Let’s start with this bit of good news: Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog will begin its U.S. release on November 4, courtesy of RLJ Entertainment. Although our review out of Cannes was a bit lukewarm — we started with “Paul Schrader might want to consider expanding his thematic scope a little” and didn’t get much nicer from there — one must work hard to tamper my excitement for a hardcore crime tale starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe.
More good news: Christine Vachon‘s Killer Films will back Schrader’s next feature, First Reformed, which is set to star Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried. Per a press release, the picture concerns “an ex-military chaplain Toller (Hawke) who is tortured by the loss of a son he encouraged to enlist in the armed forces.” After discovering the dark truth of “his church’s complicity with unscrupulous corporations,” he “embarks on a mission to destroy a gathering of the corporate heads at his church’s historic re-consecration ceremony.” Seyfried will play a parishioner who he befriends.
The project, with a screenplay Schrader says he’s “been moving toward for almost fifty years,” is currently in pre-production.
Adding to his very long list of developed projects, Mark Romanek has joined with OddLot Entertainment to direct Septillion to One, a romantic comedy concerning, of all things, “an overzealous former FBI agent who has been relegated to the fraud unit of the Texas State Lottery [and] begins investigating a beautiful and shrewd woman who had inexplicably defied all odds and hit the lottery jackpot three times.” And so he orchestrates “a game of cat and mouse with the suspect, with whom he ultimately falls head over heels in love.” [Deadline]
It’s been six years since Never Let Me Go, and Romanek hasn’t moved forward with a feature since — be that a Shining prequel or a bank-robber movie or a Boston Strangler story or Cinderella — so I’m not holding my breath, as curious as I am about the prospect. Let’s hope Adam R. Perlman and Graham Sack‘s spec screenplay (in addition to however many other factors) keeps him aboard.
And then there’s word that Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Sicario) has been tapped by Sony to remake Disorder, the just-released home-invasion thriller starring Diane Kruger and Matthias Schoenaerts. However necessary this may or may not be, the material should translate well: Alice Winocour‘s film follows a traumatized war veteran hired to protect a woman and child, only to find their mansion may be a target. Since our review posits that the concept could be improved upon, I’ll wait before declaring this a bad decision. [Deadline]