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Exclusive: Rob Minkoff (The Lion King) is set to direct Tenor by Night, a live-action comedy musical fantasy based on the Chinese-themed stage musical of the same name, created and produced by James Chiao.

Written by Peter Barsocchini (High School Musical franchise), the film is described as a whimsical, cross-cultural comedy about a Chinese American businessman who gives up his dreams of becoming a world-famous singer to build a successful mannequin business to support his family. Through a series of magical misadventures, a group of mannequins are brought to life which leads to a second chance to fulfill his dreams.

The project is believed to be the first Chinese-themed musical coming up for production in Hollywood since Flower Drum Song in 1961. Hope is for it to draft on the success of such recent Chinese American-themed box office hits as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crazy Rich Asians. Casting for the pic is now underway.

Paul Mescal has clocked his first Olivier Award nomination for his leading performance in Rebecca Frecknall’s buzzy stage adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Scroll down for the full list of nominees.

A Streetcar Named Desire netted six nominations overall, which also included first-time nods for Mescal’s co-stars Anjana Vasan and Patsy Ferran.

In other high-profile nods, Jodie Comer is nominated for Best Actress for her West End debut in the well-received Prima Facie, which has five nominations overall, including Best New Play and Best Director.

David Tennant is in Best Actor for his updated production of C.P. Taylor’s 1989 play Good, and Tom Hollander landed a nom for Patriots, Peter Morgan’s new play set during the fall of the Soviet Union, which is nominated in three categories.

This year’s most nominated production is My Neighbour Totoro, the stage adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s cult 1988 animated film.

No actor has ever looked less comfortable in a Nazi uniform than Viggo Mortensen does in this tepid morality play (based on the stage play by C.P. Taylor) about ethics, wisdom, and how readily some otherwise intelligent and upright people can dispose of them. Good thing it’s thematically appropriate that Mortensen’s John Halder is uneasy wearing the swastika -- too bad the moment when the mild-mannered literature professor of 1930s Germany dons the uniform for the first time, near the end of the film, is one of the few moments of real feeling to be found here. The film lets Halder, the epitome of the “good” people who do nothing and so allow evil to thrive, travel from “Hitler is a joke, he’ll never last” to “I never thought it would come to this” with a docility that should underline the effortlessness with which men like Halder...

Stories set in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party appeal to dramatists for obvious reasons. In hindsight, the Nazi menace seems so blatant, yet something in what Adolf Hitler espoused persuaded a significant number of Germans, which makes any look back at the era into a study of mob mentality, and—if handled right—an insight into where we could be headed. In Good, Vicente Amorim directs John Wrathall's adaptation of C.P. Taylor's play about a meek literature professor (here played by Viggo Mortensen) who reluctantly joins the Nazi party in order to advance his career and placate his family. The Nazis are interested in a novel Mortensen wrote—partly inspired by the burden of dealing with his mother's dementia—that seems to argue for the concept of mercy killing. They ask him to draft a paper that will offer a moral justification for human extermination,...

By Aaron Hillis

Poet. Painter. Photographer. Political activist. Man of the world. Sure, the first sight of actor Viggo Mortensen's cleft chin may instantly recall a marauding horde of Orcs or a naked knifefight in a Russian bathhouse, but he's too smart and impassioned an artist to be written off as just another Hollywood leading man. His latest film is "Good," directed by Vicente Amorim and based on the C.P. Taylor play of the same name. Set in 1933 Germany, the film finds Mortensen plays liberal Berlin professor John Halder, a reasonable yet silent detractor of the upswing of national socialism, who finds himself unwittingly swept up by the Nazi party after writing a novel about assisted suicide that becomes a Führer fave. I sat down with Mortensen before the holidays to gab about the film, traveling and contemporary politics -- about which he has wonderfully fervent opinions.

"Good" is...

Hollywood hasn't had to resort to any post-Christmas half-off sales.

Holiday releases -- ranging from warm puppy "Marley & Me" to kid-friendly "Bedtime Stories" to the luxe backward-running romance "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- attracted a stampede to the multiplex last weekend.

So the studios will ring out 2008 on the strength of their current year-end lineup as the industry heads toward another record-setting domestic gross.

With the coming New Year's holiday weekend serving as an opportunity for moviegoers to catch up with the film glut, including the awards-hopefuls still in limited release, no new wide openers will flood the already overcrowded theaters.

Instead, Paramount Vantage will launch exclusive runs of its World War II drama "Defiance" while ThinkFilm follows suit with its Nazi-era drama "Good."

Directed by Ed Zwick, who also penned the screenplay with Clayton Frohman, the R-rated "Defiance" is as much action picture as it is art house offering.

By Neil Pedley

After the feast of holiday offerings, there's but a meager smattering on offer for a New Year nibble. This week brings two brand spanking new holocaust movies for anyone who still has the stomach (after the other four released in past weeks) or as a tasty alternative you can enjoy some bloody murder in the former Soviet Union or some bloody murder right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. You decide.

"Angel's Blade"

Depending on your tolerance for ultra low-budget horror, writer/director Robert Stock's debut feature will either delight with its copious amounts of corn syrup-enhanced gore or look like someone had a camcorder out during an intense Halloween-themed session of Larp. Inspired by a supernatural encounter that spooked his infant son while idling on a lonely road one night, Stock was inspired to create this dark legend involving a young girl's spirit haunting the backwoods,...

Viggo Mortensen in Good

Photo: THINKFilm Good, for all intents and purposes, is a well made film, but it unfortunately must deal with the fact that it is just one of several World War II films this year and the fact that it also bears a similar resemblance to a far more engaging feature hitting cinemas at the same time, The Reader, does not work in its favor. The film hides behind its title, which sticks with you throughout, telling the audience those with even the best intentions were not immune from becoming involved in the atrocities Adolf Hitler bestowed on the world prior to and during World War II. Set in the 1930s, the story centers on John Halder (Viggo Mortenson), a literary professor whose name has attracted the attention of Hitler after a work of fiction he penned four years earlier advocating compassionate euthanasia. The topic is something...

By Nick Schager

The Holocaust is a serious subject. And November and December is serious subject matter time in Hollywood. No surprise, then, that every awards season sees its fair share of dramas set in and around WWII concentration camps. But even in light of this predictable pattern, 2008 has, to put it diplomatically, lost its freakin' mind. In the last two months of this year, there will have been six -- Six?!? -- films released that, in one way or another, deal with Nazis. Part of the problem is simply quality, as all of these releases barely rise to the level of mediocre. Yet the issue of quantity seems just as troubling, as their basic, simultaneous existence calls into question not only the continuing viability of extracting drama from this most momentous (and, consequently, well-trod) of historical tragedies, but also, fundamentally, the growing absence of originality or ingenuity in mainstream cinema,...

A new trailer has emerged today for Good, a new film starring Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs which based on a popular London play by C.P. Taylor that opened in 1999. John Halder, Viggo Mortensen, is a professor, a "good" man with a wife and children. His best friend, Maurice, Jason ...

I saw Anne Thompson's Variety article about Viggo Mortensen's incredibly promising fall slate of films. Two of his new movies will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival within the next few weeks, and the third, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, will be released in November.

The first of Viggo's two Toronto films is Appaloosa, a western co-starring and directed by Ed Harris, Viggo's co-star in A History of Violence. They're on the same side of the law in this one, and having already seen the film, I can tell you that Mortensen and bad guy Jeremy Irons are the highlights for me. The cinematography's good, but I think a lot of its impact is due to the impeccably chosen locations. That film will be released on October 3rd.

There are tons of images over at IGN for the western, but here are a couple to...