Some casting news for you today.  Check out the info in brief below:

• Clive Owen (Children of Men) will team up with The Sitter writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka for their directorial debut comedy, The King of the Castle.
• Patrick Wilson (Insidious) and Liv Tyler (Armageddon) join an ensemble cast in the sci-fi dramatic comedy, Space Station 76, written and directed by Jack Plotnick.
• Caleb Landry Jones (X-Men: First Class) will join the Canadian French-language indie, Tom a la Ferme, from director/star Xavier Dolan (Laurence Anyways).

Hit the jump for more on each picture. 

[This is a re-post of my review from the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.  Robot & Frank opens in limited release today.]

Not even ornery old men can resist the lure of a special robot friend. Robot & Frank‘s hook is in its title, but it goes beyond what could have been the premise for a weekly sitcom. Instead, the film puts together a strong juxtaposition between a man who’s started to forget everything and a robot who can remember anything. It’s a familiar story about memory being tied to personality, but Robot & Frank throws in the importance of teaching and passion as a way to keep remembering (if only for a little while longer). With the exception of a confused epilogue, director Jake Schreier and screenwriter and Christopher D. Ford have managed to build a warm, funny, and charming movie around a thoughtful premise.

The first trailer for the indie comedy Robot and Frank has been released.  The buddy comedy stars Frank Langella as a retired jewel thief who seeks to resume his criminal ways with the help of a companion robot, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard.  Steve and Matt caught the film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and both of them thought it was great (you can read Matt’s review here).  The trailer definitely seems sweet and warm-hearted, but I wonder if they’ve revealed too much of the plot.  I sincerely hope that’s not the case, as the premise sounds neat and I’m eager to experience the film for myself.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  You can read Steve’s interviews with director Jake Schreier and screenwriter Christopher D. Ford, as well as Langella himself.  The film also stars Susan Sarandon, James Marsden, and Liv Tyler.  Robot and Frank opens on August 24th.

Two new posters have arrived for a pair of September releases that I’m really looking forward to. First up is a new poster for The Words, a romantic drama from debut directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal that stars Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana and Jeremy Irons. Cooper plays a young writer who passes off another author’s work as his own and deals with the consequences that inevitably arise. The Words opens September 7th. 

A second poster comes to us today for director Jake Schreier’s Robot and Frank.  The buddy comedy stars Frank Langella as a retired jewel thief who seeks to resume his criminal ways with the help of a companion robot, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard.  Robot and Frank opens August 24th.  Hit the jump to check out the new posters.

We’ve got some shuffling of release dates for two Warner Bros. distributions and a new release date for one of our favorite films from this year’s Sundance.  Here’s a glance:

• Warner Bros. pushes back The Seventh Son from February 15th, 2013 to October 18th, 2013.
• Another Warner Bros. film, Beautiful Creatures, has taken Seventh Son’s place by moving back two weeks to open on February 15th, 2013.
• Starring Frank Langella, James Marsden, Liv Tyler, Susan Sarandon and a robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), Robot and Frank will open on August 24th of this year.

Hit the jump for more on each film.

Not even ornery old men can resist the lure of a special robot friend.  Robot & Frank‘s hook is in its title, but it goes beyond what could have been the premise for a weekly sitcom.  Instead, the film puts together a strong juxtaposition between a man who’s started to forget everything and a robot who can remember anything.  It’s a familiar story about memory being tied to personality, but Robot & Frank throws in the importance of teaching and passion as a way to keep remembering (if only for a little while longer).  With the exception of a confused epilogue, director Jake Schreier and screenwriter and Christopher D. Ford have managed to build a warm, funny, and charming movie around a thoughtful premise.

From Sundance 2012, Robot and Frank, was recently acquired by a partnership between Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions and Samuel Goldwyn Films. The festival (and Collider) favorite stars Frank Langella, James Marsden and Liv Tyler in a near-future buddy comedy about an elderly ex-jewel thief (Langella) and his companion robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard). Steve loved Robot and Frank and will soon be posting exclusive interviews with director Jake Schreier, writer Christopher D. Ford and Langella himself. Hit the jump to check out the press release.

Writer-director Ti West (The Innkeepers) has found the star of his next project. Deadline reports that Liv Tyler will star in the psychological sci-fi thriller The Side Effect. The horror story centers on “a woman who spends several months alone in space as an experimental subject for a global pharmaceutical company, and finds herself inexplicably pregnant.” So it’s kind of like Moon, but with the added terrors of ghost reproduction. Though the film is still in the horror genre, West insists that it’s fairly different from his previous films as it focuses more on the psychological.

I’d expect a title change on The Side Effect, as Steven Soderbergh is gearing up to shoot a film called The Side Effects. West will be at Sundance next week to debut the found-footage horror film V/H/S which he co-directed. If you’re unfamiliar, his earlier works include The House of the Devil and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. Tyler will also be in attendance at Sundance with her latest effort Robot and Frank.

A number of actors have signed on for the family comedy Robot and Frank. Liev Schreiber, Liv Tyler, James Marsden, and Jeremy Strong join previously announced Susan Sarandon and Frank Langella in the Jake Schreier-directed indie. The comedy marks Schreier’s feature directorial debut. The script, by Christopher Ford, is set in the future and centers on an aging curmudgeon (Langella) whose kids (Marsden and Tyler) give him a caretaker robot (voiced by Schreiber), sparking an unlikely friendship with the lonely man. Sarandon plays a librarian who serves as Langella’s only friend.

Hit the jump to read the full press release. The film is currently shooting in New York.

New posters have been released for the Sundance films Buck, The Art of Getting By (formerly titled Homework), and The Ledge.  There’s also a new poster for the Anna Faris romantic comedy What’s Your Number?  Hit the jump to check out the posters along with a synopsis for each film and its release date.

The theatrical trailer for writer/director Matthew Chapman’s The Ledge has landed online. Starring Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson, Charlie Hunnam, and Terrence Howard, the thriller screened at Sundance earlier this year and takes place as a man (Hunnam) threatens to jump from the ledge of a building. As the story goes, it becomes clear that the threat stems from a romantic and ideological dispute between Hunnam and Wilson’s characters.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer for yourself. For my part, I think the cut gives away a little too much regarding Hunnam’s purpose on the ledge. Nevertheless, the film looks to have plenty of drama and Wilson seems to be in a similarly crazy role to his turn in 2005′s Hard Candy (which I see as a plus). The Ledge is scheduled to hit theaters stateside on June 29th.

With director James Gunn’s superhero flick Super playing in limited release and VOD, I recently got to sit down with Liv Tyler to talk about how she got involved with the project.  As you might expect from Gunn (Slither, PG-Porn), Super is violent, twisted, and darkly comic.  I had a lot of fun watching it.

During the very fun interview, Tyler talked about how she got involved with the project, did she sign on to be higher up on the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scale, what her’s karaoke song (which led to her singing Whitesnake!), and what’s up with The Strangers 2 and The Hobbit.  While some actors are guarded with their answers, I have to give it to Tyler, she was a great interview. Hit the jump to watch.

With director James Gunn’s Super opening April 1, I was able to sit down with most of the cast this morning to talk about the film.  Next week I’ll be posting the full interviews, but I wanted to get what Liv Tyler said about The Strangers 2 and The Hobbit online today.

As some of you are aware, the first Strangers was made for under $10 million and it went on to make over $80 million at the worldwide box office.  With that kind of success, it’s no surprise that Rogue Pictures has been talking about making a sequel.  Early reports pegged Liv Tyler returning and that filming could begin this year.  However, Tyler told me, “I don’t know anything about…they’ve been talking about it forever and I know there is a screenplay that Bryan Bertino wrote which I’ve read part of but not the whole…I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen.  Bryan is not directing it and I’m not really in it.  I’d have to decide, but it’s not about me.”

Regarding The Hobbit, with a number of original cast members coming back, and yesterday’s press release saying that more cast members would be announced, I wondered if we might see Arwen (Tyler’s character in Lord of the Rings) return for even a few moments in either Hobbit film.  According to Tyler, “I haven’t heard from anybody.”  She also didn’t know that filming began today.  More after the jump.

A lot of online folks have been giving James Gunn’s Super a hard time because of its obvious similarities to Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass.  It’s true that Gunn’s film– which stars Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, and a hilarious Kevin Bacon– share more than a few passing similarities, but Super only improves upon the “real-life superhero” sub-genre that Kick-Ass mined so well last year.  What has Gunn done to improve the formula?  Find out after the break.

IFC has released a trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming superhero flick Super.  I like that the trailer has to animate over the language and violence in order to make it viewable for all-ages.  It’s a James Gunn movie and it’s best to expect something violent, twisted, and darkly comic.  Super looks like it’s going to deliver on all three counts and that makes me very excited to see this flick.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  Super stars Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, and Nathan Fillion.  It opens April 1st.