Here's the latest news of crime dramas on stage and screen:
MOVIES
Although the reboot of Murder on the Orient Express has been on hold for some time, it seems to be moving forward with the hiring of Michael Green to pen the script. The original 1974 movie from Sidney Lumet was based on Agatha Christie's iconic mystery novel and starred Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot.
Peter Dinklage and Nicola Peltz are in talks to join Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike in the adaptation of Deep Blue Goodbye, based on the detective novel by John D. MacDonald.
Josh Duhamel and Alice Eve have joined Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino in the cast of Beyond Deceit, a legal thriller marking the directorial debut of screenwriter Shintaro Shimosawa. The project centers on an ambitious young lawyer (Duhamel) who takes on a big case against a ruthless executive of a pharmaceutical company, only to get drawn into a murder case where he becomes the prime suspect.
The latest James Bond movie Spectre has added The Bridge star Stephanie Sigman to the cast playing a woman named Estrella, rumored to be a femme fatale character.
TELEVISION
The BBC greenlighted a third season of the UK crime drama The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson as Superintendent Stella Gibson and Fifty Shades Of Grey's Jamie Dornan as serial killer Paul Spector.
Anne-Marie Duff has snaggled the lead role in the four-part BBC psychological crime drama, From Darkness. The series follows Clare Church, an ex-police officer who left the force in the mid-90s after the impact of violence became too overwhelming, but the discovery of four bodies from a past investigation pulls her back in to a world she thought she'd left behind.
The USA network greenlighted a pilot commitment for Shooter, a drama series adaptation of the 2007 film (based on the bestselling novel Point Of Impact by Stephen Hunter), which is being executive produced by the film’s star Mark Wahlberg. The TV drama centers on a highly decorated Marine sniper who goes on the run when he's framed for an attack on the President and has to track down whoever set him up.
The USA network also handed out a pilot order to the drama Falling Water, described as "a mind-bending thriller intersecting reality and unconscious thoughts."
A&E picked up the rights to Impact, a drama series from filmmaker Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), journalist-turned-TV writer Jason George (Nashville) and All3Media America. Impact is described as a fast-paced thriller about the downing of a major commercial flight near the nation’s capital, and "when the country’s best airline investigator learns her son may have been on the flight, everyone she once trusted will become a suspect."
The Netflix Canadian thriller Between will debut on May 21, but you won’t be able to binge watch like other Netflix series, since the six one-hour episodes will only appear on a weekly basis. The survivalist thriller drama tells the story of a town where everyone over 21 years old has been wiped out by a mysterious disease, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves.
Lauren Ambrose, currently seen in USA’s limited series DIG, is the last of the four main leads to be cast in the ABC pilot Broad Squad, is a fictionalized account of the graduating class of Boston’s first female patrol officers in 1978. The other three female stars are Charlotte Spencer, Cody Horn, Rutina Wesley. Rounding out the cast are Michael Gaston (The Mentalist), Kenneth Mitchell (Jericho) and Alberto Frezza.
Rachel Boston (Witches Of East End) has been hired as a series regular in the CBS civil rights crime drama pilot For Justice, based on James Patterson’s crime novel, The Thomas Berryman Number. The series centers on Special Agent Natalia "Nat" Chappel (played by Anika Noni Rose), a cool, laser-focused, FBI agent who works in the Criminal Section of the Department of Civil Rights Division. Boston will play another DOJ lawyer with Nat’s team.
Fox has delayed production on its American remake of the UK police procedural Luther to wait until the crush of pilot season is over before resuming its search for a leading man.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
NPR's "All Things Considered" spoke with real-life cyber psychologist Mary Aiken, who's also a producer on the new show CSI: Cyber.
WBUR in Boston interviewed native son Dennis Lehane about his writing and latest novel, World Gone By.
The newest Crime and Science Radio podcast, "Spy vs Spy vs Spy," featured hosts Jan Burke and D.P. Lyle interviewing "the Queen of Espionage," Gayle Lynds.
The latest podcast from Suspense Radio's "Inside Edition" welcomed guest authors A.J. Tata, Aric Carter, CJ Box, and Leon Opio.
THEATER
Following its successful premiere at D.C.'s Arena Stage, Ken Ludwig's Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery moves to New York City's McCarter Theater. Inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the show stars Gregory Wooddell (The Lyons, As You Like It) as Sherlock Holmes with Lucas Hall (Tales from Red Vienna) as Doctor Watson, and Stanley Bahorek, Michael Glenn, and Jane Pfitsch playing more than 40 additional characters.
The Minnesota Opera is staging the premiere of a work by Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell based on the novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon (also made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury). Like the book and movie, the opera centers on an American soldier brainwashed by Chinese Communists to kill on command, hence becoming “the perfect assassin." (Hat tip to the Parterre blog.)
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