MOVIES
Jason Reitman and Nick Hornby are developing the bank heist film I Would Only Rob Banks for My Family for Fox Searchlight, which is based on a true-life story (and Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth) about a seemingly ordinary Texas family who pulled off two bold heists before they were caught attempting a third.
Proving that heist films are big right now, director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) is taking on a big-screen adaptation of the 1983 British TV series Widows, originally penned by Lynda La Plante (Prime Suspect). The plot deals with female empowerment in the form of widows of armed bank robbers killed during a heist who use a cache of books detailing the men’s past robberies to pull off their own raid.
Alexander Ludwig (Hunger Games) is joining Anthony Hopkins, Julia Stiles, and Ray Liotta in the Pacific Northwest thriller Go With Me, directed by Daniel Alfredson (The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest). The story follows a young woman, newly returned to her hometown, who becomes the subject of harassment by a local crimelord and turns to an ex-logger (Hopkins) and his laconic young sidekick (Ludwig) for help.
Ahna O’Reilly (The Help) and Richard Armitage (The Hobbit) are set to star in the psychological thriller Sleepwalker, which is about a grad student who goes to a campus sleep clinic to treat her insomnia and nightmares, but instead starts experiencing unsettling changes in her waking reality every time she wakes up. With the help of a doctor, she attempts to unravel the tangled knot of her dreams, reality, and shockingly tragic past.
Austin Stowell is joining Steven Spielberg’s untitled Cold War thriller based on the true story of an American lawyer (played by Tom Hanks) who agrees to help the CIA rescue Francis Gary Powers, a pilot being detained in the Soviet Union (Stowell).
Universal has picked up the rights to “The Hunt for El Chapo,” a New Yorker article about the capture of notorious drug cartel leader Joaquin Guzman, to be directed by Peter Berg (Lone Survivor and The Kingdom).
Haley Bennett has joined Patrick Wilson and Jessica Biel in the untitled psychological thriller that adapts the Patricia Highsmith novel The Blunderer. Set in early 1960s New York, the story follows Walter Stackhouse (Wilson), a successful architect married to the beautiful Clara (Biel) who seemingly perfect life uuntil Walter’s fascination with an unsolved murder leads him into a spiral of chaos as he is forced to play cat-and-mouse with a clever killer and an overambitious detective while at the same time lusting after another woman.
Tony-nominated actress Sanaa Lathan has signed on to play FBI agent Natalie Austin in the magician caper sequel Now You See Me 2, joining the film’s original cast members Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, as well as newcomers Lizzy Caplan, Jay Chou and Daniel Radcliffe.
A new trailer was released for the psychological thriller The Captive (formerly Queen Of The Night) from Oscar-nominated Atom Egoyan. The film stars Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos as a couple plagued by the unsolved disappearance of their young daughter Cassandra until years later, mementos of Cassandra’s start mysteriously appearing and two detectives (Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman) discover recent images of the girl online.
A trailer was released for American Heist, (did I mention heist films were big?) starring Adrien Brody and Hayden Christensen as brothers from the wrong side of the tracks – Brody playing the brother who can’t stay out of trouble, and Christensen playing the one trying to go clean who gets sucked in for one last ride.
Director Paul Anderson released a trailer he cut himself for the upcoming Inherent Vice, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel.
TELEVISION
It’s official: Netflix will broadcast Longmire’s fourth season for a total of ten episodes.
FX is developing From Hell, a drama series based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, later adapted into the 2001 20th Century Fox movie starring Johnny Depp and Robbie Coltrane. The story follows Jack the Ripper, detailing the events leading up to the Whitechapel killings and the cover-up that followed.
The popular and acclaimed BBC crime drama Luther is getting a U.S. remake from Fox, to be written/executive produced by the original series’ creator Neil Cross, with the British series’ star, Idris Elba, on board as executive producer.
Meanwhile, the BBC announced it’s going to broadcast a two-hour Luther miniseries that brings Idris Elba’s character back temporarily to the other side of the Pond.
In other BBC programming news, the network is commissioning several new shows, including a five-part 1940s thriller SS-GB from Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade based on the novel by Len Deighton; the police drama Cuffs, an eight-part series that portrays the everyday rollercoaster of being a police officer in the UK; The Secret Agent, a three-part adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel set in 1886 London where a shopkeeper works as a secret agent for the Russian government; and Undercover, a six-part series written by Peter Moffat about a woman who’s set to become the first black Director of Public Prosecutions, just as she discovers that her husband and the father of her children has been lying to her for years.
AMC is scheduling a two-part Better Call Saul premiere on consecutive nights, Sunday, February 8th and 9th. The Breaking Bad prequel will then continue to air on Mondays for the remaining eight episodes in its first season.
FX has ordered a new drama series, Taboo, from producer Ridley Scott. The project stars Tom Hardy as an adventurer who returns from Africa with 14 “ill-gotten diamonds” and seeks revenge for his father’s death by refusing to sell his family’s business to the East India Company and instead building his own trading empire.
The second season of True Detective keeps adding to its cast, including recent hire Riley Smith (True Blood) who will play a Sheriff’s deputy.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Hardboiled author James Ellroy was featured on the Guardian Books podcast, talking about profanity, political correctness and the horrors of real-life crime.
No comments:
Post a Comment