LOS ANGELES, Jan 18 — Distributor Fox Searchlight has announced a May 10 US release date for Tolkien, its biographical film about the high school years of South African-born British author J. R. R. Tolkien.
Tolkien’s school friendships, his romance with eventual wife Edith Bratt, and his World War I experiences all informed the Oxford University professor’s outlook and writing.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have more recently enjoyed a surge in popularity through the enormous critical and box office successes of six related films released between 2001 and 2014.
The Tolkien film stars Nicholas Hoult of the X-Men movies, a British actor who previously played US writer J. D. Salinger in 2017 Rebel in the Rye.
Fellow Brit Lily Collins of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Okja plays Edith, with the further involvement of Genevieve O’Reilly (Mon Mothma, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), Mimi Keene (Sex Education), Derek Jacobi (Gladiator, Murder on the Orient Express), Pam Ferris (Queen Victoria, Holmes & Watson) and Colm Meaney (Con Air, Star Trek: DS9).
The film was written by Stephen Beresford (Pride) and David Gleeson, and directed by Finland’s Dome Karukoski, whose previous films Heart of a Lion, Forbidden Fruit, Lapland Odyssey, and Tom of Finland have been well received in his homeland and abroad, the latter two featuring a measure of English and otherwise non-Finnish language dialogue. — AFP-Relaxnews
