland Emmerich
DIRECTED BY Roland Emmerich

When we think of fall films, we tend to conjure images of Dame Judi Dench in a corset. But all that may be about to change. Roland Emmerich, the Teutonic things-go-boom director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, is bringing a bit of summer to the season with 2012. And if you've seen the jackhammer-subtle trailer where the Washington Monument and the Vatican crumble to dust, you're probably wondering whether it might just be the next Transformers, too. In a role that looks like it was custom-made for Nicolas Cage, John Cusack plays a sci-fi writer who tries to save his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and kids from a global apocalypse predicted centuries ago by the Mayans — a cataclysm to end all cataclysms. ''Everybody says I love disaster movies,'' says Emmerich, ''but I actually love a good story. If it was only going to be about destruction, no, I've done that!'' Cusack says that blasting international tourist sites to kingdom come wasn't what sold him on the movie...but it didn't hurt. ''The things the script was describing were so massive and mind-boggling, it was impossible to imagine,'' says the still-giddy actor. ''I mean, you really have to take a leap of faith when it says in the script, 'And then Rome fell...' How can you possibly do that?!''

STARRING Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton
WRITTEN BY Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman
DIRECTED BY Oren Moverman

''I've never cried harder in another person's arms than Woody Harrelson's,'' says Ben Foster. The 3:10 to Yuma star plays an American soldier back from Iraq who's assigned a new post (with Harrelson as his superior) telling military families their loved ones have died. But Foster doesn't want to see the film thrown into the ''war movies'' pile. ''Saying 'I'm sorry to inform you...' is a universal exercise,'' he says. ''We're all going to keep getting that call, or making that call. It has nothing to do with war.''