Welcome to Monday and the latest crime drama roundup:
THE BIG SCREEN
Saban Films has acquired U.S. distribution rights to The Super, the Stephan Rick-directed genre thriller that stars Val Kilmer and Patrick John Flueger. The film is based on an idea by Law & Order creator Dick Wolf and centers on the mysterious disappearance of several tenants at a luxury New York City apartment building. Phil Lodge (Flueger), the building’s new superintendent and a former NYPD officer, immediately suspects Walter (Kilmer), the strange maintenance man. With his daughters’ lives on the line, Phil must decipher the cryptic riddles in which Walter speaks to solve the disappearances before it’s too late.
Anthony Mackie is the latest to join stars Amy Adams and Julianne Moore in Fox 2000’s adaptation of A.J. Finn’s bestseller The Woman in the Window. Joe Wright is directing with Tracy Letts adapting the screenplay. Gary Oldman, Wyatt Russell, and Brian Tyree Henry are also in the cast.
The Noir City: Chicago film festival continues this week through August 23 with 18 films, all but two were made during the golden era of noir in the dozen or so years following the end of World War II. The programming differs from the past few years, which saw the festival organizers looking for films outside the U.S. and from after the 1950s. The opening night featured a tribute to writer-director Carl Franklin and a double bill of his neo-noir classics and an in-person discussion between films with the director and Noir City host Eddie Muller.
The noir film festival Noir City Detroit is returning to the Motor City for its third event, September 23-25, at the historic Redford Theatre. The festival kicks off on Saturday night with a double bill of Fred Zinnemann's revenge tale Act of Violence (1949) and Stanley Kubrick's heist film The Killing (1956).
Viola Davis stars in the new trailer for Widows, the story of four women with nothing in common except a debt left behind by their dead husbands’ criminal activities.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
USA Network has given a straight-to-series order to the crime drama Treadstone, an offshoot from Universal’s Bourne franchise, from Heroes creator Tim Kring and Universal Cable Productions. Treadstone explores the origin story and present-day actions of a CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone — a covert program that uses behavior-modification protocol to turn recruits into nearly superhuman assassins.
NBC has put in development an untitled political murder mystery drama from The Art of More creator Chuck Rose, prolific TV director-producer Julie Anne Robinson and Universal TV. Based on a script Rose will write, the project centers on a series of murders predicted in a radical conspiracy blog that puts the blogger in the crosshairs of an astute NSA agent. But when they find that they may be the next target, an unlikely alliance forms as the blogger and the NSA agent team up to discover the truth, pulling them into a larger mystery than either of them could have imagined.
Jane Corry’s domestic thriller novel My Husband’s Wife has been optioned as a TV series by the makers of Baby Driver. The novel is described as "a female driven story about love, marriage and murder in an ever evolving East London." The plot unfolds over two decades and charts the lives of Lily, a 25-year-old London lawyer, and Carla, her immigrant neighbor’s young daughter who lives in a flat across the hall. The two women form a close bond which will irrevocably change their lives forever.
The Alienist Is coming back to TNT with a new title, Angel of Darkness, but it's essentially the same show with the same cast of Daniel Bruhl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans returning as their same characters. TV Guide notes that the move is likely due to the fact that The Alienist was billed as a limited series — meaning it was a closed story that was supposed to end after the eight episodes that were originally ordered. The series is based on psychological thriller novel The Alienist by Caleb Carr about the hunt for a serial killer responsible for the gruesome murders of boy prostitutes in 19th century New York City.
USA Network has opted not to order a fourth season of the thriller drama series Shooter starring Ryan Phillippe. The decision comes as Shooter has crossed the midpoint mark of its 13-episode Season 3 run, but Paramount Television is shopping the series to other networks. The series is based on the best-selling novel Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter and the 2007 Paramount film and follows the journey of Bob Lee Swagger (Phillippe), a highly decorated veteran who is coaxed back into action to prevent a plot to kill the President.
Former Grey’s Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey and popular Italian actor Alessandro Borghi (star of Netflix’s Suburra) will lead cast in the ten-part thriller series Devils. Based on the best-selling novel by Guido Maria Brera, Devils is a high-stakes financial thriller set during the European debt crisis. Nick Hurran (Sherlock, Doctor Who, Fortitude) will be the series' showrunner and director.
Prolific Emmy-nominated director Phil Abraham is set to executive produce and direct the first two episodes of the second season of Amazon’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. The series a reinvention with a modern sensibility of the famed and lauded Tom Clancy hero, starring John Krasinski and Abbie Cornish.
Luke Mitchell has been cast in the CBS drama The Code, stepping in for Dave Annable, who played the role in the original pilot. Mitchell will play Capt. John "Abe" Abraham, a driven prosecutor operating out of Judge Advocate General Headquarters in Quantico for whom becoming a Marine is a longstanding family tradition and a responsibility he treats with devotion and passion.
Tully producer Bron Studios has teamed up with Studiocanal’s Tandem Productions on a global television thriller from The Bridge co-creator Måns Mårlind. The gritty, eight-part series Shadow Play is a character-driven period thriller is set in Berlin and centers on Max McLaughlin, an American cop who arrives in the city in the summer of 1946 to help create a police force in the chaotic aftermath of the war. Max’s goal is to take down “Englemacher” Gladow, the Al Capone of post-war Berlin, while also undertaking a secret crusade to find his missing brother, who is killing ex-Nazis in hiding. However, Max is completely unaware that he is being used as a pawn in what is the very beginning of the Cold War.
A trailer was released for the CBS All Access "hillbilly noir" series, One Dollar, a Rust Belt murder mystery with an ensemble that includes John Carroll Lynch, Christopher Denham, and Greg Germann. The series changes point of view from episode to episode as it tracks the movement of a single dollar bill that moves between several people who are connected to a shocking multiple murder at the local mill. The town's deep class and cultural divides are exposed as the investigation continues and long-buried secrets are brought to light.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Vermont Public Radio profiled the 1870s female crime writer who pioneered modern detective fiction, Anna Katharine Green. The featured guest was Claire Meldrum, a professor at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, whose research into Green is the focus of a research project being honored by the Vermont Historical Society.
Writer Types welcomed bestselling thriller writer Ted Bell and romance writer turned suspense novelist Victoria Helen Stone.
Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham discussed the Bill Clinton and James Patterson book culinary mystery novels.
This week's guest on Meet the Thriller Writer was prison chaplain turned mystery author Michael Lister who talked about his long-running John Jordan mystery series.
THEATER
Phyllis Logan stars in the award-winning thriller Switzerland at the Theatre Royal Bath through September 1. The psychological thriller centers on author Patricia Highsmith, now aging and ailing. Vitriolic, bigoted and alcoholic, her eccentricities are the stuff of legend. A polished young man turns up, sent by her New York publisher to persuade the great writer to pen one final installment of her best-selling series featuring the master manipulator, Tom Ripley. But as day breaks over the mountains, it becomes clear that the charming stranger is set on a far more sinister mission.
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