“My Dark Places” is the 1996’s memoir work of the famous crime writer James Ellroy. The book is inspired from the true story of the unsolved murder of the writer’s mother, which affected his adolescence and later made him investigate on the crime. The event happened when Ellroy was only 10 years old and represented the key in his later development as a fascinated crime writer. His best known stories are “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia”.
Kirk D’Amico’s Myriad Pictures will team with Christine Vachon’s Killer Film for producing the movie. They are now discussing with several directors who are being considered for the movie. This includes Tom Kalin, the one who directed “Savage Grace”, starring Julianne Moore.
Myriad Pictures has owned the right to Ellroy’s book for about seven years, having at least one early adaptation written by the documentarian Jan Oxenberg. Robert Greenwald was once to direct the project. The script written by Oxenberg will be used for the upcoming movie.
Another Ellroy’s book adaptation movie, “White Jazz”, starring George Clooney has been announced.

Columbia Pictures won the North America rights for “We Own the Night”, the drama written and directed by James Gray, featuring Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Robert Duvall.
“We Own the Night” has quickly emerged a hot deal at the Cannes Film Festival, despite the fact that he was set for screening for Friday. The movie combines elements of crime thriller and family drama. Its story is the one of a 1980s New York nightclub manager, played by Phoenix, who is trying to save his father, played by Duvall, and brother, played by Wahlberg, from the Russian mafia.
Lionsgate, Warner Brothers, Summit Entertainment, Miramax and others were among the interested buyers of the movie. It will be released by Sony, produced and financed by 2929 Entertainment under Columbia Pictures in the fall. Columbia paid about $11.5 million for the movie and $25 million as the marketing commitment.
James Gray’s other popular movies were 1994’s “Little Odessa”, which was another movie about the Russian mob, and 2000’s “The Yards”, which also starred Wahlberg and Phoenix.

As he has recently finished “A Mighty Heart”, a movie in which Angelina Jolie stars, the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom is to start another project, “Genova”, in which actors Catherine Keener, Hope Davis and Colin Firth will have the leading roles.
“Genova” was announced to be a horror mystery movie. Its story is the one of two American girls who will move along with their British father to the Italian city Genoa after their mother died.
Michael Winterbottom wrote the script together with Laurence Coriat, with whom he had previously collaborated on both 1999’s “Wonderland” and “A Mighty Heart”.
Perla Haney-Jardine (“Kill Bill: Vol. 2”) and Willa Holland (“The O.C.”) will star also in “Genova”.

The Hollywood actress Julia Roberts is to portray the African wildlife conservationist Joan Root, who has been murdered in January in her Kenyan home. Roberts will produce the movie in a partnership with Working Title Films.
The screenplay is to be written by David Magee, who’s known for his project “Finding Neverland”. The movie was inspired by a Vanity Fair article by Mark Seal entitled “A Flowering Evil”.
The movie was announced to follow the environmentalist earlier life alongside her partner and husband Alan Root. She will then be presented after the divorce from Root, as returning to her home from Lake Naivasha, where she devoted herself to saving the lake from the ecological damage made by the flower-farm industry. After this she will be shot.
The movie was announced to be shooting in Africa, starting next year.

The three famous Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will be in the same team in a five-feature, $100 million, production partnership with Universal Pictures and Focus Features International.
This partnership will include one new movie directed by each of the “Three Amigos” Oscar-nominated directors (Cuaron for “Children of Men”, Inarritu for “Babel” and del Toro for “Pan’s Labyrinth”), and another movie written and directed by the Colombian filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia, plus a movie by Carlos Cuaron, co-screenwriter of brother Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien”.
The three Mexican directors and longtime friends have recently experienced important success in the United States. They were the ones who devised the partnership idea and shopped the $100 million-range package to several studios, which include Warner Brothers and Paramount Vantage.
Carlos Cuaron announced film will be his soccer comedy-drama titled “Rudo y Cursi”, in which the main actors from his “Y Tu Mama Tambien” Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal will appear.
The ownership of the five movies will be shared between Universal and all the five directors. Focus Features International will handle all non-North American distribution and sales for each movie.
There will be at least two out of five Spanish-language movies.

“La Terza Madre” (“The Third Mother”) is the latest film movie of the Italian horror director Dario Argento. The movie will have its premiere at this year’s RomaCinemaFest, which will run from the 18th to the 27th of October.
“The Third Mother” is the third movie in the “Three Mothers” trilogy, and it is set in the director’s hometown, Rome. The movie centers on an American art student (Asia Argento, the director’s daughter, who is an actress and a director too). She will open an urn and she will unleash the most powerful witch ever.
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival another Argento’s movie, “Suspiria”, has been screened after 30 years after its original screening.

The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl brought to this year’s Cannes Film Festival his latest movie called “Import Export”, which is showing the grey part of life, speaking about exploitation and degradation.
“Import Export” tells two stories: the story of the young Ukrainian nurse Olga, who has left her child behind for seeking a better life in Austria, and the story of Paul, an average Austrian guy, who will lose his job as a security guard.
The movie was shot in a flat, almost having the style of a documentary. It portrays the casual brutality and cruelty meat at the bottom classes of the Austrian society, represented by the immigrant workers like the Ukrainian nurse Olga and the Austrian misfits like Paul.
The Austrian director said that he was not aiming to entertain people with his movies. He would like to touch them and, “perhaps even disturb them”.
“Import Export” joins “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film, as they are both “capturing the crushing ugliness of life in the Eastern bloc”. These movies add a bleak note to the main style of the movies competing at the Cannes Film Festival.
Olga is played by Ekatarina Rak, a former nurse herself. Olga tries to earn some money as an Internet sex worker, but as she won’t be able to escape poverty, she will try her luck in Austria.
On the other hand, Paul is broke and he needs to join his father-in-law in delivering second hand slot machine to Ukraine. Here they will drink heavily and have a shocking encounter with a local girl. Paul is played by Paul Hofmann.
Neither of the two main characters has appeared in a movie before, but they are both very convincing in their roles. Ekatarina Rak hadn’t ever been to Western Europe till her coming to the Cannes Film Festival.
Seidl have been accused that he exploited “the actors” from the movie in sexual scenes or episodes that were set in wards of incontinent or dying geriatric patients. The director hasn’t been, however, moved by these accusations.
The movie has its moments of bitter comedy, but its ending has the appropriate somber tone as one of the dying women in the ward where Olga works: “Dead, dead, dead”… [And the image fades out.]

“New York, I Love You” represents the brand new project of the producer Emmanuel Benhiby, who realized “Paris, Je t’aime” too. The producer invited many important filmmakers to direct the upcoming movie.
The team will be composed from Zach Braff, Park Chan-wook, Fatih Akin, Mira Nair, Wang Xiaoshuai, Albert and Allen Hughes, Yvan Attal, Emanuele Crialese and Andrey Zvyagintsev. With such strong team of important filmmaker one should not be surprised by the film’s budget, which is about $14 million.
Benhiby said he would like to surprise the public with these young, hip directors, who have their own personal new style and movie language. He also said that three other directors will be added to the lineup. Each of them is to create a five-minute segment about a love encounter.
Then the 13th still un-chosen director will have to realize a series of transition sequences for making the film more fluid than “Paris, Je T’aime” was. The movie is expected to be about 100 minutes long. Emmanuel Benihiby said that “the idea is to give the impression of a community of directors.”
The movie will be shot almost exclusively in English. “We’ll try to be as representative of the city as possible, that’s the idea.” said the producer, who is now making future plans for another film, “China, I Love You”.
These films are all part of “The Cities of Love” concept, which is a concept about people, without having anything to do with politics.

The latest incarnation of the 007 Agent, “Bond, James Bond”, actor Daniel Craig, will play the role of a fading Hollywood star in the movie “Flashbacks of a Fool”, wrote and directed by Baillie Walsh.
The other members of the cast are Helen McCrory, Emilia Fox and Olivia Williams. The story of the movie is that of a hedonistic British actor, whose Hollywood career starts to sink in his forties.
The movie will mark Walsh’s debut in writing and directing. Walsh has also directed music video.

The beautiful charming actress Angelina Jolie stars in one of the major roles from her career, as she will play Mariane Pearl, the wife of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was back in 2002 the victim of the kidnap and decapitation by Islamic militants.
The name of the movie in which Angelina Jolie will appear is “A Mighty Heart”, and it is based on Mariane Pearl’s book “A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Daniel Pearl”. The book and now the movie recount the events leading up to and following Daniel Pearl’s death. Mariane Pearl was six months pregnant when her husband died.
The movie pictures confusion and chaos as everybody seek to track Daniel Pearl down through e-mail, phone and so on. Mariane, the U.S. consulate officials, Daniel’s colleagues and the Pakistani intelligence, they all are unsuccessfully trying to establish contact with Daniel Pearl.
Daniel Pearl was believed to have worked for the U.S. or Israeli intelligence; then speculations were made that India was in fact behind the kidnap. However, all in all, the journalist ends up with his head off.
“For me so much of why this film is important today was because I highly doubt there is anybody in this room who has more reason to hold hate inside herself than Mariane, and she doesn’t.” – said Angelina Jolie about her character, adding that: “She is a very compassionate, thoughtful person who looks to dialogue to change things, to make things better. That is, I think, a lesson to all of us.”
Brad Pitt, Jolie’s partner, is the producer of the movie.