Media Murder for Monday

AWARDS

The Los Angeles Film Critics Awards were handed out last night. Among crime drama nods, The Best Actress winner was Isabelle Huppert for her role in Elle, playing a successful businesswoman who gets caught up in a game of cat and mouse as she tracks down the unknown man who raped her.

The New York Film Critics Circle had previously announced their choices for the best films/performances on December 1, with Isabelle Huppert again a big winner. Best non-fiction film (documentary) was also won by O.J.: Made in America, which previously won four Critics’ Choice documentary awards for feature, limited doc series, director, and sports doc.

The 22nd annual Critics' Choice Awards were announced late last week by The Broadcast Film Critics Association. Among the multiple-nominated films were the crime dramas Hell or High Water and Jason Bourne. For a complete listing, check out this link via Hollywood Reporter.

MOVIES

Jodie Foster has signed on to star in Drew Pearce's directorial debut, Hotel Artemis, which is based on an original script by Pearce (Iron Man 3 and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation). The project is being produced by Ink Factory, the London-based production company that most recently worked on The Night Manager, the critically acclaimed miniseries based on John le Carré’s novel. Although few details have been released about the plot of Hotel Artemis, the thriller is set in the near-future and creates “its own distinctive crime universe," with Foster taking on the role of "The Nurse."

Sons Of Anarchy actor Tommy Flanagan is reuniting with his co-star Charlie Hunnam in the upcoming Michael Noer-directed remake of Papillon, based on the classic 1973 film that starred Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. Written by Aaron Guzikowski, the film (which also stars Rami Malek) is a modern retelling of the original that was based on the memoirs of convicted felon and fugitive Henri Charriere. Tommy will play a mysterious figure with a dark past that Papillon encounters on his journey.

The Sundance film festival lineup was announced for 2017. The slate includes Crown Heights, based on the true story of a man who devotes his life to proving his best friend innocent of murder; I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, about a depressed woman and her obnoxious neighbor who get in over their heads when trying to avenge a burglary and butting heads with a pack of degenerate criminals; Casting JonBenet, a documentary based on the unsolved murder case of the child beauty queen; The Force, a cinema verite´ look at the long-troubled Oakland Police Department; The Nile Hilton Incident, where Police Detective Noredin is handed the case of a murdered singer and realizes the investigation concerns the power elite close to the President’s inner circle, and more.

TELEVISION

Salzman and Canada's Thunderbird Films are bringing Faye Kellerman's best-selling Decker-Lazarus crime fiction series to the small screen. The production house optioned Kellerman's debut novel, The Ritual Bath, which is set in the world of Orthodox Judaism in the California hills and features LAPD detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, a widowed mother who witnesses a brutal crime and helps solve it.

NBC has put in development an hourlong procedural drama from Mike Daniels (Sons of Anarchy), described as "a character-driven police procedural with an emotional spin." The untitled drama explores the complex personal life of a former cop and mother who returns to the force to solve the murder of her detective husband.

Grimm executive producers Sean Hayes and Todd Milliner had previously announced they were working on another drama project at NBC and Universal TV, the network and studio behind the supernatural cop drama starring David Giuntoli. They've since announced that Giuntoli will also star in the action adventure mystery that's centered around a group of D.C. grad students who accidentally uncover a 40-year-old secret that leads them to attempt to unravel an unsolved murder, find hidden blood money, and avoid being killed by an assassin from the past.

Sex And The City and White Collar alum Willie Garson is set to co-star in and co-executive produce an hourlong untitled drama at NBC that's based on a story by Garson. It centers on an idealistic young former foster child who now works as a paralegal while advocating for those in need from all walks of life.  

Daniel Brühl (Rush, Inglorious Bastards) and Luke Evans (The Girl on The Train, The Hobbit trilogy) have been cast in key roles in The Alienist, TNT’s upcoming straight-to-series drama based on the international best-selling novel by Caleb Carr. The psychological thriller is set in the Gilded Age of New York City in 1896 when a series of haunting, gruesome murders of boy prostitutes leads newly appointed Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to call upon criminal psychologist (aka alienist) Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl) and newspaper reporter John Moore (Evans) to conduct the investigation in secret.  

Michael Mosley has signed on for a regular role in the 10-episode Netflix crime drama Seven Seconds, the new project from The Killing creator Veena Sud. Based on the 2013 Russian action movie The Major, the story follows tensions between African American citizens and Caucasian cops in Jersey City after a teenage African American boy is critically injured by a cop. Mosley will play Joe "Fish" Rinaldi, a seasoned New Jersey detective assigned to work with prosecutor KJ Harper (still to be cast). Patrick Murney will portray Gary Wilcox, a cop working with Diangelo (David Lyons), Osorio (Raul Castillo), and newcomer Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) on the Narcotics squad in Jersey City.

BBC One recently aired a new documentary titled Serial Killers: The Women Who Write Crime Fiction. The show featured prominent crime writers Val McDermid, Patricia Cornwell, Martina Cole, husband-and-wife author team Nicci French, Sarah Phelps, and Paula Hawkins in interview with presenter Alan Yentob. The program also explored why readers of crime are mostly women and more often than not, the writers are too. No information yet on a possible PBS or BBC America broadcast date.

Quantico is moving from its Sunday slot to Mondays starting in January as part of ABC's midseason schedule, taking over the time slot currently occupied by freshman drama Conviction that ends its run after 13 episodes. Meanwhile, Quantico cast members explained the midseason finale's twist and cliffhanger to the Hollywood Reporter.

CBS announced its scheduling plans for winter and spring 2017, with Ransom, a hostage negotiator procedural, kicking off the network's new midseason lineup on Sunday, Jan. 1 before moving to its regular time on Saturday, Jan. 7. Training Day, a reboot of the Oscar-winning corrupt cop drama, premieres Thursday, Feb. 2, with Bill Paxton taking on the Denzel Washington role as the crooked veteran detective and Justin Cornwell in the Ethan Hawke role as his idealistic young partner. Katherine Heigl's new show Doubt will premiere Wednesday, Feb. 15, with the former Grey's Anatomy star playing an attorney who starts to fall for her client, who is accused of murdering his girlfriend 24 years prior.

A trailer was released for the upcoming true-crime documentary Beware the Slenderman (premiering Jan. 23), which tells the tale of the notorious 2014 stabbing of a 12-year-old Wisconsin girl by two of her classmates. The accused girls told authorities they did it to appease the Slender Man, a fictional ghoul taken from a popular horror-story collective online.

The Hollywood Reporter put together a slide show of all known TV shows that are ending in 2017.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The newest Crime and Science Radio podcast featured "Naming The Unidentified, Finding The Missing" : An Interview With J. Todd Matthews, Director of Case Management and Communications for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste, hosts of the podcast Two Crime Writers and a Microphone, recently welcomed Ayo Onatade from Shots Magazine and UK crime author Mark Billingham.

A Stab in the Dark host Mark Billingham is joined in the studio by The Poison Tree and Broadchurch author Erin Kelly and creator of Death In Paradise Robert Thorogood to discuss the art of adaptation. Paul Hirons also spoke with writer and producer Adam Hamdy who explained the top 5 tips he uses to adapt crime fiction.  

Author Debbi Mack interviewed crime fiction author Simon Wood on the Crime Cafe podcast.

The Chat Noir Mystery & Suspense Radio Show featured guest author Linda Davis.

On BBC Radio online, you can listen to the first episode of "The Cinderella Killer," based on Simon Brett's novel. Bill Nighy stars as Brett's protagonist Charles Paris, a charming alcoholic actor who often takes on detection by assuming a variety of roles.

Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell for posting Professor Bruce Campbell's William & Mary Tack Faculty Lecture on "The Detective Is (Not) a Nazi: German Pulp Fiction."

In EQMM’s April 1947 issue, Harry Kemelman, creator of the best-selling Rabbi David Small series, saw print for the first time as the winner of a special prize for best first story in EQMM’s second annual worldwide short-story contest. His story "The Nine Mile Walk,' is featured in the monthly EQMM podcast series, read by another author whose first story appeared in EQMM, book reviewer Steve Steinbock.

The Invisible Event blog paid tribute to John Dickson Carr on the 110th anniversary of the author's birth and noted that you can listen to the first 10 episodes of "Murder by Experts," a radio drama project Carr was involved with, for free at Archive.org.