(Photo by Sony/courtesy Everett Collection)
Before he would get to utter the words “Bond, James Bond” to the delight of millions, Daniel Craig built up a durable if not spectacular resume, showing up in a range of films from the first Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider to A Kid In King Arthur’s Court. As the sniveling son of mob boss Paul Newman in Road to Perdition, Craig was able to make an impact with a broad audience in a film that already had plenty for us to look at, including Conrad L. Hall’s rain-drenched cinematography and a rare anti-hero turn from Tom Hanks.
By 2005, Craig was on the cusp of a major breakthrough with a co-starring role in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and crime flick Layer Cake, essentially a stylish and gritty feature-length audition tape to play Agent 007. The following year, he and GoldenEye director Martin Campbell launched Casino Royale, a rousing and hard-nosed crowdpleaser revealing a James Bond for a new cynical generation. He’s since reprised the role three more times with Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre, and when he returns in 2020 with No Time to Die, Craig will have the longest consecutively tenured Bond in film history.
Of course, when you’re James Bond, every non-Bond role you take becomes something of an automatic sensation. Some roles, like Logan Lucky or David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo really demonstrate Craig’s range. Other films, like Dream House or The Invasion, are spectacular bombs. And the rest, along the lines of Cowboys & Aliens and The Golden Compass, are right in the mushy middle.
We know on which end of the spectrum Craig’s latest film, the Rian Johnson whodunit Knives Out, lands. (Hint: It’s his best-reviewed movie ever.) With No Time To Die‘s April 2020 November 2020 April 2021 October 2021 release now behind us, take a look back as we rank all Daniel Craig movies by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo
Though he made his debut over a decade and a half ago in the celebrated HBO war miniseries Band of Brothers, Tom Hardy has truly broken out over the past few years, making a name for himself in major blockbusters and smaller indies alike. This weekend, he’ll anchor a BBC miniseries called Taboo, which will subsequently air in the U.S. on FX on January 10. It’s a period drama about a London man who returns home from Africa in 1814 to take charge of his late father’s shipping business amid a swirl of dark conspiracy, and it provides Hardy with another complex role to sink his teeth into. With that in mind, we thought it would be appropriate to take an appreciative look at some of the brightest critical highlights from his impressive filmography.
While Tom Hardy is best known for a handful of high-profile roles, his filmography is far more eclectic than his blockbuster projects might suggest, and 2016’s London Road is a fine example of just how far afield he’s gone when picking scripts. Part real-life murder mystery, part musical (yes, really), director Rufus Norris’ look at the way a series of murders affected a British community blends jarringly disparate elements into an utterly memorable whole — and enlists the services of stars like Hardy, whose appearance highlights rarely tapped areas of his range. As Dave Calhoun wrote for Time Out, the film adds up to “An exciting, unsettling experience blessed with imagination and compassion.”
It sounds sweet, but Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake is anything but — it’s actually a pitch-black morality play about a successful drug dealer (Daniel Craig) who plans to retire from the business without tipping off his powerful supplier (Kenneth Cranham), partly with the assistance of a science-savvy young associate (Hardy). It’s all for naught, of course, and he soon finds himself needing to stay one step ahead from a growing list of enemies intent on doing him in before he can walk away from the business. “Vaughn’s film falls short of Goodfellas,” argued Kyle Smith of the New York Post, “but thanks to his ability to organize a complex story and bold, color-drenched photography by Ben Davis, Layer Cake is a cocked fist of a movie, impossible to ignore.”
After countless entries — some of them classics — how do you add something new to the professional fighting movie genre in the 21st century? Well, you probably can’t, but if you’re going to add to the list, it definitely helps if you step into the ring with a cast that includes Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte, all of whom answered the bell for director Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior. Starring Hardy and Edgerton as brothers whose separate quests for redemption put them on a collision course that can only be settled by beating people to bloody pulps, it made unlikely believers out of critics who’d seen more than their share of this kind of story — including Roger Ebert, who mused, “This is a rare fight movie in which we don’t want to see either fighter lose.”
Hardy was overshadowed here by Leonardo DiCaprio’s ferociously committed performance — and arguably also by a bear — but any old-fashioned revenge quest is only as good as its villain, and as the loathsome John Fitzgerald, Hardy gave DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass a burning need to drag his battered body across the American frontier. One of 2015’s more grueling dramas, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant was also among its most critically acclaimed; as Brian Tallerico argued for RogerEbert.com, “You don’t just watch The Revenant, you experience it. You walk out of it exhausted, impressed with the overall quality of the filmmaking and a little more grateful for the creature comforts of your life.”
Few novelists have ever been able to match the cerebral layers that John le Carré applied to his take on the spy thriller, and adapting his work for the screen has always been a daunting task, particularly given that he operated in a genre that’s tended to prize action over intelligence. But director Tomas Alfredson (working from an adaptation written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan) proved himself more than up to the task with this 2011 version of the author’s 1974 classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman as a retired spy brought back into active duty to investigate some troubling claims made by a defected MI6 operative (Hardy). Cool-tempered and whip-smart, this Tailor brought the book satisfyingly to life for critics like NPR’s Ella Taylor, who wrote, “Alfredson offers no concessions to hindsight, no lessons for today. Instead, he’s kept faith with le Carré’s bleak, romantically elegiac vision of a moment in 20th century history at once glorious and doomed.”
Hardy’s marvelously committed performance in Bronson put him on the radar for a number of new fans, but it was his appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Inception the following year that announced his arrival into the blockbuster ranks. Part of a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page, Hardy played Eames, a member of the team of “extractors” headed up by DiCaprio’s character whose unique method of identity theft involves burrowing into dreams and impersonating people the dreamer trusts. It’s heady sci-fi stuff, punctuated with thrilling set pieces and impressive visuals, and topped off with an ending that viewers are still arguing over years later. “Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels,” wrote an admiring Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. “[It’s] a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes.”
The Dark Knight Rises had a tough act to follow in The Dark Knight, and a fair portion of that burden fell on Hardy’s performance as the movie’s villain, the masked terrorist known as Bane. Forced to act behind a facemask and under the shadow of Heath Ledger’s trilogy-defining turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight, Hardy put his own stamp on the series — and, with some bone-crunching combat in the movie’s big fight scene, on Christian Bale’s Batman. “Give Hardy credit,” insisted Dann Gire for the Daily Herald, “for supplying Bane with plenty of conviction and gravitas in a movie that, frankly, is less about actors than knockout set pieces captured in eyeball-popping spectacles.”
There have been so many gritty neighborhood crime dramas at this point that narrative twists are few and far between, and the success or failure of a movie like The Drop — directed by Michaël R. Roskam from a Dennis Lehane screenplay — rests more heavily on its stars than most. Happily for Roskam, he hit paydirt with his leading men, casting Hardy as a bartender caught up in an organized crime operation run by his cousin (James Gandolfini in his final film performance) and surrounding them with a supporting cast that included Noomi Rapace and Matthias Schoenaerts. “With actors as interesting as Hardy, Gandolfini and Rapace,” observed Michael Phillips for the Chicago Tribune, “at least the cliches in The Drop have a fighting chance of holding your attention alongside the odd severed limb.”
It takes place entirely in a moving car, and the camera rarely even leaves his face, yet Locke is as minute-by-minute gripping as any classic action thriller — and none of it would work without the mesmerizing work Hardy delivers in the title role. Starring as a man speeding to a fateful destination while caught between life-altering professional and personal crises, Hardy runs the emotional gamut from pleading to outraged over the course of the movie, and is never less than riveting; as Ty Burr wrote for the Boston Globe, “Hardy rises to the gimmick and grounds Locke with a performance as watchably charismatic as it is minimalist. You can’t take your eyes off him — which is fortunate since there’s no one else there.”
Hollywood’s franchise hunger has reached the point where any level of cynicism regarding a sequel, reboot, or reimagining is defensible, and given that it had been 30 years since the last Mad Max installment, one could be forgiven for approaching this Hardy-led continuation of the saga with a somewhat jaundiced eye. But all that time away from the franchise clearly gave director/co-writer George Miller plenty of ideas, because Fury Road is that rarest of blockbuster beasts: an action thriller that isn’t content to merely string together set pieces. In fact, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful film, one whose message is afforded equal importance alongside epic action sequences arranged with balletic, eye-popping grace. Amidst all this, Hardy’s Max Rockatansky remains a man of few words – in fact, he spends a good deal of the film with a mask covering his mouth – but alongside co-star Charlize Theron, he grounds the movie’s gonzo outbursts with palpable human emotion. “Believe all the hype,” cautioned Christy Lemire. “This movie will melt your face off.”
This week the shelves are packed, and just in time for the holidays! Check out the long-awaited big-screen debut of Springfield’s finest (The Simpsons Movie), Matthew Vaughn‘s fantastic tale of witches, romance, and flying pirates (Stardust), or, as we strongly advise, take a chance on one of the year’s best cinematic gems (Once).
Tomatometer: 88%
It took eleven Simpsons scribes to bring the yellowest family in America to the big screen — and a marketing campaign turning 7-Eleven stores into Kwik-E-Marts that can only be described as “inspired” — but the payoff was huge. After 19 more-or-less stellar seasons (ok, quite a few were less but it got better, didn’t it?) Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie made a fashionably late entrance into the movies, to the tune of over half a billion dollars and counting, with a feature-length adventure involving the destruction of Springfield, a pet pig, environmentalism, Albert Brooks, and Green Day.
Tomatometer: 75%
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’ illustrated fairy tale captivated readers upon publication in 1997; a decade later, Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn enlisted the likes of Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Charlie Cox) in an English town called Wall bordered by a secret realm of magic, pirates and witches, the Certified Fresh Stardust dazzled critics with its heartfelt, if sprawling, tale of romance and adventure. Check out the DVD for behind-the-scenes commentary, deleted scenes, and a blooper reel.
Tomatometer: 98%
John Carney‘s Irish Once is, quite simply, one of the best films of 2007. The micro-budgeted musical — shot for an astounding $160,000 guerilla-style, on the streets of Dublin — stars real-life artistic partners Glen Hansard (of The Frames) and Marketa Irglova, as a busker and an immigrant who meet and form an immediate musical bond. The Grammy-nominated soundtrack bears 13 hauntingly beautiful original songs, which alone are worth the price of admission. If you missed it in theaters — and a lot of you did — pick it up now on DVD.
Tomatometer: 96%
In 1982, Ridley Scott unleashed his stylishly noir sci-fi tale of replicants and blade runners onto the world, and geeks the world over were never the same. But whose vision did they see? After a 1992 Director’s Cut that was ironically not Scott-approved, we now have Blade Runner: The Final Cut. At 93 percent, the original version already had overwhelming critical praise; at 96 percent, Scott’s “final” vision, available this week, may be even closer to perfection.
Tomatometer: N/A
The original Bring it On (2000) was a gem of a teen comedy about a privileged high school cheer captain (Kirsten Dunst) trawling the cutthroat waters of competitive cheerleading; the uninspired sequel, set on a college campus, provoked one to lament “it’s already been broughten.” Thankfully, a third installment (Bring it On: All or Nothing, starring Hayden Panetierre) revived the flagging franchise, leading us to hope, spirit fingers waving, that the feat could be repeated…in a third sequel! Bring it On: In It To Win It is that new hope — a cheertastic take on Romeo and Juliet. Sigh.
Tomatometer: 25%
If you’re like me, you love Comedy Central’s Reno 911; maybe, then, you won’t mind the underrated Balls of Fury, an Enter The Dragon-style spoof about the illicit ping-pong circuit starring Dan Fogler, Christopher Walken, Maggie Q and James (Lo Pan!) Hong. Lo Pan!
Tomatometer: 15%
Oh Jason Lee, what hath you wrought? You haven’t had this bad a critical ravaging since Stealing Harvard!
Ain’t It Cool News recently caught up with director Matthew Vaughn for a chat about projects past (Layer Cake), present (Stardust), and future — including a possible film adaptation of…Marvel Comics’ Thor?
Vaughn’s name has been floated in connection with the Thor film for several weeks now — since it was reported that Mark Protosevich had written a script — but this interview marks the first time the director has spoken publicly about the project. And judging from the following quote, Vaughn’s been taking classes at the Shia LaBeouf School of Cagey Non-Denial:
I’ve been discussing it with Marvel. I really like the Marvel guys, and it would be good to make. We’re trying to find something to work on together. If THOR is going to happen, I don’t know. I’m seeing them again next week. And, the other problem is the whole strike thing. It’s, like, we’d like to make a movie before the strike, so whether THOR could be the one, I don’t know.
The strike Vaughn is referring to is the seemingly inevitable breakdown in negotiations between the studios and the Writers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, and Screen Actors Guild, all approaching the end of their current contracts. If a project looks like it’ll be in development past the strike zone — and Thor almost certainly fits that description — it’s likely to stay on the shelf until new agreements are hammered out.
And speaking of hammers, for those unfamiliar with the mallet-wielding ancient Norse god, the comic-book version of Thor has enjoyed a long and storied history in the Marvel Universe, from his 1962 debut to a recent J. Michael Straczynski-led reboot. It’s unknown which segment of the character’s history will be the focus of Protosevich’s script.
Source: Ain’t It Cool News
He’s a Norse god with a giant hammer. Bring on the bad guys!
According to the L.A. Times, the script for "Thor" has been written by Mark Protosevich, the writer of "The Cell," "Poseidon," and this winter’s "I Am Legend."
Early word indicates that Matthew Vaughn is being courted to direct. You’ll remember Vaughn as the guy who was about to direct "X-Men: The Last Stand," but bailed and headed off to do "Stardust" instead. (He also directed "Layer Cake.")
More word on this Marvel project when it becomes available. Because if there’s one thing we can’t have enough of, it’s superhero movies.
Source: L.A. Times
In an otherwise unremarkable office building in London’s trendy Soho, the clichés are out in force; magic is being made, fantasies are coming to life and dreams are being realised. It may be marketing agencies, new media designers and ad companies in the vicinity, but on the second floor of this particular building a small group of people are putting the finishing touches to "Stardust", one of Paramount’s late summer tent-pole releases, and perhaps the most ambitious film ever to be made in Britain.
Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, "Stardust" is a sweeping fantasy comedy with a cast list so impressive it’s impossible to resist – Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes, Peter O’Toole and Rupert Everett to name a few – and production values that’ll give "Pirates of the Caribbean" a run for its money. And the film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, has brought Rotten Tomatoes UK into the edit suite for an exclusive look at how the film is shaping up.
Claire Danes, Robert De Niro and Charlie Cox in a scene from Matthew Vaughn’s "Stardust".
"The pitch is it’s Pirates of the Caribbean meets The Princess Bride," Vaughn tells us, as he opens up the first reel on the Avid and skips past the Paramount logo and onto the first shot of the film. It begins with Ian McKellen‘s powerful narration setting up the magical land beyond Wall, a town bordering the real world and home to our hero, Tristran, played by newcomer Charlie Cox. "It has the same sense of humour as The Princess Bride, but it also, hopefully, matches Pirates in terms of the swashbuckling action and effects."
Vaughn is best known for directing "Layer Cake" and for his collaboration with Guy Ritchie as the producer of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch", so when we see fantasy romance and comedy on the screen we can’t help but point out to him that it’s a big departure. "It is," he agrees, "but ultimately I don’t want to be the sort of director who does the same thing every time." With this only his second feature in the director’s chair we’re fairly certain, from what we’ve seen, that there’s little chance of that.
"So what would you like to see?" he asks. "Action? Adventure? Romance? Comedy?" We ask for a little of everything and he laughs, thinks for a minute – perhaps with a little hesitation at opening the film up to fresh eyes before it’s even finished – and finally turns to the computer.
Michelle Pfeiffer in a scene from Matthew Vaughn’s "Stardust".
*SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR TWO PARAGRAPHS*
On the screen Vaughn shows us some of the first effects shots in the movie as a star falls to Earth and sets events in motion that’ll shape the rest of the film. Back on terra-firma, as Tristran attempts to woo his sweetheart Victoria (Sienna Miller) by promising to bring the star back in exchange for her hand in marriage, we’re introduced to the film’s other interested parties. They are the haggard witch-queen, Lamia (Pfeiffer), who desires the youth trapped at the heart of the star, and the swiftly depleting sons of Stormhold; Primus, Secundus and Septimus (Jason Flemyng, Rupert Everett and Mark Strong respectively) who will stop at nothing – including fratricide – to bring home the chain the star carries, a pendant that holds the power to succeed their father (O’Toole) as ruler of the land.
We’re later given a glimpse of Tristran’s first meeting with the star, who turns out to be an ethereal young woman played by Claire Danes, a slice of Robert De Niro as he barters with none other than Ricky Gervais on the cost of lightning bolts in the funniest scene of the day, and finally a few slices of the climactic battle. In the "Princess Bride" vein this is not "Lord of the Rings" warfare but rather a somewhat clumsy swordfight with plenty of magic thrown in. And it plays beautifully because there’s something inherently unexpected in the meeting of a village farmer, the queen of the witches and an ambitious future monarch fighting over a fallen star.
*SPOILERS END*
Sienna Miller in a scene from Matthew Vaughn’s "Stardust".
If anything is slightly worrying Vaughn and line producer Tarquin Pack, who joins us as we watch the footage, it’s not the juggernaught of third parts that precede the release of the film in August; "Spider-Man 3", "Shrek the Third" and "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" all beat "Stardust" into cinemas, not to mention any number of other franchise movies, while "Rush Hour 3" – directed by Brett Ratner who took the reins on "X-Men 3" when Vaughn stepped down – opens on the same day.
"I think people are going to be looking for something new after all of those sequels," Pack says, "and as far as Rush Hour 3 is concerned, unless they’ve had a change of heart they’re not going after the same audience we are. Paramount originally wanted to put Stardust out on the same day as The Simpsons; if that’d happened we’d have had trouble, but Rush Hour 3 doesn’t really concern us."
"The Princess Bride" does, though. It’s a small concern, but it’s there; Pack reminds us that as cherished as it’s come to be on DVD, "The Princess Bride" had a tough time in cinemas and he’s hoping "Stardust" doesn’t suffer the same fate.
With startling visual effects, a punchy script – Vaughn jokingly takes credit for a line we particularly like when we ask if it was in the book, "Neil will probably try to tell you he wrote it, but he’d be lying!" – and a tone not seen on the big screen for far too long, we don’t suppose this’ll be the case; "Stardust" has the potential to be the biggest surprise of the year, and from the looks of things it’s certainly well on its way.
Ricky Gervais in a scene from Matthew Vaughn’s "Stardust".
"Stardust" hits US cinemas on August 10th and arrives in the UK on 19th October. Check out more new images from the film in our image gallery.
Everyone always says The Oscars would be better if "normal people" were allowed to vote on them. And yet every year, The People’s Choice Awards Nominations are embarrassingly silly.
Here’s a list of the movie category nominations, thanks to ComingSoon.net:
FAVORITE FEMALE MOVIE STAR
Jennifer Aniston
Halle Berry
Sandra Bullock
FAVORITE MALE MOVIE STAR
Johnny Depp
Tom Hanks
Denzel Washington
FAVORITE LEADING LADY
Cameron Diaz
Kirsten Dunst
Scarlett Johansson
FAVORITE LEADING MAN
Matt Damon
Brad Pitt
Vince Vaughn
FAVORITE FEMALE ACTION STAR
Kate Beckinsale
Halle Berry
Uma Thurman
FAVORITE MALE ACTION STAR
Johnny Depp
Samuel L. Jackson
Jet Li
FAVORITE ON-SCREEN MATCH-UP
Jennifer Aniston & Vince Vaughn in "The Break-Up"
Matt Damon & Jack Nicholson & Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Departed"
Johnny Depp & Keira Knightley in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest"
Apparently the "Best Movie" nominees will be announced later. "Santa Clause 3" hasn’t been out long enough, I guess.
You may have caught a few of the nifty new X-Men 3 commercials during House, American Idol, or Survivor, but if you haven’t, those thorough movie nerds over at JoBlo’s can point you in the right direction. Also available for the X-nuts is a rather enjoyable interview between Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman and IGN FilmForce, which you can find right here.
As any half-awake movie fan knows by now, X-Men: The Last Stand is the third (and final?) chapter in Fox’s mega-popular superhero series. Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-ventures, defected over to WB to make Superman Returns, which opened the door for Layer Cake helmer Matthew Vaughn — who promptly bailed on the project, leaving it available for Rush Hour director Brett Ratner.
Opening mega-wide on May 26th, The Last Stand promises tons of manic mutant mayhem, and the most recent trailer has turned even some of the staunchest skeptics around.
Variety reports on a pretty exciting new project from director Matthew Vaughn ("Layer Cake"). The filmmaker will direct an adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s "Stardust" for Paramount, and he’ll do it with the help of Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Claire Danes, among others, of course.
"Paramount has set Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Charlie Cox and Sienna Miller to star in "Stardust," an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel to be directed by Matthew Vaughn. Pic begins shooting in the U.K. and Iceland next month.
Story concerns a star-crossed youth from the English village of Wall who tries to win the heart of his true love by searching for a falling star and heading into a magical world where he must deal with a witch and a pirate.
Film will be the first for Vaughn since "Layer Cake," after he dropped out of the third X-Men pic for personal reasons. A majority of shooting will be done in the U.K."
When we last heard from filmmaker Matthew Vaughn, he was bailing on the "X-Men 3" project and leaving it in the hands of Brett Ratner. Now comes word from Variety that the "Layer Cake" director will be adapting Neil Gaiman‘s "adult fairy tale" "Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie" for the big screen.
"Gaiman’s novel, first published in 1997 as "Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie," is set in a town in the English countryside where the magical and mortal mix. Story’s centered on a young man who promises his beloved that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm, where he has to contend with witches, goblins, gnomes, talking animals and evil trees.
"Stardust," which won the 1999 Mythopoeic Award for adult novel, was originally set up at Dimension. The feature project’s being developed with the goal of tapping into veins of fantasy and comedy akin to those in "The Princess Bride" and "The Neverending Story.""
ComingSoon.net shares with us the long-in-coming announcement, and it’s one that shouldn’t stun any of the astute movie geeks: British actor Daniel Craig has been signed to play everyone’s favorite superspy, James Bond. The next 007 adventure, "Casino Royale," goes before the cameras early next year.
Mr. Craig is probably best known for his excellent performance in Matthew Vaughn‘s "Layer Cake," but the guy’s been doing great character work for years.
After making his cinematic debut in John Avildsen‘s "The Power of One" (1992), Craig appeared in such films as "Elizabeth" (1998), "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" (2001), "Road to Perdition" (2002), "Sylvia" (2003), "Enduring Love" (2004), and "The Jacket" (2005). The actor just finished work on Steven Spielberg‘s "Munich" and is now filming Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s thriller "The Visiting."
Let the Bond discussions begin in full swing, but we think Mr. Craig is a fine choice. Now all the producers have to do is replace their screenwriters and we just might get a Bond adventure that’s worthy of the legendary character.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures will hold a press conference on 10/14 to announce the name of the actor who’ll be stepping into the role of James Bond. Early buzz indicates that it will be Daniel Craig ("Layer Cake"), but we won’t know for certain until Friday afternoon.
"Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio backing new Bond film "Casino Royale," said Wednesday that the actor who will portray the suave secret agent with a license to kill would be named at a news conference in London on October 14. No further details were disclosed, and the mystery remains over who will star in the film franchise that has grossed nearly $4 billion at global box offices since the first Bond flick, "Dr. No," hit the silver screen in 1962."
The previous Bonds were Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan.
Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures jointly announced today that the upcoming film being directed by three-time Academy Award-winning director-producer Steven Spielberg will be titled "Munich."
"Munich" is an historical thriller set in the aftermath of the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Universal Pictures will release the film in the United States and Canada on December 23, 2005; DreamWorks Pictures will handle international marketing and distribution.
Munich recounts the dramatic story of the secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and assassinate 11 Palestinians believed to have planned the 1972 Munich massacre — and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it. Eric Bana ("Troy") stars as the Mossad agent charged with leading the band of specialists brought together for this operation.
Inspired by actual events, the narrative is based on a number of sources, including the recollections of some who participated in the events themselves. The script is the first feature film written by Tony Kushner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and many other awards for his epochal Broadway drama "Angels in America" as well as its Emmy Award-winning adaptation for HBO. The film is produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Barry Mendel, Spielberg and Colin Wilson.
The international cast also includes Daniel Craig ("Layer Cake"), Geoffrey Rush ("Shine"), Mathieu Kassovitz ("Birthday Girl"), Hanns Zischler ("Walk on Water") and Ciarán Hinds ("Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera").
(Internet gossip also indicates that Kurt Russell will play a small role in "Munich.")
The Hollywood Reporter brings some rather annoying news for all you "X-Men" fans: Citing "personal reasons," filmmaker Matthew Vaughn has decided to step away from directing "X-Men 3." No word yet on how this sudden change will affect the start of production … but Fox better find a good director, and fast!
Bryan Singer, director of the original "X-Men" as well as "X-Men 2," is currently working on WB’s "Superman Returns" epic, so he’s definitely out of the running. Mr. Vaughn has been credited with bringing actors like Vinnie Jones ("Snatch") and Kelsey Grammer ("Down Periscope") to the project, and he’s presently turning a few arthouse heads with his directorial debut "Layer Cake." Rest assured that we’ll bring you any fresh X-news as soon as we hear it.
