George Clooney set to direct Coen brothers movie

George Clooney is in talks to direct a 1950s-set noir thriller scripted by the Coen brothers, The Guardian reports, citing Deadline.

Suburbicon, which is thought to be similar to the Coens’ 1985 debut Blood Simple in tone, would be Clooney’s fifth film as director. It’s rumoured that he’ll also take a role, though casting details have yet to be announced.

Clooney has starred in four Coen brothers films: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading and Hail, Caesar!, their new film, which is due out next year. In it, Clooney plays a boneheaded 50s star who is kidnapped by a mysterious cult.

The star’s most recent film as director, The Monuments Men, was about a misfit group of US army soldiers tasked with rescuing artworks from the Nazis during the second world war. It was slated by critics, including the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver, who said it was “filled with unearned patriotic sentiment, sketchy to the point of inanity, and interrupted every few minutes with neurotic self-justification”.

The Coens, meanwhile, have been writers for hire on a number of big projects recently. They scripted Angelina Jolie’s poorly reviewed second world war drama Unbroken, wrote a draft of Steven Spielberg’s cold war thriller Bridge of Spies, originally written by Matt Charman. Bridge of Spies won a five-star review from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who said the film had a “brassy and justified confidence in its own narrative flair”.