First Clip from Fox Searchlight's 'Never Let Me Go'

Here's the first clip from Never Let Me Go, which teams the new Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, with two of England's best young actresses, Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley. It's also Mark Romanek's first film in about a decade, since One Hour Photo.

The film is an adaptaton of the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which in 2005 was named among the 100 best novels since 1923 by Time, the magazine that also proclaimed it the year's best book. Ishiguro also wrote The Remains of the Day. Though you wouldn't know it to watch this clip, there's a big sci-fi element to the story; in a dystopian Britain, human cloning for orgran transplants has become commonplace, and the three students were bred to be donors and nothing more. I would suspect that's still in the film, but as I said, you can't place it here. British press has already seen the filmand has been very supportive of it so far. We'll find out whether or not Fox Searchlight has another awards season player when Never Let Me Go opens in two weeks.

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Searchlight Sets Dates for '127 Hours' and 'Black Swan'

Fox Searchlight has become an awards season leader over the past few years and while I don't expect this is the last we've heard from the boutique studio between now and then - there are still the films at the Toronto Film Fest to weed through - Searchlight has locked in two of its big candidates.

Chronologically, the first is 127 Hours, the bio-pic of mountaineer Aron Ralston, who severed his own arm to free himself from between two rocks. James Franco plays Ralston and the film is directed by Danny Boyle. Two years ago, Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire was a grand slam for Searchlight, and that combination is back on November 5th. The next film on the docket is Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. Swan will debut at the Venice Film Festival and the high-minded, artistic branch of of Fox will open the film on December 1st.

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Carey Mulligan to Star in Searchlight's 'Stoker'

Carey Mulligan has the world in front of her and thanks to an Oscar-nominated turn in An Education (one that was clearly better than the performance that won the Academy Award), she's going to keep attracting plenty of attention. She's supposed to play Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I'm not sure that's set in stone just yet. However, she does have another film with a big name director already lined up.

The Los Angeles Times informs us that Mulligan will go in front of the camera for Stoker, which has also caught the eye of Jodie Foster. Jodie should work more. Anyway, the film will at least be produced by Tony Scott and Ridley Scott, and there are those who think one of those cats might direct, as well. Now, the first of two very weird add-ons here is that Stoker would come from Fox Searchlight, and Scott Free is not exactly known for its boutique fare. Having said that, they did partner with Searchlight for Cyrus, and it doesn't get too much further off Hollywood's well-worn path than the Duplass brothers.

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Fox Searchlight Already Folding 'Gentlemen Broncos'?

Updated on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 3:03PM by Get The Big Picture

I don't want to speak too soon, but what the hell has happened to Fox Searchlight this year? It started out well enough, with Notorious becoming a surprise hit. There was also (500) Days of Summer, which will likely emerge as the studio's big awards charge at the end of the year. And we don't know what will happen with Fantastic Mr. Fox quite yet.

But check out the rest of the line-up: Miss March, bomb. Post Grad, bomb. Adam, $2 million in almost four months. Whip It, troubling returns that should have been much greater. Amelia, won't make money and it won't get any nominations, which is the reason it was made. But Gentlemen Broncos, featuring Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and directed by Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess, might be the biggest loser of them all. And Searchlight knows it. The movie only made $11,000 this past weekend in two theaters, and received very bad reviews overall. As a consequence, I received the following note from the studio: "Fox Searchlight’s Gentlemen Broncos will not be opening in your market. There is no longer an opening date for this film."

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Danny Boyle Signs Three-Year Deal with Searchlight

Fox Searchlight did not become the new standard for lower budget Oscar bait by accident. It is a well run boutique studio that has placed a film in the Best Picture race in four of the last five years, winning the highest award in film for Slumdog Millionaire.

Now Fox Searchlight has locked up the director of Slumdog, Danny Boyle, for a three-year deal, a production agreement that also includes Pathe Pictures. So Boyle will now have whatever projects he chooses to do in the next three years co-financed by the two studios, which, as you can imagine, is a good thing for a director like Boyle who prefers to work a little outside the mainstream. We recently reported that Boyle was looking at adapting Maximum City, a critical sort of non-fiction guide to Mumbai that he used to fill in the gaps while working on Slumdog, but The Los Angeles Times says he might also make a gritty bio-pic about mountain climber Aron Ralston, who got pinned by a rock in 2003 and amputated part of his own arm so he could escape.

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