Michael Radford (Merchant of Venice) will direct a new version of King Lear with Al Pacino in the title role. “While Pacino has played many Shakespearean characters, he has never played King Lear, the aging monarch who selects his successor by parsing his kingdom in three parts, ruled by his trio of daughters. Two of them are scheming connivers who flatter their father, while the one loving daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play that game and is exiled. The king ultimately loses everything,” Variety reports, without even the courtesy of a spoiler alert.

It’s Barry Levinson’s turn to make a World War II movie. The director “has signed on to helm a $35 million feature version of Anatoly Kuznetsov's WWII classic Babi Yar. Novel is the author's harrowing account of witnessing mass executions of Jews, gypsies, Poles and prisoners of war during the German occupation of Kiev. The title refers to a ravine called Babi Yar where the atrocities took place."

Robert Stone’s 1998 novel Damascus Gate is coming to the screen. The political thriller “is set in a world in which a groundbreaking accord between Palestinians and Israelis is nearly complete when a burned-out journalist comes upon an extremist plot to sabotage the effort,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

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