Since she won't be struggling with her alternate side in a world of Heroes any time soon, Ali Larter is getting Obsessed. Variety reports that she's going to star in Screen Gems' upcoming thriller, along with Beyonce Knowles and Idris Elba. Television director Steve Shill will helm the project, from a script by David Loughery. The latter has penned the likes of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and The Three Musketeers, had a 13-year break after Tom and Huck, and is now back with this and the upcoming Lakeview Terrace.

In the hand that rocks the professional cradle, Elba plays "an asset manager who has a knockout wife (Knowles) and thriving career until a temp office worker (Larter) begins stalking him." What better validation can an actor get? One gets stalked by an attractive woman, and the other gets to be a "knockout." Acting can be so rough!

Screen Gems head Clint Culpepper is said to be "working with Knowles' and Larter's reps to iron out scheduling kinks," but the company is planning to get the film into production this summer.

Remember David Goyer's Jewish-themed thriller that Scott told us about back in February? About the dybhuk -- "an angry, undead spirit that possesses a human being?" The spin was that it would be the dybhuk of a boy who died in Auschwitz, and is now terrorizing a young woman played by Cloverfield's Odette Yustman. Gary Oldman signed on to play a "spiritual specialist" and The OC's Cam Gigandet took the role of the haunted girl's boyfriend. Now, The Hollywood Reporter posts that the film has a name -- Unborn -- and more cast -- Meagan Good (Stomp the Yard), Carla Gugino (Sin City), Jane Alexander (Fur), Idris Elba (American Gangster), and Rhys Coiro (24).

With the players in place, this is how it's breaking down -- Yustman's haunted girl is getting Good as a best friend, Coiro as a college professor, and Gugino as a mother. Meanwhile, Alexander is playing a Holocaust survivor and sister of the slain boy, and Elba will be a priest helping Rabbi Oldman with the exorcisms.

Oldman is enough to have me intrigued, but more in a Hebrew Hammer sort of way -- a down-and-dirty Rabbinical Spiritual Specialist. Dig it? Heck, I'm even itching to see Alexander as the sister. However, a serious Holocaust spook story? I'm not so sure. Eh, we'll see soon enough -- principal photography got underway today.

Maybe it's because I just sat through the lazy, depressing Fred Claus. Maybe it's because I was expecting Tyler Perry in drag. Maybe it's because my holiday spirit is at an all-time low. Whatever the reason, This Christmas came as a complete surprise. I kinda loved the thing.

Loretta Devine plays Ma Dear, the matriarch of a sprawling Los Angeles-based family with a whole lot of secrets. A whole lot. There's Quentin (Idris Elba, Stringer Bell on The Wire -- the best show on television), a musician who owes big money to some bookies. There's Lisa (Regina King), trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage with the hissable Malcome (Laz Alonso). There's Kelli (Sharon Leal), a sexually frustrated businesswoman. There's Claude (Columbus Short), in love with a woman (Jessica Stroup) he's scared to introduce to his family. Ma Dear has a secret of her own regarding Joe (Delroy Lindo), something of a surrogate father to the Whitfield clan. Oh, and Baby (R&B sensation Chris Brown)? He wants to sing, damn it!

That's a lot of stories to keep afloat, and writer/director Preston A. Whitmore II handles that list and many more mini-dramas with ease. It's quite the balancing act. Whitmore has written and/or directed several smaller projects since 1995's Vietnam drama The Walking Dead, but Christmas will put him on the map in a big way.

If I really scour my memory, I can vaguely remember the excitement that Guy Ritchie used to incite with his films. God, it has been seven years since I last went to the theater to see one of his movies -- Snatch. Yet no matter what cinematic pitfalls he has suffered since then, he's got one heck of a cast lined up for his next film -- RocknRolla. Variety has just announced the cast, which consists of Gerard Butler (300), Tom Wilkinson (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Thandie Newton (Crash), Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges (Hustle & Flow) and Idris Elba (The Reaping). (No, surprisingly, there's no Jason Statham anywhere to be seen.) Not only is this cast much better than Madonna, but it's pretty great in its own regard!

Erik Davis first posted about RocknRolla last month, when word hit that Ritchie was writing and directing another feature in the vein of his big successes -- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. The film is about a Russian mobster who coordinates "a crooked land deal, putting millions of dollars up for grabs and attracting all of London's criminal underworld." If this cast is the collection of criminals, this is looking to be a group reminiscent of the pirate kings in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, but with much more recognizable faces. The budget on this puppy is under $20 million, it has already started production and will be done in his classic "fast-paced, low-budget style." Now, will it sweep away that really bad offering and get him back on track as the guru of bad arses, or will Dark Castle Entertainment and Warner Bros. have a stinker on their hands?

On my Prom night, a mixup at the rental shop forced me to wear the tuxedo of a morbidly obese man. I spent the entire evening sweating profusely and praying my pants didn't fall to the ground. That was pretty scary. But I'm sure it has nothing on the upcoming remake of the slasher favorite Prom Night, starring Brittany Snow (John Tucker Must Die) and headed up by TV director Nelson McCormick. We mentioned the remake last month and now someone else has been added to the cast -- British actor Idris Elba. Fans of the mind-blowingly great HBO show The Wire (in a perfect world, this would include everyone), will recognize Elba as the beloved-by-fans Stringer Bell, the man who tried to apply economics classes to the Baltimore drug trade.

Elba's got a lot of projects lined up -- you'll soon be able to see him in the Hilary Swank thriller The Reaping, the horror sequel 28 Weeks Later, and the highly anticipated Denzel Washington/ Russell Crowe flick American Gangster. Elba will play a police detective in Prom Night. The original film was about a group of kids who accidentally kill a child and six years later are stalked by a masked killer at their high school dance. It starred scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis and ... Leslie Nielsen! It's easy to forget that Nielsen was once a dramatic actor. In the summer of 1980, Prom Night was released just a few weeks after comedy classic Airplane!, which must have made it difficult for horror fans to take Nielsen seriously in the role. "A hospital? What is it?" "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."

If you're expecting Daddy's Little Girls, the latest film from writer-director Tyler Perry, to be a broad comedy like Diary of a Mad Black Woman or Madea's Family Reunion, you're in for a big surprise. Perry doesn't get into drag and play Madea in this movie -- in fact, he doesn't appear onscreen at all (unless he had an uncredited cameo where I didn't recognize him). Don't let the brightly colored poster with the cute little girls on it fool you -- this isn't a comedy, either, but is meant to be a drama with a message. Daddy's Little Girls has its funny moments, but overall it's fairly somber from the start. Monty (Idris Elba) is a mechanic who wants to buy the auto shop where he works from soon-to-retire Willie (Louis Gossett, Jr.). His three daughters are primarily cared for by his mother-in-law, who implores him to take over custody so the girls won't fall into the hands of their neglectful mom, Jenny (Tasha Smith), who is living with the neighborhood druglord. The mother-in-law dies from lung cancer early in the film, and Jenny, who hates Monty, takes him to court to gain full custody of her kids just out of spite.

To earn money for a lawyer, Monty is forced to moonlight as a driver for the high-powered and self-centered lawyer Julia (Gabrielle Union), but she fires him after he detours a trip to handle an emergency with his kids. Meanwhile, her friends insist that Julia has to find herself a man, and so she suffers through humiliating (yet comic) blind dates in search of Mr. Right. He needs a good lawyer, she needs a good man ... you get the picture. Daddy's Little Girls never goes for the subtle when it can resort to the obvious. The "bad guys" of the movie are one-dimensional: we don't empathize with ex-wife Jenny in any way, and the film works hard to make her awful in every way. She smokes, she and her boyfriend try to make her oldest daughter sell drugs, and she laughs at the kids when they watch drug-dealing thugs beat up someone. Monty, on the other hand, is shown as almost saintly: he goes to church, he's polite and friendly with all his neighbors, and he truly loves his little girls.