The Bookie & The Bruiser | New thriller from Bone Tomahawk director S Craig Zahler announced

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Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete writer-director S Craig Zahler has a new film in the works. The Bookie & The Bruiser will star Vince Vaughn and Adrien Brody.


Ever since he made his eye-catching debut with 2015ā€™s horror western Bone Tomahawk, S Craig Zahler has established himself as a specialist of tense, gritty films about tough men backed into even tougher situations.

Zahlerā€™s latest project, The Bookie & The Bruiser, sounds similarly uncompromising. A period piece set in late 50s New York, itā€™s about two World War II veterans, one Jewish, one Italian, who team up to create an ā€œillicit gambling operationā€. Their new enterprise soon gets them in trouble with Irish gangsters and the Mafia.

According to Variety, Zahler has signed up his regular collaborator Vince Vaughn, who starred in Brawl In Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete (pictured above), to appear in this latest project. Given his stature, itā€™s likely heā€™ll play the Bruiser of the title ā€“ ā€œan oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side.ā€

Vaughn will be joined by Adrien Brody in the other title role ā€“ ā€œa pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivnerā€ who becomes a bookmaker.

Filming on The Bookie & The Bruiser is reportedly set to begin this autumn.

Production company Anton is working with Zahler on the film, and hopes to find distribution for it at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. The CEO of Anton, Sébastien Raybaud, describes The Bookie & The Bruiser as an ā€œaction-packed tale of a searing conflict between the Irish-American and Italian Mafias in New York.ā€

Anton is also financing Fuze, the upcoming thriller from Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie. That oneā€™s set to star the reliably watchable Aaron Taylor-Johnson and is due to begin filming in June.

When he isnā€™t writing and directing movies, Zahler is also a prolific novelist, cartoonist and musician ā€“ the latter taking in a death metal band called Realmbuilder and a synth project called Binary Reptile.

More on The Bookie & The Bruiser as we get it.

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