The lovely Lena Headey is a favorite with just about everyone here at Cinematical -- click on her tag and you'll see many love letters devoted to her films both past and upcoming. Now she's adding a new credit to her resume, as Headey will be taking the director's chair for her film Kill Drug.

Formerly titled Retribution, it's a project Headey has been attached to for some time ... and when you want to get a movie done, you tackle it yourself. Starring Headey, the formidable Charlotte Rampling, and Jason Flemyng, it centers on an underground group of Longon vigilantes. Headey will star as Sally, a woman recruited into by its founder ... who just happens to be her mother, Sue, who murdered her abusive husband back in the 1970s. However, Sally discovers that all is not as it seems, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely ... and probably that working with your mother is a really bad idea.

"My ambition to direct has been fuelled over the last fifteen years, by working alongside great directors. It has also been my film education," Headey told Empire. "Kill Drug is smart, articulate, compelling, sexy, fun, dark, deeply poignant and not afraid to laugh at itself. Above all it is a gripping and compelling journey, a study of humanity's darkest flaws and purest innocence."

Headey has been slowly making her mark as one kickass chick in films and television -- and it's pretty darn cool that she's going to join the rare, elusive breed of female directors. Hopefully Kill Drug will be the first of many on her resume.

It isn't just superhero stories that do brisk business in Hollywood these days -- horror comics are popular too. Variety reports that the latest to be optioned is The Night Projectionist, an upcoming miniseries published by Studio 407, which will be brought to the big screen by Myriad Pictures. The two have also teamed up for Hybrid, which will begin production later this year.

Penned by Bob Heske, it's a story more along the lines of 30 Days of Night than the bloodsuckers of Twilight or Underworld. The story kicks off in 18th century Romania (as all vampire stories must) as a village prepares to lynch a village girl for launching a vampire plague that is destroying their humble townsfolk.

Fast forward to present day and Halloween's Eve, where an all night Dracula-thon film festival is taking place in a decrepit theater. Unluckily for the attendees, the projectionist is a vampire -- and with his help, the human audience is trapped inside, ready to be feasted upon. (This could happen to any one of us -- carry a crucifix to your next all-night film festival, readers.) It all connects back to that unlucky Romanian village, and the man who betrayed it all those years ago.

You can catch a preview of the comic over on Studio 407's website -- the art is fantastic and there is actually a pretty cool twist in just 8 pages of story. (For the artistically inclined, there's also a behind-the-scenes look at the artwork on Horror Comic Book News.) Heske's first issue isn't due on shelves until February, but it's gotten good reviews from Ain't It Cool News, Comics Bulletin, and the Rundown already. Definitely one to look out for.

Here's the first good news of 2009! Variety reports that Hugh Jackman is now off the official wishlist for Cleo, the Steven Soderbergh musical that will reportedly star Catherine Zeta-Jones as the legendary Egyptian queen, and feature the music penned by Guided by Voices.

Jackman has apparently left talks not because of the concept, but due to a scheduling conflict. (Maybe it's Drive, since everything else has vanished from his IMDB page.) Ray Winstone remains in discussion to play Julius Caesar, and Zeta-Jones is still rumored to be Cleopatra herself.

I may be one of the few celebrating the news. I know Soderbergh is a master of taking preposterous concepts and turning them into cinematic brilliance, but a Cleopatra rock musical just sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. Jackman is a wonderful stage performer, and I've been dying to see him in a movie musical for years. (If you've never seen his pre-Wolverine turn in Oklahoma!, do yourself a favor and rent it now.) But not this one -- Soderbergh or not, it just sounds too campy to be believed.

Since Variety is stumped as to what caused the schedule conflict, I'll make a New Year's wish and hope his production shingle has decided to really get moving on that remake of Carousel. Jackman has had the rights to it for awhile, and to see him singing and dancing in that is ten times better than seeing him as a rocking Mark Antony.

(We're reposting our SXSW review of The Lost Coast to coincide with the film's release via Amazon VOD)

By: Eric D. Snider

As Jasper, the narrator and protagonist of The Lost Coast, begins to describe the events of Halloween night, he says, "We found a dead body -- but more on that later." You know it's an eventful night when discovering a corpse isn't even the lead story.

In this moody, occasionally dreamlike drama, it's not what happens to Jasper and his friends that's important, so much as what happens within Jasper's soul. Yes, most of the drama here is internal, and while writer/director Gabriel Fleming falls prey to some of the missteps typical of new filmmakers, he gets a lot right, too, with a lot of emotional insight.

The film is constructed around an e-mail that twentysomething Jasper (Ian Scott McGregor) is writing to his fiancee overseas, in which he explains what happened the previous night. We gather from his tone that the events were of some importance, and the fact that it was Halloween in San Francisco -- one of the most raucous nights in a raucous city -- suggests there may have been shenanigans (if you know what I mean).

When we were kicking around ideas for year-end superlative Cinematical Sevens, I was proudly tasked with chronicling the year's finest in big-screen mayhem, violence, destruction and other such shenanigans. When I was kicking around ideas for said feature between me, myself, and I, there were too many titles to leave off the list, so instead of highlighting only a mere couple of movies, I've opted to sort these puppies out by specific manner of cinematic excess.

So there.

1. Most pervasive destruction - The Joker may have terrorized Gotham to the tune of a destroyed hospital, a wrecked helicopter, a sunken SWAT truck, a toasty fire engine, and a golden district attorney, but even he can't top the Cloverfield monster's swath of destruction across the real-life Gotham. Statue of Liberty? Gone. Brooklyn Bridge? History. Central Park? Adios. And that's not including all the Hollister stores that our protagonists might've fled to. (On a smaller scale, though, Inside's lady in black terrorizes a pregnant woman on Christmas Eve to the point of all but painting every last wall in her house with the blood of her victims. Gotta love the French!)

Say it ain't so, my European friends: arthouse theaters on the Continent are -- shudder!! -- now showing mainstream flicks like Mamma Mia! and Wall-E alongside their usual specialty fare like the Israeli animated feature Waltz With Bashir. And not just on the Continent, according to Variety, but in Britain too! What is the world coming to? Is this the end of Western civilization?

It's not news that mainstream movies have crept steadily onto arthouse screens in the US. In my neck of the woods (Dallas), for example, Landmark Theatres operates two multiplexes that, once upon a time, showed independent and foreign-language pictures almost exclusively. The Inwood Theatre is currently showing Bedtime Stories in its large downstairs auditorium, with Seven Pounds and Rachel Getting Married screening upstairs in the two small (50-60 seats) rooms upstairs. It's similar at the Magnolia, where The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Yes Man claim three of the five screens. The Angelika Film Center operates two complexes in the area and does a bit better, with 10 of 13 screens dedicated to specialty releases this week.

Similar to the US scene, European exhibitors cite "changing audience tastes, a reduction in the number of single-screen venues that used to favor local fare as well as a glut of specialty pics." Western Europe has about 33,000 screens, of which "roughly one quarter" are single-screen venues. The single-screen houses are finding it tough to compete against the multiplexes, with more than 300 single-screen theaters closing in Italy alone over the past five years.

The Motion Picture Association of America does a few other things too, but its most visible impact on movie-going is its ratings system. G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17, you gotta have a rating for your movie if you want most theater chains to show it, and the MPAA's secretive clan of breast-counters and violence-ignorers decides which label its gets.

An overwhelming majority of films get the rating they deserve -- or, at the very least, a rating that's consistent with how the MPAA has rated other films with similar content. But some MPAA decisions are baffling, illogical, or just plain outrageous. Here are the ones that perplexed us the most this year.

The Worst MPAA Ratings of 2008

1. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (rated PG for "epic battle action and violence"). The MPAA says, "The ratings are intended to provide parents with advance information so they can decide for themselves which films are appropriate for viewing by their own children." It's all about parents looking out for their kids. So how in the name of C.S. Lewis did this film -- rife with stabbing, throat-slitting, decapitating, and large-scale slaughter, much of it perpetrated by teenage characters -- get a PG? Does the fact that most of the violence is bloodless (and therefore not realistic) somehow make it family-friendly? Had there been even one sexual reference, it would have gotten a PG-13. Thank goodness Disney only packed the film with killing instead!

It's always cool to see the indie comic publishers getting movie deals -- especially a crazy, multi-film one. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Arcana Studios and Legacy Filmworks are teaming up for no less than five adaptations.

The first up is Paradox, based on the three issue series by Christos Gage, who also penned the film's screenplay alongside his wife, Ruth Fletcher Gage. It will be directed by Stargate: Atlantis helmer Brenton Spencer, and star Kevin Sorbo. Sorbo will play a cop of a parallel Earth (is there any other kind?) ruled by magic, who finds himself investigating a series of murders committed by the unknown force of science. You might snicker at the premise, but one of the characters is Winston Churchill, who gets to be a 130-year-old sorcerer. You can check out a preview here.

They've also lined up Martin Shapiro's Chopper, which follows a headless, ghostly biker named Jeremiah Payne. As the Angel of Death, he patrols the streets and exterminates sinners. You can check out a preview, but read fast, they're actually planning to start shooting next month. My favorite of the lot is Jay Busbee's Sundown, which sees a journalist and a small-town Arizona sheriff hunting down vampires. Cowboy hats and the supernatural is an automatic win for me.

The other films have yet to be determined -- Arcana has some gloriously pulpy stories in its library, so the possibilities are rather endless. Got any favorites you'd like to see, or recommend to your fellow readers?

Coming up on the new year, it's interesting to see which films we had thought would've been released by this point. In the summer of 2007, I recall myself and several colleagues showing up for a press screening of Jonathan Levine's lauded slasher, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, only to discover it was canceled just that morning and the film had been sold from the Weinstein Company to Senator that afternoon. (The film has since landed at Sony, whose indie arm, Sony Classics, already saw Levine's follow-up, The Wackness, to a proper theatrical reception.)

At least the Weinsteins gave something up for a change. The oft-shuffled Killshot and Fanboys are tentative January and February releases at the moment, respectively, and I just want to see for myself if The Poughkeepsie Tapes has been worthy of its modest reputation following a BNAT '07 screening -- the same BNAT that featured the reportedly sweet Trick 'r Treat that WB continues to hoard.

A perhaps more morbid curiosity has me keeping an eye on Paramount's Case 39, just to see if it's really that bad, and who knows what similar straits Assassination of a High School President, The Accidental Husband (originally last March), and Possession (originally last February) are in following Yari Film Group's bankruptcy -- not that I have much invested in the last two, but Assassination is a perfectly release-worthy noir take-off that deserves a home.

So what do you guys and girls think? Which of these are you most dying to see? What was the longest you ever waited to catch something, and were you ultimately disappointed or satisfied by the time it came your way?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Hugh Jackman returns to the role of the adamantium-clawed Wolverine. I loved the first two X-Men features and even kind of liked the third one, but the idea of Wolvie going solo without the rest of Xavier's crew leaves me kind of cold. Start sharpening your claws for a May 1 release.

Eden Log
The trailer for this French film is delightfully vague. Apparently the movie portrays a bleak future set in a subterranean world. I'm not real clear on the details, but the imagery is fascinating. This one goes into limited release in February.

I Love You, Man
Paul Rudd plays a man about to get married, but finds himself without male friends and in need of a best man. Soon he's good pals with Sydney (Jason Segel), but his relationship with his fiance begins to suffer. Both of these actors have made me laugh before, but I don't know about this one. Spread the love on March 20.

Against the Dark
Another zombie apocalypse? Nope, it's a vampire apocalypse this time, and with much of the world's population annihilated our only hope is a group of vampire hunters led by -- wait for it -- Steven Seagal. I'm not a Seagal fan but I can see this one having a certain B movie appeal. It comes out on February 10.