We’ve got a couple of casting stories to share this afternoon.  First up, Drive star Oscar Isaac has been set to topline the indie Partisan, per Deadline.  Ariel Kleiman wrote and will direct the film, which is described as “a confronting fable about a vengeful man raising his children to attack the world that wronged him.”  Isaac has been landing a number of high profile roles as of late including William Monahan’s thriller Mojave and the crime drama Memorial Day.  Isaac will next be seen in Joel and Ethan Coen’s folk period pic Inside Llewyn Davis.

Hit the jump for casting news concerning a Good Day to Die Hard star joining the cast of the anticipated novel adaptation Divergent.

Before I dive headfirst into what could be considered overselling to the “nth degree”, I have a disclaimer: I’m a total sucker for nostalgia-inducing, high school-centric, coming of age films. With that out of the way, I cannot recommend enough that you watch author/writer/director Stephen Chboksy‘s adaptation of his own novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, as soon as possible. The pic hit Blu-ray/DVD this past week and over the course of 24 hours I rented it, watched it, loved it, returned it (yes, somehow late fees are still a thing…), and purchased it for my own collection. I could go on and on about the emotional note the movie hit for me at every turn but I’ll spare you the fanboy torment. Suffice to say that I’ll be looking back fondly on this one for quite a while.

My “Blu-ray/DVD pick of the week” aside, this week’s installment features a week of Die Hard that includes Matt revisiting the entire franchise and A Good Day to Die Hard interviews with Bruce Willis and more, coverage from Steve’s visit to the set of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, a slew of video interviews from this year’s VES Awards including talks with Ang Lee and Wally Pfister just to name a few, Beautiful Creatures interviews with Emmy Rossum and more, and a healthy amount of images from the floor of Toy Fair 2013. Yep, you guessed it, a brief recap and link to each of the above can be found on the other side.

Opening this weekend is director John Moore’s A Good Day to Die Hard.  The fifth Die Hard film has John McClane (Bruce Willis) teaming up with his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), to settle their differences and take down the bad guys.   The film also stars Yulia Snigir, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sebastian Koch, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, and Anne Vyalitsyna.

During the recent Los Angeles press day I got to speak with Jai Courtney. We talked about the audition process, the biggest surprise making the movie, working with Bruce Willis, Spartacus, I, Frankenstein, and more.  Hit the jump to watch.

Over the last few days, I’ve looked back at the Die Hard franchise, and tried to explain what makes these films unique.  The obvious answer is John McClane (Bruce Willis).  Willis helped to craft a memorable character who was the wise-cracking, scrappy, desperate hero we can all root for.  But it’s not simply an attitude.  Die Hard is a matter of circumstance and response, and the two best films—Die Hard and Die Hard with a Vengeance—back McClane into a corner and force him to rely on his wits and strength to survive.  He gets the shit kicked out of him, swears constantly, but laughs in the face of near death.  John McClane’s personality lives in A Good Day to Die Hard.  Everything else dies horribly.

20th Century Fox has released a new clip from director John Moore’s sequel A Good Day to Die Hard, and it demonstrates exactly why it’s probably not a good idea to think you can best a helicopter full of guns.  Bruce Willis’s John McClane and Jai Courtney’s Jack McClane square off against said helicopter in this clip, giving fans a tease of the kind of action they can expect from the fifth film in the Die Hard franchise.  I’ll say this: the CG effects don’t look terrible.

Hit the jump to watch the new clip, and if you missed it click here to read the first entry in Matt’s ongoing Die Hard retrospective series.  The film also stars Sebastian Koch, Yulia Snigir, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anne Vyalitsyna, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  A Good Day to Die Hard opens Thursday, February 14th.

It’s been 25 years since Die Hard exploded into theaters, launching a new cinematic hero and changing the paradigm of action movies.  In A Good Day to Die Hard, Bruce Willis reprises his iconic role as police detective John McClane.  Set against the backdrop of deadly corruption and political vendetta in Russia, McClane teams up with his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), to settle their differences and take down the bad guys.  The film, which opens in theaters on February 14^th, also features Sebastian Koch and Yulia Snigir.

At the recent press day, Willis, Courtney and director John Moore talked about why it was time for another Die Hard movie, what makes the McClane character so appealing to audiences, the origin of the signature line, taking the franchise to another country for the first time, and using Mi-24 assault helicopters in the action sequences.  Willis also discussed what it’s meant to him personally to play one of the greatest action characters in film history, why being a father is his favorite job, and how his real life experience has enabled him to play a great on screen dad.  Hit the jump to read more.

With a couple weeks to go before it hits theaters, A Good Day to Die Hard marketing has gone on overdrive.  In the past couple weeks, we’ve seen TV spots, new images, a new clip, and now a four-minute featurette has been released.  The big takeaway from the featurette: the action movie is an action movie.  My main concern isn’t the amount of action, but how John McClane (Bruce Willis) relates to that action.  The guy who took down a fighter jet in Live Free or Die Hard isn’t John McClane.  The appeal is that he’s an everyman who kills lots of bad guys and barely survives.  I’ve seen all the marketing, and I’m still not sure which McClane is going to show up, but I hope it’s the latter.

Hit the jump to check out the featurette.  The film also stars Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yulia Snigir, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anne Vyalitsyna, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14th.

20th Century Fox has released a new clip from A Good Day to Die Hard.  The fifth Die Hard film has John McClane (Bruce Willis) teaming up with his son Jack (Jai Courtney) in Moscow to right Russian baddies.  I’m still not sure what the plot is, but this clip shows that it’s still the same old John McClane when it comes to laughing in the face of danger before blowing danger’s head off.  The end of the clip is a bit of a missed opportunity since McClane tells his son they’re not going to die, and Jack should have responded, “But Dad! It’s a good day,” [looks directly into the camera] “TO DIE HARD.” [explosion]

Hit the jump to check out the clip.  The film also stars Sebastian Koch, Yulia Snigir, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anne Vyalitsyna, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14th.

We’ve grown pretty familiar with John McClane (Bruce Willis) over the course of the twenty-five-year Die Hard franchise, but the next installment will introduce some new faces.  In A Good Day to Die Hard,  Jai Courtney (Jack Reacher) will get in on the action as McClane’s son, Jack, and Yuliya Snigir (Inhabited Island) will play Irina, the…uh…attractive Russian woman, a role which she plays quite well.  Directed by John Moore (Max Payne), the fifth installment in the Die Hard series also stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead (The Thing) as McClane’s daughter, Lucy.  We’ve got 16 new images from the movie to share with you after the jump.

Some new images have cropped up today for John Moore’s A Good Day to Die Hard and James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now.  The fifth installment in the Die Hard series features John McClane (Bruce Willis) and his son Jack (Jai Courtney), who are seen amidst a lot of destruction in this new image.  We also have an infographic from the original 1988 film, which is the first in a series that will be released for each film leading up to the February 14th release of A Good Day to Die Hard.

We’ve also got some new images that feature Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) and Miles Teller (Project X) being all young and cute in The Spectacular Now.  Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kyle Chandler, Brie Larson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the picture  debuts at Sundance this Friday.  Hit the jump to see the new images.

Just yesterday we brought you the good news that A Good Day to Die Hard would be rated R.  Today, a new TV spot for the John Moore film, the fifth in the Die Hard series, confirms that rating.  The commercial doesn’t show much in the way of new footage, especially if you’ve already seen the previously released TV spots, but there is, of course, a new one-liner.

Starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14th.  Hit the jump to watch the new TV spot.

Why is John McClane (Bruce Willis) smiling? Because our sources have informed us that A Good Day to Die Hard is rated R!  This means that McClane and son (Jai Courtney) are about to go apeshit on a bunch of Russian criminals and are free to curse as loud as they want and shed as much blood as possible along the way.  Fans had been a little worried that director John Moore’s picture, the fifth in the Die Hard series, would be rated PG-13 like its predecessor, Live Free or Die Hard.  Rest assured that the new film should look a lot more like the originals if the R rating is any indication.

Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14th.  Hit the jump to watch the most recent trailer for A Good Day to Die Hard. 

Fox has released a new trailer for A Good Day to Die Hard.  Usually at this point, the trailers begin to reveal the basic plot (and some go too far and reveal the whole movie).  However, the fifth Die Hard is a little over a month away, and I still don’t know what the plot is beyond “McClane n’ Son fight bad Russians.”  The Die Hard movies have never been complex, but the villain always has a clear motive, so we know what John McClane is trying to stop.  I think the bad guy in this movie wants nukes or something, but even that seems kind of vague.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The film stars Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yulia Snigir, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anne Vyalitsyna, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14th.

Fox has released the first TV spot for A Good Day to Die Hard.  Like the trailer, the thirty-second commercial features a bunch of quick cuts set to “Ode to Joy.”  It is a nice, distinctive hook for the marketing campaign to keep things fresh for the fifth entry of the Die Hard series that finds John McClane (Bruce Willis) and his CIA operative son (Jai Courtney) teaming up in Russia to stop a nuclear weapons heist.

Sebastian Koch, Yulia Snigir, Cole Hauser, Amaury Nolasco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Anne Vyalitsyna, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead also star in the sequel directed by John Moore.  A Good Day to Die Hard opens February 14, 2013.  Watch the TV spot after the jump. [Update: 20th Century Fox has now released a second TV spot, which is included after the jump.]

It’s almost difficult to remember what a hard-boiled, stripped-down, old-fashioned action-thriller looks like.  We’ve become so reliant on CG for our action and jump-scares for our thrills that we forget solid action-thrillers don’t need to rely on gigantic budgets or creepy mysteries to make an impact.  Jack Reacher is that confident action thriller we’ve been missing.  Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie has created a film that almost feels like a throwback in its confident plotting and attitude.  Furthermore, Tom Cruise once again reminds us that we can never underestimate his acting talent, and while he may not share the physicality of the character in the book, the attitude remains.