Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist would like to be a novel. In fact, it once was a novel. The film is based on Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 best-seller, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is already being taught in freshman English classes. It’s understandable that Nair and screenwriter William Wheeler would want to preserve the spirit of the original text as best they can. Unfortunately, the result of their work isn’t a film. At best it’s a two-hour mid-season episode of a network terrorism drama, and at worst it’s a cacophony of brutally simplified metaphors spat onto the silver screen. Wheeler’s script has big, big ideas. At its center is Changez, played by rising star Riz Ahmed, whose skilled performance is really the only exciting thing about the film. He’s a college professor in Lahore, suspected by the CIA of having ties to a local terrorist organization. A Western academic, a colleague, has just been kidnapped and the city is about to erupt in a panicked violence. Yet Changez is calmly sitting in a tea house across from Bobby, an American journalist (Liev Schreiber). To call the tension palpable would be an understatement – riding on this single conversation is the weight of the entire world.

What is Casting Couch? It’s basically a casting news bonanza. Learn who the big names Melissa McCarthy has recruited for her movie Tammy are, as well as what Kiefer Sutherland is getting himself into, after the jump. Though we’ve yet to see for ourselves what the results of teaming Kristen Wiig up with the Anchorman crew in Anchorman 2 are going to be, the film’s director and star, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, must be happy with what they’ve seen so far, because THR is reporting that they’re now in talks to make her the star of an indie comedy they’re producing called Welcome to Me. McKay’s wife, Shira Piven, will be directing the film, which is said to be about a woman with dissociative personality disorder who stumbles into a fortune and uses her newfound cash to create a cable access show where she talks about her life. Sounds like it’s going to be like that live tour thing that Charlie Sheen did, only not scary because it isn’t real.

In the soaringly earnest but effective Touch, Kiefer Sutherland barks so many of his lines with the strained desperation of an exhausted man who’s just barely keeping it together. He’s shouldering a tremendous weight and no one around him is sensitive to his plight. But then, he doesn’t really expect them to be. Best known as badass Jack Bauer, here, a more vulnerable Sutherland is Martin Bohm, widowed father of a mute, emotionally challenged boy and the nucleus of this ambitious Fox drama by Heroes creator Tim Kring.

The last time Lars von Trier explored a relationship in decay, the divisive auteur could not have been more in your face. While parts of Antichrist were labeled as pure button-pushing, it was button-pushing in the greatest way possible. The director made a 2-hour endurance test, a great one at that. His latest, Melancholia, is not an endurance test. Right from the beginning prologue, which paints a picture of events to come, von Trier sucks one into his world of emotional and cynical chaos. The whole film, despite von Trier’s bombastic filmmaking nature, is surprisingly grounded. This isn’t about the destruction of earth, but of these characters. The apocalypse is only used to symbolize all of the characters’ emotional deterioration.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this shit late at night, what do you expect?

The good news is that Dunst just scored the leading role for an iconic director. The bad news is that he’s known for torturing his lead actresses.

The season premiere of Day 8 of Fox’s 24 combines assassination attempts at the U.N. with fabulous hair on Middle East leaders.

Joel Schumacher, remembered most for alienating Batman fans in the mid-90s, has set his cast for the upcoming Twelve, based off a novel by young writer Nick McDonell.

After a horrifying accident with a glowing meteorite turns Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) into a giant, she’s drugged and imprisoned by the government in a secret facility run by General W.R. Monger (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) where she meets some of the strange monsters our government has kept secret for years.

Dreamworks’ upcoming animated film Monsters vs. Aliens is shaping up to be their funniest release yet. Sure it’s directed by Rob Letterman, the writer/director of the abysmal Shark Tale, but the man seems to have learned a lot since then.

Before Kiefer Sutherland saved the world he was all about living the good life. Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.

Take a glance inside “Mirrors” and you’ll find a frighteningly good time staring back into your soul.

The newest Red Band trailer for Alexandre Aja’s “Mirrors” brings the scares and the blood to pique your interest.

Anyone who has a Kiefer Sutherland fetish or an affinity for vampires is sure to love the 1987 cult classic, The Lost Boys. In the same respect, anyone who does love the original is surely terrified by the announcement of a sequel.

And sees nothing of interest. BOO-YAH. Check out the trailer inside.

Take a peak at a behind the scenes featurette of the upcoming “Mirrors,” directed by Alexandre Aja and starring Kiefer Sutherland.

For the sixth excursion into CTU, Jack is sprung from a Chinese prison as a negotiating tool for terrorists. And this is a good thing, too.