Albert Nobbs is a study in tasteful restraint. But that doesn’t mean it’s slow, passionless or dry. Rodrigo Garcia’s film trades in subdued emotions and subtle currents of longing that are deeply felt, driven home by the great performances of leads Glenn Close and Janet McTeer and a screenplay that’s attuned to the sense of wonder — and the longing for something better — that accompanies the pursuit of an unlikely dream. Close stars as the title character, a devoted and rigid butler at a small 19th century Dublin hotel. Albert has a secret, of course. He’s a woman, living as a man to work and save enough money to open a small tobacco shop. When the obsessive, justifiably paranoid Albert meets Hubert Page (McTeer), a handyman facing the same predicament, he’s inspired to begin opening up, moving forward in his store-owning aspirations and fomenting a romance with the deceptive maid Helen Dawes (Mia Wasikowska).

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr pulls out his screening schedule, which looks like a gambling addict’s racing form. He bounces from huge, mainstream releases to minor indie award contenders. Facing motion-capture CGI, tattooed bisexual investigators, cross-dressing waiters, silent film actors, and a lead star who is literally hung like a horse, Kevin tries to make sense of the seemingly countless releases this holiday week. Exhaustion from this process makes it impossible to buy a zoo or face the 3D end of the world, but his movie stocking is full, nonetheless.

Focus Features has just announced a helmer for their Anna Karenina adaptation penned by Tom Stoppard, and while it’s a bit of a no-duh assignment, it’s still a very fine one. Joe Wright will direct the film, adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s classic (read: every high school kid is assigned to read it, and none of them ever do) novel. Despite my more bookwormish tendencies, my familiarity with Anna Karenina is quite lacking, so we’ll turn to Focus’ plotline for the film, which tells us that “the story unfolds in its original late-19th-century Russia high-society setting and powerfully explores the capacity for love that surges through the human heart, from the passion between adulterers to the bond between a mother and her children. As Anna questions her happiness, change comes to her family, friends, and community.” Also, it’s Russian and it’s Tolstoy, so it’s also not a feel-good work by any stretch. But the film has a solid cast already attached to it, including some names that Wright has worked with before, including Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina (in her third role in a Wright production), with Jude Law as her husband Alexei Karenin, and Aaron Johnson as Count Vronksy, with other roles filled by Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfayden (Mr. Darcy in Wright’s Pride & Prejudice), Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Emily Watson, Olivia Williams (from Hanna), and Ruth Wilson.

It was a month ago that I first heard about Oliver Stone directing an adaptation of the Don Winslow Novel “Savages.” A couple of the key male roles had been cast, but Jennifer Lawrence was out as the female protagonist, O, due to her involvement in The Hunger Games. Now Stone and company seem to have found their new choice to play O, and they’ve filled out a couple of the other key roles as well. The three main characters of the film are Chon, Ben, and O, two dudes and a chick who start a successful grow operation and find themselves running afoul of a dangerous Mexican drug cartel. When we last saw Savages it had already cast Taylor Kitsch as the ex Navy SEAL Chon, Aaron Johnson as the botany expert Ben, and Salma Hayek as the head of the cartel Elena. This time Deadline Laguna reports that not only has Gossip Girl star Blake Lively been chosen to play O, but also a few big names have been approached to join the cast as well.

Adapting Don Winslow’s novel “Savages” has been on Oliver Stone’s to-do list for quite some time. Well now quite a bit of news about how his efforts are coming together has come to light. I’m not familiar with Mr. Winslow’s work, so the first thing I did when trying to put together this article was figure out what “Savages” was all about. During my search I came across this blurb, apparently from the book’s publisher, that was just too hilarious not to share: “Baditude. Bad attitude. Ben, Chon, and O have a bad case of it, but so would you if you were the twenty-something Laguna-cool producers of the best hydro on the Left Coast and now a powerful and vicious Mexican cartel wants in on your business. Ben’s a genius botanist out to save the world. Chon’s a former SEAL with a “Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder.” O is a South Orange County slacker girl who loves them both. When the cartel kidnaps O to keep the boys in line, serious baditude breaks out in this twenty-first-century thriller that blasts through all the old rules and blows the lid off the genre. But that’s baditude for you.”

Joe Wright first gained recognition in Hollywood by doing period dramas starring Keira Knightley. After stepping out of that genre for 2009’s The Soloist and this year’s Hanna, he is set to return to what brought him to the party. This time he has Knightlyy cast as the lead in an adaptation of the Russian classic “Anna Karenina”. Written by Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina” tells the story of a woman in a loveless marriage who bucks societal expectations by starting an affair with a military man.

A month ago, we reported on the short list of young talent that Sony was eying for their reboot of Spider-Man. All in all, the list was fairly average. There were no stand outs in particular, but all of them would be passable as the web-slinger. Jamie Bell, Alden Ehrenreich, Andrew Garfield, Frank Dillane, and Josh Hutcherson are basically the same actor with different haircuts. At least Sony knows what they want. The news today being passed around the horn is that…there is no news.

Brian Singer has been taking meetings with the likes of Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass) and Andrew Garfield (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) for the lead role in his next film, Jack the Giant Killer. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the film’s release has been delayed, and will not begin shooting until February 2011.

As Cole Abaius pointed out late last week, a hyperbolic debate has occurred regarding the alleged potential of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass to “kill” the superhero movie by subverting its conventions, or whether or not such subversions and the very existence of this film stand as evidence that audiences have tired of the conventional superhero film, or the superhero film as a whole. This post attempts to answer such questions by briefly examining Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction and applying it to genre film theory and, specifically, Kick-Ass.

So, it’s finally out in theaters. That hyper-violent, uber-hyped, hypnotically action-packed movie that everyone’s been talking about. Now it’s your turn to talk and tell us what you thought…

With Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn wanted to go against the grain and against the studios, and it looks like he may have done just that.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr kicks ass with Kick-Ass and laughs it up at Death at a Funeral

There’s something significant about my notes situation as the credits rolled Matthew Vaughn’s high-energy comic adaptation. There was only one note to be written, and it came only at the end. My Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles notepad was blank, except for three words: “That was fun.”

Aaron Johnson is a very smart actor. He’ll be a very successful and hotly sought-after actor if Kick-Ass opens big next weekend. And while that may open the door to other big projects, don’t expect any of them to be superhero movies any time soon…

Earlier today, a reader pointed me in the direction of a YouTube page where an intrepid movie lover could find an awesome new international TV spot for the upcoming film Kick-Ass, which highlights some of the film’s more vulgar and violent moments.

Robert Levin reviews a Sundance 2009 title that stars Aaron Johnson from Kick-Ass and Carey Mulligan, that painfully adorable actress who got nominated for an Oscar for An Education. Interested?

In a few weeks Kick-Ass is going to try to achieve what films like Mystery Men and Blankman could not. “Not suck,” you might say and you’d be right on that. But the latest superhero dark comedy, inspired by Mark Millar’s smashing graphic novels, will try to also break past the barrier of comic fan approval alone and burst into the hearts and wallets of the general public.

Most of us were taught growing up that it wasn’t nice to swear. And that it isn’t nice to kill people with a badass sword. Apparently comic super-genius Mark Millar didn’t get that lesson growing up. All of his properties, especially the two that have now been turned into films — Wanted and now Kick-Ass — include a lot of violence and a lot of words we wouldn’t say in front of our grandmother. And in this writer’s opinion, they’re better for it.

When we first got our hands on the red band trailer for Kick-Ass in late December, we had no idea what we were in for. Now, we’re completely enamored with what is to come.

From the early footage that blew the roof off of Comic-Con in San Diego to the much talked about screening at Butt-Numb-a-Thon last week, Kick Ass is all over the geek world. And now we’ve collected the whole set of posters.