Cinefile

Age before beauty?: Richard Dreyfuss, 40, has decided against starring in “50” (yes, he’d have had to age a whole decade) for director Mark Rydell who’s making the screen version of the Avery Corman best seller at Tri-Star. . . .

Ben Kingsley’s been tapped to play Simon Wiesenthal in an HBO miniseries based on the famed Nazi-hunter’s life, which goes before the cameras in Hungary in April. Brian Gibson (“Poltergeist II”) directs from the script by Abby Mann and Lane Slate. . . . Amanda Donohoe (“Castaway”), Hugh Grant (“Maurice”), Catherine Oxenburg and Sammi Davis (“Hope and Glory”) are the cast of Ken Russell’s “Lair of the White Worm,” based upon Bram Stoker’s last novel. Russell films late February in Northern England on this tale of an archeologist whose discovery of ancient ruins allows a horrifying myth to come true.

Allen Garfield heads for Broadway to play the title role in “The Pawnbroker” this fall. Based on the 1965 film (with Rod Steiger), written by David Friedkin, the stage version has been adapted by the late writer’s son Gregory. . . . Walter Matthau heads for Italy to play a harried exorcist opposite actor-writer-director Robert Benigni (the elfin Italian of Jim Jarmusch’s “Down by Law”) in “Little Devil.”