News: Tommy Lee Jones

Tommy Lee Jones, on good bad guy form in this week’s final film for tip-top director Robert Altman, A Prairie Home Companion, should be back on our screens at some point later this year in the Coen brothers’ next outing, No Country for Old Men. With a plot revolving around the discovery of some dead bodies, drugs and a big pile of cash, here’s hoping it’s a return to form for the duo, whose last couple of outings have been decidedly sub-par, considering the genius of their earlier films. After that, Jones will take the lead as a career military man trying to find out what’s happened to his son, AWOL after returning from Iraq, in the topical and potentially controversial In the Valley of Elah from Crash writer/director Paul Haggis.

News: Paul Haggis

The Oscar-winning writer/director behind the likes of Crash and Casino Royale has teamed up again with Clint Eastwood to script this week’s Flags of Our Fathers, following their previous award-winning success with Million Dollar Baby. He has two projects currently in the pipeline, both of which he will write and direct.

Set for release next year, In the Valley of Elah will tackle the difficulties faced by soldiers returning from service in Iraq, potentially reviving a genre that prompted numerous superb movies – everything from Rambo to Born on the Fourth of July – when the war veterans concerned were returning from Vietnam. Tommy Lee Jones will star as a career officer desperate to find out what has happened to his son, AWOL after serving in Iraq, aided by Charlize Theron’s detective.

After that will come Honeymoon With Harry, a “blackly comic drama” (apparently) about a man who, when his fiancee is killed two days before their wedding, decides to take her father on the honeymoon to scatter her ashes. Even though they hate each other. No actors have yet been attached – but don’t be too surprised if it ends up being renamed “Meet the Maker” and starring Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro as a slightly more morbid sequel to Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers…