Check out the latest casting news from the following films:

• Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) will join The Normal Heart, Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Tony Award-winning play that stars Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer and Jim Parsons, and will debut on HBO.
• Zach Gilford (The Last Stand) will star opposite Allison Miller (17 Again) in Devil’s Due, the Twentieth Century Fox thriller with found footage elements.
• Abigail Spencer (Cowboys & Aliens) has joined Beautiful Now, an indie drama from writer/director Daniela Amavia that centers on a passionate dancer who asks herself if she likes what she sees when her life flashes before her eyes.

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement.

A new full-length trailer for director Kim Jee-Woon‘s actioner The Last Stand has been released.  The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the old sheriff of a sleepy border town who’s called to action when a drug kingpin flees an FBI prisoner convoy, and tries to make his way to Mexico.  This trailer gives us a better look at the action outside of the border town involving Forest Whitaker‘s law enforcement character and also highlights some of the lighter aspects of the pic.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  The film also stars Eduardo Noriega, Rodrigo Santoro, Johnny Knoxville, Jaimie Alexander, Peter Stormare, Zach Gilford, and Genesis Rodriguez.  The Last Stand opens January 18, 2013.

The first trailer for Kim Jee-Woon‘s The Last Stand has gone online.  Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as the old sheriff of a sleepy border town who’s called to action when a drug kingpin flees an FBI prisoner convoy, and tries to make his way to Mexico.  It’s a good premise for nice little action-thriller, but Schwarzenegger seems totally miscast.  He’s just not really meant for small movies because he’s a big persona.  There’s nothing subdued about him.  So when a huge guy with a thick Austrian accent is wandering around a small town like it’s no big deal, he seems horribly out of place.  Maybe it will work better in context, and I really like the action on display from Kim Jee-Woon.  It’s a nice break from the shaky-cam antics other directors may have brought to the picture.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The film also stars Forest Whitaker, Eduardo Noriega, Rodrigo Santoro, Johnny Knoxville, Jaimie Alexander, Peter Stormare, Zach Gilford, and Genesis Rodriguez.  The Last Stand opens January 18, 2013.

You’ll see a little bit more of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Expendables 2 than you did in the first film, but once The Last Stand rolls in next January, the whole screen belongs to the former Governor.  We previously brought you the first image from the film, but now we’re happy to share an official synopsis and poster.  The actioner from director Ji-woon Kim stars Schwarzenegger as the aging sheriff of a border town, which happens to be the last hope of keeping a drug cartel leader from fleeing the country.  The Last Stand, also starring Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker, Eduardo Noriega, Rodrigo Santoro, Jaimie Alexander, Peter Stormare, Genesis Rodriguez and Zach Gilford, opens January 18th.  Hit the jump for the official synopsis and poster.

We’ve got a trio of TV casting stories to share with you this evening. First up, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the Swedish one) star Michael Nyqvist has landed the villain role in ABC’s drama pilot Zero Hour. The show comes from Prison Break scribe Paul Scheuring and centers on a skeptics magazine editor who is pulled into “one of the most compelling conspiracies in human history.” ER vet Anthony Edwards is set to play the magazine editor, and THR reports that Nyqvist will play one of the villains at the heart of a global conspiracy. He’s a mercenary who shares a special connection to the show’s protagonist.

Nyqvist has already done the “foreign star takes on American villain role” bit in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, but Zero Hour will make his US television series debut. I’m a big fan of Edwards and the premise sounds interesting enough, so it’s safe to say I’m sold on checking out the pilot should ABC pick the show up to series. Hit the jump for casting news concerning Everybody Loves Raymond star Brad Garrett and Friday Night Lights alum Zach Gilford.

The first trailer for In Our Nature has been released in advance of the March 10 premiere at SXSW.  The indie drama features two of our favorite actors from two of the best dramas of the last decade in Mad Men‘s John Slattery and Friday Night Lights‘ Zach Gilford, starring alongside Jena Malone and Gabrielle Union.  Plus, the premise is believable and fraught with potential: Gilford takes his girlfriend (Malone) up to the family country house for a romantic weekend, but runs into his estranged father (Slattery), who shows up with his own young girlfriend (Union).  From there, the trailer fails to separate itself from the pack of indie dramas about troubled families that precede In Our Nature.  (Pretty sure there’s a scene where the two young leads scream their troubles away.)  But trailers typically don’t accomplish that even if the film does, so I remain hopeful for the feature debut of writer/director Brian Salverson.

Hit the jump for the trailer and a few screencaps.

Filming has begun on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback film The Last Stand and the movie has added two more actors to its cast.  Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker and masochist Johnny Knoxville have signed on to Kim Jee-Woon’s crime drama.  Schwarzenegger will play sheriff of a sleepy border town who serves as the last line of defense against a drug cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) headed for the Mexican border.  Harry Dean Stanton, Rodrigo Santoro, and Luis Guzman have also been announced to co-star.

There’s currently no word on who any of the supporting actors other than Noriega will play.  Whitaker recently signed on to star in the voodoo thriller Vipka, and Knoxville will co-star with Patton Oswalt in an untitled comedy from Todd Rohal.   The Last Stand also stars Harry Dean Stanton, Rodrigo Santoro, Luis Guzman, Zach Gilford, and Jaimie Alexander.  Hit the jump for the press release, which includes the full synopsis.

Hey gang: Who’s up for another Dane Cook departure into serious acting? Well, you’re getting one anyway. The trailer for Answers To Nothing, the popular comic’s latest venture outside Good Luck Chuck territory, has been released. Set in Los Angeles, the film is a sombre ensemble drama about an unrelated (or so you think!) array of people “trying to do the right thing.” Cook plays a man conflicted about cheating on his wife with a cool rocker chick, while the search for a missing child and a seemingly very distraught beat cop also factor into things. Based on the trailer, it comes off a bit like a darker, less cohesive Crash.

Directed and co-written by Matthew Leutwyler (Dead and Breakfast, or more recently The River Why), the pic features a solid group of mostly TV thesps, including Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost) as Cook’s wife, Barbara Hershey (Black Swan) as Cook’s mother, Julie Benz (Dexter) as a police detective, and Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) as someone who doesn’t appear to be in the trailer. Distributed by Roadside Attractions, Answers to Nothing will begin a limited theatrical run on December 2. Hit the jump to check out the trailer.

We have a couple quick casting stories to report.  First up, Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) has joined Arnold Schwarzenegger comeback’s film The Last Stand.  Directed by Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil), The Last Stand “centers on a disgraced LAPD cop who is now the sheriff of a sleepy border town. When a drug kingpin is headed for Mexico with a hostage and entourage in tow, the sheriff is the only thing that stands between him and freedom across the border.”  Deadline has no details on Gilford’s character but reports that shooting is just getting underway in Albuquerque.  Gilford’s a solid actor who had a tendency to get overshadowed by his FNL co-stars, but he’s a quality addition to any cast.

The Last Stand is due out January 18, 2013.  Hit the jump for casting news for Stuart Blumberg’s Thanks for Sharing.

Sam Trammell (True Blood) has joined the cast of Long Time Gone, the directorial debut of Precious producer Sarah Siegel-Magness.  The story centers on “a broken family who must cope when Gordie Iris (Anthony LaPaglia) leaves his wife, Augusta (played by Virginia Madsen), for another woman.”  Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) and newcomer Graham Rogers play the two sons who have no idea how to comfort their despondent mother until Amanda Crew (Charlie St. Cloud) steps in.

Karen McCullah (The Ugly Truth) adapted the screenplay from the April Stevens novel Angel, Angel.  The independent production will continue to shoot around Los Angeles through the end of October.  Read the official press release after the jump.

Friday Night Lights has proven to be the Little Engine that Could. The show recently finished airing its fourth season and a fifth is on the way in October.  The upcoming season will be its last, but the fact that the show has pushed on for so long, despite its lack of success with ratings, seems to say something about its quality.  The fourth season was just released on DVD and you can check out my full review of it after the jump:

Around this time every year, all the networks start to cast their pilots.  While you may think every show that gets developed ends up on the air, you’d be mistaken.  The odds of creating a show that actually makes it is very small, and to become a hit show, it’s like winning the lottery.  To try and raise the odds of a successful crop of new shows, the networks develop many pilots.  In fact, the number is often two or three times what they actually need.  That way they can pick the best of the bunch, and the rest are usually never seen or heard from again.  Again, even if you hear about a pilot, it doesn’t mean you’ll ever see it.

Saying that, a number of actors (Daniel Dae Kim Cast, Michael Chiklis, Jason Ritter, Zach Gilford, Aisha Hinds, Todd Williams) have recently been cast in pilots that are about to shoot.  Hit the jump for details on what shows they landed on:

It seems a little unfair to rip into a movie like “Post Grad”.  I don’t mind doing it with a movie like “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” because it comes from strong source material, has solid actors, and cost a $150 million to make so a failure is not only a disappointment but a little offensive.  But “Post Grad” is so insipid, so in love with its empty characters, barely able to understand its own premise, and comes to such sickening conclusions, I can’t let it pass.  When the only way to survive it is to wonder how the next scene will be worse than the one that came before, I feel justified in ripping the film apart since it ripped apart my soul for what felt like an eternity.  I can’t understand why Fox Searchlight didn’t dump this straight to DVD and now it’s gonna be taking up 1,958 screens this weekend and wasting the time of those foolish enough to pay a ticket because they thought the movie looked kind of cute judging from the standee in the lobby.

When last we saw the cast of “Friday Night Lights,” they were suffering from a particularly brutal version of the sophomore jinx. Barely renewed for a second season after a low-rated (but critically praised) initial run, “FNL” added “bad timing” to its list of problems upon its return; thanks to the 2007-08 writers’ strike, production halted after 15 episodes, and despite the fact that the show was one of the only scripted series on NBC’s schedule during the strike, it continued to languish in the lower reaches of the Nielsens. The closing moments of the season’s final episode – which saw the Dillon Panthers on the verge of the playoffs, and star running back Brian “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles) dealing with the aftermath of a brawl that cost him a scholarship – seemed likely to wind up going down as a terribly unsatisfying conclusion to a series that never had a chance to really hit its stride.