Pages tagged “film release”

Platinum Dunes, the production company through which Michael Bay produced remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher and now Friday the 13th, has confirmed plans to remake Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. The project had long been in development, with a script already in the can and production set to start in the first half of next year.

On Dec. 29, Warner Brothers lost the preliminary court judgment for distribution rights to the hotly anticipated movie adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, long considered the gold standard of graphic novels.

Ben Affleck’s full reinvention as a film director hasn’t quite happened yet, even though we retain fond memories of Gone Baby Gone from last year. He’s slowly begun to work back into ensembles roles in new movies like the American version of State of Play and He’s Just Not That Into You, but now Variety reports that he’s in talks to direct Arizona, a film about the slain Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

Johnny Depp is not lacking in the upcoming projects department. In the last few months he has secured another Pirates sequel, an animated flick with Gore Verbinski, an Alice in Wonderland adaptation with favored partner Tim Burton and rumored roles in Sin City 3, The Lone Ranger remake and Dark Shadows. On top of his acting gigs, Depp is currently looking for a director for Rex Mundi, a Dark Horse comic he bought the rights to back in 2006.

Hunter Hill and Perry Moore were unlikely directors for Lake City. It was their first feature and the two had extremely limited experience with film, the only other credits to their names Moore's work as executive producer on the Chronicles of Narnia films. Whatever its success, it was a bold undertaking. Apparently it or Hill's work with Paper magazine attracted the notice of Spike Jonze, who's currently at work on the effects and post-production of Where the Wild Things Are.

Ridley Scott’s Nottingham just got a lot more sensible—and a lot less cool.

Whether she was fired or walked off and came to a “mutual decision” with Summit Entertainment, director Catherine Hardwicke will not return for New Moon, the sequel to Twilight.

We already warned you that The Dark Knight would re-open in January in order to make a big Oscar push (and, you know, to make some more money). Well, now we have a date: Jan. 29. No word yet from Warner Bros. on how many screens the film will re-open on.

One of the brightest lights of music video directors has long been Mark Romanek. Although he never had quite as much vision as his Propaganda peers David Fincher and Spike Jonze, there's no denying his technical mastery. If other directors sometimes treated videos like short films, Romanek used his chameleon-like skills to match his filmmaking to whatever best fit with the music.

As is the custom for a young actor on his way up, Shia LaBeouf has agreed to star in The Associate, the latest film adaptation of a John Grisham novel.

Don't ever, ever tell Derek Zoolander he's only got one look. Perhaps taking a cue from BFF Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller revealed recently that he's set to take another walk down the runway as the consummate male model.

On the heels of her massive success in Twilight (she plays the lead role of Bella, for all you non-16-year olds), the Hollywood Reporter has announced that Kristen Stewart will play Joan Jett in The Runaways.

Martin Scorsese has long put out a movie every couple of years, and given the rate his queue has been filling up lately, his twilight years look to be no less prolific. According to Production Weekly, he’s now attached to direct Falcon’s Tale, a new film based on an unpublished book optioned by Paramount.

When Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist came out this October, TheMovieBlog posted a short lamentation: "Already Bored With Michael Cera." They were neither the first, nor the last, to voice such opinion—film and TV critics had long been noting the stark similarities among the roles of his career—but they did state the concern with a certain amount of pith:

Atom Egoyan is best-known for his non-linear films focused on alienation. He's perhaps equally well-known for being really Canadian, and is in fact one third of what I like to call The Canadian Contingent, which is a filmmaking/crime-fighting supergroup with fellow canucks David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin that I just made up. Together they travel to high-profile film festivals to fight against their arch-nemeiss, the evil master of cliches Dr. Commercial Success.

Perhaps that project Anand Tucker announced recently—The Danish Girl with Nicole Kidman playing a transsexual—was a bit too heavy for his liking. While he's still attached to the project, Tucker's announced he's in talks to direct another picture that's, shall we say, a bit more commercial.

A couple months back we mentioned that Jason Reitman was working on getting George Clooney on board (rimshot!) for his forthcoming dramedy, Up in the Air. Now, per Variety, comes news that The Departed's Vera Farmiga will star opposite Clooney in the film.

HBO helped launch late comedian Sam Kinison's career (he appeared on a Young Comedians special in 1984), and so it's only fitting that it would be the studio to air his new biopic, Brother Sam. The film will be directed by Tom Shadyac, and Kinison will be portrayed by Dan Fogler.

Cue collective grumble from cult sectors: Universal has officially nabbed Gore Verbinski to produce a remake of The Host, the much-touted 2006 creature epic from South Korea.

Being a teenager sucks. Being a teenage vampire? Now that's the sort of misery worthy of an obtusely titled album. But if you just happen to be an adolescent bloodsucker on a Washington peninsula poised to cash in on the (lucrative) intersection of J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, life is actually pretty good right now.

Although it will doubtlessly inflame fans, Fox has hired Josh Schwartz, the man who brought us Gossip Girl and The O.C., to write the script for a youthful reboot of the X-Men franchise.

John Malkovich is known for a lot of things (good acting, his self-effacing sense of humor, baldness) but less so as an activist or film director. Still, he's done his fair share of both, being a longtime outspoken Libertarian and directing the 2002 feature The Dancer Upstairs. So the announcement in Variety that he plans to fim a documentary on the plight of migrant children wasn't totally out of the blue...but it was pretty close.

Outside of journalists, Katharine Graham still isn't that well-known. But for those in the industry, she remains a hero if only for her Washington Post leadership during the Watergate Scandal and her support of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their investigation.

According to the Hollyood Reporter, Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa are set to join their fellow Hamlet 2 producer Eric Eisner in the production of a biopic about Jerry Garcia. The three have just signed on to produce the as-yet unnamed project, which promises a revealing look at the Grateful Dead frontman's youth.

If the inherently morbid 6,557 mile cross-country trek in Killing Yourself to Live had one lesson for Chuck Klosterman, it was the old trope that the journey is more important than the destination. Still, the destination has been pretty nice for Klosterman; five books into his career, he's the reigning king of pop-culture addicts. He'll be adding another feather to his cap (probably a Kiss hat) soon too: Half Shell Entertainment has nabbed film production rights to Klosterman's rock memoir/romantic confessional.

After years of talks, Marvel Studios has officially hired Joe Johnston to direct First Avenger: Captain America, part of an ambitious slate of major comic adaptations the studio is set to finance over the next several years.

Although some have pegged his latest, Changeling, as more or less a horror movie, Clint Eastwood is in talks to direct Hereafter, a new supernatural thriller to be produced by Steven Spielberg.

Some things date a movie horribly: rear projection, clearly hand-drawn animation for special effects, Shelley Duvall in a starring role, etc. But there are some films that contain none of these elements but are still, in and of themselves, a piece of pop-culture ephemera from another time and place. This is where Karate Kid firmly lands. Its premise is ridiculous, and pretty much everything about the film seems to exist more for the pleasure of lousy VH1 Remember the __s programs than as an actual attempt at making a movie. That being said, it sure is a fun and quotable flick.

In Sept. 2007, we reported on the first news of the next Simon Pegg/Nick Frost collaboration, to be called Paul. At the time, all we knew about the film was that the Hot Fuzz stars' typical roles would be reversed: Frost would take the lead role and Pegg plays the incompetent sidekick. Or, as Pegg put it in an interview with MTV's movies blog, "It's different actually. I'm the bitch in this one."

You have to hand it to Nicole Kidman. In her career, the Aussie actress has juxtaposed standard Hollywood fare (often box-office disasters) with challenging, non-traditional roles in independent films with little to no commercial appeal. For every Cold Mountain, there's a Birth, where she played a woman convinced her dead husband had been reincarnated into the body of a 10-year-old boy; or a Dogville, the Lars Von Trier's three-hour melodrama on human nature at its worst; or a Fur, an "imaginary portrait" of famed photographer Diane Arbus that saw her lover, Robert Downey Jr., covered head-to-toe in hair. Even her Oscar-winning role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours was a bit of a gamble.

There has been perhaps no better match between a comedian and a project this decade than with Jack Black and School of Rock. Sure, Will Ferrell's been memorable in a number of things, like Old School and Elf. Vince Vaughn was funny in Wedding Crashers, but his wisecracking motormouth shtick has since grown tiresome. Bill Murray found the role of a lifetime in Lost in Translation, but the film was more of a melancholic meditation on life and loneliness than a full-blown comedy. For our money, Black's infectious and warm performance in Richard Linklater's film is simply pure, unadulterated brilliance. Anyone who can make the cello joke at the two minute mark work deserves our praise. (Let's just pray the proposed sequel doesn't taint it.)

British director Michael Winterbottom has yet to really break out in the American box office, but that's probably because he couldn't care less. His films run the gamut from purposefully difficult (A Cock and Bull Story) to pitch dark (The Road to Guantanamo). However, his next picture, The Killer Inside Me, may be just the thing to pick up more than trifling interest stateside.