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After making a splash on the Croisette in 2017 with his debut feature Until The Birds Return (Un Certain Regard selection), Karim Moussaoui is finally at work on his sophomore project — which began production today. The Cineuropa folks report that that thesps Sammy Lechea and Zar Amir Ebrahimi will topline The Vanishing with Hamid Amirouche, Idir Chender, Nadia Kaci and Nassima Benchicou added on as supporting players. Production will take place over the next two months – moving from Marseille to Tunisia. Les Films Pelléas’ David Thion and Philippe Martin are producing. The project will likely tempt Locarno and Venice programmers next year.…...

A 17-year-old Parisian girl of Algerian parentage struggles to negotiate the conflicting tensions between desire, familial expectation, peer pressure and heritage in debuting writer-director Kamir Aïnouz’s intermittently successful “Honey Cigar.” Refreshingly empowering in how it foregrounds the female gaze together with the young woman’s ownership of her sexual urges, While the core ideas are sound and Zoé Adjani’s charismatic performance imbues those ideas with a soul, the unexceptional screenplay flounders in its attempt to make each issue equally real and multifaceted. Francophone territories will likely account for the lion’s share of the film’s revenue, together with feminist showcases.

Aïnouz, half-sister of Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz, mines elements of her own life for the story, set in 1993 when Algeria was experiencing a surge of Islamist violence. Selma Merabet (Adjani) lives with her parents (Amira Casar and Lyes Salem) in the upscale Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. Dad’s...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Neïl Beloufa's Occidental (2017) is showing January 10 – February 8, 2019 exclusively on Mubi.In the age of globalization, French-Algerian visual artist Neïl Beloufa addresses the slippery slope of human interaction, empathy, and prejudice, cloaked in kitsch 1970s hotel environment. Shot entirely at his own studio south of Paris, Occidental is his second feature film, yet Beloufa’s career is prolific with mixed media installations and docu-fiction short films. By setting the time and tone of the film fifty years in the past, the artist makes a clear commentary on the contemporary state of exception, exemplified by protests, suspicions, homophobia, and racism—all of it glazed in vivid reds, greens, and pink, soaked in a moody score. Occidental is both a critical nod and a tribute to an imagined, capitalized, pseudo-tolerant, Wicked West. The film is centered around the Parisian hotel Occidental,...

Espionage thrillers have it rough these days, what with contemporary headlines beating anything Hollywood can cook up. Still, Beirut has an undeniable retro appeal: It's 1982 in Lebanon, the eve of Israel's invasion. A hostage situation is pulling Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), a former U.S. diplomat in Beirut, back into a spycraft shitstorm he'd practically kill to avoid. He's been mediating low-level labor disputes in Boston, spending his spare time in bars using booze to blast away memories of what happened to him on the job a decade before.

Flashback...

Chicago – The psychological desperation of life-or-death decisions are in play within “Beirut,” the new geopolitical thriller featuring Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”). The various mazes within the story, set during the Lebanon civil war of the 1980s, is comparative to “Casablanca,” especially through the world-weary expression of Hamm’s character.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The writer is Tony Gilroy, who specializes in creating story mazes within films like ‘Michael Clayton” and the Jason Bourne series. “Beirut” works primarily on an emotional level, with flecks of revenge, sorrow and time-bomb-ticking personal connections that are destined to explode. The geopolitical nature of the film is rooted in the 1982 Jordanian conflict, which split the decimated title city into “zones,” that placed enemies literally blocks from each other. Like Rick in the film “Casablanca,” the character that Jon Hamm portrays is motivated outside of any heroism, but is eventually brought into a situation that makes his assignment a saving grace.

Well, better late than never. It has taken screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s script of Beirut only 27 years to reach the screen, but it was well worth the wait especially in that it gives its leading man Jon Hamm a movie role worthy of his talents. So why did it take so long for the script Gilroy wrote near the beginning of his career in 1991 to get made? Chalk it up to the mysteries of the movie industry, or perhaps just bad timing. Whatever the reasons, Beirut, which details a fictional hostage crisis in war-torn 1982 Lebanon, is a period film that also resonates today, perhaps showing that communication and diplomacy might be worth trying before rashly dropping bombs.

Under Brad Anderson’s tight and precise direction, the script from Gilroy (who went on to write and direct Michael Clayton, along with the Jason Bourne films) is almost a throwback to the...

Returning to Sundance long after his first appearances there with Next Stop, Wonderland and Happy Accidents, among others, Brad Anderson’s Beirut is a thriller made from a quarter-century-old script by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity). Jon Hamm stars as a former diplomat, Mason Skiles, who returns to Lebanon a decade after his former posting there, getting involved in a complex hostage situation involving a standoff with his former friend-turned-terrorist Karim (Idir Chender). Editor Andrew Hafitz (The Last Days of Disco, Bully, Keane) explains how his verite background helps inform his approach to cutting and which two directors taught him the most. Filmmaker: How and why did you […]...

French-Algerian visual artist and filmmaker Neïl Beloufa’s second feature, Occidental, opens in media res as its eponymous setting, the tawdry Hotel Occidental, is going up in flames. Its exterior is beset by clashing police and protesters while a man is vexedly trapped inside one of the inn’s rooms, seemingly more annoyed than distraught despite his presently dire situation. This familiar setup suggests that, by the time the film catches up with this scene, the chain of events that preceded it will have provided some clarity or context for the sequence and lead to a fuller understanding of how and why things wound up this way. But as the subsequent opening credits, set against images of the lethargic, largely anonymous protest that led to the ensuing riots, imply with their dual-layered text (tinted by retro pastels scattered haphazardly around the frame), this will not be the case. Beloufa aims...

New York-based distributor picks up thriller written by Tony Gilroy.

Bleecker Street has secured Us rights to director Brad Anderson’s High Wire Act starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike.

The political thriller centres on a top Us diplomat who leaves Lebanon in the 1970s after his wife is killed. Ten years later, he gets called back to a war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives with a mission only he can accomplish.

The film also stars Dean Norris, Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Shea Whigham, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender, and Jonny Coyne.

Mike Weber of Radar Pictures, Gilroy, and Shivani Rawat and Monica Levinson of ShivHans Pictures produced the film. Ted Field and Steve Saeta served as executive producers.

Bleecker Street collaborated with ShivHans Pictures on the release of Captain Fantastic, Trumbo, and Danny Collins..

“Brad’s film is the kind of adult thriller a smarthouse audience craves,” Andrew Karpen, CEO of Bleecker Street, said. “It’s...

Bleecker Street has secured U.S/ distribution rights to director Brad Anderson’s High Wire Act, which was written by Tony Gilroy.

The political thriller centres on a top diplomat (Jon Hamm) who leaves Lebanon in the 1970s after his wife is tragically killed.

10 years later, he gets called back to a war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives (Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris) with a mission only he can accomplish.

The film also stars Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Shea Whigham, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender and Jonny Coyne.

Mike Weber of Radar Pictures, Gilroy, and Shivani Rawat and Monica Levinson of ShivHans Pictures produced the film. Ted Field and Steve Saeta served as executive producers.

Bleecker Street previously collaborated with ShivHans Pictures on the release of the Oscar-nominated films Captain Fantastic and Trumbo, and Danny Collins.

“Brad’s film is the kind of adult thriller a smarthouse audience craves,” Andrew Karpen, CEO of...

High Wire Act made Deadline’s list of hot titles at Cannes last year, and now Bleecker Street has scooped up U.S. rights to director Brad Anderson‘s period spy thriller starring Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike and Dean Norris. Tony Gilroy wrote the script. Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Shea Whigham, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender and Jonny Coyne also star in the film about top U.S. diplomat (Hamm), who leaves Lebanon in the 1970s after his wife is killed. A decade later, he…...

Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. distribution rights to director Brad Anderson's political thriller High Wire Act.

Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike head up the cast of the film, written by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy).

The story centers on a top U.S. diplomat (Hamm) who leaves Lebanon in the 1970s after his wife is killed. Ten years later, he gets called back to a war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives (Pike, Dean Norris) with a mission only he can accomplish. The film also stars Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Shea Whigham, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender and Jonny Coyne.

High...