It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
AWARDS
The Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) award nominations were announced this past week. Among the crime drama nods are House of Gucci (based on the true story of Patrizia Reggiani and the events leading up to her conviction for murdering her ex-husband), which was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (essentially, "Best Picture"); in the Best Actor category, Benedict Cumberbatch was nominated for his role in Power of the Dog, and Denzel Washington was nominated for The Tragedy of Macbeth; and in the Best Actress category, Lady Gaga was nominated for House of Gucci. On the TV side, Mare of Easttown received several acting nods, including Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series (Kate Winslet; Jean Smart) and Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series (Evan Peters). You can check out all the SAG honorees via this link.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) also unveiled longlists that narrowed the field in 24 different categories at the British Academy Film Awards. Among the crime dramas in the Best Film category are House of Gucci; No Time to Die; The Power of the Dog; and The Tragedy of Macbeth. House of Gucci and No Time to Die were also nominated in the Best British Film category, along with The King’s Man. The Wrap has a wrap-up of all the categories and longlisted honorees.
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Gal Gadot is attached to star in and produce a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, To Catch a Thief, for Paramount Pictures, with Eileen Jones writing the script. Plot details about the remake are being kept under wraps, but the original 1955 film starred Cary Grant as a retired cat burglar who has to save his reformed reputation by catching an impostor preying on the wealthy tourists of the French Riviera. The film also starred Grace Kelly, who played the daughter of a wealthy widow.
Denzel Washington revealed he’s gearing up to return for The Equalizer 3, a sequel to his action franchise with director Antoine Fuqua, who is also in talks to return to direct the sequel. The Equalizer was first released in 2014 and starred Washington as a former marine named Robert McCall who tries to rescue a young girl from violent Russian mobsters. The original film and the follow-up were based loosely on the 1980s TV series, which has also been more recently adapted as a CBS series starring Queen Latifah.
Aaron Eckhart has been set as the lead in Renny Harlin’s action-thriller, The Bricklayer, which is due to get underway in March in Europe. Millennium Media is producing with Gerard Butler after both teamed up with Eckhart on the lucrative "Has Fallen" franchise. In The Bricklayer, someone is blackmailing the CIA by assassinating foreign journalists and making it look like the agency is responsible. As the world begins to unite against the U.S., the CIA must lure its most brilliant – and rebellious – operative out of retirement, forcing him to confront his checkered past while unraveling an international conspiracy.
Snake Eyes star Andrew Koji is set for the ensemble cast of the action-fantasy Boy Kills World, joining Bill Skarsgård, Samara Weaving, and Yayan Ruhian, with first-time feature director Moritz Mohr helming the project. Boy Kills World is described as a one-of-a-kind action spectacle set in a dystopian fever-dream reality and follows a boy who is a deaf mute with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he escapes to the jungle and is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death.
A new take on the cult 2012 martial arts film, The Raid: Redemption, is coming to Netflix from producers Michael Bay and Gareth Evans, with Patrick Hughes (The Hitman’s Bodyguard) on board to direct. The original 2012 movie, written and directed by Evans, was heralded for its "hyper-kinetic and violent action sequences and unrelenting pacing." The film followed an Indonesian S.W.A.T. team trapped inside a tenement run by a mobster who sends his endless army of killers and thugs to stop them from climbing to the top of the building. The new film is set in Philadelphia’s drug-infested "Badlands"” and follows an elite undercover DEA task force as they climb a ladder of cartel informants to catch an elusive kingpin.
Netflix is planning to shoot back-to-back sequels for Red Notice in early 2023. Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, Red Notice stars Dwayne Johnson as an FBI agent who is forced to team up with a thief (played by Ryan Reynolds) in order to best another thief (Gal Gadot). Thurber is also writing both sequels, with production subject to the availability and deals of its three principal stars.
RLJE Films has unveiled the brand new poster and trailer for Last Looks. Previously titled Waldo, the comedy-crime film stars Charlie Hunnam as ex-LAPD superstar Charlie Waldo and Mel Gibson as Alastair Pinch, an eccentric actor who spends his days drunk on the set of his TV show. When Pinch’s wife is found dead, he is the prime suspect and Waldo is convinced to come out of retirement to investigate what happened. The case finds Waldo contending with gangsters, Hollywood executives, and pre-school teachers, all in pursuit of clearing Pinch’s name … or confirming his guilt.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Justified: City Primeval has been greenlighted at FX, with Timothy Olyphant reprising his role as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens for the limited series. Seven years after the end of FX’s Justified, Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions are producing their latest Elmore Leonard adaptation, based on the author’s novel City Primeval: High Noon In Detroit. The show returns to Givens’s story eight years after he’s left Kentucky and now is based in Miami, balancing life as a marshal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a Florida highway sends him to Detroit where he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent sociopath who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and wants to do so again.
HT to Crime Fiction Lover for reminding me that the new crime drama, The Responder, is coming to BBC One later this month. Best known to crime fiction lovers for his starring roles in the likes of Sherlock and Fargo, Martin Freeman stars in the series, taking on a very different role as Chris, who is described as "a crisis-stricken, morally compromised, unconventional urgent response officer tackling a series of night shifts on the beat in Liverpool."
Actor and filmmaker Mark O’Brien is set to star in season 2 of HBO’s Perry Mason in the recurring guest star role of Thomas Milligan. Thomas is Los Angeles’s ambitious Deputy District Attorney, described as "an aggressive attack dog in court as he strives to make his mark and ascend to greater heights, no matter whose blood he has to spill to get there." Season 2 will be eight episodes long with Matthew Rhys returning to the title role in the Emmy-nominated series.
Acclaimed author Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy crime novels are getting a TV series adaptation. The Bayou Trilogy novels—Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do—chronicle business-as-usual corruption in the fictitious Louisiana parish of St. Bruno. In the eye of the storm stands Detective Renee Shade, whose sense of duty collides with a violent underbelly of Dixie Mafia, ex-cons, dirty cops, and political grifters, along with pesky personal demons and a web of family entanglements.
Season 2 of The Flight Attendant has added Sharon Stone in a recurring role opposite Kaley Cuoco's Cassie Bowden. Stone will play Lisa Bowden, Cassie’s estranged mother who would prefer to stay estranged. The second-season storyline has Cassie living her best sober life in Los Angeles while moonlighting as a CIA asset in her spare time. But when an overseas assignment leads her to inadvertently witness a murder, she becomes entangled in another international intrigue.
Domhnall Gleeson has been tapped as the title character in FX’s 10-episode limited series, The Patient, playing a serial killer who holds a psychotherapist hostage and demands the doctor cure him of his homicidal urges. Steve Carell was previously announced to star as the therapist when the show was first ordered to series in October. Also joining the series are Linda Emond, Andrew Leeds, and Laura Niemi.
Zorro is headed to the CW as a gender-swapped reimagining of the classic masked vigilante character. Co-penned by Sean Tretta and the brother-sister team of Robert and Rebecca Rodriguez (Rebecca will also serve as director), Zorro centers on a young woman seeking vengeance for her father’s murder who joins a secret society and adopts the outlaw persona of Zorro.
A series adaptation of Hell or High Water is in the works at Fox. The one-hour drama is based on the 2016 western crime drama that starred Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, and Ben Foster. In that film, Pine and Foster starred as two brothers who rob banks in order save their family ranch, with Bridges playing one of the Texas Rangers who was trying to hunt them down. Here’s the logline for the Fox version: "When a ruthless oil tycoon attempts to plunder a West Texas ranching community, two local brothers dodge a zealous Texas Ranger and fight to keep what’s theirs, one bank robbery at a time, come hell or high water."
Two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali will star in and produce Onyx Collective’s limited series, The Plot, as a struggling author who finds success with an act of literary theft and finds himself playing a game of cat and mouse with someone who knows his secret. The series landed at Disney’s Onyx Collective after a bidding war across multiple streaming platforms. It will air on Hulu in the U.S., Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ in all other territories. The Plot is based on the 2021 best-selling novel of the same name by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Another Korelitz book, You Should Have Known, was adapted into HBO’s 2020 limited series, The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
Lyndon Smith, Zuri Reed, Jake Austin Walker, Antonio Cipriano, and Jordan Rodrigues are set as series regulars opposite Lisette Alexis in National Treasure for Disney+. The project is an expansion of the National Treasure movie franchise told from the point of view of young heroine Jess (Alexis), a DREAMer in search of answers about her family who embarks on the adventure of a lifetime to uncover the truth about the past and save a lost Pan-American treasure. Smith will play FBI Agent Ross, while Reed, Cipriano, and Rodrigues play Jess's friends and cohorts. Walker takes on the role of a fellow treasure hunter who's magnetically drawn to Jess.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
NPR's Scott Simon talked to author Elizabeth George about her new mystery, Something to Hide, the 21st Inspector Lynley novel.
The Sopranos star, Michael Imperioli, is joining season two of true-crime podcast, Deep Cover, this time focusing on the Chicago mob. Deep Cover: Mob Land, which is narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Halpern, centers around Chicago’s corruption in the 1970s and 1980s. The first season, which featured Walton Goggins, followed a Detroit FBI agent as he goes undercover in an outlaw motorcycle gang and his bizarre series of discoveries that inadvertently lead to the U.S. invasion of a foreign country. The ten-episode series premieres on January 24 and you can listen to the trailer via this link.
Aaron Philip Clark, author of Under Color of Law, was interviewed by Robert Justice for the Crime Writers of Color podcast.
The latest episode of the Crime Cafe podcast featured Debbi Mack's interview with forensic pathologist and crime writer, Ellery Kane.
On Wrong Place, Write Crime, Frank Zafiro chatted with Vikki J. Carter about her role as The Author's Librarian; the importance of research; her books in progress; and her own podcast (Authors of the Pacific Northwest).
My Favorite Detective Stories welcomed Jule Selbo, a screenwriter and playwright whose debut crime novel is 10 Days: A Dee Rommel Mystery.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club spoke with Lorie Lewis Ham about her debut novel, One of Us (Tower District Mystery #1).
The latest trio of featured authors on Crime Time FM included Jane Casey, Liz Nugent, and Jefferey Deaver.
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