On the one hand, there’s a revenge thriller with shootouts, car chases, detective work, and a dynamite climax. On the other, there’s a woefully underwritten love story that can’t think of anything else but to have the leads stare at each other. And not the meaningful kind of staring either — Farrell spends about five-eighths of the flick with this sad/confused expression that looks like he caught his mother in bed with a clown.

Farrell plays Victor, an up-and-comer in a gang led by Alphonse (Terrence Howard). What the gang actually does is not entirely clear, but they appear to be connected to a cocaine-dealing group of British-Jamaicans, at least until Alphonse suspects them of assassinating one of his men and orders the whole lot killed. In the ensuing shoot-out, Victor is wounded, and we follow him back to his ramshackle highrise apartment, where he spends his days watching videos of his wife and kid and ogling the girl in the next building over (Noomi Rapace).

The girl, Beatrice, lives with her somewhat hard-of-hearing mother (Isabelle Huppert) and is haunted by the scars on her face left by a car accident with a drunk driver. She and Victor share pregnant waves to each other until Bea works up the courage to ask Vic out.

Let’s face it, director Brian De Palma hasn’t made a really good movie since Carlito’s Way. And no, Mission: Impossible doesn’t count. His movies are never boring or conventional, however, but he sorta seems to be unable to do consistently good work.

Fortunately, he keeps getting chances to prove he’s still got it. He’s got a new thriller coming out soon called Passion and the Toronto International Film Festival has today posted a trailer for it.

Passion stars Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. It is also written by De Palma and based on the 2011 French movie Love Crime directed by Alain Corneau.

We’ll give you a couple guesses as to what the movie is about. Or, you can just watch the trailer. That works too.

Enjoy.

Despite a divided reception among fans and critics, Prometheus still managed to be a mild financial success for Fox this summer. So much so that the studio is actively working on a sequel to the prequel-ish film.

The Hollywood Reporter has learned directly from Fox that the potential continuation of this new branch of the Alien universe is in go mode:

Scott and the studio actively are pushing ahead with a follow-up (stars Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace are signed) and are talking to new writers because Prometheus co-scribe Damon Lindelof might not be available. “Ridley is incredibly excited about the movie, but we have to get it right. We can’t rush it,”… A Prometheus sequel would be released in 2014 or 2015.

People give Fox a lot of gruff for how they have been handling their genre franchises in the last decade, but recently they have shown a commitment to those franchises that goes beyond the new standard of reboot. It is almost refreshing to see a studio stubbornly standing behind the good and bad of what came before.

In the case of Prometheus, even though some people didn’t like the film, few people disagree that heady sci-fi like that should be encouraged. So this news is met with cautious optimism, if for no other reason than the hope that we get the definitive Fassbender as a decapitated head film.

Keep it tuned to The Flickcast for any new updates on Prometheus 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Robert Downey Jr. has had a pretty amazing resurgence in his career in the past few years. Mostly due to Favreau’s excellent use of him in both Iron Man and Iron Man 2, but an unrelated film is what put Downey at the top of people’s tongues for time after that. That film starred the once Hollywood bad boy as the world’s first detective, Sherlock Holmes.

The film blew up across the globe, pulling in over $500 million worldwide, and warranting a brand new sequel, that we’re now getting the first look at. Titled “A Game of Shadows, the film looks to give us a pretty awesome rivalry between Sherlock and Moriarty, the shadowy villain from the first film. Here’s the official premise.

Sherlock Holmes has always been the smartest man in the room…until now. There is a new criminal mastermind at large–Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris)–and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil, coupled with a complete lack of conscience, may actually give him an advantage over the renowned detective.

Check out the first full trailer for the film (which will likely be attached to prints of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 this weekend) and be sure to catch Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in theaters on December 15th.