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Oscar chatter has already commenced, with the prognosticating class busy twittering and blogging their early predictions for awards season. As the fall season kicks into gear, theatre fans can look forward to three high-profile stage-to-screen adaptations being in the mix as likely awards contenders, including two of the last three Tony Award winners for Best Play — God of Carnage (2009) and War Horse (2011). One boasts a star-studded cast, the other traffics in epic adventure, and both have legendary directors at the helm in Roman Polanski (the story is shortened as "Carnage" on film) and Steven Spielberg ("War Horse," which, technically, draws on the source novel by Michael Morpurgo, not the London and Broadway stage adaptation of the book).

In addition to those two December releases, Beau Willimon's acclaimed Off-Broadway drama, Farragut North, has been adapted for the big screen by Willimon, George Clooney, and his producing partner Grant Heslov as "The Ides of March." The film, directed by Clooney, opened in theatres on Oct. 7, starring acting dynamo Ryan Gosling.

Here's a rundown of what to look forward to this fall on the big screen:

Could there be a better time for a political thriller about scheming spin-meisters, dirty tricks, and shady power plays on the Presidential campaign trail? Zeroing in on the disillusioned zeitgeist with laser-like precision, "The Ides of March" has been loosely adapted from playwright Beau Willimon's Machiavellian morality tale Farragut North, which was produced in 2008 by the Atlantic Theatre Company and in 2009 in Los Angeles headlined by "Star Trek" star Chris Pine. Co-written for the big screen by Willimon and directed by George Clooney, the film co-stars Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti. Set in the tense waning days of heavily contested Ohio presidential primary, "Ides" highlights the corruption that emerges from the runaway ambition and the insatiable thirst for power that infects the political class. Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, a charming, fast-rising, ruthless press secretary who works for a Howard Dean-like insurgent Democratic presidential hopeful with a few skeletons in his closet. As a political scandal threatens to upend his candidate's chance at the presidency, Meyers' loyalty and idealism are brutally tested.

	Matt Damon and Anna Paquin in "Margaret."
	Fox Searchlight

Talk about a sophomore slump. The award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and film director Kenneth Lonergan has spent the past six years trying to bring his second feature film, "Margaret," to the big screen. After blazing onto the scene in 2000 with his acclaimed debut drama "You Can Count on Me," which earned Oscar nominations for Laura Linney as Best Actress and Lonergan for best original screenplay, Lonergan wrote and directed his second feature, "Margaret," all the way back in 2005. Since then, the film has been caught in a hellish legal limbo between its producer, Gary Gilbert, and studio Fox Searchlight. Lonergan reportedly handed in a film that had a three-hour running time, much longer than what was necessary to secure his right to final cut. Lawsuits between Gilbert, Fox Searchlight, and Lonergan were filed, and Gilbert was reportedly unable to get Lonergan to trim the epic running time, despite attempted assists from the likes of producer Scott Rudin and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The film, which opened Sept. 30 in a limited release, now clocks in at 149 minutes. But it's been six years since it was shot. Indeed, Anna Paquin, who's 29 now, plays a teenager in the film, and Matt Damon still possesses a fresh-faced boyishness.

Early versions of the screenplay were praised for its allegorical parallels to 9/11. With the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks having just passed, perhaps "Margaret" will resonate. The film centers on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student who's plagued by debilitating remorse that she inadvertently played a role in a bus accident that claimed a woman's life. She attempts to reconcile her feelings and make things right, but meets with opposition at every step. Increasingly angst-ridden, she begins emotionally brutalizing her family, friends, teachers, and most of all, herself — as her youthful ideals collide with the realities and compromises of the adult world. A raft of theatre veterans, including Matthew Broderick and J. Smith Cameron, star in the film. A theatre director and writer and best friend of Broderick, Lonergan is known for his plays This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero and The Waverly Gallery, which was nominated for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

	Michael Shannon
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Steppenwolf Theatre Company veteran and "Boardwalk Empire" star Michael Shannon, who gave a riveting performance last winter as a desperately frantic producer in the Off-Broadway play Mistakes Were Made, stars in "Take Shelter" (it opened Sept. 30 in NY and LA, and goes national in October) as a Midwestern everyman possessed by increasingly harrowing visions and quietly coming apart at the seams. Shannon, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for his role as the mentally disturbed neighbor in "Revolutionary Road," has become the go-to actor for playing unhinged men that burn with a disquieting, often manic, intensity. But for his lead role as Curtis LaForche in "Take Shelter," Shannon also shows off his tender and vulnerable sides, even while he's unraveling at the seams. In the film, Shannon plays a young husband and father living in a small Ohio town with his wife Samantha (rising star Jessica Chastain) and his six-year-old daughter, Hannah, who is deaf. They're a happy family. But when Curtis begins having a series of terrifying dreams and daytime hallucinations about an encroaching, apocalyptic storm, he channels his anxiety into the obsessive building of a storm shelter in his backyard in hopes of keeping his family safe. As Curtis descends into a downward spiral of anxiety, manifested by increasingly strange and erratic behavior, he begins to privately fear that his harrowing apocalyptic visions could signify something uncontrollable inside of him.

Hugh Jackman will return to the Great White Way this fall — for the first time since The Boy From Oz seven years ago — with his one-man show Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway. But before he gets started with the seductive soft-shoeing and soulful singing, Jackson hits the big screen in "Real Steel" (it opened Oct. 7), which imagines a future in which boxing has gone high-tech — with humans replaced by 2,000-pound, 8-foot-tall remote-controlled steel robots. Playing a washed-up former boxer, Jackman and his estranged son bond over their attempts to restore a hunk-of-junk robot-fighter to championship glory.

That smoldering Spaniard Antonio Banderas, who made his Broadway debut in the 2003 revival of Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit's musical Nine, reunites with the visionary Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodovar, for his pulpy new thriller, "The Skin I Live In." Almodovar helped establish Banderas as a leading man in classic films like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (turned into a musical by Lincoln Center Theater last season), but the duo haven't worked together in 20 years — since the 1991 film "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" Banderas first teamed up with Almodovar on his 1982 directorial debut, "Labyrinth of Passion," and the two continued to collaborate throughout the '80s. Banderas eventually transitioned to Hollywood, first making his name in films like "The Mambo Kings" and "Philadelphia," then becoming a bona fide leading man with "Desperado," "Evita" and "The Mask of Zorro." In "The Skin I Live In," a macabre mix of Hitchcockian melodrama and erotic beauty, Banderas plays a wealthy and prominent plastic surgeon whose wife was burned in a car crash. Since then, the twisted doc has doggedly been trying to invent a synthetic skin that can protect people from any type of harm. In need of a human guinea pig, he appears to be holding a woman hostage in his palatial mansion. Yet captor and captive seem to be in love. Could this woman be the doctor's supposedly dead wife? Or someone he's been surgically altering to resemble her? The unsettling creep-factor is through the roof on this one.