Another week, another Marvel-related tease. Just in case any of us were shifting our attention away from the superhero-centric Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: The Dark World star Natalie Portman recently dropped a hint to Sci-Fi Now that the studio is actively working towards a movie starring a female superhero.
One of the biggest question marks popping up among next month's crop of new releases is the Kimberley Peirce-directed remake of Brian de Palma's classic horror flick Carrie. So far, marketing for the film, which stars Chloë Grace Moretz as the tormented young telepath, has struck an uneasy balance between high school drama, supernatural thriller and flat-out horror, and I'm curious to see whether audiences will respond well to that mix.
With Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D predicted to premiere to huge numbers on ABC next week, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe currently standing as the third highest-grossing film franchise of all time, it's safe to say that superheroes are here to stay. And so, news that Marvel is looking to cement its grip on your television with another original series shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone.
José Padilha's RoboCop remake, due out next year, has been garnering a lot of attention on the Internet since the debut of its first trailer earlier this month, and with all the new footage, fans of the original, a deceptively smart '80s actioner which starred Peter Weller, have likely found themselves wondering whether the remake will be able to deliver in terms of quality and at the box office.
However you feel about Angelina Jolie's acting abilities in front of the camera, you've got to give her credit for choosing some truly challenging projects to launch her budding career as director. The A-lister made her directorial debut back in 2011 with In The Land Of Blood And Honey, a romantic drama set against the brutally violent backdrop of the Bosnian War, and now she's gearing up for her next film, a World War II-set survival epic based on the Laura Hillenbrand bestseller Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.
Perhaps no film emerged from the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals with as much unqualified success as Steve McQueen's upcoming slavery drama 12 Years A Slave, which follows the journey of a freed black man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in 1841 Washington D.C. who is kidnapped and sold into slavery by ruthless traders.
A comedy about cops seems like a no-brainer, and yet, the concept has been barely explored by most networks. With uniforms, a strict code of conduct and regular exposure to the nutjobs of a modern-day American city, the police force, it appears to me, could be a lucrative comedy goldmine. So props to Brooklyn Nine-Nine, certainly the best new offering from FOX this fall, for entertaining the audience on its own terms, with its well-cast crop of actors and immediately distinctive spin on the workplace comedy.
Typically, it's the stunt people who are in danger on the sets of big-budget action flicks like The Expendables 3, but it was series star Jason Statham who found himself in a sticky situation on the film's Bulgaria set, according to co-star Terry Crews.
After dazzling audiences at the center of this past summer's biggest love triangle in Baz Luhrmann's glitzy update of The Great Gatsby, British thesp Carey Mulligan has joined the cast of yet another star-studded adaptation of a literary classic: Thomas Hardy's renowned nineteenth-century novel Far From The Madding Crowd.
