What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly gathering of links that was almost known as Oscar News After Dark, but then its creators remembered that they only really care about he Oscars for about one week per year, so it would have been a waste. With that in mind, welcome to the final edition of News After Dark in that one week of the year when we care about the Oscars. We begin tonight with an image tweeted by writer Roberto Orci, who may or may not being issuing a controlled leak situation for Paramount from the set of Star Trek 2. Said producer Damon Lindelof of the pic, which depicts a yet unknown character played by Benedict Cumberbatch being subdued by Zach Quinto’s Spock, “The weird thing about that Trek photo is we weren’t even shooting. Quinto just really hates Cumberbatch.”

Fire up the kettle and break out the Jaffa Cakes, because I’m ready to curl up with a cup of tea and devote my television habits exclusively to the efforts from across the pond. Okay, even I know I couldn’t live without a weekly one-two punch of Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon (returning this week on Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, respectively), but the BBC has been offering up a bevvy of programming that seems tailor-made for TV geeks like myself, and I’ve aristocratically sipped the British Kool-Aid in a big way. I’ve long been a fan of television with a stiff upper lip. At a young age, my European mother, bored with some of the comedies of the 80s (not everybody loved Mork & Mindy, apparently), turned to the programming of her mother continent – re-runs of Are You Being Served?, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, heck, even Mr. Bean, and I soaked it up like a tea-soaked sponge; the only second grader at Maple Hills Elementary to practice her cockney British accent on the playground. So it should come as no surprise that when it came time to curate my own cultural landscape, I looked to the Brits for inspiration. Sure, most teenagers listen to The Smiths at one point or another, and The Clash is pretty much a staple of adolescent angst, but as for TV? I watched each episode of Ricky Gervais’ take on The Office ad nauseam, got an education from Doctor Who,

With my review and claim that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a near-masterpiece, I don’t believe it’s possible to get more hyperbolic about this film. Perhaps my fourth viewing, which will inevitably take place soon, could make that happen. Why such grand enthusiasm for a slow-burn “thriller” that’s splitting plenty of folks? Well, go see for yourself. Thankfully for you lot, director Tomas Alfredson‘s film is expanding into 800 theaters today. To further urge you wise readers to go see the film, Focus Features was kind enough to give us these exclusive behind-the-scenes shots of Alfredson shooting the breeze and working with Gary Oldman and John Hurt on set. They’re black and white, meaning they’re all prestigious and such.

As pre-production on the J.J. Abrams directed sequel to 2009′s Star Trek intensifies, we are beginning to see some updates from the folks at Paramount. Namely casting rumors about villains, rumors about what villains will appear and a few things about Benicio Del Toro being in, out and everything in between. Tonight brings us reason to forget about all that and celebrate something slightly more official. Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of Steven Moffat’s incredible BBC series Sherlock, Steve Spielberg’s War Horse and soon to be the voice of ‘Smaug the Dragon’ in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, has joined returning cast members for the still untitled but very much anticipated Star Trek sequel.

As I wrote in both my review and interview with Gary Oldman and Tomas Alfredson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is not one’s average spy thriller. Nothing portrays the spy lifestyle as exciting or “awesome,” just cold, lonely, and harsh. Perhaps the greatest character who represents the themes of the film, while also still feeling like a person, is Jim Prideaux, played by Mark Strong. Prideaux, like every other character in the film, descends to worse and worse places, emotionally and mentally, as things progress. The character’s as lonely as can be, and Strong conveys that with every somber and sad look on his face. It’s an interesting contrast to another one of Strong’s performances from this year as Clive in The Guard. A lot of actors discuss how they love variety and go for it — and most genuinely mean it — but Strong seems to be one of the prime examples of someone doing it right. A sympathetic villain, an alien superhero, and an isolated spy make up an eclectic bunch of characters. Here’s what Mark Strong had to say about the catharsis of press, the divisiveness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the comfortable amount of takes:

Tomas Alfredson‘s directorial follow-up to the beloved Let the Right One In is, on the outside, appears to be a drastically different film. Taken at face value, Let the Right One In is about a boy following in love with a vampire and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is about the search for a high-powered government mole. Digging deeper, both films are startlingly, but beautifully similar. They’re stories about repressed loners, even down to the smallest of characters and the most intimate of moments. At the center of the lonely bunch is George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman, in an all internal and “it’s-in-the-eyes” performance. Very few spies are as emasculated, cold, and unsuave as Smiley & Co. Unlike the Bonds and Bournes of the spy world, by the end of this film, no one will wish they were these characters of the Circus. A few weeks ago I had a chance to sit down with both Alfredson and Oldman for a quick interview where we discussed the paranoia-causing structure of the film, the gray enigma of George Smiley, and how much politer British spies are.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr hunkers down and braces for award season. He also prepares for an onslaught of celebrity guest stars in New Year’s Eve, which features a poster that looks like a “Friends available to chat” sidebar on Facebook. In order to watch all the movies for the week, Kevin hires the only babysitter available… Jonah Hill. What could possibly go wrong with that? Fortunately this frees him up to see some of the smaller releases, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, W.E. and I Melt with You. And he wraps up the week wondering why everyone needs to talk about him.

Heads up, L.A. rejects. Focus Features has hooked us up with a way to send you to the Los Angeles premiere of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch. And by send, we mean give you tickets. You’ll have to furnish your own local transportation to get you to the event. To boot, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an excellent movie. I can confirm as much first hand, as I caught it a few weeks ago. You’ll get a free, good movie to watch and you may even end up seeing a few famous people, if you’re into that sort of thing. Find out how you can enter to win yourself a pair of tickets after the jump.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that, at least for tonight, will divert your attention away from it being a slow news day by using a rousing round-up of visual stimuli. That’s right, we’re busting out infographics! We begin tonight with one of a few hot-off-the-press photos from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, featuring the cast. Among them was this shot of dreamy Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace, also dreamy. There’s also some pretty kick-ass science fictiony stuff promised alongside this oozing sexuality.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy hasn’t been seen by very many people here in my home of the U.S. of A, but it premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a whole lot of acclaim, and it’s already been released in the UK where it has been dominating the box office, so it’s probably time for the rest of the world to start getting geared up for its roll out to other countries over the next couple of months. If you haven’t seen the trailer for the movie yet, it’s a Cold War-Era espionage story based off of a book by John le Carré starring Gary Oldman as a spy named George Smiley. The film is directed by Tomas Alfedson (Let the Right One In), and it’s got a supporting cast that boasts names like Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch, among others. Given all of that pedigree put together in one place, I’m kind of feeling like I don’t even need to see the movie to already be excited for a sequel. And according to a story in The Guardian, one might soon be on its way.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes to us thanks to Tomas Alfredson, who is best known to horror freaks as the director of the original Let the Right One In, which is nervy and terrifying and better than just about any other vampire film made, oh, well, pretty much ever. Now it looks as if Alfredson is trying to do for the spy genre what he did for the vampire genre – basically, make it exciting and interesting again. The loverly Rob Hunter showed us the first trailer for the film back in June, and I proceeded to slobber all over it like I’d never seen a piece of movie marketing before. The film features an all-star cast packed with badasses, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, John Hurt, and Stephen Graham. It’s essentially as if every single actor you’ve ever wanted to see in a spy flick got together and made that spy flick, but made it much more clever than you would have been able to craft on your own.

Adult thrillers can be hard to come by these days, and that’s a damn shame. By ‘adult’ of course I’m not referring to films like Basic Instinct but to something more akin to George Clooney’s The American. Say what you will about the pacing (I happened to love it), but The American made no attempt to pander to a younger, ADD-riddled demographic and instead told exactly the story it wanted to tell. Thankfully Clooney and director Anton Corbijn aren’t the only filmmakers interested in such an endeavor. Tomas Alfredson made a big splash on the international scene with his vampire coming of age tale Let the Right One In, itself an adult thriller of sorts, and later this year he returns to the screen with an adaptation of the John le Carré bestseller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s a spy thriller set during the waning days of the Cold War and sees an agent pulled from retirement to help ferret out a mole in Britain’s MI6 organization. The cast list reads like a who’s who of British awesome including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, and Ciarán Hinds. Check out the first trailer below.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s an obsessively curated column that collects the most interesting links from around the movie blogosphere. It includes a bit of commentary, but only when the mood strikes. Which, for the purposes of this column’s author, is all the time. Gird your loins and put on your power rings, because it’s about to get wild in here. Getting ready to see Green Lantern this weekend? Our review will be live tomorrow. But if you need a primer before then, I would defer you to io9′s very thorough beginner’s guide to Green Lantern. It should bring you up to speed just in time to become angry about whether or not the film is faithful.

British actor Martin Freeman has been on a real roll over the last decade. Many people first came to know him as Tim in the original UK version of The Office, then he went on to make appearances in the much beloved Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg film comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and then he went on to great acclaim playing a modern version of Dr. Watson on BBC’s outstanding series Sherlock. But probably the biggest news of Freeman’s career came when he was cast in the lead role of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s upcoming The Hobbit. Now, Freeman’s string of good luck may be over, because he’s opened his mouth when he shouldn’t and caused a big kerfuffle. According to Freeman, his Sherlock and The Hobbit worlds are about to collide. While picking up Sherlock’s BAFTA award for Best Drama, he let slip that his co-star on that show, Benedict Cumberbatch, was all set to join the cast of Jackson’s fantasy epic as well. This news comes as a bit of a shock, as Cumberbatch has been made a pretty large name due to his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, with production already ongoing this is pretty late in the game to be adding new actors to The Hobbit, and all the big roles seem to be taken. The news also came as a shock to Cumberbatch himself, who said that his casting was supposed to be a surprise and that he wouldn’t reveal anything else about

What is Movie News After Dark? Only the most high-octane dose of movie news you could possibly have in the middle of the night. Everything in here is worth reading, friends. Except for my commentary. You could probably take or leave that, depending on your mood. The image above marks the first official image from Fright Night, the Craig Gillespie remake 3D remake of the 80s horror film of the same name. In this shot, Colin Farrell plays the vampire next door, and he appears to be looking to start a diet comprised completely of Anton Yelchin. Over at Cinematical (which I feel dirty linking to…) they have shots of Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Imogen Poots, who has one of the more adorable names ever.

For whatever reason, Sherlock Holmes has seen something of an unexpected cultural resurgence recently. Of course, one could argue that the pipe-smoking gumshoe is ubiquitously present in some form or another as his image resonates well beyond the pages in which Arthur Conan Doyle originally encapsulated and explored his identity decade in and decade out; it seems merely a matter, instead, of how present he is in mainstream forms of popular culture at any given moment. That Sherlock Holmes is an object of the public domain only provides greater opportunities for his likeness to arise in myriad ways across media. But what’s unique about the recent incarnations of Holmes is the great variety of forms he takes within a variety of representational modes: the various Holmses we’ve seen recently are not only very different, but distinct in a way that function in conversation, and even in conflict, with each other. The only certainty that arises out of this variety of Holmes characters is that there is no one certain, dominant interpretation of the character, but rather many that audiences can choose from. That several incarnations of Holmes have arisen in popular media almost simultaneously does not point to a broad need in our culture relating to some intrinsic notion of who Holmes is “supposed to be.” Instead these examples are, to varying degrees, different niche versions of the character, each interpretation responding to some specific need.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law no longer feel anything like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. If you have been privy to the world of Sherlock, as seen through the eyes of Steven Moffat and his team at the BBC, you know exactly what I’m talking about. With the release of the first official image from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes 2 (seen above), we are reminded that there’s another Holmes out there in the world who is not played by Benedict Cumberbatch. It feels off, to say the least.