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Liam Neeson has starred in plenty of action movie classics, but his underrated 2014 release, A Walk Among the Tombstones, is getting some belated attention as it’s now trending on streaming. Written and directed by Scott Frank, this acclaimed writer has an impressive filmography that includes co-writing scripts for Minority Report, Marley & Me, and Logan.

Liam Neeson reinvented himself as an action star in favorites like Taken and The Grey, hit movies that followed his acclaimed roles in mature dramas such as Schindler’s List and Michael Collins. With A Walk Among the Tombstones standing as a hidden gem in his filmography, it’s great that it’s finally getting the recognition it deserves on streaming.

A Walk Among the Tombstones Is Trending On Paramount+ This 2014 Neo-Noir Thriller Adapted A Novel By Lawrence Block

A Walk Among the Tombstones is an impressive addition to Liam Neeson’s action movie resume,...

Liam Neeson has more than cemented his spot as one of the most legendary action heroes of all time, but more than 10 years ago, the Irish actor featured in a star-studded crime thriller that’s returned to streaming charts. Neeson stars alongside Dan Stevens (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), David Harbour (Thunderbolts*), and Boyd Holbrook (Logan) in A Walk Among the Tombstones, the 2014 psychological thriller following a private eye who is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who murdered his wife. A Walk Among the Tombstones is currently streaming on Paramount+, and it’s one of the most popular movies on the platform, sitting at #8 at the time of writing. The film earned scores of 68% from critics and 53% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and it grossed $58 million at the box office against a $28 million budget.

Ruth Wilson, best known for her role as Alice Morgan in Idris Elba...

Two years before he was the Sheriff of Hawkins, Indiana, in the Netflix hit Stranger Things, David Harbour played a vicious killer in a 2014 Liam Neeson movie that’s now gaining momentum on streaming. The 2014 crime thriller film A Walk Among the Tombstones is in the No. 9 spot on Paramount+’s Top 10 movies in the U.S., per FlixPatrol. As of July 9, A Walk Among the Tombstones is ahead of Norbit (2007) and just behind Mean Girls (2004).

A Walk Among the Tombstones comes from writer-director Scott Frank, who wrote 2017’s Logan.Frank is also the co-creator of the Netflix hit series The Queen’s Gambit. The 2014 movie is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Lawrence Block. In addition to Neeson and Harbour, A Walk Among the Tombstones also stars Dan Stevens,Boyd Holbrook,and Laura Birn (Foundation).

Liam Neeson Stars as a P.I.

Neeson, who is no stranger to the action-thriller genre,...

As much as actor Harrison Ford has cemented his career playing fantastical protagonists — Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Dr. Richard Kimble (to a lesser extent) — the man is no stranger to stepping into the shoes of darker and grittier characters. There is 1986’s The Mosquito Coast and 2000’s What Lies Beneath, which both have him play someone evolving into a twisted and evil person by the movie’s end. More prominently though, 1982’s Blade Runner saw him play a cold and detached police officer who kills androids because of an ignorant social bias. If Ford has already proven that he could play anywhere on the character trait chart, why did he surprisingly bow out of playing private detective Scudder in 2014’s A Walk Among the Tombstones?

In an interview with Daniel Robert Epstein (writing for The Suicide Girls), Scott Frank (the director of the aforementioned movie) says that the Star Wars actor “chickened out.

Set your notifications. Cancel Wednesday night trivia. If you’re old like me, actually get out your red pen and mark your calendar. Seven movies are leaving Netflix this month, and you’ll want to be sure to watch them before they say farewell.

One of them is an Oscar-winning Best Picture. Another, in the eyes of many, should have been. One is a sheer guilty pleasure.

There’s cutting-edge satire, vitally important social commentary, and quite possibly the best film ever made in its particular sub-genre.

Seven movies to stream on Netflix before they leave in March

I will caution you about one thing: with a minor exception or two, these movies tend toward the violent, from the outright physical to the intensely emotional. There are some comic moments to be found and perhaps a tiny bit of offbeat romance, but these are generally high-octane, in-your-face adventures. However – and...

Every month, Netflix is making room for fresh content to entertain its over 300 million subscribers. Unfortunately, this means having to clear out certain titles that may be approaching a licensing agreement expiration. Netflix makes an adamant effort to stay on top of letting viewers know what will be available and unavailable on the platform, but it can be hard to keep track of what's leaving and arriving and when.

Finding a favorite movie or show on streaming can be a pain, and the imposed time constraints of finishing a series can limit enjoyment. Before the opportunity to catch up on a show or see a movie that may have been skipped upon its release is missed, here are the shows that should be at the forefront of the proverbial Netflix watch list.

One Piece Film: Strong World Shouldn’t Be Missed by Anime Fans Leaving March 15

One Piece has skyrocketed...

While Liam Neeson might be into his 70s, he is still going strong, giving fans movies that still weave the same magic. When fans look back at his career, they will be hard pressed to choose which one is the best out of the lot.

Many films will be in the running for the spot. While the likes of Schindler’s List, Taken, or Silence might come to mind, there is a movie that has etched its place in fans’ hearts for many reasons. A Walk Among the Tombstones might be a movie that has the moniker of being flawless.

A Walk Among the Tombstones remains one of Liam Neeson’s most celebrated works to date Liam Neeson was highly praised for his performance in A Walk Among the Tombstones || Image by Karen Seto, licensed under Cc By 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Directed by Scott Frank, the 2014 movie is a crime...

The neo-noir action thriller 8 Million Ways to Die earned just 0% on Rotten Tomatoes despite an accomplished cast led by Jeff Bridges and Rosanna Arquette. The set was notoriously troubled, and, as the script had not been finalized by the time filming began, many of the actors needed to improvise their scenes. The film noir genre often mixes crime and romance, but critics found the pacing uneven, with neither of these plot elements working in a film that offered a dark look at the world of law enforcement.

8 Million Ways to Die was based on a crime book series by Lawrence Block, which featured the unlicensed private detective character, Matthew Scudder. Scudder is an alcoholic ex-cop who left the NYPD and his family after accidentally causing a young girl's death. In 8 Million Ways to Die, Scudder is played by Jeff Bridges, The next Scudder book to be adapted...

The highly anticipated third film in Ti West‘s X trilogy, MaXXXine is finally here, and the fans of the franchise are loving it. With a setting of the 80s when the real-life Night Stalker murders took place, the final film in the X trilogy follows the story of Maxine Minx as she finally gets her big break into the film industry, but when a mysterious serial killer begins to kill the starlets of Hollywood, Maxine’s future in the City of Angels comes into danger. MaXXXine stars Mia Goth in the lead role with Elizabeth Debicki, Halsey, Lily Collins, Sophie Thatcher, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan, Giancarlo Esposito, Chloe Farnworth, and Bobby Cannavale starring in supporting roles. So, if you loved the glitz, glamour, murder, and mystery in MaXXXine, here are some similar movies you could watch next.

Pearl (Prime Video) Credit – A24

Pearl is the second film...

There are a ton of great murder mystery movies available to stream on Netflix right now – including Murder Mystery. Murder mystery movies have always been popular, and the genre has made a comeback in recent years with hits like Knives Out, See How They Run, and Kenneth Branagh’s series of Agatha Christie adaptations. Audiences love a good murder mystery movie because the plot actively involves the audience. In a well-crafted whodunit, the clues are all there for the viewer to solve the case for themselves – and there’s usually a doozy of a twist ending.

The Netflix streaming library has a wide variety of murder mystery movies to offer. There are gritty procedurals about the hunt for a killer, like The Guilty and A Walk Among the Tombstones. There are comedic deconstructions of the whodunit formula, like The Nice Guys, as well as murder mystery movies that mix in other genres,...

Hard Case Crime previously published two of my favorite Stephen King novels—The Colorado Kid and Joyland—so I'm thrilled that they've teamed up with King once again to publish his new book, Later. With the supernatural noir now available in paperback, audio, and digital (ahead of its limited edition hardcover release on March 30th), we've been provided with an excerpt to share with Daily Dead readers!

Click the cover art below to read an excerpt from Later, and to learn more about King's new novel, read the official press release and visit:

https://titanbooks.com/70537-later/

Press Release: Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, will publish Later, a brand-new novel by Stephen King, on March 2, 2021.

Later tells the story of Jamie Conklin, a boy whose unusual abilities could aid his single mom and her police detective lover – but only at a terrible cost.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange is one of the most popular characters in the McU (audiences rated him one of their favorites in post-screening surveys), and while it hasn’t been announced just yet, most assume that Doctor Strange 2 is in the midst of pre-production and is targeting a 2020 release date. But it wasn’t always this way. Back in the hazy days of the 1980s, before Tim Burton’s Batman proved to studios that there was big money in superheroes, Marvel was trying and failing to get their own Doctor Strange film off the ground.

C. Robert Cargill, who co-wrote the McU pic, revealed on Twitter earlier this week about how that went, and about the role the sadly departed Stan Lee played in its pre-production. It seems that multiple screenwriters took a stab at the project, including Larry Cohen, Bob Gale and Lawrence Block. None of them really worked,...

Stan Lee once wrote a script for a Doctor Strange movie and a page from his script his now available online. This comes from screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, who penned the version of the movie that actually got made in 2016. As part of a tribute to Lee following his passing, Cargill shared a page from the script, in addition to a story about the long development process that went into bringing Stephen Strange to the big screen.

A very low-budget movie was made about the Sorcerer Supreme in 1978, but Marvel, a few years later, decided that they wanted to try and do something a little more high-profile. They brought in several writers to take a stab at the script and one of those guys was none other than the characters co-creator, Stan Lee, who birthed Doctor Strange with the late Steve Ditko. C. Robert Cargill explained the long process to...

When Julie Reynolds (played by Lauren Nieuwland) receives an anonymous email promising her a financial windfall if something happens to a stranger, she puts it out of her mind...until she receives an envelope of cash the next day and her world is turned upside down. The film also stars Sofia Amir Asir and Aron Marzetti. It was written by Sara Beinat and Rajiv Whabi, who also directed and produced. The movie is adapted from the 1964 short story “When this Man Dies” by acclaimed American novelist Lawrence Block. Says Block, "I'm delighted to see this early story of mine adapted for the screen—and especially pleased by the skill and sensitivity of the adaptation. It's a treat!" "If Something Happens" will be available to...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Given the title character’s reputation for bending time, perhaps it’s fitting that a decades-old draft for a Doctor Strange movie came back to haunt one of the writers of the 2016 film.

Screenwriter and novelist C. Robert Cargill this week recalls how a complaint from Bob Gale – who worked on the script for an early, unsuccessful attempt at bringing the Sorcerer Supreme to the big screen – brought Cargill into contact with a long, messy history of unrealized scripts and shifting ownership.

I lost an entire Christmas after Doctor Strange came out… A month after the movie goes out I get a phone call. The WGA says, ‘Okay, we’ve got a problem. Bob Gale just contacted us and said that he wrote a draft in 1984 of Doctor Strange and he feels that that was borrowed for this film.’ And I’m like, ‘Wait, Bob Gale as in the guy...

Looking at an imposing Liam Neeson on the poster for A Walk Among the Tombstones, you’d be forgiven for mentally grouping the film with his past action-star endeavors, including Taken, Unknown and Non-Stop. That was certainly the mistake I made. Neeson, all grizzled machismo and barked one-liners, would surely shock and awe as he used his overpowering authority and very particular set of skills to rid the world of some deserving evildoers.

So imagine my surprise when, while watching A Walk Among the Tombstones, I realized that writer-director Scott Frank, adapting a novel by Lawrence Block, had no interest in delivering another Neeson-powered action extravaganza. What he set his sights on, and what he successfully delivers with the film, is something far more ambitious, interesting and enjoyable. A Walk Among the Tombstones is a hard-boiled crime noir, a dark and disturbing detective story set in a brittle, washed-out version of New York.

Did I hear someone say they wanted more awesome contests? Anyone? Well, today, we’ve got you covered, with one of the coolest giveaways in quite some time. With two awesome flicks starring Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens making their Blu-Ray debut this month (The Guest and A Walk Among the Tombstones), we’re teaming up with Universal and Way To Blu for “Danuary,” giving away an awesome prize pack related to both films.

If you’re one of three (3) lucky winners of this contest, you’ll be bringing home all the following swag:

1 Blu-ray combo pack of A Walk Among The Tombstones

1 Blu-ray combo pack of The Guest

1 Guest-themed shot glass

1 copy of the killer soundtrack for The Guest

Both movies are absolutely terrific, the former a hard-boiled crime thriller and the latter a fun and kinetic throwback to the synth-heavy films of John Carpenter, so nothing should stand...

While 1999 may not seem that long ago, there are stylistic differences in fashion and clothing that had to be observed and followed for those working behind the scenes on A Walk Among the Tombstones. Based on Lawrence Block’s best-selling series of mystery novels, the film tells the story of private investigator Matthew Scudder (Liam Neeson), who is hired by drug kingpin Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) to find out who kidnapped and murdered Kristo’s wife. Costume designer Betsy Heimann’s challenge was to design a 1999-inspired look that was also timeless. For Scudder’s character, she created a dark uniform of sorts. “Scudder’s … Continue reading →

The post VOD Spotlight: Behind The Scenes on A Walk Among the Tombstones appeared first on Channel Guide Magazine.

A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson (Non-Stop, The Grey, Taken series) and Dan Stevens (The Guest, “Downton Abbey”) debuts on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack and DVD on January 13, 2015 from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. Based on Lawrence Block’s best-selling series of mystery novels and directed and written by Academy Award-nominated writer Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Minority Report, The Wolverine), A Walk Among the Tombstones is produced by Jersey Films’ Danny DeVito.

In this intense thriller, Liam Neeson plays Matt Scudder, an ex-nypd cop turned unlicensed private investigator who reluctantly agrees to help a drug trafficker (Dan Stevens) hunt down the men who brutally murdered his wife. When the Pi learns that this is not the first time that these men have committed this sort of twisted crime — nor will it be the last — he must blur the line between right and wrong as he races to track the...

CinemaNerdz is proud to offer our readers a chance to win one of five Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Combo copies of A Walk Among the Tombstones starring Liam Neeson and Dan Stevens.

For your chance to win one of the discs, just look for the “giveaway” box further down on this page.

There you’ll be directed to a variety of methods by which you can enter the contest. You’ll be asked to provide a valid email address, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, and Tweet the contest. That’s it! That’s all you have to do to enter. We’ll contact you to let you know if you’ve won one of the prizes. But hurry, because the contest ends at 12:00Am on Friday, January 16th!

About The Film

A Walk Among The Tombstones: Based on Lawrence Block’s bestselling series of mystery novels,...

Though Liam Neeson has propelled many an action thriller to big box office numbers, his gritty noir A Walk Among the Tombstones was not what you’d call a big hit – and that’s a shame, considering that the hard-boiled detective story is a much better movie than Unknown, Taken 2 and Non-Stop added together. Luckily, for those of you who missed it in theaters, Universal Studios Home Entertainment has just announced that it will be bringing A Walk Among the Tombstones to Blu-Ray on January 13th next year.

The Blu-Ray will include a 1080p resolution transfer and a DTS-hd Master Audio 5.1 track. Additionally, a DVD, Uv digital copy and iTunes-compatible digital copy will be included on the release. Special features include:

Matt Sudder: Private Eye – Author Lawrence Block and Screenwriter/Director Scott Frank discuss the complex character of Matt Scudder and how he transforms from page to screen. (Blu-ray...

Universal Pictures

With the recent releases of A Walk Among The Tombstones and The Equalizer, the crime film is as present as ever in our cinemas. Tombstones is a brutal, gritty mystery, seemingly tailor made for Liam Neeson’s brand of tough, haunted heroism. Those who enjoy a taut, page-turning thriller novel will love it (which is appropriate, considering it is based on a series of books by Lawrence Block). The Equalizer satisfies as a more heightened, bombastic crime story, featuring Denzel Washington excelling as an ingeniously badass defender of the downtrodden who takes on the Russian Mob pretty much single-handedly. These films seemingly exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they show just how much room for manoeuvre there is in the crime genre, with potential for many varied types of story to be told.

Many observers and fans of the genre would say that the 1970’s were...

Liam Neeson’s good performance only just elevates the general seen-it-before-ness, including a risible appropriation of women’s pain for men’s redemption. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

I have not read the source material

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

Women’s suffering as a motivation for men to do something adventurously badass features in, oh, about one movie every week; this week’s is The Equalizer. But rarely has that connection — the abuse or murder of a woman or women kickstarting a man’s emotional and spiritual journey — been so explicit as it is in A Walk Among the Tombstones. Novelist Lawrence Block’s ex-cop private eye Matt Scudder, here in Liam Neeson (A Million Ways to Die in the West) mode, doesn’t work for drug-trafficker scum like Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens: The Guest) as a matter of principle,...

Everybody says, bring back those great, gritty 70s adult thrillers. Scott Frank makes one with Liam Neeson in A Walk Among The Tombstones, and not enough people show up to launch it into a franchise. With $13 million in ticket sales so far, it’s $5 million short of what it is needed to trigger more films based on the Matthew Scudder character from Lawrence Block’s mystery novels. I can sit here and wonder if the results would have been better had Universal opened it after Denzel Washington’s turn in The Equalizer this Friday, when appetites will be whetted for challenging adult films and heroes without capes. Or I can point to the squeamishness of some critics who blasted Frank for faithfully adapting a novel about Scudder’s hunt for two serial killers preying on the girlfriends and daughters of drug dealers. It is hard to pretty that up, but one normally smart,...

Final Update, Monday, 2:12 Pm: The fall season is off to a good start, thanks to Fox’s The Maze Runner which opened nicely to $32.5M for the three-day weekend. The next installment of the film, The Maze Runner 2: Scorch Trials, is already set to bow September 18, 2015. While Fox has created another franchise for the industry, Liam Neeson and Universal weren’t so lucky with A Walk Among The Tombstones. The picture didn’t appeal to the female audience — that same demo which helped Non-Stop open to $28.8M earlier this year for the actor. Tombstones ends this weekend with $12.7M. This Is Where I Leave You opened to mediocre numbers after having a less than expected Sunday. It will take in only $11.5M for Warner Bros.

Speaking of franchises, Sony and Denzel Washington hope to launch one next weekend with The Equalizer and those of us who have seen it believe it will happen.

"The challenge is to translate the feel of those novels into something visual, and then from a story standpoint, the moves in these stories are very small," writer/director Scott Frank told us about bringing Lawrence Block's 1992 book "A Walk Among The Tombstones" to the big screen. "...And the challenge is to make those little moves feel big enough that they warrant a movie. Once upon a time you could. In the sixties and seventies and even going back to film noir, the private eye story was very common. But now movies are about spectacle..." And in watching the film this past weekend, you can clearly see Frank's moves to make 'Tombstones' an action movie, while keeping the thematic texture and pulp grit of Block's source material. The film's opening flashback sequence (borrowed from Block's first book in the Scudder series, 1976's "The Sins Of The Fathers") with Liam Neeson...

Chicago – I don’t know about your dad, but mine – love him as I do – isn’t Jason Bourne, James Bond or Bryan Mills. At the age of 62, Liam Neeson somehow still kicks ass as Bryan Mills in “Taken” and fans everywhere love riding every minute of his butt-kicking thrill rides.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

Denzel Washington, Daniel Craig and Matt Damon are certainly a close second for who your fantasy dad would be, but really the winner is Liam Neeson every time. And I don’t just mean for those of us with daddy issues.

Liam would play baseball or My Little Pony with you, teach you wise life lessons, make you laugh and send you on your merry way in life. All the while, he’d be protecting you in the shadows if ever enemies find reason to harm you. He’s scary to bad guys even without a gun as...

On Friday morning, first-time feature director Wes Ball was sweating bullets. His debut film was opening and he was nervous despite the early positive numbers that were already flooding into the box office reporters. “I just don’t want anything to go wrong,” said the young filmmaker in an interview for Entertainment Weekly Radio.

Well, clearly nothing has gone awry with the director’s first entre into feature filmmaking.

For the male-populated young adult adaptation of James Dashner’s best-selling novel The Maze Runner racked up an estimated $32.5 million for a first-place finish, giving Twentieth Century Fox all the necessary...

Writer/director Scott Frank transforms novelist Lawrence Block’s best-selling book into a disturbing suspense thriller with a captivating premise in “A Walk Among the Tombstones.” Liam Neeson stars as Matt Scudder, a troubled former N.Y.P.D. officer turned private detective who is retained by drug trafficker Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) to find the men (David Harbour, Adam […]

The post Scott Frank, A Walk Among The Tombstones Interview appeared first on MoviesOnline.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is a tidy, character-forward procedural offering up Liam Neeson in this year’s second “Liam Neeson movie” working in a more somber, less super-heroic mode than in Non-Stop or the Taken bonanza. A Walk Among the Tombstones finds haunted P.I. Matthew Scudder hunting a couple of sick slashers targeting 1990s New York women in a grim but engrossing dot-connector the likes of which you have certainly seen before, yet is still worth a run due to a well-casted ensemble and the elegant filmmaking of writer/director Scott Frank (he also scripted Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Minority Report) and cinematographer Mihai Malamaire (D.P. on The Master, so that’s enough of a draw for me).

Coming from the raw world of pulp novelist Lawrence Block, the milieu is grim, the violence deeply unpleasant and misogynistic, but A Walk Among the Tombstones works...

Chicago – Liam Neeson still looks good being a badass., but “A Walk Among The Tombstones” is a vehicle unworthy of his particular set of skills. It’s not a tightly constructed thriller like “Non-Stop,” and it lacks the sheer over-the-top ludicrousness of “Taken 2.”

This is largely a by-the-numbers jalopy that can best be called forgettable.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

I can’t fault the premise, though. Neeson stars as Matt Scudder, an unlicensed private dick and former NYPD cop who now operates just on the outskirts of the law. The film opens in the early 90s with Neeson sporting a wig and goatee that look like they came from a Halloween shop. After a shootout with stickup artists in a bar left a civilian casualty, Neeson quits the force. Now he helps those types of characters who would rather not have regular cops sniffing around their affairs.

Flash forward to 1999 (for seemingly...

Although the trailers and other marketing materials being utilized to sell "A Walk Among the Tombstones" will have you believing that it's another run-of-the-mill Liam Neeson thriller, it's not. The movie is intricate and beautifully done, with one of the finer Neeson performances in recent memory, a twisty crime movie plot (based on a Lawrence Block novel of the same name), and nary a superhero in sight. We recently got to chat with Scott Frank, the film's writer/director, who you might know from his long and illustrious resume that includes collaborating with Steven Spielberg ("Minority Report"), Steven Soderbergh ("Out of Sight") and several other people who aren't named Steven (including Jodie Foster, Kenneth Branagh, Barry Sonnenfeld and Aaron Sorkin). He's also one of the most sought after script doctors in Hollywood. During the course of the interview we talked about everything from the pressure of adapting well-known mystery novelists to the.

Another day, another movie with a grizzled Liam Neeson character. Don’t get me wrong, when the material is right Neeson can step into this kind of hard-edged subject matter and gruff his way to the end of the movie with relative ease, but ever since he’s taken on such roles that showcase his Charles-Bronson-in-Death-Wish chops it’s been the details surrounding him that are hit or miss. For every solid outing like Taken there is a goofy misstep like Non-Stop (and for the record, I kind of liked Non-Stop). With A Walk Among the Tombstones, an adaptation of author Lawrence Block’s weirdly enduring Pi character Matthew Scudder, Neeson and the subject matter toe the line between two poles—the gritty and genuinely fearsome ‘70s no-nonsense throwback and bafflingly de-fanged plot points added for misplaced character context.

In a pre-9/11 New York, former NYPD cop and current private...

I’ve been reading Lawrence Block’s New York–set Matthew Scudder detective novels for almost three decades and hoping that some filmmaker would finally nail their distinctive, highly influential vibe, in which the Pi hero meets sadism with grim stoicism but goes all-out to get the bad guys anyway: If it’s in his control to do something, he will — he must — act. Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die missed the essentials (it was set in L.A.!), although it did have its druggy charms. Now the talented writer-director Scott Frank comes awfully close in his adaptation of one of Block’s better novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones. I’d be way more enthusiastic if Frank hadn’t swapped out the book’s horrific, unforgettable ending for something so conventional, I can barely remember it a few days later.The bad guys (David Harbour and Adam David...

A Walk Among the Tombstones, out Friday, has writer-director Scott Frank adapting the 10th novel in Lawrence Block’s long-running, best-selling mystery series. Starring Liam Neeson as unlicensed private investigator Matt Scudder, the film follows what happens when he is hired by a heroin dealer to track down the team who held his wife for ransom, but learns that the crime might not have been an isolated incident. Also featuring Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Boyd Holbrook, Adam David Thompson, Mark Consuelos and Brian "Astro" Bradley, the dark crime thriller from Universal and Cross Creek Pictures is expected to open in the mid-

read more...

After an unsuccessful comedy (A Million Ways To Die In The West) and drama (Third Person), Liam Neeson is back in full Taken (that unexpected 2008 hit that made this greying screen vet a full-fledged action hero) mode. There’s a couple of twists for this go-around. He’s not out to rescue a loved one from kidnappers, but is hired to track down somebody that’s grabbing up victims for ransom. Now like Non-stop from early this year, he’s a haunted fella’ who’s battling the bottle (in the former flick he was still imbibing, while now he’s in full program). But he’s not on a plane or dashing around exotic locales. He’s trudging the gritty, and often soggy, mean streets of Manhattan. Interestingly he’s playing a character we’ve seen on screen before, way back in 1986 it was Jeff Bridges in 8 Million Ways To Die.

After a few quiet weeks, business should pick up substantially this weekend. Three major new releases hit theaters, and young-adult adaptation The Maze Runner will likely finish at the front of the pack.Opening at 3,604 theaters, The Maze Runner is the latest attempt to cash in on the young-adult craze that's led to successful franchises like Twilight, The Hunger Games and Divergent.For every hit, though, there's at least two misses: in the past two years, the young-adult graveyard includes Beautiful Creatures, The Host, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Vampire Academy.Ahead of the weekend, it's pretty clear that The Maze Runner is going to avoid falling in to the latter category. While the existing fanbase is more-or-less on par with other would-be franchises*and much lower than The Hunger Games or Divergent*20th Century Fox has done a good job campaigning to non-readers.Marketing has nicely established the movie's mysterious premise,...

It’s been a busy year for global action star Liam Neeson who delivers a riveting performance in his new suspense thriller, “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” his fifth major film to hit theaters in 2014. The crime drama which opens September 19th was adapted by director Scott Frank from Lawrence Block’s best-selling series of mystery […]

The post Liam Neeson Interview, A Walk Among The Tombstones appeared first on MoviesOnline.

Exclusive: As Universal Pictures prepares for Friday’s opening of the Scott Frank-directed adaptation of the Lawrence Block novel A Walk Among The Tombstones, the studio is courting its star Liam Neeson for another thriller novel it is percolating. It’s Tell No One, the thriller by bestselling novelist Harlan Coben. There is a script by Oscar-winning Argo scribe Chris Terrio, but they are going to do some work before Neeson will officially attach. I hear it’s going to happen, even if it is a little ways away.

While Coben is an accomplished deliverer of page-turner thrillers, he has yet to really hit it in Hollywood. His best outing came on the French version of Tell No One, which was turned into a hit by filmmaker Guillaume Canet. The success of that film led to the Universal deal and Terrio’s writing. Gavin O’Connor has circled the film as director.

Matthew Scudder might not be a familiar to most of us, but to crime fiction obsessives, you might as well be talking about Batman or Superman. Over 35 years, the alcoholic NYPD cop turned private eye has featured in seventeen best-selling novels by genre master Lawrence Block. Though his sole big-screen appearance before now was in almost unrecognizable form, played by Jeff Bridges in Hal Ashby's famously disastrous final movie "8 Million Ways To Die," Scudder may be about to hit the big time, as he hits multiplexes this Friday, embodied by Liam Neeson, in Scott Frank's "A Walk Among The Tombstones." Scudder's walking a beat that many have gone down before. Taking literary detectives and putting them on screen is virtually as old as cinema itself, and movie sleuths have been among some of the medium's most enduring characters. So, with "A Walk Among The Tombstones" hitting theaters, we've...

A Walk Among the Tombstones is not just another Taken-esque movie starring Liam Neeson, even if the marketing may suggest as much. Instead, writer/director Scott Frank (The Lookout) has crafted something of an old school noir based on the best-selling novel by Lawrence Block in which Neeson plays a private investigator on the trail of a pair of demented serial killers who take pleasure in kidnapping and dismembering their female victims. Whyc Because they're just body parts. Neeson plays Matt Scudder, an eight years sober ex-detective turned paid-under-the-table, private investigator. Matt has just been approached by a man (Dan Stevens) whose wife was kidnapped and killed, even though he paid the $400,000 ransom. She isn't the first woman the film's two villains (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) have killed and she isn't likely to be the last as they prey on a specific kind of victim, one that's more likely to pay while,...

This weekend, Liam Neeson puts on the growl and attitude for "A Walk Among The Tombstones," but don't expect another "Taken"-eque romp. Instead, the Scott Frank-directed adaptation of Lawrence Block's novel is a surprisingly morally complex look at an ex-cop hired by drug dealers to find a pair of twisted serial killers. It's often grim, but don't worry, Neeson still whips out his gun and takes care of business when he has to. Indeed, it's been a running theme of his films of late, and thankfully, Universal has released this handy chart to document all his on-screen kills in one place. Ranging from "Darkman" to "The Chronicles Of Narnia" to "Taken," Neeson has traveled around the world, cinematically anyway, putting together a helluva body count. Frankly, it's only a matter of time until someone makes a supercut with all of this data, if there isn't one already.

Set in 1999, writer/director Scott Frank's A Walk Among the Tombstones attempts to capture some of the collective uncertainty and raw fear present just before the completion of the last millennium. Adapting Lawrence Block.s 1992 crime thriller, Frank sets Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-nypd cop haunted by his own past now working as a private investigator. When Scudder agrees to help a heroin trafficker (Stevens) find the men responsible for murdering his wife, Scudder begins to find his own unlikely path towards redemption.

After more than a decade in development, writer/director Scott Frank has succeeded in turning best-selling novelist Lawrence Block’s signature book into a harrowing suspense thriller with an intriguing premise in A Walk Among the Tombstones. Liam Neeson stars as Matt Scudder, a troubled former N.Y.P.D. officer turned private detective whose quest for redemption leads him to help a heroin trafficker (Dan Stevens) track down the men (David Harbour, Adam David Thompson) who brutally murdered his wife. Adapted for the screen by Frank, the crime drama also stars Boyd Holbrook, Brian “Astro” Bradley, Sebastian Roché, Mark Consuelos, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. At the film’s recent press day, Frank talked about how the project first came together, why it took so long to bring to the screen, what convinced Neeson to come on board, casting Stevens into the dark role of a drug trafficker, the pivotal...

"Excalibur" was a formative theatrical experience for me. It was one of the first R-rated films I specifically decided I wanted to see in a theater. I'd seen other R-rated films before that, but always at random and because someone else decided I was going to see it. With "Excalibur," I was crazy to see it, and the film landed on me like a ton of bricks. Surreal, violent, beautiful, explicit, and for a mythology nut, seeing how the film dealt with each of the characters, each of the Arthurian archetypes, I was in love. One of the guys who made an impression in the film was a young Liam Neeson, and for the rest of the '80s, he racked up a number of performances where, good film or bad, he made an impression. How could he not? No one else looked like him. Slightly over eight feet tall,...

Chicago – In the latest HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 25 pairs of advance-screening movie passes up for grabs to the highly anticipated new mystery “A Walk Among the Tombstones” starring Liam Neeson!

“A Walk Among the Tombstones,” which opens on Sept. 19, 2014 and is rated “R,” also stars Dan Stevens, David Harbour, Maurice Compte, Laura Birn, Adam David Thompson, Kim Rosen, Eric Nelsen, Razane Jammal and Al Nazemian from writer and director Scott Frank based on the novel by Lawrence Block. Note: As this film is rated “R,” you must be 17+ to win this Hookup.

To win your free “A Walk Among the Tombstones” passes courtesy of HollywoodChicago.com, just get interactive with our social media widget below. That’s it! This screening is on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. in downtown Chicago. The more social actions you complete, the more points you score and the higher yours odds of winning!

It’s not for nothing that the names of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are reverentially referenced in writer-director Scott Frank’s adaptation of the 10th novel in Lawrence Block’s long-running, best-selling series featuring unlicensed private eye Matthew Scudder. Distinctly and proudly old-fashioned in its retro, film noir vibe, A Walk Among the Tombstones is notable for its dark atmospherics and strong performance by Liam Neeson in the latest example of his unlikely late career transformation into an action hero. Less impressive in terms of plotting and characterizations, the film should have a strong box-office opening, but

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In his fifth major film release this year, Liam Neeson delivers a riveting performance in Scott Frank’s fast-paced thriller, A Walk Among the Tombstones, adapted from Lawrence Block’s best-selling series of mystery novels. Neeson plays Matt Scudder, a disgraced ex-nypd cop turned private investigator operating outside the law who’s approached by a heroin trafficker (Dan Stevens) to find the men (David Harbour, Adam David Thompson) who brutally kidnapped and murdered his wife. Opening September 19th, the crime drama also stars Boyd Holbrook, Brian “Astro” Bradley, Sebastian Roché, Mark Consuelos, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. At the film’s recent press day, Neeson revealed why he’s attracted to these larger than life roles, how he draws his inspiration from cinematic heroes like Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, the appeal of playing a character like Scudder, his research and preparation for the part, what it was like...

Based on Lawrence Block’s bestselling series of mystery novels, A Walk Among The Tombstones stars Liam Neeson as Matt Scudder, an ex-nypd cop who now works as an unlicensed private investigator operating just outside the law. When Scudder reluctantly agrees to help a heroin trafficker (Dan Stevens) hunt down the men who kidnapped and then brutally murdered his wife, the Pi learns that this is not the first time these men have committed this sort of twisted crime…nor will it be the last. Blurring the lines between right and wrong, Scudder races to track the deviants through the backstreets of New York City before they kill again.

Written and directed by Scott Frank (The Lookout), A Walk Among The Tombstones is produced by Jersey Films’ Danny DeVito, Double Feature Films’ Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, Exclusive Media’s Tobin Armbrust and Cross Creek Pictures’ Brian Oliver.

Universal Pictures...

As we look in the rearview mirror of the summer blockbusters, September heralds the start of the fall movie season. Filled with Hollywood heavyweights and A-listers, here’s our Big list of the most anticipated movies coming to cinemas this autumn and during the holidays.

Our exhaustive list includes films that are playing at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival as well the ones that already have a theatrical release date. With the awards season on the horizon, we also added a few bonus films at the end to keep your eye out for in the months ahead.

Pull up a chair, grab a pen and paper and get ready for Wamg’s Guide to the 100+ Films This Fall And Holiday Season.

We kick it off with what’s showing in Toronto at the film festival that runs September 4 – 14.

Maps To The Stars – September 2014 – Toronto International Film Festival; UK & Ireland September...