News: Forest Whitaker

Whitaker’s been picking up awards and nominations left, right and centre for his turn as Ugandan dictaor Idi Amin in this week’s The Last King of Scotland, so far cleaning up for Best Actor with many of the US Critics’ awards.

Unsurprisingly, given all the praise, he’s got a fair few more – typically varied – projects in the works, from animated baseball family comedy Everyone’s Hero (the last directorial effort of former Superman Christopher Reeve) to a return to the world of fashion that he last visited in Pret a Porter for the drama Ripple Effect, about a fashion designer going through a crisis of confidence.

Then there’s more typically quirky, Indy-fick Whitaker fare, like The Air That I Breathe, based on an old Chinese proverb and starring Kevin Bacon as “Love”, Brendan Fraser as “Pleasure” and Sarah Michelle Gellar as “Sorrow” – Whitaker will play “Happiness”. Or perhaps another big budget potential blockbuster, like Vantage Point, a thriller about an attempted assassination of the American President told from five different perspectives (in a deliberate attempt to mimick the classic Kurasawa pic Rashomon).

Most worth looking forward to, though, is the next outing from screwball director Spike Jonze – Where the Wild Things Are. Based on the popular children’s story about a young boy who creates his own forest world inhabited by fabulous creatures, if they can get the animation right, this could prove to be something very special indeed. If you know the books, Whitaker will be voicing Wild Thing – which could well work very nicely.

News: Sophie Okonedo

Since her turn in 2004’s Oscar-winning Hotel Rwanda,up and coming British acretress Okoned’s career has been going from strength to strength. After this week’s Scenes of a Sexual Nature, she will barely be off our screens for the next year, with four films and two TV projects coming up – including in the BBC’s revival of the popular children’s storytelling show Jackanory from January.

On the big screen, she’ll be cropping up alongside siblings John and Joan Cusack in The Martian Child before acting as the love interest for two very different stars – rapper Mos Def in the 1970s period piece Stringbean and Marcus, and Matthew Broderick in inter-racial dating drama Wonderful World – before taking on the action thriller genre alongside Kevin Bacon (somewhat implausibly stepping into the shoes of original star Vin Diesel) in Black Water Transit.

News: Sarah Michelle Gellar

Despite her top-notch turn in the modernised Dangerous Liaisons that was Cruel Intentions back in 1999, and money-making roles in the two live-action Scooby-Doo flicks, Gellar’s career has hardly boomed since her fame-making TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended three years ago. Nonetheless, she has been a bit of a workaholic, with four movies already completed or in post-production, and two more in the pipeline.

First up, due out in January, is yet another horror flick, The Return, where Gellar’s nightmares lead her on a quest to solve a 15-year-old murder. She is also set to challenge our gag reflexes in an entirely different way in The Girls’ Guide to Hunting & Fishing, where she’ll play a young woman enters a romance with an older man – played by Alec Baldwin, of all people.

More promising sounds The Air That I Breathe, an experimental drama based on an ancient Chinese proverb, where she will play “Sorrow” alongside Kevin Bacon’s “Love”, Brendan Fraser’s “Pleasure” and Forest Whitacker’s “Happiness”. The one that could really make it for her, however, is Alice. Due for release in America in July next year, Gellar plays a grown-up version of the Alice from Lewis Carrol’s beloved novels, who returns to Wonderland following an emotional breakdown.