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The hand-drawn French adventure film opens next week in the United States.

The post GKIDS Announces Star-Studded English Cast For Steampunk Pic ‘April and the Extraordinary World’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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The video game stars are finally getting their long-awaited big screen outing.

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An official trailer has been unveiled for a film adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Paul Giamatti as Monsieur Homais, Ezra Miller as Leon Dupuis, and Mia Wasikowska as the titular protagonist.

According to Digital Spy, the story “centres around a young doctor’s wife who finds herself dissatisfied with her life in provincial France.” Click here to download a free eBook edition of Flaubert’s 1857 novel. (via POPSUGAR)

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Onyx Films, the Paris-based producer of the fantasy film Upside Down and the low-budget animated sci-fi Renaissance, is currently working on an animated film adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella The Little Prince.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film has now gained a voice cast comprised of James Franco, Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Benicio Del Toro and Paul Giamatti. More notably, the film is to be directed by Mark Osborne, co-director of Dreamworks’ 2008 hit action-comedy Kung Fu Panda.

Some may consider it unusual for the director of a successful animated film from a major American studio to move on to a project from a small foreign studio, however when you consider the diversity of Osborne’s previous work: live action sequences in Spongebob Squarepants, music video work for “Weird Al” Yankovic and a half-dozen live action and stop motion film projects, it seems like his experience may aid a project of any size.

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A promising trailer was released today for The Congress, the new live-action/animated hybrid directed by Waltz with Bashir helmer Ari Folman. The film will premiere this Thursday at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival. No theatrical release dates have been set so far beyond France, where it will open on July 3.

The Congress is loosely adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, and follows an aging actress (Robin Wright) who agrees to sell a digital version of herself to a movie studio with the stipulation that she can never act again. The live-action portions of the film also star Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, and Paul Giamatti.

The film was produced as a co-production between Israel, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Luxembourg, but the creative heavylifting appears to have been done in Israel. Folman’s collaborators on Bashir rejoined him for this film, including animation director Yoni Goodman, production designer David Polonsky
, editor Nili Feller, composer Max Richter and sound designer Aviv Aldema. The Israeli paper Haaretz offers an in-depth article about how the film was conceived and produced.

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Over at MTV News, sixteen upcoming movies were pitted against one another to determine the winner of the “MTV Movie Brawl 2012.” In the final round, almost four million votes were cast and Cosmopolis (a Don DeLillo adaptation starring Twilight actor Robert Pattinson) emerged victorious over The Hunger Games (starring Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence).

In an interview with MTV, director David Cronenberg explained how he first learned about the brawl: “Cosmopolis, while I think in terms of what it is as cinema is pretty hefty, but in terms of budget and promotion, it’s an underdog compared to something like the Dark Knight franchise. I really didn’t think we would have much of a chance. That really got my attention.”

In the video embedded above, MTV caught up with Cosmopolis actor Paul Giamatti to get his reaction on the movie’s win. Several of the Movie Brawl film are literary adaptations including John Carter, The Avengers, Snow White & the Huntsman, The Hobbitand The Dark Knight Rises.

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I’ve always disliked The West Wing, primarily because it peddles the myth of brave and decent politicians, always doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. In reality I suspect the public prefer not to think about the dirty deals and corrupt and seedy goings on behind closed doors, which makes The Thick of It more my cup of tea – maybe that’s the UK/US divide? Of course I’m not saying most politicians don’t enter the fray with the best of intentions, but they universally seem to disappoint and the longer they hang around, the more they disappoint. Power corrupts. Even the scent of power corrupts.

So full marks to Ides of March for telling the down and dirty, shabby story of how politics always seems to turn out. Last Wednesday I joined George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood on the red carpet for the UK premier. To really appreciate a movie, I try to read as little as I can about it beforehand, so I can watch at face value. Because of that I can admit my ignorance by believing we were likely to have some kind of retelling of the Julius Caesar story (by coincidence the play I studied for my O level Shakespeare), so I entered the Odeon Leicester Square confident of making the necessary connections between the film and the Bard. Not a bit of it.

The bfi (the British Film Institute in official lower-case letters) is a great institution and a former employer of mine, but their organization often leaves a lot to be desired. I ended up being sent to various spots around central London to collect my tickets, meaning I only reached the red carpet about one minute before curtain up. I ran past George Clooney being interviewed without noticing, sat down in my seat and then saw the whole shebang being projected on the cinema screen.

As part of the bfi London Film Festival, my old colleague Sandra Hebron (it’s her last year as Artistic Director of the LFF) called Clooney up on stage where he proceeded to share a few jokes and introduce various cast and crew. Then the curtains parted and we were treated to 101 minutes of an intriguing thriller, even if the expected links to Shakespeare were missing.

This is the fourth film Clooney’s directed. In front of the camera he plays Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and leader in a two-horse race with a Senator from Arkansas. What I loved about the movie was that it’s not The West Wing – it shows just how sordid the realpolitik can be, and all credit to Clooney he’s right at the heart of it. The Ides of March of the title refers to the date of the key Ohio primary, which will fall on 15^th March and help decide the contest.

The US Primary system has al

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Last night, at the close of the Philadelphia screening of the soon-to-be-released feature film, WIN WIN, writer/director Tom McCarthy and 17-year-old wrestler/terrific actor Alex Shaffer took questions from an audience that had clearly fallen in love with their film (I was right there with them: in love).  Alex plays a wayward kid who finds himself in the home (and on the wrestling team) of a good man who has done a bad thing.  Can I leave it at that?  Should I also add that the good but ethically compromised man is played (phenomenally) by Paul Giamatti, that Amy Ryan adds great emotional depth, that there are little girls in this film who will blow you away, and that a nerdy wrestler had us screaming for him when he finally took on Darth Vader at a match?

McCarthy, who wrote THE STATION AGENT, THE VISITOR, and UP, doesn't go for easy in his plots.  He has a surprising range of unexpected story lines (who puts croquet and wrestling in the same film?), an ability to dig out from moral tangles (why are we rooting so hard for Giamatti's character, when he has done such an unscrupulous thing?), an impeccable ear for real but original dialogue (there's a great bit here that arises from a certain JBJ tattoo (see the film, find out for yourself)), a dancer's rhythm (we need to laugh just when McCarthy gives us cause to laugh) and an outstanding eye for talent (seriously, this is some cast).  I have had the pleasure of meeting McCarthy's partner on this and other films, Mary Jane Skalski of Next Wednesday productions, and I felt her talent and presence as well—her ear, her eye, her maternal heart. 

Alex Shaffer had never, he told us last evening, acted beyond a stint in a middle school play before he responded to a call for theater-tempted New Jersey high school wrestlers.  Man, can this kid act—slaying the audience as much by what he won't say as by what he finally does.  Apparently Shaffer is also quite the wrestler, having won the state championship shortly after this film wrapped.  It was fun to watch him share this film last night with his four best friends and his cousin.    

Find out more about the film here, and go see it when it appears nationally in theaters in mid March.

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In a fascinating casting choice, Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson will star in an upcoming adaptation–leaping from Stephenie Meyer to Don DeLillo in a single bound.

Critically-acclaimed director David Cronenberg will be adapting DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and the cast is still being sorted out. The 2003 novel studying one eventful day in the life of a young New York City millionaire.

Here’s more from Deadline New York: “Marion Cotillard and Paul Giamatti are also reportedly doing the film, but those same reports had Colin Farrell poised to take the lead role … Pattinson is following a path based on strong filmmakers and tasteful source material. He took the role because he is a big fan of Cronenberg’s work and an admirer of DeLillo’s books.”

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