Maybe you’ve seen photos of recent public appearances by actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto and wondered why they’re both so emaciated. The answer is "for their craft." Both men will play AIDS patients in Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee’s (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria) next project, The Dallas Buyers Club, a movie set in the mid-1980s, the bad old days of the AIDS crisis. McConaughey plays real-life AIDS activist Ron Woodruff, a heterosexual electrician whose battle with the FDA over non-toxic AIDS drugs became a cause taken up by other people living with AIDS in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Leto plays a character named "Rayon," a drag performer, who gets involved in the underground medications movement started by Woodruff. Jennifer Garner and Steve Zahn will co-star in the film and it will also feature the acting debut of indie rock star Bradford Cox (the bands Deerhunter and Atlas Sound) as Leto’s boyfriend. It follows the award-winning documentary How To Survive A Plague in a cinematic mini-wave of ’80s AIDS remembrances and, with HIV infections on the rise among young gay men who weren’t around to experience that decade of fear, couldn’t be more appropriately timed.

Jane Lynch gets some Afternoon Delight

The 2013 Sundance Film Festival is right around the corner and so is Afternoon Delight. That’s not a euphemism for anything related to film festival hook-ups, by the way, it’s just the name of a comedy premiering at Sundance from director Jill Soloway (Six Feet Under). Starrying Kathryn Hahn, Juno Temple and Jane Lynch, it’s the story of a Los Angeles housewife who takes in a stripper as her live-in nanny. And if Indie Film Law has anything to say about it, that thong-wearing Mary Poppins is going to teach the family some things about life right after she displays proper pole technique to her young charges. But that’s just a guess. And whatever, it’s got Jane Lynch in it. Does she ever do anything wrong besides occasionally freak us out on Glee by being nice to people? Watch this one get scooped up at the fest and unleashed into art-houses later in 2013. That’s another guess.

It’s on! X-Men sequel gets McKellen and Stewart

Bryan Singer has made it official: the sequel to X-Men: First Class will include the cast of that film, including January Jones, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender and Nicholas Hoult, as well as the last two contract negotiators, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart. Singer will direct this next film in the ongoing saga of superpower-having-mutants-as-metaphors-for-being-gay, shooting in London this year for a release date of July 18, 2014. That means that all we don’t know yet is the plot. And, as any good Internet user knows, is a thing for the bloggers to tease and coax out and breathlessly announce each time a publicist or on-set journalist is given a tiny morsel of information and imagery to share with the salivating movie-nerd audience. This is the new production paradigm, so watch this space. If anything breaks open wide, you’ll be informed.

Charlize will have her Vengeance

OK, truthfully, there’s nothing technically lesbian about this following bit of movie news. Except for, you know, everything. And you may not be familiar with director Park Chan-wook, but the Korean filmmakers’s "vengeance trilogy," consisting of the movies Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, has been blowing the minds of foreign film fans for several years now. And while the Oldboy remake is already in the can with Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen, today we’re here to discuss ladies, specifically Charlize Theron in the American version of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. The Oscar-winner for Monster, having already proven she can be terrifying and violent, will play a woman imprisoned for 13 years for a crime she did not commit. Then, upon being set free, she wreaks deadly havoc on the people who put her there. Did we say deadly havoc? We meant insane deadly havoc. The kind of deadly havoc usually reserved for Michelle Rodriguez, who must have been busy when the casting agents were doing their thing. It’s the kind of movie that, if done properly, will be as artful and disturbing as the original. And if it’s not done well, it’ll still feature one of cinema’s most beautiful women, destroying everything in sight until she’s satisfied. They call that a win-win. And you’re welcome.