Director Spike Lee‘s upcoming Oldboy is viewed as a remake of Park Chan-wook’s brilliant 2003 film, but in reality it’s a new adaptation of the original source material, a graphic novel by Nobuaki Minegishi. The story remains the same, though. A man (Josh Brolin) is kidnapped and imprisoned for twenty years with no clue as to his captor’s motive or identity. He’s inexplicably released one day and given a limited amount of time to discover the answers to all of his questions, but he may not like what he finds. In fact, he most definitely won’t like what he finds. Oldboy co-stars Sharlto Copley and Elizabeth Olsen and hits theaters on October 11th. [Press Release]

What is Casting Couch? It’s the casting news round-up that continues its jam-packed week with stories involving Jesse Eisenberg, Emile Hirsche, Matt Smith, Kristen Stewart, Pierce Brosnan, and even more. We’re bursting at the seams here, people. Hearing that übermensch Tom Hardy is going to get a chance to beef up and kick some ass on screen is never a bad thing, so rejoice in the news that he’s just been cast as the lead of an action film called Locke. Anthem announced today [via ComingSoon] that they’ll be financing the film, which comes from a script by and will be directed by Eastern Promises writer Steven Knight. Locke is said to be about a man named Ivan Locke who receives a fateful phone call one day that forces him to put his entire life on the line in a “tension-fueled ninety minute race against time.” Title is the main character’s last name, plot has a real-time element…yeah, this definitely sounds like it was supposed to be a Jason Statham movie. Looks like somebody’s got some competition.

The first thing we’re supposed to learn about Lilly (Dakota Fanning) and Gerry (Elizabeth Olsen) is that they are best friends – no, like, best friends, sisters, totally bonded, deeply close, passionate friends. This is a fine sentiment – really, one of the best – but it’s a hard one to grasp when Lilly and Gerry, the center of Naomi Foner’s Very Good Girls trashcan their years-long friendship because some dude (and, also, this dude? Of all the dudes? This one?) is temporarily sexually attractive to both girls. Yes, it’s this story again. To be fair, Foner’s film does throw a few wrenches into this now-standard formula – namely that both girls are virgins looking for someone to change that before they head off to college, and that only one of the girls is aware that she’s involved in a love triangle – but it’s otherwise just another destructive addition to a genre of romance films that needs to go away, or at least be handled in a far more mature and compelling manner.

Editor’s note: Liberal Arts opens in limited release this Friday (just in time for back-to-school!), so please enjoy our Sundance review of the film, originally published on January 23, 2012. Triple threat Josh Radnor‘s first feature, happythankyoumoreplease, debuted at Sundance in 2010, hitting big with the crowds and ultimately winning the Audience Award. The film was written and directed by Radnor, who also starred in it as a disaffected twentysomething struggling to make meaningful connections with others in big, bad New York City. Radnor’s latest outing, Liberal Arts, is written and directed by Radnor, and stars the multi-hyphenate as– well, you probably know the rest. But while happythankyoumoreplease was perhaps too much of a classic first feature – complete with overly precious touches and too much reliance on the magic of coincidence and not enough emphasis on the sort of things that actually happen in the real world – Liberal Arts sees Radnor and his craft maturing wonderfully, which is startlingly in-line with the aims of the actual film.

In Liberal Arts, Josh Radnor plays a 35-year-old man who returns to his alma mater and meets a 19-year-old (Elizabeth Olsen) that completely floats his boat. They struggle through a fiery, instant connection in order to come to grips with their own personal hang ups. And that’s how he met your mother. The Sundance film – which was also written and directed by Radnor – now has a trailer that’s not nearly as twee as an indie romance should be. It’s close, but it’s toned down compared to its brethren, and it’s tough to beat Olsen being cool and advanced:

Editor’s note: Red Lights hits limited release this Friday, so please take this re-run of our Sundance review (originally posted on January 23, 2012) as a green light to give it a read. Rodrigo Cortés returns to Sundance after 2010′s Buried with another film about confinement and restriction – but one that turns those attentions to the human mind and its limits, instead of the body and its own absolutes. In Red Lights, Cortés sets his sights on the world of paranormal investigations, but in a way wholly different than we’ve come to expect from horror flicks that mine similar territory. Red Lights centers on Drs. Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Buckley (Cillian Murphy), who work to disprove paranormal activity. The pair split their time between teaching at a university (to packs of eager students) and traveling to presumed paranormal occurrences (to debunk them). Both Matheson and Buckley maintain that they’ve never seen true paranormal activity that cannot be explained in one way or another (most often due to simple lies and farce), but they’re about to be challenged by an old foe of Matheson’s who appears to break all the boundaries the pair set. Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) was once a famous blind psychic, who retired amidst whispers of behavior that led to the death of his greatest critic – and now, he’s returned.

Red Lights is a film filled with divisive questions. After the film’s Sundance premiere, many were either wrapping their heads around the grounded supernatural thriller’s final moments or completely scoffing at it. Whether one’s reaction is good or bad towards the questions writer/director Rodrigo Cortés is posing, he still gets a reaction out of you, as shown by the film’s early reviews. For most of its running time, Cortés is not afraid of playing with audience’s expectations and perceptions of the events as they play out on screen. Unlike his previous film, Buried, most of Red Lights can’t be taken literally. The difference between ambiguity and having no answers for your film’s questions can get blurred easily, but, as Cortés told us, he wrote and crafted the film with all of his own answers in mind. Here’s what Rodrigo Cortés had to say about the story’s exploration of duality, his flawed protagonists, and how to question everything we see in Red Lights:

Multi-hyphenate Josh Radnor has had a real nice time at the Sundance Film Festival. His debut film, happythankyoumoreplease, premiered at the festival in 2010, and he just brought his second feature, Liberal Arts, to Park City this past January. Both films star Radnor as a shiftless twentysomething who is, for a variety of reasons, unhappy with his current lot in life. But whereas happythankyoumoreplease tended to feel too twee, too naval-gazey, too unformed, Liberal Arts showed a tremendous progression in Radnor’s talents and execution. And now you can see it, too! IFC will release the film just in time for back to school on September 14 of this year. The film also stars Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney, and Zac Efron, and should be the perfect way to ease back into fall drudgery after the fireworks of the summer season.

Deadline Hawthorne reports that, after weeks of speculation, Spike Lee‘s Oldboy has finally signed an interesting pick to play the film’s central villain. Sharlto Copley was the latest name rumored for the role just last month, but after rounds and rounds of unsuccessful casting for all three major roles in the film, it seemed like the project was a bit doomed. But now that Copley is officially set for the part, and costars Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen remain locked in, the film is set to start filming in late September. Like Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film, Oldboy centers on Brolin’s character (in this incarnation, he is reportedly named “Joe Douchett”), a man who has been imprisoned against his will by an unknown man. Eventually freed, he’s set on a course to find the man who put him there (and to discover why) – Copley will play “Adrian Pryce,” “a mysterious billionaire trying to destroy the life of Joe Douchett.” But until Oldboy kicks off, Copley is busying himself with another high concept role, this time as a potential hero.

At first glance, Peace, Love & Understanding looks like your typical indie film. The focus is on characters – relationships between parents and their children, budding romances – and the humor mostly comes from a political place, throwing uptight suit-and-tie types in a confined space with characters who are on the extreme left and watching them all chafe against each other. Chances are you could watch its first trailer and feel like it was an advertisement for a film that you’ve seen a hundred times before. That is, if it didn’t have such an appealing cast. They kind of set the project apart. Well-worn material or not, it’s pretty hard to catch wind of a movie that’s cast Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, and Elizabeth Olsen as three generations of very different women and not get a little bit excited. With Fonda and especially Keener, you have a couple of acting veterans who always bring the goods in anything they do. And with Olsen you have a hot young performer who is going to have the eyes of Hollywood on everything she does, at least for her next few projects. Factor in that the leading ladies are being directed by a solid old hand in Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer) and Peace, Love & Understanding looks like it’s going to be a safe risk when you’re deciding what to hand your movie money over to.

Back in 2010, Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés got the attention of U.S. audiences by putting Ryan Reynolds in a box for Buried. Now he’s back with an ensemble number that looks at the world of celebrity psychics. The first trailer for Red Lights doesn’t let us in on the secret of whether psychic powers really exist in its world or not, but it raises the question. And what it does reveal to us along the way is that it has an impressive cast that makes it look more than worth checking out. If you want to know more about the film, you can also check out Kate’s review from Sundance – or just check out the trailer below.

Please let this one work out. Variety reports that Sharlto Copley has been offered the villain role in Spike Lee‘s take on Oldboy, a piece of casting so inventive and unexpected that I’ve gone a bit cross-eyed over it. Lee’s remake/reimagining of Chan-wook Park’s film (itself based on the manga by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya) has been plagued by great pieces of possible casting that have not panned out – from Colin Firth not taking on the baddie role to Rooney Mara sliding out on the female lead – so it’s high time someone outstanding signs on and gets this thing moving. Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen are already on board for the film, with Brolin taking on the role that Choi Min-sik played in the South Korean version – a seemingly regular man who is kidnapped and kept in a single room for fifteen years. Eventually freed, he then embarks on a quest to find out who is responsible and why they did it – which, of course, plays right into the mastermind’s plan. Olsen’s role is that of a caseworker who works with Brolin to uncover the past, a twist on Kang Hye-jeong’s role as Mi-Do in the original film, who is a young sushi chef (who still helps out with that nasty past-uncovering).

Up-and-coming actor Oscar Isaac seems determined to round out his slate with interesting and very different roles – after both his solid work in Drive and turning in the best performance in the blood-and-trash-splattered trainwreck that was Sucker Punch, we will next see him starring in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, The Bourne Legacy, and Ten Year. Past that, he will now reportedly star in Charlie Stratton’s Therese. The film, previously known as Therese Raquin (it appears that the title has been officially changed or everyone over at Deadline Orleans is too lazy to type it out completely), is based on the Emile Zola novel and play of the same name, and will star Elizabeth Olsen in the eponymous role. Set in the late 1800s, the film centers on Therese and the loveless marriage she’s been forced into with her sickly mama’s boy of a cousin, Camille (Tom Felton). Her overbearing aunt (Jessica Lange) is the ostensible matchmaker of this disastrous pair and her continued pressure on Therese, combined with the intolerable Camille, ultimately force Therese to look for love elsewhere – with Camille’s friend Laurent (to be played by Isaac). Even if you’re not familiar with the story, you can probably guess that it doesn’t end well. I mean, really, really not well.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr heads to the desert to hide in a cave, hoping against hope that some mystical bald alien will beam him to Mars so he can make a pass at the ridiculously gorgeous Lynn Collins in a brass bikini. Unfortunately, no one came to his rescue, so he snuck into an abandoned house in upstate New York to terrorize some people. Again, no one came. That left Kevin to skip his movies this week so he could go to the library and find a book that would allow him to curse Eddie Murphy into not speaking. He hasn’t been heard from since.

A gimmicky horror film from Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water), Silent House keeps you engaged until that timeless genre staple, the moronic plot twist, takes the movie to a weird, sinister places and saps the fun out of it. Of course, that makes it hard to review the picture, which depends so heavily on that third act reveal. The first hour-plus is pretty gripping, a real-time single-take (undoubtedly including disguised cuts) depiction of a young woman named Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) being tormented by mysterious stalkers inside a lakeside home she and her father (Adam Trese) are restoring. It’s a creepy place, with the windows boarded up, the doors locked and the power shut off. Cell phones don’t work and there are no neighbors. The filmmakers, remaking a 2010 Uruguayan movie, play up the closed-off quality by setting the action during the late afternoon, with the sun first setting outdoors. The slivers of light that occasionally peak in, suggesting that helps lies just outside the front door, make the home an ideal setting for a suffocating living nightmare.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of things you’ll enjoy. We promise. We begin tonight with the story of the evening. Or more to the point, the casting story of the evening. Elizabeth Olsen has been offered the lead role in Oldboy, the Spike Lee directed remake of the incredibly popular Korean revenge film. Heralded for her performance in Martha Marcy May Marlene, Olsen has burst onto the scene with her ability to act, something she has over her elder sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley. She’s a good choice for just about everything, even a movie that probably shouldn’t be attempted in the first place. Like this one.

Thérèse Raquin, the period drama that Elizabeth Olsen and Glenn Close are teaming up for, has got some new casting news. In case you don’t remember, Thérèse Raquin is an adaptation of an Émile Zola story penned and set to be directed by Charlie Stratton. It tells the story of a Parisian girl in 1867 who is forced into a loveless marriage with her sniveling, weakling cousin at the behest of her domineering aunt. Eventually the girl, Thérèse, becomes enamored of one of her husband’s friends, and then murder and infidelity ensue. Olsen, of course, it set to play the young girl, and Close the aunt. But what of the two male characters? Originally I tried to spread the false rumor that Giovanni Ribisi would be playing the sickly husband, but thankfully nobody pays attention to what I say and the rumor didn’t spread. Now the role actually is in the process of being cast and the good news is that the actor who’s negotiating is probably the only person who has just as much experience at being sniveling and weird as Ribisi. Who better to play a sickly, annoying little turd than Draco Malfoy? That’s right, Daniel Radcliffe’s sneering nemesis from the last decade or so, Tom Felton, is looking likely to join the cast.

Sometime around Cannes last year we reported that Elizabeth Olsen and Dakota Fanning would be starring in a new movie by first time director Naomi Foner called Very Good Girls. It’s a story that Foner penned about a couple of young girls who have made a pact to lose their virginities, who then come into conflict with each other when they fall in love with the same “charismatic street artist.” All these months later it appears that this film is finally gearing up to happen, and there’s some news about who has been cast to play the deadbeat object of their misguided affections. No, it’s not the guy who played Nick from Family Ties like I suggested originally, Foner and company went in a completely different direction. According to a report from Deadline Leningrad, curly-headed manic pixie dream boy Anton Yelchin is in final negotiations to take the role. Those that saw him in last year’s Like Crazy know that Yelchin is no stranger to adeptly playing young love related melodrama, and the kid is just so cheek-pinchingly cute… so I guess this casting was kind of a no-brainer. There’s no telling what Foner is going to be able to deliver as a director, but I now find myself looking forward to this one on the strength of the cast alone. I hope it’s a story interesting enough to deserve so many talented young actors teaming up.

The upcoming movie Kill Your Darlings will look at the relationship between beat authors Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and the man who introduced them, Lucien Carr. It was a relationship that reportedly began with murder, as soon after the three became friends Carr was implicated in the killing of another man named David Kammerer, and the famous authors found themselves caught in the middle of all the drama. Sounds like a saucy little story, especially with the “based on true events” factor that it has working for it. But perhaps even more exciting than the murder aspects of this story is the cast that it is now being assembled to bring it to life. The first casting announcement was that Daniel Radcliffe would be shrugging off his wizarding robe and branching out in another direction to portray Ginsberg. The idea of watching Radcliffe do something so different could have been enough to sell people on this movie alone, but some new casting details have surfaced that add to the anticipation. According to a report from Variety, not only has the Kerouac role been filled by Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston, and the Carr role filled by In Treatment’s Dane DeHaan, but Martha Marcy May Marlene’s breakout star Elizabeth Olsen has signed on as well. She’ll be playing Edie Parker, who was an art student and a girlfriend of Kerouac’s.

After standing tall upon the rubble of bones and ash, letting loose a hyena-like cackle and biting into the leg of an indie producer while the blood dripped down her cheeks, Elizabeth Olsen will now return to the land she conquered last year with two new features. The actress who crushed audiences in Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene and (to a lesser extent) Silent House heads back to Sundance with two new battle axes to grind. The first is Peace, Love and Misunderstanding where she continues her love of commas alongside co-stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chace Crawford and Catherine Keener. The dramedy focuses on a woman in the midst of a possible divorce who reunites with her estranged hippie mother (Jane Fonda) on her hippie farm with the kids in tow. It played at Toronto and apparently works well without being too difficult to digest. The other film is Josh Radnor‘s Liberal Arts. The How I Met Your Mother star’s second outing as feature writer/director sees him playing a man headed back to his old college only to fall in love with a bright, beautiful young woman played by Olsen. So, it seems like there’s nothing in the holster that’s as challenging as MMMM, but Olsen has already dominated that scene, and her return is a kind of victory lap on her way to even more work. Hopefully you enjoy watching her do what she does, because she’s going to be around for a while. And so will we because we’ll