Could romcom queen Kate Hudson be branching out at last? Earlier this week, she signed on for her first animated feature in DreamWorks’ Me & My Shadow, and she’s now gunning for action stardom with Everly. Joe Lynch (Knights of Badassdom) will direct from a 2010 Black List script by Yale Hannon. Hudson will play a woman trapped in her apartment as she fends off attacks from assassins hired by her ex, a ruthless mob boss.

Hudson is best known for her romantic comedy roles, like last year’s Little Bit of Heaven and Something Borrowed, but her upcoming slate shows a little more variety. In addition to Me & My Shadow and Everly, she also has Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist due out next year.

After the jump, Piper Perabo fights a bear and Common does magic.

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I enjoyed his debut feature Submarine enough that I would’ve been looking forward to Richard Ayoade‘s next effort no matter what it wound up being, but his sophomore project is already shaping up to be every bit as interesting as his first. Jesse Eisenberg was cast in the lead role last summer, and it’s now been announced that rising star Mia Wasikowska will be joining him as well. The film is baed on a classic novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with a script by Ayoade and Avi Korine (Harmony’s brother). More details after the jump.

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One Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee and the actor who made the EGOT famous simultaneously elevate the quirky family drama Predisposed. Melissa Leo plays a drug addicted mother whose son, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is forced on a madcap adventure on the most important day of his life. On his way to drop mom off at rehab, he’s taken hostage by a a crazy drug dealer (Tracy Morgan), takes oxycontin, is forced to parent his little sister and even takes part in a Revolutionary War reenactment.

Co-directed by first time feature director Phil Dorling and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner from their short of the same name, Predisposed is extremely ambitious and, at times, succeeds in fulfilling those promises thanks in large part to fantastic performances by the three leads. Read More »

Eight years after his sophomore directorial effort P.S., Dylan Kidd is heading back into feature filmmaking with a new comedy for CBS Films titled Get a Job. And he’s got his eye on some intriguing young stars (and Bryan Cranston) for the lead roles: Miles Teller is in talks for one of the leads, while offers have gone out to Cranston and Anna Kendrick for other roles. Meanwhile, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jay Pharoah, and Jesse Eisenberg, who starred in Kidd’s debut Roger Dodger, are said to be circling as well. More details after the jump.

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Maybe it’s just because I got a cat this year — the first living, breathing creature I’ve owned since I failed to keep a hamster alive circa 1995 — but I couldn’t help noticing that the films of 2011 featured some damn great animals. Some were the stars of their films, like Rango (Johnny Depp) in Rango, while others played second fiddle to less interesting, or at least less adorable, human stars, like Rosie (Tai) in Water for Elephants, but all deserve special mention in my book.

And yeah, okay, the fact that they also serve as a convenient excuse to post cute animal photos during a slow news week happens to a nice little bonus as well. Read on after the jump.

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Briefly: 2011 was a great year for Woody Allen. His playful, entertaining film Midnight in Paris turned into the year’s runaway arthouse hit, taking in $60m to become Allen’s greatest domestic success. Sony Classics has distributed the director’s last few films and after their stellar success with Midnight in Paris, I think it has been pretty much a foregone conclusion that his next movie, Nero Fiddled, would go out via the company as well.

Variety reports that deal has been set, with Sony Classics picking up North American and UK rights to the film, which stars Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page. As is typically the case with a new Allen film we don’t know much about the plot — all we’ve got is that the Rome-set film “consists of four separate vignettes — two with American characters, two with Italian characters — but the vignettes never intersect.”

The film will get a summer 2012 release, and is a likely bet for a Cannes debut.

We’ve already had the chance to ooh and ahh over most of the Sundance Film Festival 2012 slate earlier this month, but with weeks to go until the festival four latecomers have just been announced. There are a few last-minute additions every year; last year’s included Miranda July’s The Future, while 2010′s included Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right.

This year, we have the intriguingly titled sci-fi John Dies at the End; This Must Be the Place, starring Sean Penn as an aging rock star; Jesse Eisenberg and Melissa Leo‘s new comedy Predisposed; and the Norwegian drama Oslo, August 31st. Read the descriptions after the jump.

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As the American Film Market goes on, we see a lot of synopsis and sales art releases for upcoming films. A lot of times these aren’t all that illuminating, because the synopsis info just rehashes what we already know, and the sales art is created before anything is ever shot, so at best it can only get across the most basic idea of the film. (Comepare, for example, the sales art for Drive to the final posters.)

But Louis Leterrier has a movie shooting early next year called Now You See Me that might be worth highlighting once more. I’m interested in the film because it represents a break from the movies Leterrier has done in the past (The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk, Clash of the Titans) and in part because it has a pretty impressive cast led by Mark Ruffalo and Jesse Eisenberg. The sales art out of AFM positions the film, tonally, in Ocean’s Eleven territory, while the synopsis clarifies a few roles for some of the actors. Both are below. Read More »

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