Sir Ian McKellen has said he will reprise his role as Gandalf in the two-film adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The Lord of the Rings star told Empire magazine that it was not a part to turn down.
“Yes, it’s true,” he said, when asked if he was set to return.
“Obviously, it’s not a part that [...]

 
Your average superhero movie tends to be more style than substance. But when director Jon Favreau took on Iron Man, one of the original Marvel comics, he wanted to ensure the end result wasn’t your average superhero movie.
Key to that plan was casting former drug addict, felon and Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr.
(Stuff NZ)

Natalie Portman is to star in a new version of Wuthering Heights, the tragic Emily Bronte romance which has been the subject of numerous big screen outings. Portman will play Cathy Earnshaw, whose love for her foster brother Heathcliff starts a ball rolling which destroys the lives of family members across two generations.
Ralph Fiennes and [...]

Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, and Sam Rockwell are set to star in the Kirk Jones-directed Everybody’s Fine, Miramax Films’ remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 movie Stanno tutti bene. De Niro plays a widower who decides on a whim to take a road trip to reconnect with his grown kids. Along the way [...]

Elizabeth Banks is going from the world of adult films to the White House.
The actress, who recently wrapped shooting Kevin Smith’s comedy “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” is in final negotiations to portray first lady Laura Bush in “W,” Oliver Stone’s biopic on the life and presidency of George W. Bush.
Josh Brolin (”No Country [...]

 
A London schoolboy studying for his A-levels is about to sign up to play comic book hero Tintin in a trilogy of films to be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
Thomas Sangster, 17, from South London, has already been to Los Angeles to work on preproduction test sequences with both directors.
Sangster, you may recall, [...]

Twentieth Century Fox’s John Singleton-directed A-Team movie is set for release on June 12, 2009. Casting has not yet been announced. The movie will be based on the 1980s TV show starring Mr. T and George Peppard as members of a team of former special forces soldiers, set up for a crime they didn’t commit, [...]

Biggie is coming to the big screen. Fox Searchlight has hired Jamal Woolard, a Brooklyn-based rapper, to play late rap icon Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., in its upcoming biopic “Notorious.”
Derek Luke, Angela Bassett and Anthony Mackie also have been cast in the movie, the art-house studio said. Directed by George Tillman Jr. (”Soul [...]

If you don’t recognize that African-American actor standing between Jack Black and Ben Stiller, there’s a good reason: He’s white. In Tropic Thunder, an epic action comedy co-written and directed by Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus’s [...]

Emily Mortimer and Jackie Earle Haley will play mental patients in the mystery drama “Shutter Island,” Martin Scorsese’s latest collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Max von Sydow has also joined the cast of the Paramount Vantage project, which begins production next week.
DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo play two U.S. marshals who travel to a Massachusetts island to [...]