In the works: Casting "The Road."

In the works: There's a new cast addition to John Hillcoat's hotly anticipated (at least by us) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" — Charlize Theron has signed on to play the wife, a role that will be kept almost entirely to flashbacks, to Viggo Mortensen's unnamed man escorting his young son through a hellish, post-apocalyptic America. [Variety]

Todd Graff, the writer/director of "Camp," has found a dancin', singin' star for his next film, the similarly themed "Will." "High School Musical"'s Vanessa Hudgens will play a former stutterer who bonds with a high school outcast to form a band. [Hollywood Reporter]

Giuseppe Tornatore, the filmmaker responsible for "Cinema Paradiso" and "The Legend of 1900," will next direct a film about Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese activist who's spent most of the past two decades under house arrest due to her campaigns for democracy. Weirdly, Marvel's Avi Arad will serve as one of the producers:

"At first I thought it wasn't my kind of movie, but then I realized it was. To me, Suu Kyi was like a character from 'X-Men,' except she's a real hero, not an imaginary one -- she didn't need to do what she did, and she gave up a lot to do it."

Arad is determined that "The Lady" be a movie for the broadest possible audience. "There's a real commercial opportunity to tell this story. I don't want to do a biopic like HBO or the BBC would do. We have to find a way of making it bigger than that. It's a love story and a political thriller. If it's not commercially successful, we will have missed the mark," he said. [Variety]

We ain't got nothing at all.

Stephan Elliott, the writer/director of midnight movie favorite "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," will direct Jessica Biel, Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas in an adaptation of Noel Coward's play "Easy Virtue," about an American divorcee who marries a young Englishman, and then is forced to face his disapproving parents. [Hollywood Reporter]

Trailers: There's a trailer for George A. Romero's "Diary of the Dead" up here — the film, which is a sort of reboot of the "Dead" franchise, and which premiered at Toronto a few months ago, has attracted some seriously mixed reviews, but remains one we're really looking forward to seeing at Sundance.

Cillian Murphy plays a video store clerk and Lucy Liu an iteration of that crazy, kooky girl who pops in to bring adventure and love to the life of a repressed movie protagonist in "Watching the Detectives" — trailer's here, and interesting mostly for its peek at Murphy attempting awkwardly to play light.

Acquired: First Independent Pictures has picked up Chen Shi-Zheng's "Dark Matter" for an April release. The film, which premiered at Sundance last year, stars Liu Ye, Aidan Quinn and Meryl Streep and received renewed attention after the Virginia Tech tragedy for its similar themes of violence springing from an academic setting, and, though no one chose to put it so indelicately, its unbalanced Asians. [Hollywood Reporter]

+ Charlize Theron hits 'The Road' (Variety)
+ 'Musical' star fills 'Will' bill (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Tornatore courts a Nobel 'Lady' (Variety)
+ Biel extols 'Virtue' for Endgame (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Trailer: Diary of the Dead (MySpace)
+ Trailer: Watching the Detectives (Peace Arch Releasing)
+ 'Dark' sees light at First Independent (Hollywood Reporter)