Boy George, David Harewood, Lulu & Patricia Hodge Join Diane Keaton In ‘Arthur’s Whisky’; Arclight To Launch Sales At Cannes

Arthur's Whiskey has lined up a stellar cast with Diane Keaton as the leading lady, alongside Lulu and RuPaul's Drag Race UK winner Lawrence Chaney.

EXCLUSIVE: France tv distribution has launched sales on French director Benoît Jacquot’s upcoming crime thriller Belle starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Guillaume Canet.

EXCLUSIVE: Producer Moshe Diamant, film financing company Chiltern Media, and the Santa Monica-based sales firm Film Bridge International have set a sales and production partnership to launch at this week’s Cannes Market.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features Boy George, lead singer of Culture Club, was synonymous with 1980s pop culture. Following a string of ubiquitous international radio hits such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” and “Karma Chameleon,” the Grammy-winning singer embarked on a solo career, with his recording of “The Crying Game” punctuating Neil Jordan’s Academy Awarding-winning film of the same name. A steady fixture on reality shows as host of “The Voice Australia” and “The Voice U.K.,” Boy George is hitting the big screen, playing himself in Arclight Films’ comedy adventure “Arthur’s Whiskey,” starring Oscar-winner Diane Keaton, David Harewood (“Homeland,” “Blood Diamond”) and legendary Scottish recording artist Lulu. Arclight Films is handling worldwide rights to “Arthur’s Whiskey,” directed and co-written by Stephen Cookson. Arclight Films is selling the pic at the Cannes market. 

Lionsgate has taken worldwide rights to The Killer’s Game, an action comedy package that has Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) set to star and JJ Perry (Day Shift) aboard to direct. The studio will launch sales at the Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off tomorrow.

Friday on “The View.” The “Because I Said So” actress, 77, stopped by the daytime talk show with her “Book Club: The Next Chapter” co-stars Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen. Their new film, which hit theaters Friday, is a sequel to the foursome’s 2018 movie “Book Club.”“View” co-hosts Joy Behar, Sara Haines, and Alyssa Farah Griffin asked the legendary actresses about aging and their Hollywood memories.But when Griffin got to Keaton, “The First Wives Club” star seemed nervous, even calling the live studio audience “scary.”“All of you have made me think about aging differently, and I think it’s so powerful to see you can just have so much fun at any age. Now, Diane, I have to ask…” Griffin began.

EXCLUSIVE: Isabelle Huppert (Elle) and Finn Wittrock (Luckiest Girl Alive) have closed deals to star in Free Radicals, an English-language home invasion thriller based on the same-name short story originally published in The New Yorker by Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro.

Angelique Jackson “Beneath the Grass,” a drama about the criminal justice system and marijuana incarceration rates, will hit the market at the Cannes Film Festival next week. Mía Maestro, Quincy Isaiah and Jeff Kober will lead the film, which begins production next month in New Jersey. Paradigm is representing worldwide sales for the film. “Beneath the Grass” is set in 2008, capturing both the economic recession and the “Yes We Can” summer, and follows a single Latina mother whose illegal marijuana business is jeopardized when her young son befriends the new neighbors, a young white boy and his police officer grandfather.

EXCLUSIVE: Emmy nominee Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games) and Oscar nominee John C. Reilly (Chicago) are set to lead timely Cannes market package Dreamquil, an AI thriller which HanWay Films is launching.

John Travolta (Grease) and Katherine Heigl (Firefly Lane) have boarded the rom-com That’s Amore!, written and to be directed by two-time Academy Award winner Nick Vallelonga (Green Book), with Christopher Walken (Severance) also in talks to star.

Naman Ramachandran Principal photography has commenced on Adam MacDonald’s survival thriller “Out Come the Wolves.” The feral feature, which will be shot on location in Dundas, Ontario throughout May, follows the story of a woman who takes her fiancé to a secluded cabin to meet her best male friend, before things take a dark turn during a hunting trip. The film is represented for international by Altitude Film Sales, who will be discussing the film with buyers at the upcoming Cannes Film Market. MacDonald’s credits include “Backcountry”, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and “Pyewacket”, which also debuted at TIFF. He also directed the third and fourth seasons of “Slasher” and the upcoming season five for AMC’s Shudder. Most recently, he completed directing the first virtual reality horror movie experience for Meta entitled “Be Mine.”

The long-awaited sequel to “Beetlejuice” now has a release date, scheduled to come out in 2024.

EXCLUSIVE: Justin Theroux is latest new addition to the ensemble of Warner Bros. Beetlejuice sequel that has Tim Burton directing and Michael Keaton set to reprise is iconic character. Winona Ryder also set to reprise their roles from the 1988 original supernatural comedy with Jenna Ortega set to play Ryder’s daughter in the pic.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International “My Life As a Zucchini” director Claude Barras has set up his latest stop-motion animated feature, “Savages!” Production company Gebeka International — a Hildegarde-Goodfellas company formed in 2021 — and production, financing and sales studio Anton are behind the project, which will be written by Barras and Catherine Paille (“Magnetic Beasts”). The project will be shopped to buyers in Cannes next week. “Savages!” follows the emotional journey of a girl, her father and a rescued baby orangutan. The film has a strong environmental and conservationist message, exploring the crisis of the destruction of rainforests.

Naman Ramachandran Melissa Barrera (“Scream VI”), Nicholas Hoult (“The Menu”) and Lana Condor (“Moonshot”) headline the cast of “The One,” from writer-director team Kevin Armento and Jaki Bradley. HanWay Films is handling worldwide sales, and will launch the film at the Cannes film market, with WME Independent and UTA co-repping the film for North America. “The One” follows Taylor (Barrera), who’s made a last-ditch effort to find love by becoming a contestant on a reality dating show. Now down to just herself and two other women competing to win the heart of Mason (Hoult), Taylor begins to feel the artifice of the show fade, and the game becomes terrifyingly real. Amidst the opulent beachfront setting, fairy-tale dates, and ever-flowing champagne, pursuit turns into obsession and rivalry turns into treachery as reality itself blurs.

The stars of Book Club: The Next Chapter lit up the red carpet for the NYC premiere on Monday (May 8)!

Nicolas Cage (Renfield) and writer-director Andrew Niccol (Anon) will reteam with Vendôme Pictures, the Academy Award winning studio behind CODA, on Lords of War — a sequel to the 2005 crime thriller Lord of War, which starred Cage as Yuri Orlov, a composite character based on numerous arms dealers.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s beyond obvious that women deserve a movie that portrays and celebrates them in their sixties and seventies reveling in the joys of romantic adventure and uninhibited sex. It’s not so obvious that they deserved “Book Club,” the 2018 comedy about four hale, hearty, and prosperous senior friends who read “Fifty Shades of Grey” in their monthly literary white-wine klatsch, only to discover that E.L. James’s S&M princess fantasy jump-starts their hibernating libidos and/or their desire to commit to the men who are courting them. You could use a whole Thesaurus paragraph of withering descriptives to evoke the sort of movie “Book Club” was. It was prefab, it was cookie-cutter, it was paint-by-numbers, it was broad enough to play to the peanut gallery, it was four glorified sitcoms jammed into one overly synthetic package.

Naman Ramachandran Following the success of “Purple Hearts,” Embankment will launch global pre-sales of new romantic movie, “The Upside of Falling Down,” at the Cannes film market. The film is directed by Oran Zegman (“Honor Society”) and stars Antonia Gentry from worldwide hit “Ginny & Georgia” alongside Calam Lynch (“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the second season of “Bridgerton”). The film is written by Rebekah Crane, based on her own acclaimed novel of the same name, and Kelly Walker. The official synopsis of the film reads thus: “Clementine (Gentry) has lost her memory in an accident and runs away from the hospital with the help of a stranger, Kieran (Lynch) to discover who she is now, before she can reconnect with who she used to be. As she allows herself to free dive into new beginnings, new joys, new loves, and finds the courage to grow into a new version of herself, she begins to fall for this super-cute, charismatic, warm and enigmatic stranger. As Clem puts together the puzzle of her past to find the truth of who she really is, she pieces together returning memories of her past life. Clem and Kieran fall deeply in love, and Clem finds she isn’t the only one with secrets… and when the truth is told, lives are turned upside down…”

EXCLUSIVE: Drew Pearce’s upcoming action thriller, Cooler, starring Dave Bautista, which we first told you about, is launching sales at the Cannes Market, we hear from sources.