Media Murder for Monday

Here's the latest roundup of crime-themed dramas on stage and screen:

AWARDS

The Golden Globes were handed out last night. For all the nominees and winners, check out the complete list here.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced the nominations in the various film categories, with the Imitation Game and Benedict Cumberbatch collecting more honors. Author Gillian Flynn was also nominated in the Adapted Screenplay category for Gone Girl.

MOVIES

Elmore Leonard's novel Bandits is finally getting the big-screen treatment, thanks to Bruce Willis who optioned the novel. He'll also play the lead, an ex-con turned mortician in his brother’s funeral home, who gets sucked back into the underworld after an encounter with a gorgeous lapsed nun on the run from a Nicaraguan military criminal.

British actor Idris Elba has optioned Poe Must Die by Marc Olden for three feature films, according to Publishers Marketplace (and via Mysterious Press). The tagling for the book is "A satanist threatens the planet, and only Poe has the imagination to stop him."

Scarlett Johansson will play the lead role in the live action American remake of the classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell. She'll portray a character based on the series' cyborg detective, Major Motoko Kusanagi, leader of a Japanese counter-terrorism organisation focused on cybercrime in a futuristic world.

Sons of Anarchy star Theo Rossi has joined the cast of psychological thriller When The Bough Breaks, directed by 24's Jon Cassar. The film is about a professional couple who hire a blue collar woman to act as their surrogate, but she develops a violent fixation on the husband before the baby is even born.

Ansel Elgort (of The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent), has signed to star with Chloë Grace Moretz in November Criminals, the teen thriller adaptation of Sam Munson’s 2011 novel about two teenagers who venture into the seedy underbelly of Washington, D.C. to investigate a friend’s murder while falling in love for the first time.

The first trailer was released for the dark comedy The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds as a a crazy guy who kills people when his cat and dog tell him to.

TELEVISION

The second season of Fargo has filled out its cast, adding Ted Danson, Patrick Wilson, and Jean Smart as regulars alongside newly-added recurring characters played by Nick Offerman, Brad Garrett, Kieran Culkin, Bokeem Woodbine, Jeffrey Donovan and Angus Sampson.

ITV has found the lead for its 10-part series Jekyll & Hyde, in the form of Da Vinci’s Demons star Tom Bateman. He’ll play Robert Jekyll, the grandson of the original doctor with the dual personality.

Fox ordered a pilot based on Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, originally made into a film starring Tom Cruise. It's said to be a sequel to the film, set 10 years after the end of Precrime in DC. As one of the Precogs struggles to lead a normal human life, he remains haunted by visions of the future until he meets a detective haunted by her past who may help him find a purpose to his gift.

Hallmark Channel is optioning another original movie franchise, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, based on the books by Joanne Fluke. The series will star Alison Sweeney as Hannah Swensen, shop owner of the Cookie Jar who turns into a culinary detective and finds herself trying to solve a crime while getting caught in an unexpected romantic mystery of her own.

Emmanuelle Chriqui (formerly of Entourage) has joined the cast of TNT’s crime drama series Murder In The First as a regular for the upcoming second season opposite Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson. She'll play a "brash, daring and a total bad-ass" officer with the SFPD Gang Task Force.

John Travolta is set to star as Robert Shapiro on FX’s miniseries American Crime Story miniseries about the O.J. Simpson trial. He joins fellow cast members Cuba Gooding Jr., David Schwimmer and Sarah Paulson.

AMC has ordered a Making of the Mob docudrama, that will blend dramatic scenes with interviews and archival footage as it traces the rise of the American mafia.

Lifetime has ordered two additional episodes of its new series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles.

A&E announced the return dates of The Bates Motel and The Returned back-to-back on March 9.

USA's series Covert Affairs just wrapped up its fifth season with a cliffhanger episode, but it will have to stay "hung" after the network decided not to renew the show for a sixth season. The show center on a young CIA worker, Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) who eventually graduated to working undercover as an importer and exporter under her handler, Auggie (Christopher Gorham).

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

William Kent Krueger joined Libby Hellmann on the program Second Sunday Crime, a new podcast from Authors on the Air, to discuss his multi-award-winning novel Ordinary Grace and other writing.

George Pelecanos sat down for an interview with NPR's Fresh Air program to talk about his latest publication, The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories.

The WTF podcast with Marc Maron recently featured an in-depth (two-hour) interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose latest project is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice about stoner private eye Doc Sportello in a 1970's "part noir, part psychedelic romp" detective story set in L.A.  The cast includes Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short and Katherine Waterston

Margaret Maron appeared on UNC Public Radio's Bookwatch program, talking about her latest novel, Designated Daughters.

THEATER

At London's Donmar Warhouse Theater, the musical City of Angels began its run in December and continues through February 15. With a book by Larry Gelbart, music by Cy Coleman, and lyrics by David Zippel, the play features a double plot about a writer trying to adapt his private eye novel into a Hollywood movie, and the private eye trying to find a missing daughter despite increasing complications with women.

Also in London, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins continues its run through March 7. Assassins focuses on the tales of men who tried to assassinate a President of the United States, from John Wilkes Booth (played by Aaron Tveit) to Lee Harvey Oswald (Jamie Parker).

KNPR had a profile of Las Vegas' longest-running dinner theater show in town, Marriage Can Be Murder.