It's been seven years since Sin City set a new standard for fidelity in adapting a comic book, with co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller basically using Miller's influential hyper-noir comics as storyboards for the audacious, green-screen intensive production.  Talk of a sequel taking on more of Miller's work began almost immediately, the directors have been promising that it will happen almost ceaseless for the better part of a decade with nothing to show for it.  But it's actually going to go down now.  Really.

For big would-be blockbusters, release dates are obviously critical.  A lot of thought goes into just when a film should reach theaters in order to guarantee that all-important opening weekend.  After all, Sony set a release date for a sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man more than a year ago, and we're still almost three months out from the reboot.  Today, there's big release date news for three big movies.  Disney's revisionist fantasy Maleficent now has a March, 2014 date, while we'll have to wait longer for both The Dictator and Ender's Game.

Angelina Jolie has long been associated with Maleficent, Disney's live-action rejiggering of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, and now it looks like production will get underway this summer.  You can see why the studio has been so keen to make the film after 2010's Alice in Wonderland gave the big-budget treatment to a familiar fantasy story and earned a billion dollars globally, and the new fairy tale project is ready to go, as Jolie's committed to make it her next film. 

Not only is the actress currently set to work on Maleficent in just a few short months, but the project seems to have found its sleeping beauty in Elle Fanning.

As an actress, Angelina Jolie certainly doesn't need much introduction.  One of the most famous and bankable stars in contemporary film, Jolie won an Academy Award for her incendiary supporting turn in 1999's Girl, Interrupted and was nominated almost a decade later based on her work in Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood.  Her credits include performances in films as varied as A Mighty Heart, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt, and The Good Shepherd.  As a fixture on the covers of magazines adorning supermarket checkout aisles, she arguably needs even less introduction, thanks to being one-half of one of the most famous couples on the planet.

Already a multi-hyphenate, Jolie is adding writer and director to her her resume, as her first produced screenplay is also her feature directorial debut.  In the Land of Blood and Honey, which opens in limited release on December 23rd, is reflective of Jolie's well-documented global humanitarian efforts, particularly her status as a Goodwill Ambassador United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  The takes place in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.  The film centers on two fictitious characters, a Bosnian solider played by Goran Kostic and Zana Marjanovic as a Bosniak woman with whom he had a connection before the war.  While chronicling the brutality of war and ethnic cleansing, the story shows how these two characters and their relationship are changed by the incredible and horrific circumstances surrounding them.

With the release of In the Land of Blood and Honey imminent, Angelina Jolie is promoting the feature extensively.  IAR's managing editor Jami Philbrick recently had the rare opportunity, along with other select members of the press, to sit down and speak with the Jolie about her directorial debut.  Jolie discussed how the film came about, directing for the first time, the difficulties of making a modern war movie in two different languages, and the responsibility to depict these events with the appropriate honesty and force.

Between Panic Room and Zodiac, director David Fincher didn't release a movie for five years, and when you're talking about a perfectionist auteur on Fincher's level, that's a long time to lay low.  He's been prolific as of late, though, and his next feature, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, hits theaters in just about a month.  But what will he do next?  In all likelihood, it'll be one of two projects, and the one that he's been attached to for awhile is Disney's new 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  While there's no absolute guarantee that Fincher's next will be a high seas adventure, Disney has just hired Andrew Kevin Walker, who has a history with Fincher, to rewrite the screenplay.

For the last eleven months, things have been pretty quiet on Cleopatra, Sony Pictures' 3D take on the life of the famous Egyptian queen.  Quiet enough, in fact, that it seemed the project had lost steam, despite the continued involvement of Angelina Jolie as the title character.  Now though, it turns out that Sony has not yet given up on Cleopatra, and are bringing aboard another Oscar-winning screenwriter to rewrite the script.  Not only that, but an A-list director whose next film involves a girl and her dragon tattoo might just be interested in directing the film.

In 2008, the summer action movie Wanted managed the rare feat of incorporating Angelina Jolie's bare backside, exploding rats, inexplicable looms, an expletive-spouting Morgan Freeman, and intentionally ludicrous physics for 110 minutes of entertainment that felt like a hyperactive 13 year-old boy's sketchbook coming to screaming, disjointed life.  Given that the film went on to earn $341.4 million globally, talk of a sequel was natural, though it seemed to die on the vine last year.  Not so, it seems, as according to Derek Haas, and and writing accomplice Michael Brandt have just been hired by Universal Pictures to get to work on Wanted 2.

Every once and a while, in between the sequels and prequels, the reboots and remakes, super hero films, computer animated children’s movies, and R-rated comedies, Hollywood will produce a socially important film.

In fact, there is actually a long tradition in Hollywood of making socially responsible movies going all the way back to 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird, which dealt with racism in America. Since then we’ve seen Tinseltown concentrate its energy on illuminating such important social issues as AIDS (Philadelphia), slavery (The Color Purple), abortion (The Cider House Rules), the environment (Erin Brockovich), the Holocaust (Schindler’s List), and the impact of war (The Deer Hunter). But seldom has Hollywood taken a long look at the troubles that affect human rights in Africa.

With the exception of the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, the problems in eastern and southern Africa have gone greatly ignored in popular motion pictures. Only thanks to the actions of Hollywood movie stars like George Clooney, Angelina Jole, and Brad Pitt do most Americans even know about the difficulties surrounding African areas such as Sudan. But now two new films are shining a spotlight on the human rights issues plaguing East African countries. First, Golden Globe-nominated director Marc Forster’s feature film Machine Gun Preacher, which chronicles the life and times of drug dealing criminal turned activist Sam Childers and his work defending Sudanese orphans. The movie stars an all-star cast of exceptional actors including Gerard Butler (300), Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone), Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), Kathy Baker (Clean and Sober), and Souleymane Sy Savane (TV's Damages). The second film is a documentary entitled Bouncing Cats, which takes a look at how dancing and hip-hop is empowering youth in war-torn Uganda. 

In the six years since Sin City first cartoonishly brought the black and white ultraviolence and hyper-noir tough guys of Frank Miller's comics to cinemas everywhere, the hope for a sequel has persisted.  Every few months, either Miller of co-director Robert Rodriguez will provide a usually positive update indicating that Sin City 2 could very well be right around the corner, but for six years, the project hasn't come together.  Following another round of hopeful talk from Rodriguez in July, Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan has come aboard Sin City 2 to polish the script.

Back when Darren Aronofsky was still attached to direct the stand-alone semi-sequel The Wolverine, it looked as though the project would be in production by the summer, with a hirsute Hugh Jackman once again sporting adamantium claws, this time on location in Japan, where the Frank Miller-inspired story takes place.  Then Aronofsky abruptly bailed and an unprecedented natural disaster wracked Japan.  20th Century Fox said publicly that The Wolverine would proceed with a new director, and now that James Mangold is in negotiations to helm, Jackman himself claims that shooting should get underway this fall.