Paging Oscar, paging Dr. Oscar! One of this fall's buzziest biopics is certainly Diana, examining the last years of Diana, Princess of Wales (Naomi Watts), and her highly scrutinized relationship with Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews).
Though Avengers: Age of Ultron, officially announced at this year's Comic-Con, isn't due out until 2015, information about the superhero sequel continues to emerge at an impressive rate.
Red Crown Productions has landed British thesp Idris Elba and Sin Nombre helmer Cary Fukunaga for their upcoming adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala's bestselling 2005 novel Beasts of No Nation, Deadline reports.
One upcoming Oscar bait film that has been flying surprisingly low under the radar has been Peter Landesman's Parkland, a true-history drama about the fallout surrounding the JFK assassination, centralized at Dallas' Parkland Hospital, where the 35th President of the United States was rushed after being shot in a motorcade by Lee Harvey Oswald.
It worries me how frequently Hollywood insults the intelligence of young people. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, the latest in a long string of YA adaptations attempting to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Twilight, is just another blatant offender, presuming that its target audience will be too distracted by a photogenic cast and visuals to notice that it doesn't have a single original idea in its pretty little head.
When you consider actors who are known for playing particular kinds of roles, Steve Carell rests pretty firmly within the comedy niche. He's made a career playing sweet-natured nice guys like Michael Scott (NBC's The Office), Brick Tamland (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy), and Barry Speck (Dinner for Schmucks). He's certainly not the type of actor most would consider when casting a killer.
Jonathan Banks, who plays fearsome fixer Mike on AMC's terrific Breaking Bad, has joined the upcoming fifth season of NBC's cult comedy Community, reports Entertainment Weekly.
The upcoming con-artist comedy Focus has gone through quite a series of casting upheavals since it was announced last year. The film, to be helmed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, was originally supposed to re-team Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, the stars of the writer-directors' last effort, the well-received Crazy Stupid Love.
The 86th Academy Awards won't be held until March 2nd next year, but I say it's never too early to start speculating about how this year's line-up might look like. In terms of potential candidates for Best Picture, the first half of 2013 has been almost entirely barren, with only a few long-shot candidates like Jeff Nichol's drama Mud and Richard Linklater's romantic trilogy-capper Before Midnight.
One of the movies I'm anticipating most this fall is definitely Spike Lee's reimagining of the ultraviolent South Korean thriller Oldboy. Park Chan-wook's original was a relentlessly brutal and shocking film, and how American audiences will connect to the unsettling storyline should be interesting.
