Daniel Day-Lewis has been cast in the title role of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s long-gestating Lincoln biopic.

In the long, long delayed picture, Day-Lewis will play the 16^th  American president, a Republican who helped to free slaves in Confederate states like Virginia and Alabama before his assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth.

The towering British actor is best known for his legendarily immersive performances and collaborations with great directors like Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) and Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York). (In a theatre performance of Hamlet, Day-Lewis infamously left the stage after an early scene prompted a memory of his late father).

In a press release, Spielberg says that the two-time Oscar winner’s casting is a major plus for the production.

“Daniel Day-Lewis would have always been counted as one of the greatest of actors, were he from the silent era, the golden age of film or even some time in cinema’s distant future. I am grateful and inspired that our paths will finally cross with Lincoln,” he says.

Originally, Irish actor Liam Neeson was cast in the role, a decision which would have meant a Schindler’s List reunion for the director and star.

However, Neeson left the production after he grew too old for the role, after a long series of delays. (In the meantime, Spielberg released War of the Worlds, Munich and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and has worked on the upcoming The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn and The War Horse whilst Neeson has been cast as another American president, Lyndon Johnson, in Precious director Lee Daniel's Selma, a Martin Luther King biopic). 

Lincoln is due for release in 2012 and will be scripted Tony Kushner (Munich, Angels in America) - adapting from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.

Traditionally, the Boxing Day weekend is one of the most successful weekends for cinemas around the country. (In 2009 and 2007, the Boxing Day weekend was the third most successful time of the year for local cinemas, according to Box Office Mojo).

In previous years, we have witnessed the likes of Sherlock Holmes, The Curious Case of Bejamin Button, The Golden Compass and Happy Feet jostling for box office supremacy. Here, News Hit will be looking at some of the new films out this year, including art-house releases like Blue Valentine to less lofty fare like Little Fockers.     

Romantic drama Blue Valentine has been very successful on the Festival circuit, garnering acclaim at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. Starring two of North America’s finest young actors – Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson, The Believer) and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain, Wendy and Lucy) – writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s tale of a couple falling in and out of love looks set to garner controversy and debate over its depiction of a modern relationship. In America, for instance, the film has garnered an NC-17 rating, which states that no one under 17 is allowed to see the film (previously, Lust, Caution and Bad Education have been assigned the rating). The Weinstein Company is challenging the rating – which is commercial suicide, as some distribution businesses like Blockbuster have refused to stock those titles – arguing that the film’s depiction of love and sex is more challenging and authentic rather than exploitative.  

I must confess that the prospect of a modern re-invention of a Fox-produced, Jack Black-starring Gulliver’s Travels does not exactly fill me with excitement. Directed by Rob Letterman (a former animation director whose Monsters vs. Aliens was a major hit, despite its lack of warmth or wit), this new version of the fabled Jonathan Swift tale will likely bring plenty of visual gags as befitting Gulliver’s awkward relationship with the lilliputians, a group of smaller people who live in a monarchy. Likely, Fox will be looking for this re-invention to generate a Sherlock Holmes-style surprise hit, however, Black’s patchy recent work (Year One, Be Kind Rewind) and an absence of style behind the lens will mean that this is highly improbable. Hopefully, Black and Letterman will prove me wrong. (Although given that Fox believes that Swift's tale needs a movie novelisation, this is unlikely).   

Blue Valentine is not the only film fighting a controversial ratings decision in the United States. The King’s Speech was given an R rating for a sequence in which the stammering King George VI (Colin Firth) starts swearing at the instruction of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). The Weinstein Company (yep, them again) are arguing that the rating is unfair because the sequence is used “in the context of speech therapy” rather than derogatory or offensive, providing the characters with a sense of emotional resonance. This rating would also dash many of the film’s Oscar hopes, as the film – directed by Tom Hooper (The Damned United) and co-starring Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon – will be looking for a more mature audience in the vein of the successes of Stephen Frears’ The Queen.  

Another Meet the Parents sequel has been on the cards for Dreamworks for some time, given the success of the first (over $400 million worldwide) and second (over $650 million) feature. Meet the Parents: Little Fockers will not only re-unite Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Owen Wilson and Barbara Streisand, but will also feature Harvey Keitel, meaning that this will be the fifth collaboration between De Niro and Keitel after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. What this enticing prospect will mean for a Meet the Parents film is unknown, the first in the franchise not to be directed by Jay Roach (instead, Paul Weitz will direct the film, a safe option for the filmmaker after the flops of American Dreamz and Cirque du Freak).  

Marie Antoinette may have elicited a vitriolic and incredulous reaction from an audience perhaps looking for a more literal, less impressionistic rendering of the French monarch, but I could dig it, so much so that I found its delicate balance of emotion even more impressive than director’s Sofia Coppola’s previous ventures (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation). Which makes her latest, Somewhere, extremely tantalizing, especially given that this tale of a hard-living, remorseful movie star (Stephen Dorff) and his newly-pubescent daughter (Elle Fanning) earned Coppola the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival. 

Earlier this year, I named the German-language, Orwellian drama The Lives of Others as the best film of the past ten years. That is mighty high praise indeed, and I stand by this suggestion, which makes the prospect of the director’s follow-up, The Tourist, exiting. A frothier, Hitchcockian blend of romance and mistaken identity, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarrk’s The Tourist is a remake of the French hit Anthony Zimmer and offers Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie star roles as a misanthropic everyman and a superspy. (The project has been long in development, as directors Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, My Life as a Dog) and Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) were considered for the project, and stars Tom Cruise, Sam Worthington and Charlize Theron came and went). Typecast European villains Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Rufus Sewell and Steven Berkoff co-star, in which they will no doubt attempt to out-act, out-wink and out-shifty-eye one another.

Finally, there are a couple of French films.

Sarah’s Key is the latest French film starring Brit Kristin Scott Thomas, in which the Oscar nominee plays an American journo whose research of the Holocaust upturns a tale of a ten year-old Jewish girl who locked her younger brother in a cupboard to protect her from the local police when she is arrested. Tribute suggests that Toronto Film Festival audiences appreciated director Gillles Pacquet-Brenner's adaptation of the Tatiana de Rosnay novel.

Heartbreaker is a French Hitch/My Best Friend’s Girl hybrid in which Romais Duris plays the "heartbreaker," a man hired to break-up relationships. It currently holds a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan writing "slick entertainment is rarely as, yes, slickly entertaining as it is in Heartbreaker."

I have written a blog on the film Agora, which is up on the Filmink website.

The film is an unusually intelligent production, and - in the blog - I discuss its effective message of tolerance and compassion in an increasingly intolerant time.

Here is the film's trailer.

Dennis Leary is in talks for the role of Captain Stacy in Sony’s untitled Spider-man reboot, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Leary – the stand-up comedian-turned-actor best known for the “Asshole” song and the post 9/11 fireman series Rescue Me – will play the fabled Stacy, father of one of Spidey’s first loves Gwen (played in this new film by Emma Stone) and a key mentor figure to Peter Parker in the earlier comics.

Previously played by James Cromwell in Sam Raimi’s troubled Spider-man 3, Stacy is a hardened, but kindly senior officer in the New York police force and will demand sensitivity and warmth from the normally abrasive actor.

Leary joins Andrew Garfield (Red Riding, The Social Network) as Peter/Spider-man, Stone (Superbad, Easy A) as Gwen, Rhys Ifans (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Notting Hill) as Dr Conners/The Lizard and Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now, The West Wing) and potentially Sally Fields (Forrest Gump) as Uncle Ben and Aunt May.

The film will also be directed by (500) Days of Summer’s Marc Webb and written by James Vanderbilt (Zodiac).

In related news:

Vogue has some new images of Julie Taymor and U2’s Broadway musical, Spider-man: Turn off the Dark.

Taymor – who is a superstar director on Broadway thanks to her enormously successful retelling on Disney’s The Lion King – has given a more baroque, indie-rock look to some of Marvel’s famous rogues most famous characters, including Peter Parker/Spider-man (Reeve Carney), Mary-Jane Watson (Jennifer Damiano), Green Goblin (Patrick Page), Carnage (Cletus Kasady) and the newly-created Swiss Miss (Sean Samuels).

As you can probably tell from these photographs by the legendary Annie Leibovitz, this is a very expensive endeavour (costing up to $52 million), and has gone through a number of delays, in which actors such as Evan Rachel Wood (as MJ) and Alan Cumming (as Green Goblin) left the production.

Whether or not fanboys or the general public will flock to this more elaborate, artful rendering of the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko favourite will be revealed when the show opens on the 11th of January.

Here is a glimpse of Carney’s rendering of one of the shows songs, "Boy Falls from the Sky," on Good Morning America.

It exists, but its the opposite of what exists. What is it? Anti-matter ofcourse! The Large Hadron Collider that I've mentioned in the past has finally been put to good use! Scientists at CERN, the Europian Centre for Nuclear Research, have managed to create and trap 38 particles of Anti-Hydrogen atom after 335 attempts and have managed to suspend their successful results in a magnetic field, long enough to study them more extensively than ever before. Even though antimatter could be created before, it could only be done so in a free state, which would cause for the it to collide with matter and equalise itself immediately.

Whether scientists will be able to create the perfect strudel using this new finding is yet to be decided, though we surely are going to get to know soon enough what created matter, why the universe exists and maybe even why it is the way it is.

As much as this sounds like a hoax out of a Dan Brown Book, have a look at the CERN press release for yourself and maybe even the Al Jazeera version for an edited and quickly readable version.

All answers aside, one of the biggest questions looming is, despite being one of the coolest and most advanced (even touted as one of the reasons for the internet's existence), why netiher the CERN nor the Large Hadron Collider do not have a more suitably aesthetic, advanced and Web2.0 website, we shall never know.

The official teaser trailer to Warner Bros.-financed, Martin Campbell-directed Green Lantern is finally online.

Last week, Entertainment Tonight previewed a "first look" at the film, and now we have a longer teaser, courtesy of Apple.  

The new trailer gives a good glimpse of Mark Strong's CGI-tinkered Sinestro, Peter Sarsgaard as Dr. Hector Hammond both before and after his monstrous transformation, Temuera Morrison as the honourable Abin Sur and Hal Jordan's completely CGI-suit in action.  

For those who are not sure of their Green Lanterns from their Yellow Lanterns, Green Lantern stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, a cocky pilot who discovers the dying Sur and joins the Green Lantern Corps. when he accepts Sur's ring. Sasgaard is the scientist Dr. Hammond who is less lucky, experiencing gigantism in his brain when he discovers a meteor. The cast is rounded out by Blake Lively as love interest Carol Ferris, Tim Robbins as Hammond's Senator father and Angela Bassett as Gov agent, Amanda Waller.

Warner Bros. seems confident in the film and has hired Michael Goldenberg (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Contact, uncredited re-writes on Green Lantern) to write the sequel.

Carey Mulligan is the frontrunner to play Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming literary adaptation, The Great Gatsby, according to Vulture.

If chosen for the part, Mulligan would join Luhrmann (who wrote the screenplay with long-time writing partner Craig Pearce) and linked stars Leonardo DiCaprio (as the romantic dreamer Jay Gatsby) and Tobey Maguire (as narrator Nick Carroway) on the project.

The original article comments that Scarlett Johansson (Iron Man 2, Lost in Translation) is also a strong possibility, but her schedule on Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo will likely rule her out of the role. 

Last month, Deadline reported that Deadline reported that Luhrmann workshopped a script with DiCaprio, Maguire and another British actress Rebecca Hall as Daisy. (On November 1, Deadline also suggested that actresses Hall, Johansson, Natalie Portman, Amanda Seyfried, Abbie Cornish, Blake Lively and Keira Knightley were also in contention).

If Luhrmann decides to go with Mulligan, the popular An Education actress (whose Never Let Me Go will be released March 17 next year) will be the third actress the play the role in a feature film, after Lois Wilson (in 1926), Betty Field (in 1949) and Mia Farrow (in 1974).

None of this is official though, and Luhrmann is a notoriously fickle casting director (for Moulin Rouge! Heath Ledger was lined up for the male lead, but was apparently used to audition leading ladies after Luhrmann already had his original choice, Ewan McGregor, according to this Herald Sun article).

SBS One will screen the acclaimed crime Red Riding trilogy this week.

Based on David Pearce's Red Riding Quartet, this series fictionalises the Yorkshire Ripper case - a series of killings by Peter Sutcliffe in the '60s and '70s.

Earlier, this year I reviewed the trilogy and found it to be an extremely haunting, intense drama.

A British Zodiac (or a neo-noir James Ellroy), the Red Riding trilogy features fantastic performances from Andrew Garfield (Boy A, The Social Network, the upcoming Spiderman reboot), Rebecca Hall (Please Give, The Town), Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings, Goldeneye) and David Morrissey (State of Play, Blackpool) and top-notch writing from Tony Grisoni (Tideland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

The first part 1974 will screen tonight at 10.05. The second part 1980 will screen tomorrow at 10.05. The first part 1983 will screen Thursday at 10.05.

The next Alan Smithee Show will focus on the new Harry Potter film.

In the podcast, Tim and Jared will review Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Jared calls it "unsatisfactory" whilst Tim says it is "as good as half a film can be"). They will also be looking back at the previous films, as well.

The podcast will be up on the website at the end of the week. Here are the first and second podcasts.

NewsHit have 10 double passes to the new sci-fi thriller Monsters.

Six years ago a NASA space probe crashed to earth with a shipload of alien stowaways on board - in the time since, a massive section of the Mexico-US boarder has been fenced off and is now quarantined as an 'infected zone'.

Today, the American and Mexican military still struggle to contain "the creatures"...

Photojournalist Andrew (SCOOT MCNAIRY) is keen to get pictures of the creatures, but when he's tasked with getting his boss's daughter (WHITNEY ABLE) back to the US, a one-day trip turns into a surprising journey.

Not your average sci-fi monster movie, MONSTERS is instead a one-of-a-kind hybrid, a cross genre road movie love-story that just happens to travel into the heart of an alien-infested war zone.

Monsters will be released on the 25th of November by Madman Entertainment

For your chance to win a FREE double pass to the film all you need to do is email your address to benplymin@newshit.com.au with MONSTERS in the subject line.

The new Wolverine film will be simply called The Wolverine, according to HitFix's Drew Mcweeny.

Directed by the acclaimed Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), The Wolverine will re-team the American filmmaker and star Hugh Jackman after the mixed-bag of their passion project, The Fountain.

In the piece, Mcweeny also comments that the new film will also be a "one-off" or a one-shot - a comic-book phrase which means that the episode will have little direct relation to the rest of the franchise besides Jackman's turn in the title role - and will be written by The Usual Supect's Christopher McQuarrie. (Reelz Channel also comments that the ep will take inspiration from Frank Miller and Chris Claremont's arc, Wolverine)

Given that the last entry seemed to be an inane, plot-less series of cameos from other mutants (hey, there's Cyclops! And Professor Xavier! And Gambit!) and directed by an Oscar-winning director clearly unsuited to a picture of that size, this can only be a good thing.

Does this mean that we can pretend the stupidly-titled, stupidly-written X-Men Origins: Wolverine never happened? Or should we despair that a man of Aronofsky's talents is wasting his time on a franchise?

The Fox production will be shooting in New York and Japan next year. There is no official date yet.

Sony Pictures has released the first trailer to Battle: Los Angeles and it's a corker.

Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Darkness Falls) directs an alien invasion action film that is part-Independence Day, part-Black Hawk Down combat drama, and - from the look of this teaser - the production team seemed to have gotten the mix right.

This is exactly what a teaser should be: an intense, atmospheric, impressionistic glimpse into the feel and tone of a film. (The trailer's very powerful song is Johann Johannsson's "Sun's Gone Dim").

The film co-stars Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men, The Dark Knight), Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar, Girlfight), Michael Peña (Crash, World Trade Centre) and Bridget Moynahan (Lord of War) and will be released next March. Here is the Official Website.

But what do you guys think? Is this the best trailer of the year? Or just a great song? Here are a list of other fantastic trailers from 2010.