Scripted

It seems a movie script about WikiLeaks has been leaked to the founder of the site himself. In a speech posted to the Web on Friday, Julian Assange said he had obtained the script for “The Fifth Estate,” an upcoming DreamWorks film that stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange and Daniel Bruhl as former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The film, which set to be released in the U.S. on Nov. 15 through Disney's Touchstone label, began principal photography last week in Iceland and is filming this week in Berlin.

Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie "Mama" are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick. That misfire becomes just one more bump in the road when you long for more bumps in the night. Though there are a few frights - a skittering shape that keeps showing up is the best - rather than dishing out pure scary movie chills, first-time director Andy Muschietti serves up a darkly twisted allegory about a mother's protective instincts.

Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were behind two of the most acclaimed movies of 2012, the political thrillers "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty," and the smart money in Hollywood had both vying for directing honors at next month's Academy Awards. Yet when the Oscar nominations for director were announced Thursday, Affleck and Bigelow were passed over. Instead, two of the five slots went, stunningly, to longshot Hollywood outsiders: a 30-year-old New Orleans artist making his feature debut and an Austrian auteur who has worked almost exclusively outside the English language.

Patrick Dempsey may enjoy the return Thursday of the "Grey's Anatomy" TV series, but the would-be owner of the Tully's Coffee chain will be in a more somber mood Friday as a U.S. bankruptcy judge decides whether the actor's bid for the Seattle firm wins out. Last week, Dempsey, nicknamed McDreamy by his adoring fans, triumphantly announced that the company had chosen his $9.15-million bid. Dempsey's group, Global Baristas, said it would keep Tully's...

Bravo's "Real Housewives" franchise has inspired many things. Plastic surgery. Prenup agreements. Divorce. But on BET it's led to a new comedy series called "Real Husbands of Hollywood. " The series, which premieres Jan. 15, spoofs the long chain of "Housewives" programs and focuses on celebrity friends who hang out together, usually while their famous actress wives are working. The series stars Kevin Hart, Boris Kodjoe, Nick Cannon, J.B. Smoove, Robin Thicke and Duane Martin and, like the Bravo reality series, features a lot of screaming, cursing and fighting.

This year's Black List, a ranking of hot screenplays that have not yet finished principal photography, honors scripts about the NFL draft, the early life of Dr. Seuss, and a 40-year search for three siblings taken from an Australian beach. The list is compiled by former production executive Franklin Leonard, who said more than 290 film executives contributed their 10 favorite scripts of the year. To be eligible for inclusion in the list, the scripts had to receive at least six mentions from inside the Hollywood development community.

BEIJING - Yang Jin shot his first film, "The Black and White Milk Cow," in his hometown in 2004 for $1,600. He asked villagers to be his actors, paying them only in cigarettes, and his main expense was $320 spent renting the titular cow. The tale of poor, rural China won him a $5,000 prize at Switzerland's Fribourg International Film Festival, but it had no chance of being seen or making money in his homeland. Because it touched on the subjects of AIDS and Chinese Christians, Yang knew it wouldn't get past the censors, and thus could never play in Chinese theaters, on TV, or even be sold legally on DVD. Yang's second film was a similarly shoestring, underground affair.

When "Silver Linings Playbook" began filming, the script clocked in at 110 pages, which made it barely manageable for the movie's scant 33-day shoot. But then writer-director David O. Russell and his actors worked on some things while rehearsing the film that Russell then incorporated into the script. And, throughout the shoot, they kept discovering things. So many things that when Russell tells Cooper in this excerpt from the Envelope Screening Series that the final script eventually ballooned to 154 pages, the actor can respond in only one possible fashion.

Like the deer in the headlights that opens the thriller "Deadfall," this is a film about the tragic consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bad roads, bad weather, bad family dynamics are equally problematic. And when Olivia Wilde's lost girl Liza says, "You don't want to take me home," well, that should not be taken lightly. Honestly, the deer was the lucky one. He didn't have to suffer through what happens next. Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, who won a foreign-language Oscar in 2008 for "The Counterfeiters," another dark morality tale, has a keen eye for the scenic possibilities of the snowy rural outpost of upper Michigan where the film is set. It is the screenplay's strangely schizophrenic sensibility that's harder to understand.

Bravo has established itself as a birth site for reality TV touchstones -- through franchises such as "Real Housewives" and "Top Chef" -- but it really, really wants to get in the scripted game and has picked up two new scripted shows to pilot to help make that their reality . The pilots are expected to start production early next year.  "Rita," produced by Fox Television Studios, "is an adaptation of a Danish series that centers on...