No one's is ever going to launch an Oscar campaign for Need for Speed, but there's a case to be made for unpretentious, action-packed popcorn pleasures like the racing thriller. Aaron Paul gave a mesmerizing performance, the stunts were spectacular and, perhaps best of all, it proved that helmer Scott Waugh (Act of Valor) knows his way around a slick action vehicle. Now, Waugh is set to dive into the deep end for a much pricier venture - a $120 million sci-epic titled Inversion.
One of Hollywood's most irrepressible It Girls of late has undoubtedly been Margot Robbie, who shot to fame with a powerhouse performance in The Wolf of Wall Street and has since dug in her heels by securing lead roles in big productions like con-artist caper Focus, David Yates-directed Tarzan, war memoir adaptation The Talian Shuffle and survival drama The Mountain Between Us. One of her most exciting projects, however, is actually one of the least buzzy - low-key dystopian thriller Z for Zachariah.
Even as EuropaCorp prepares to relaunch the Transporter series, with the Ed Skrein-led Transporter Legacy set for next summer, the original Transporter himself is gearing up for a new action franchise. Jason Statham has been confirmed to reprise the role of Arthur Bishop in Mechanic: Resurrection, a long-planned follow-up to the rather forgettable 2011 actioner The Mechanic.
Though it has already been overshadowed by The Lego Movie, Big Hero 6 and The Book of Life when it comes to Oscar buzz, Laika's The Boxtrolls was one of the most weirdly entertaining moviegoing experiences of this fall. Impeccably animated and energetically executed, it suffered from a messy story but succeeded partly because its big, beating heart was undoubtedly in the right place.
Fans of the hilarious FX spy comedy Archer are counting down the days until the sixth season arrives sometime next January, but now they can add another major event to their calendars. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has officially announced that it will be sending Archer: The Complete Season Five, also known as Archer Vice, to home media platforms on January 6th, 2015.
Audiences will likely be divided on Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, a brutal, bold and beautiful film that flies by, even at a hefty 126 minutes - so long as you're willing to climb on board with its somewhat ludicrous premise. There are those who will struggle to swallow the basic set-up - that a failed climate change experiment plunged the world into another ice age, the only survivors of which had managed to clambor onto a fortified train that uses a perpetual motion engine to endlessly travel the globe. To those people, I say this: do your best to suspend your disbelief, because where Bong goes from there is truly spectacular.
Finally, an adaptation of William P. Young's inspirational Christian bestseller The Shack is picking up steam over at Lionsgate, now that the studio has set Stuart Hazeldine to sit behind the camera on the project.
Hot on the heels of picking up Ioan Gruffudd starrer Forever for a back-nine order, ABC has pulled the plug on freshman comedy Selfie, opting not to order any more installments past the series' initial 13-episode order.
In a fall season filled with high-profile flops (cough, cough, Utopia, cough), even decent but steady ratings can be enough to earn a freshman series a vote of confidence. Such is the case with ABC's Forever, an Ioan Gruffudd-starring drama about a medical examiner solving cases while attempting to figure out the mystery of his own immortality. The network just opted to pick up an additional nine episodes of the series, bringing its first season order to a full 22 episodes.
