Clive Owen gets 'The Confirmation'; Olivia Cooke may Join 'Ben-Hur'; Haley Bennett Boards 'The Blunderer'

Bob Nelson, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Alexander Payne's Nebraska, has gathered a terrific cast for his directorial debut, The Confirmation. Clive Owen, Maria Bello, Patton Oswalt, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Forster, Matthew Modine, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Jaeden Liebherer (St. Vincent) will star in the film about "8-year-old Anthony (Lieberher) and his estranged father (Owen) spending two days together for the first time in forever, as the boy’s mom (Bello) and new husband (Modine) head off to a religious retreat. Their mutual unease is exacerbated when the father’s truck breaks down, his landlord locks him out of his house, and the toolbox that provides his living gets stolen. As they search for the stolen tools with help from an odd neighbor (Oswalt), the father and son begin to establish a connection." [Deadline]

Bates Motel and Ouija star Olivia Cooke is eying a role in the Ben-Hur remake directed by Timur Bekmambetov. If she agrees, which is up in the air because of other high-profile projects she's been offered, Cooke would play Tirzah, Ben-Hur's sister. Jack Huston stars as the Jewish prince forced into slavery by his former friend. Morgan Freeman, Ayelet Zurer, and Toby Kebbell are also on board with a release date set for February 2016. [TheWrap]

Imogen Poots has dropped out of the untitled adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Blunderer, with Haley Bennett (Kaboom) coming aboard to replace her. Andy Goddard is directing the film, which stars Patrick Wilson and Jessica Biel. The story takes place in 1960s New York and follows "Walter Stackhouse (Wilson), a successful architect married to the beautiful Clara (Biel); they lead a seemingly perfect life. But Walter's fascination with an unsolved murder leads him into a spiral of chaos as he is forced to play cat-and-mouse with a clever killer and an overambitious detective while at the same time lusting after another woman."  [THR]

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Review: 'Ouija' starring Olivia Cooke and Douglas Smith

What is it about toys and board games that make such great antagonists in horror films? Is it that these inanimate objects are designed for fun and enjoyment, but really have deep connections to the foulest of evils? Whatever the reasons are, Hasbro hasn't found them in Ouija, a painfully dull attempt to turn their supposedly-supernatural party game into a low budget scarer. On the surface it seems like a sound idea; a lot of people have had some frighteningly good fun with Ouija boards over the years, and they're probably better off inviting friends over to play it than sitting through a film this tired and rote.

By comparison, Ouija makes Hasbro's last attempt to adapt a board game look like pure genius. That would be last year's noisy and stupid Battleship, which you could never snooze through no matter how sleepy Brooklyn Decker's line delivery got. Drifting off into slumberland is pretty easy during Ouija, though, which conjures up zero scares and never deviates from a bland playbook. The film begins with best friends Debbie and Laine happily playing with their Ouija board as kids, only to be interrupted in their fun by the arrival of one's sister. But it was enough for the girls to make a connection with something terrible, and years later as the girls are grown up, its presence has only gotten stronger. They may think it's "only a game", but clearly something disagrees.

When teenaged Debbie (Shelley Hennig) dies under mysterious circumstances, and is revealed to have been something of a Ouija addict, her best friend Laine (Olivia Cooke) gathers a few friends to communicate with Debbie...through the board, of course. Along with her ill-tempered sister Sarah (Ana Coto), Debbie's boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), Laine's boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff) and close friend Isabel (Bianca Santos), they reach out to Debbie but end up contacting something far worse. Predictably, people start dying and it's up to them to figure out why.

There's a pretty good chance for Ouija to offer up some Final Destination-style dark comedy, the path a film like this absolutely should have taken, but instead what we get is a deadly serious and frightfully dull bore. You won't be surprised by anything screenwriting and directing duo Stiles White and Juliet Snowden come up with as they basically rip off every horror you saw a decade ago. Spooky dead kids, a scorned mother, and deep family secrets literally buried in the attic are what's in store. Nothing to see here, folks. Although the film is shot well enough it never stops looking like something that should be airing on the CW, not on the big screen. There's never a sense of terror; never a sense that anybody is in real danger, and nothing the filmmakers tries to do changes that. Part of the problem is the wooden performances by much of the cast, with only Cooke capable of holding our attention for more than a few minutes. She's genuinely great on the hit Psycho spinoff, Bates Motel, and maybe her familiarity with the genre is why she stands out from her co-stars.

Most importantly, it's hard to figure out what Hasbro gets out of a movie like this. Unlike Transformers,  GI Joe, or Battleship which were clearly designed to sell toys, who's going to run to their local Wal-Mart and pick up a Ouija board? Certainly they won't based on this utterly forgettable movie.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

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Deadly Spirits are Unleashed in First Trailer for 'Ouija'

It may seem like the oddest of combinations but if you happened to catch The Fault In Our Stars in theaters some weeks ago there may have been a trailer for Ouija in front of it. Why? Well, I guess in a way they both deal with teenagers and death, but only one is based on a board game that relied on superstition and healthy doses of cheating to be interesting.

The first trailer for Ouija has finally made its way online and basically it looks like your average horror flick aimed at teens, but there's reason to expect more. Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes and the geniuses at Blumhouse co-produced with Simon Kinberg (X-men: Days of Future Past) having co-written the script about a group of friends who unleash the dark powers of a spirit board while attempting to contact a dead friend. Olivia Cooke, Douglas Smith, and Shelley Hennig star with Stiles White directing.

Ouija reveals the answer on October 24th, just in time for Halloween.


Ouija - Trailer 1 by Dread Central

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Review: 'The Signal,' starring Laurence Fishburne and Brendon Thwaites

Now I’m going to keep it 100 with you readers here: I went into The Signal not knowing anything about this. I think at most I might’ve seen the trailer when I was sitting in a Landmark theater before seeing Palo Alto. So I’m sitting down thinking, "I’m clearly slipping here on my critic game." Luckily, going in blind smacked me with such a wondrous surprise. I got to go in knowing nothing about The Signal, a tight 95-minute sci fi thriller that starts nice slow and builds to great conclusion.

The story starts with a trio of friends on a road trip. Nick and Jonah are taking Nick’s girlfriend Haley to California, where she is going to Caltech. Along the journey the two, who are hackers that go to MIT, are searching for another hacker going by the handle of Nomad. They are trying to get some payback as Nomad almost got them expelled from MIT. They end up tracing Nomad to a remote place in the middle of the desert and once they search, things go bad quickly, and soon we just see Nick waking up in some government-looking facility in captivity being questioned by scientist in protective suit named Damon.

I’m not going to lie here: This film is pretty surprising. The film starts pretty much like a simple relationship drama and then for a short moment went into found-footage territory that got me scared. See, I find those films quite laughably terrible, but then right when you think it’s going in one direction, it completely changes on you again. This is where the film excels: its ability to shift between genre styles yet still keep its science-fiction core.

There are not many actors in this film, so the focus is manly on the four main stars here. Most of the heavy lifting in acting is on Brendon Thwaites as Nick and Laurence Fishburne as Damon. Each scene with the two of them has a great back and forth that at points can remind you of Fishburne’s scenes in the show Hannibal with how much is said with just calm delivery and facial expressions. Beau Knapp does well as essentially the “best friend with quips” Jonah. The script doesn’t overdo it at all. The Haley character is pretty interesting in the beginning of the film, but basically becomes a damsel in distress that left me very cold. I think Olivia Cooke who plays Haley could’ve done more if given the chance.

Overall, William Eubank has directed a pretty great little sci-fi film. It gave me the same feeling the films Moon and Chronicle did. Here is something new and original on the screen with fresh faces that didn’t cost the GDP of a small country to make.  I hope all you take the time to find and see this summer-time gem of a film because it’s really worth it.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Guttenbergs

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New Trailer for Horror 'The Quiet Ones' Starring Jared Harris and Sam Claflin

Sometimes the old tricks are still the best ones. Old school horror label Hammer did pretty well with The Woman in Black a couple of years ago, well enough that the Daniel Radcliffe-led genre film has a sequel on the way. But the studio also has another creep fest in The Quiet Ones, and it'll attempt to spook you without the use of found footage or excessive gore.

A third trailer has been released for the film led by Jared Harris, Olivia Cooke, and Sam Claflin, which kicks off when a bunch of students try to create their own poltergeist. Of course it goes disastrously wrong, and the supernatural force they unleashed could prove unstoppable. This definitely fits with the Hammer mold, and with Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart) having worked on the script there's even more reason to check it out.

Directed by John Pogue, The Quiet Ones opens April 25th.

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Laurence Fisbhurne Hears 'The Signal' in First Trailer and Poster

"Can you recall for me the first time you encountered the signal"? One of the most buzzed about films at this past Sundance was The Signal, a sci-fi feature starring Laurence Fisbhurne, rising star Brenton Thwaites, and Olivia Cooke. The first trailer has been released and it's a little tough to figure out what's going on, other than Thwaites being interrogated by Fishburne about his encounter with the mysterious signal. There is more to it, obviously, and you can check that out in the official synopsis:

Three college students on a road trip across the Southwest experience a detour: the tracking of a computer genius who has already hacked into MIT and exposed security faults. The trio find themselves drawn to an eerily isolated area. Suddenly everything goes dark. When one of the students, Nic (Brenton Thwaites of “The Giver” and “Maleficent”), regains consciousness, he is in a waking nightmare… 

Alrighty then. Despite a lot of positive response to the film, the people I know personally who saw it were less enthusiastic. We'll find out what The Signal has to offer when it opens June 13th.


The Signal Trailer by Stuff We Like

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Maggie Grace Returns for 'Taken 3'; Olivia Cooke Eyes 'Me & Earl & the Dying Girl'

* Well, Liam Neeson has said nobody will be taken in Taken 3, which means Maggie Grace will have to find something new to do. She has been confirmed to return for the action film as the daughter of specially-skilled agent Bryan Mills. The awesomely named Olivier Megaton is directing, and Forest Whitaker has been rumored for a supporting role. She's also snagged the female lead in an upcoming CBS comedy exec-produced by John Cusack. Meh. [Deadline]

* Olivia Cooke, who is terrific on Bates Motel, is in talks for the lead role in Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, which surprisingly enough is described as a coming-of-age story in the vein of a John Hughes movie. Jesse Andrews wrote the original novel and adapted the Black List-approved screenplay which "follows a quirky high school student in Pittsburgh who is forced by his mother to befriend a sick girl he once knew when they attended Hebrew school together. Well-liked by every clique in school without actually belonging to any of them, the young man's commitment to the new friendship changes his life." Alfonso Gomez-Rejon is directing. [TheWrap]

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New Trailer for Hammer Film Horrors'The Quiet Ones' Starring Sam Claflin

Coming off the huge success of The Woman in Black, the revitalized Hammer Films is coming back with a new horror, The Quiet Ones. Starring Jared Harris, Olivia Cooke, Erin Richards, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire's Sam Claflin, the supernatural horror is supposedly based on true events surrounding an experiment to create a poltergeist out of dark human energy. Do people realize their soon-to-be disastrous experiments are going to end up the stuff of low-budget thrillers as they're doing them? Probably not.

Directed by John Pogue, The Quiet Ones opens April 11th. Check out the trailer and full synopsis below.



PLOT: A university student (Sam Claflin of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) and some classmates are recruited to carry out a private experiment — to create a poltergeist. Their subject: an alluring, but dangerously disturbed young woman (Olivia Cooke of Bates Motel). Their quest: to explore the dark energy that her damaged psyche might manifest. As the experiment unravels along with their sanity, the rogue PHD students are soon confronted with a terrifying reality: they have triggered an unspeakable force with a power beyond all explanation. Inspired by true events, The Quiet Ones is directed by John Pogue from a screenplay by Craig Rosenberg and Oren Moverman and John Pogue, and based on a screenplay by Tom de Ville.

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Juliette Binoche Digs Up 'The 33'; Dustin Hoffman Joins Lance Armstrong Pic; Olivia Cooke Plays 'Ouija'

* The cast of Chilean miner drama The 33 has been rounded out with the additions of Juliette Binoche, James Brolin, Oscar Nunez, Kate Del Castillo, Lou Diamond Phillips, Mario Casas, Juan Pablo Raba, Tenoch Huerta, Jacob Vargas, Marco Trevino and Alejandro Goic. They join the already-cast Antonio Banderas in the film directed by Patricia Riggin that chronicles the true story of the 33 miners who became famous in 2010 when they were trapped in a collapsed mine for 69 days. The film has been in development practically while they were still underground, but has the full support of the miners, their families, and the rescuers. [Deadline]

* Stephen Frears' Lance Armstrong biopic may not have a title but the cast is coming together quite nicely. Filming is taking place now in Europe with Ben Foster as the disgraced cyclist, and now the latest to join is screen legend Dustin Hoffman. Chris O'Dowd, Jesse Plemons, and Guillaume Canet co-star in the film written by John Hodge (Trance) and based on David Walsh's book, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit Of Lance Armstrong.

*  Bates Motel star Olivia Cooke has joined the previously-announced Douglas Smith and Daren Kagasoff in Ouija, the upcoming horror based on the "spooky" board game you played with friends at night. Directed and co-written by Stiles White, the film follows a group of friends who realize that a deceased friend had been messin' around with a Ouija board before she died. This sounds terrible but with Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes teaming up with Blumhouse Productions on this one, perhaps it could be a surprise low-budget horror hit?

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