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Updated: I added a video featuring an interview with Kuklinski at the end of the article

Who would you rather see play a character described by Deadline as "a hulking 6'4" and 300 pound" contract killer who "lived what on the surface was a quiet life as husband and father in New Jersey"? Mickey Rourke or Michael Shannon? It's a question buyers at the American Film Market are facing right now as they decide between two dueling features centered on Richard Kuklinski, the notorious contract killer for the Gambino family who, by his own account, killed up to 200 people.

The question came up regarding these two films after ComingSoon.net uploaded the poster to the right and even after I posted it earlier today someone immediately asked what happened with the Rourke feature, which was first reported back in September. As it turns out, there is now one film being shopped...

There are two Afm project packages being shopped on the same subject: Richard Kuklinski, the notorious New Jersey mob hit man. Nu Image has Boardwalk Empire's Michael Shannon to play Kuklinski and Benicio Del Toro and (maybe) James Franco attached to The Iceman, a film that will be directed by Ariel Vromen that is eyeing a production start next summer. Natural Selection CEO Matty Beckerman comes to Afm with a rival project, on which he said he has just closed a deal for life rights of Kuklinski's wife, Barbara, and Pat Kane, the cop who brought Kuklinski to justice. The project, based on the Philip Carlo book The Ice Man: Confessions Of A Mafia Contract Killer, is being scripted by American History X's David McKenna and has Mickey Rourke attached to play Kuklinski. Beckerman is producing and said his Natural Selection will fully fund a movie that will start production in the spring.

Yet another Brit-gangster film version of the Rettendon Range Rover murders; this is as shoddy and cliched as the rest of them, writes Xan Brooks

Just as the American western had its Gunfight at the Ok Corral, so the British crime flick has the Rettendon Range Rover murders of December 1995, in which a trio of drug dealers were shotgunned to death on the back roads of Essex. This is the third film to revisit the scene, scampering in the wake of Essex Boys and Rise of the Footsoldier, trampling the evidence underfoot as   it sniffs excitably at a pungent mess of gangster cliche. Tamer Hassan, king of the British B-movie, stars as the thuggishly avuncular Pat Kane, who dons various outfits as he wades   from triumph to disaster. Here he is, resplendent in regulation knitwear as he tosses a snivelling grass over the prison railings. There he is, modelling a...