It’s an all-new episode of The Flickcast for your listening pleasure. Six, count ’em, six new ones in a row. It really must be some kind of record.

On this week’s episode Chris and Joe discuss the newest casting “development” for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, the upcoming Marvel movies slate, the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer, the latest installment of The Walking Dead and a whole lot more. That’s right, more. As usual.

Picks this week include Chris’ pick of Christopher McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun and Joe’s pick of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship, or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook, Google+ or via email.

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We’re back again with an all-new episode of The Flickcast. Be happy because it probably won’t last. But for now …

On this week’s show, Chris and Joe discuss and debate more Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn’s personality, upcoming TV series like Shutter Island and The Omen, Denzel Washington’s career and his upcoming Equalizer movie and the brand new season of Doctor Who.

Guess which of your favorite hosts liked the season premiere and which didn’t? Not that hard to figure out. Of course, that’s not all they talk about. There’s also the usual “more.”

Picks this week include Chris’ pick of the just released D&D Player’s Handbook from Wizards of the Coast and Joe’s pick of the movie Locke, featuring Tom Hardy and a car.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship, or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook, Google+ or via email.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Ebert would have loved this: It does not gloss over major events that tarnish his star – his alcoholism, his pettiness, even his face. This is not simply a chronicle of the critic’s final few months, rather it’s an overview of his life, aptly so, I suppose, as it’s adapted, in part, from Ebert’s memoir Life Itself.

Ebert was born in Urbana, Illinois, about an hour and a half south of Chicago, and grew up early on recognizing that he had a considerable talent for writing. In his mid-twenties, he began writing movie reviews for The Chicago Sun-Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1975. Around that time, too, he teamed up with Gene Siskel, forming something of the U.S.’s popular critical consensus for nearly 25 years.

Most of those beats you probably know, and director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) does an excellent job filling them in, yes, with interviews from those who knew Roger best during those times, and passages from the book, but even more so with a deft pace aided by short interspersions of Roger today, or at least Roger in 2012. These diversions are, thankfully, less a study in courage than a testament to stubbornness, wit, or another key personality trait that maintained while the body faded away.

This first trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street actually came out last night, but that’s okay. We still feel it’s important enough to bring to you.

That mostly because its Martin Scorsese teaming up with Leonardo DiCaprio again. They seem to do pretty well together before. Check out The Departed if you don’t believe us.

In this one, a biographical crime pic based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort, DiCaprio plays the hard partying “boiler room” stockbroker who scammed $200M from investors and was indicted for securities fraud in 1998.

Also in the film are Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Jean Dujardin, Rob Reiner, Kyle Chandler, Margot Robbie and Jon Bernthal. Look for this one to hit theaters on November 15.

Check out the first trailer after the break.

Do you remember the lead up to John Carter? How most people had a big problem with the marketing but many held a faint glimmer of hope that remained until the first reel ran in theaters opening weekend. Yeah, World War Z wishes it was generating that kind of reaction.

Basically, all of the worst parts of the bible would be an upgrade over the current approval rating of the upcoming PG-13 zombie epic. The stench of the film has been brewing for years, delays and behind the scenes instability have not provided any faith of a good adaptation of a book that is already hard to envision in cinemas. The problem is the structure of the book, it is an oral history not a linear narrative, and no one understands how a Brad Pitt saves the world film was the best that could be done.

So consensus is the film will be a terrible, no good, very bad adaptation and the best we are hoping for is a fun diversion wearing a WWZ pelt for warmth. Of course this leads to all the bitching and moaning about how the film’s existence is an affront to the loyal book fans who deserve better. Well cool your jets book worms and hipster wanna bes, there is a silver lining to this story and it alone more than justifies the looming horror of the upcoming film.

Director Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, The Departed) and Leonardo DiCaprio (Shutter Island, The Aviator) have both committed to an adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street. This film will be the fifth time the duo will be working together.

The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Jordan Belfort. It chronicles his rise and fall as a Wall Street stock broker in the 80’s and 90’s.  The script for the film is written by Terrence Winter, who is currently the executive producer of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance. Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits, just not for the clients.

As with writers, Directors are pretty high on our list of important pieces of the film and TV making puzzle. If writers are the initial creative force that takes an idea from nothing and makes it into something, directors are the force that shapes that something into a clear vision and fulfills its potential for greatness. Or, they get it as close as it’s ever going to get.

With that in mind, the Directors Guild of America President Taylor Hackford today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2011.

“The directors nominated this year for the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award have each demonstrated an inspired command of the medium. The fact that their prodigious talents have been recognized by their peers is the highest honor a director can achieve,” said Hackford. “I offer my most sincere congratulations to each of the nominees.”

The winner will be named at the 64th Annual DGA Awards Dinner on Saturday, January 28, 2012, at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.

The nominees are (in alphabetical order):

WOODY ALLEN
Midnight in Paris
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Mr. Allen’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Managers: Matthieu Rubin, Helen Robin
First Assistant Director: Gil Kenny
Second Assistant Director: Delphine Bertrand

Nothing like awards season to let you focus in on some fantastic film music! The Golden Globe nominations went out this week and in honor of that Film Score Friday is going to cover the nominated scores each of the next four weeks. I say four weeks because we already covered the excellent War Horse by John Williams. So let’s start off big with Hugo by Howard Shore.

Howard Shore is one of today’s leading composers, everyone and their mother knows his stuff from The Lord of the Rings, but Shore has had an impressive career beyond Middle-Earth. So it was an immediate pleasure to realize he was writing the music to Scorsese’s cinematic love letter to film.

Shore brings a fantastic French sound to the table. Much like Michael Giacchino’s Ratatouille score, Shore takes a the French style and makes it work beautifully within his own bag of tricks. The French influences are in almost every aspect of the score, yet at no time does it sound like wall to wall French music.

I tend to think of Scorsese as a master of genre films—he’s done gangster films (Goodfellas, Casino), comedy (After Hours, The King of Comedy), police drama (The Departed), psychological thriller (Shutter Island), boxing (Raging Bull), biopic (Kundun, The Aviator, No Direction Home), concert (Shine a Light), historical (Gangs of New York), literary classic (The Age of Innocence), even a remake Cape Fear) and a sequel (The Color of Money)—but he tends to bring such a distinct touch to the films, they don’t quite feel like genre films.

So when I heard he was taking a stab at a kiddie flick, Hugo immediately shot to my most anticipated Scorsese film to date (outside, of course, of the fictional film he was making with Larry David as the money-hurling mob boss in Curb Your Enthusiasm)—added to that who wouldn’t be interested in Scorsese’s take on 3D?

And Hugo doesn’t disappoint. It’s not the most compelling story, but for all its two-hour-seven-minute running time, I wasn’t bored once. There’s a lot more going on, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the rundown.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an urchin who haunts a Paris railway station in the early 1930s, repairing its clocks and stealing various cogs and sprockets to rebuild the homunculus he and his father (Jude Law) were working on right up to his death. While Hugo tends to remain out of the sight and mind of the station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s less successful evading the eye of the toymaker he robs (Ben Kingsley). Caught trying to thieve a wind-up mouse, he’s forced to give up his father’s notebook, which includes all the instructions on repairing the mechanical man and provokes a strange reaction from the toymaker.

It turns out even decades of laughter through the form of hundreds of felt puppets can’t beat the Kristen Stewart pregnancy movie. After having one of the most intense marketing campaigns that Disney has ever executed for The Muppets, Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 still managed to beat the film in the box office by over $10 million during the holiday weekend.

The vampy melodrama got the #1 spot for the second weekend in a row with $42 million this weekend, while Muppets (which made $42 in total since it opened on Wednesday) was only able to pull in an estimated $29 million. It looks like vampires really are more popular than singing frogs and pigs. Shame.

Also hitting theaters this weekend, Sony’s Arthur Christmas fell flat with an estimated $12.7 opening weekend. Speaking of falling flat, Scorsese’s Hugo had an even weaker opening, as it came in 5th place with just over $11 million.

These films could very well do better as we draw closer to the holidays, but don’t expect to see much in the form of sequels for these family classics. Those films may not have performed as well as they could have, but what did was the Weinstein’s My Week with Marilyn which pulled off just over $2 million for its first weekend.