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Sandrine Kiberlain and Pierre Lottin are set to headline Jean-Baptiste Leonetti’s French comedy-drama Whatever It Takes (Personne d’Autre) as polar opposites who connect under strange circumstances. The film will begin shooting in the Paris region at the end of the month.

Lottin plays Jean, a stubborn single in his thirties who has shut himself off from the world. When he meets Kiberlain’s Rose, a mother of three with a disarming joie de vivre, the two form an unlikely pairing. Ugc will release the film in France in 2026.

Snd is launching sales on the title at Unifrance’s...

★★☆☆☆ The division between deranged villainy and complete buffoonery is a fine one. As bloodthirsty, silver-tongued businessman John Madec in French director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Beyond the Reach (2014), Michael Douglas tramples all over the line drawn in the Mojave desert sand as a maniacal caricature of Gordon Gekko toting a high-calibre Austrian rifle. Based on the 1972 novel Deathwatch by Robb White, Léonetti's film could have occurred any time since and in any barren, unforgiving landscape.

★★☆☆☆ With a homicidal big game hunter as its chief antagonist, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Beyond the Reach (2014) has a ripped from the headlines topicality, but unfortunately this plodding thriller consistently fails to engage. Michael Douglas plays John Madec, a high-flying finance mogul who likes to relax by taking trophies of wild, rare, if not actually endangered species. He doesn't particularly enjoy hunting, he assures his young tracker Ben (Jeremy Irvine), finding it tedious - he just likes to have heads on his walls. Madec turns up in the small town bordering the Mojave Desert in his $500,000 SUV with his specialist rifle and greases the palms of the local constabulary into letting him hunt a bighorn sheep.

“Beyond this point, there will be monsters” says a pensive, gravelly-voiced Michael Douglas. The venerable star of Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s Beyond the Reach is not far wrong either, as this character drama set out in the unforgiving landscape of the Mojave Desert very quickly becomes a dark cat-and-mouse horror flick. Problem is, it’s just not a

The post Beyond the Reach Review appeared first on HeyUGuys.

I struggled to start this review because Beyond The Reach divided me in a tonally confusing, strangely endearing kind of way. Director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti calls upon the blistering Mojave Desert heat in his adaptation of Robb White’s novel Deathwatch, but he also calls upon a goofy-as-hell Michael Douglas. Part of the film wants to be this badass “most dangerous game” reimagining, turning Douglas’ character into a comic-booky Bond villain, while another more reserved aspect thrives on exploiting an extremely human struggle between two obviously mismatched classes. It’s about the rich vs. the poor, not just man vs. man, but most importantly, it’s about a raging lunatic who looks like a Cabela’s poster child gone apeshit.

Michael Douglas plays Madec, a millionaire/billionaire businessman who loves hunting big game. Jeremy Irvine plays Ben, a local tracker who is pining over a girlfriend who just left for a more fruitful college life.

A dangerous game is played in a very hostile environment in Beyond the Reach, the latest film from director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti. The story opens up on Ben (Jeremy Irvine), a young tracker in the southwest who gets an offer he can’t refuse from a rich and powerful businessman named Madec (Michael Douglas).

Madec hires Ben to take him to a vast and barren part of the Mojave Desert where he hopes to add to his hunting collection. But in his hastiness to get a kill, Madec accidentally shoots a man and is forced to cover up his crime. Ben, however, doesn’t want to play along. Not willing to go down for murder, Madec turns the gun on Ben and forces him to walk across the desert with nothing on other than his underwear. With the hot sun bearing down on him, Ben has to use his knowledge of...

Michael Douglas goes behind the scenes of his neo-Western Beyond the Reach in a new featurette.

The actor has teamed with filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti on an adaptation of Robb White's acclaimed 1972 young adult novel Deathwatch.

Michael Douglas turns 70: We celebrate with 18 classic pictures

Michael Douglas receives Unicef award for nuclear campaign work

Douglas stars as alpha-male big-game hunter Madec, who has a tragic accident out on the range while hunting a big horned sheep.

Madec attempts to broker a vow of silence with his young companion Ben (Jeremy Irvine), only for the consequences of their accident to begin haunting both men before long.

"[This film] had everything. It had a great story, a really interesting character and a lot more kind of action than a lot of movies that I've done," Irvine reveals in Beyond the Reach's extended featurette.

Viewers are also taken to the location filming of the...

In 1972, novelist Robb White wrote the desert thriller Deathwatch, about a rich hunter named Madec who accidentally kills a human in the Mojave and decides to cover up his mistake by murdering his guide. Two years later, it was turned into the film Savages, starring Andy Griffith in the lead role. Griffith was unexpectedly great as a big-city bigwig, but the decades since have given us Michael Douglas, the slick-haired snake-oil actor who seems to have been slithering toward this part for 40 years. Now Douglas gets a crack at the character in Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's remake Beyond the Reach. Today, the millionaire sniper stalks his prey in a $500,000 Mercedes SUV stocked with an espresso machine. Yet while Madec sautés asparagu...

Beyond The Reach Roadside Attractions Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes. Grade: B Director: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti Screenwriter: Stephen Susco, from Robb White’s book “Deathwatch” Cast: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine Screened at: Dolby24, NYC, 4/7/15 Opens: April 17, 2015 This year’s third month has gone down as the coldest March on record in those parts of the Northeast afflicted with a steady reading of five degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. But as some say, there is no such thing as cold weather: there is only the wrong clothing. If you wear the right layers of heavily insulated coats and pants, you can comfortably go out even in [ Read More ]

The post Beyond the Reach Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

This summer we'll see Michael Douglas in Marvel mode as he has a co-starring role in Ant-Man alongside Paul Rudd. But before then, Douglas is getting a little dark with a thriller called Beyond the Reach. In what is essentially a more campy adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game, the film follows an upscale loan shark who is taking in the Mojave Desert with a little hunt. But when his young guide (Jeremy Irvine) is surprising by his human-hunting game, he ends up being the next target, with nowhere to run but deeper into the scorching, dry wasteland. This looks like an awesome B-movie right on par with the first Taken. Here's the first trailer for Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Beyond the Reach, originally from Yahoo: Beyond the Reach is directed by French filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti and written by Stephen Susco (The Grudge), based on the book Deathwatch by Robb White.

The Southwestern desert. Temperatures exceed 130 degrees. Without water, the average man will die within 60 minutes. Michael Douglas is not your average man! That is the set up of the brand new trailer for Beyond the Reach, which also stars Jeremy Irvine.

In Beyond the Reach, a high-rolling corporate shark (Michael Douglas) and his impoverished young guide (Jeremy Irvine) play the most dangerous game during a hunting trip in the Mojave Desert in this lean, mean cat-and-mouse thriller. Douglas will do anything to protect his fame and fortune. When one misfire unexpectedly kills a man, the trip devolves into a nerve-racking game between the hunter and his young guide.

Beyond the Reach is in theaters and on demand April 17. Take a look at the first footage, which offers up sweeping vistas of the desert, along with thrilling scenes of this duo trying to outwit one other without being the first to die.

Roadside Attractions will release Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's latest film "Beyond the Reach," a deadly thriller that sees Douglas cast as a corporate shark desperate to salvage his reputation after an accident during a desert hunting trip threatens to dismantle his fame and fortune. Jeremy Irvine ("War Horse") co-stars as his wise hunting guide who suddenly finds himself Douglas' next target. As the trailer indicates, the brutal desert setting serves up a minefield of dangers that Irvine must navigate in order to save himself and bring Douglas to justice. This nail-biting premise guarantees an electrifying face-off that the two leads carefully build up to in this isolated cat-and-mouse game. "Beyond the Reach" will be released in theaters and On Demand starting April 17. Check out the trailer below: Read More: Liongsate/Roadside Acquires Michael Douglas' Desert Drama 'The Reach'...

It’s been a while since Michael Douglas turned in a performance to rival that of his greatest character, Wall Street‘s Gordon Gekko. In the last decade, the once-solid actor has steered clear of sharp, probing movies and invested in more palatable fare such as And So It Goes and Last Vegas. That period of safe moves appears to over – for a brief time, anyway – judging by this first trailer for his next effort, Beyond The Reach.

The film made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and since then it seems to have hidden from public view. Until today that is, as Yahoo! Movies has dropped the first preview, which strikes a chord somewhere between thriller and survival horror.

In the lead role, Douglas plays a ruthless businessman who ventures out into the Mojave Desert for an exclusive hunting excursion. All goes as one would expect.

Every year at the Toronto International Film Festival, there are a handful of films out of the hundreds selected to screen that just completely pass us by. Sometimes those pictures turn out to be hidden gems, while others are overlooked for a reason. However, in the case of "Beyond The Reach" (originally titled "The Reach"), maybe it didn't even need to screen at Tiff at all. It's every bit a b-movie thriller, not a prestige pic, but that doesn't matter as it looks like a decent slice of sun-baked fun. Michael Douglas and Jeremy Irvine star in the movie, directed by Jean-Baptiste Léonetti ("Carré blanc"), that centers on a massively successful businessman and expert tracker who goes on a hunting trip out in the Mojave Desert with a young guide. However, when the millionaire accidentally kills someone, the kid becomes his next target. A simple premise, and maybe not the brainiest the flick,...

Since I spend all day writing about movies, it's rare when a trailer comes out for a film I had no idea existed. But that's exactly what happened with Beyond The Reach, a new film starring Michael Douglas and Jeremy Irvine (War Horse). Here's the synopsis:

A high-rolling corporate shark (Michael Douglas) and his impoverished young guide (Jeremy Irvine) play the most dangerous game during a hunting trip in the Mojave Desert in this lean, mean cat-and-mouse thriller.

This looks like a fantastic, tense movie, and while the entire concept is a little bit ludicrous, it's the kind of thing that can translate very well into a tight, suspenseful film. This looks like a hell of a movie, and this first trailer definitely got my attention. Check it out below, thanks to Yahoo:

Written by Stephen Susco and directed by French filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, Beyond the Reach will be released...

I like the premise of humans hunting other humans for sport because it’s delightfully ludicrous and perversely entertaining. It’s a lean, direct concept that removes the frills to become a battle of wits between the hunter and “the most dangerous game”. For the majority of its runtime, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s The Reach sits comfortably inside this framework. The story takes the occasional shortcut, but it also works in some subtext about economic inequality, which is a nice touch. However, as the movie starts winding down, I realized I was perhaps giving Léonetti too much credit as The Reach crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Ben (Jeremy Irvine) is bummed about his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan Lawrence) leaving to go to college, but he doesn’t have much time to dwell on it as he’s recruited by the local sheriff (Ronny Cox) to be a guide for wealthy asshole...

Michael Douglas will produce and star in the thriller "The Reach" at Furthur Films and Good Universe.

Based on Robb White’s novel "Deathwatch," Douglas will play an arrogant businessman and big game hunter in pursuit of his ultimate prize who hires a young guide to lead him into the American desert.

After he shoots and kills an innocent man, a game of cat-and-mouse unfolds when the guide refuses to take part in a cover-up.

Jean Baptiste Léonetti ("Carré Blanc") will direct from a script by Stephen Susco. Douglas and Robert Mitas are producing.

Source: Screen Daily...

She has built a solid career resume in a very short time span with Christophe Honoré, Bertrand Bonello, Quentin Tarantino, Raoul Ruiz, Woody Allen and Michel Gondry's upcoming, "The Foam of the Days," and now Lea Seydoux is set to topline Abdellatif Kechiche's film adaptation of Blue Is a Hot Color. The actress will star alongside Adele Exarchopoulos (who had a bit part in Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Carre Blanc - a Tiff preemed item). We imagine production is set for sometime in the spring. Wild Bunch is backing this project. Update: Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier reported this days before the Variety article --- so we've changed the source. Gist: Based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel, this is about Clementine (Lea Seydoux), an adolescent, who discovers desire and love with Emma (Adele Exarchopoulos), a blue-haired girl. Worth Noting: Kechiche's fifth feature film will be his first book (more specifically graphic novel) adaption.

Yesterday we brought you a look at 10 films from the Galas & Specials programs ahead of Thursday's kick off of Hollywood's AFI Fest 2011. Today we've got a preview of a few highlights from the extensive World Cinema program. Don't forget to check out our interview with programming brass Jacqueline Lyanga & Lane Kneedler and stay tuned for plenty more from AFI Fest soon. Carre Blanc One of the big hits from this year's Fantastic Fest, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's French dystopian science fiction tale is weird, poetic and wonderful. Bring along your best croquet gear. Trailer | Clips & Clips | Trailer Kinyarwanda Alrick Brown's film set during the Rwandan genocide has found fans everywhere it has played - not to mention winning the...

Up until last year, film festivals had always been a bit of a mystery to me. I had gone to a few conventions before and been shown advanced screenings of films, but to actually go to an event where all you did was watch films seemed a bit beyond my reach. Didn’t help either that I had never really lived in areas with affordable or frequent festivals. That is, up until last year when I was introduced to AFI Fest. They hooked me in with free tickets and the promise of engaging cinema from around the world. To say I had fun is a bit of an understatement. As the credits to the last film rolled, I decided that I would come back next year in a more professional manner and write about it.

Which brings us to now. AFI Fest 2011 Presented by Audi is a little over a...

Chantal Akerman (center), Almayer's Folly World Cinema Selections Almayer's Folly: Chantal Akerman loosely adapts Joseph Conrad’s novel set in Malaysia, the tragic tale of a failed European trader and his "mixed blood" daughter. Dir Chantal Akerman. Cast Stanislas Merhar, Marc Barbé, Aurora Marion, Zac Andrianasolo. Belgium/France. U.S. Premiere. Alps: Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos returns with a tale of a group offering an unusual service for grieving families: They inhabit the role of the recently deceased. Dir Yorgos Lanthimos. Scr Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou. Cast Aggeliki Papoulia, Aris Servetalis, Ariane Labed, Johnny Vekris. Greece/France. U.S. Premiere. CARRÉ Blanc: One of the strongest debuts in years, CARRÉ Blanc is a dystopian sci-fi vision of a world with limited resources and limitless cruelty. Dir/Scr Jean-Baptiste Léonetti. Cast Sami Bouajila, Julie Gayet, Jean-Pierre Andreani, Fejria Deliba, Valerie Bodson. France/Luxembourg/Russia/Belgium/Switzerland. The Day He Arrives:...

Another day, another lineup announcement from AFI Fest 2011 that sends me positively reeling. Today sees the film festival rolling out their World Cinema, Breakthrough, Midnight, and Short selections. Today also sees me jumping up and down and repeatedly screaming, “Alps! Alps! Alppppssss!” As has been the trend with AFI Fest’s recent lineup announcements, this crop of films guarantees that the festival is a can’t-miss for any film buffs in the Los Angeles area. There’s a number of titles here that festival-obsessed cinephiles will recognize from recent events – films like Ben Wheatley‘s Kill List, Morten Tyldum‘s Headhunters, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti‘s Carre Blanc, Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film, and for Dogtooth obsessives like me, Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Alps. AFI Fest will run from November 3rd through the 10th in Hollywood, with all screenings taking place at The Chinese, the...

Carré Blanc

Written and directed by Jean-Baptiste Leonettie

2011, France

The world of Carré Blanc is a desolate expanse of concrete housing complexes. A square emblem, representative of a nameless, faceless state entity, is emblazoned everywhere. Loudspeakers stationed at every street corner call out population statistics, urge residents to copulate, and endlessly extol the virtues of the sport of croquet. In an apartment building a woman argues with her son and hastens to defenestrate herself. Her body is quickly taken away and the boy is hustled off to live in a state school where he too tries but fails to commit suicide. Years later, the boy, Phillipe (Sami Bouajila) is the successful and confident hiring manager of an inscrutable business and his wife, Marie (Julie Gayet), walks the empty streets and appears generally unconvinced by the world she’s been indoctrinated into.

Ostensibly a dystopian-future film, Carré Blancis more accurately a minimalist,...

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I’m operating on, because what better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? Some of the best authors will tell you that writing a short story is a lot harder than writing a long one, that you have to weigh every sentence. What better medium to see how this theory plays itself out beyond that than with movie trailers? Eye Of The Storm Trailer I like this kind of story, I do. It's familiar territory, to be sure, but if there's someone who I...

The 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and will run until September 18th. Now you’re going to hear a lot about the celebrities in town, the parties going down and the massive queues, but at the end of the day Tiff is about the movies. And with over 330 movies playing this year, there’s definitely no shortage of films to choose from.

After much deliberation and careful calculation we’ve made our picks. Between the five of us covering the fest, we’re likely going to see close to 125 of the films playing Tiff this year. Yeah, it’s a lot of movies. Certainly more than can be listed here. So we’ve asked our writers to narrow it down to their top three picks.

You can find the full film line-up here, but here is what Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Zack Kotzer and Will Perkins think...

September is the busiest month for the Sound On Sight team with Telluride, Tiff, Pop Montreal, The Atlantic Film Festival, New York Film Festival and yes Fantastic Fest. Starting September 22nd anyone interested in genre film will have their eyes on Fantastic Fest, one of the biggest and possibly coolest fests in the world. After months waiting, the organizers have finally announced the final wave of programming. Here is the press release.

Austin, TX–Wednesday, September 7th, 2011– Fantastic Fest is excited to announce its final wave of feature film programming including the world premiere of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence on opening night courtesy of IFC Midnight and Comic-con Episode IV: A Fan’S Hope on closing night.

The Human Centipede became a cultural sensation after its premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2009 where it won Best Horror Film and Best Actor. The festival is excited to welcome back director...

Guess it's just a centipede-y kind of day. Aubrey already showed you a new preview image from "The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence." Now I've got the info on where you'll be able to see the film for the very first time: Austin's Fantastic Fest, on September 22. The deranged depravity debuts as this year's Opening Night Film.

Along with the announcement that director Tom Six's sequel to everyone's favorite ass-to-mouth horror movie will make its world premiere at the festival, Fantastic Fest also solidified the remainder of its lineup today. You can see it all below, but here are a few noteworthy highlights: the Us premiere of Morgan Spurlock's San Diego Comic-Con documentary, "Episode IV: A Fan's Hope," a Cuban zombie movie called -- you're gonna love this -- "Juan of the Dead," and a 30th anniversary screening of "An American Werewolf in London" with makeup artist Rick Baker in attendance.

If you've been on the fence about attending this year's edition of Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, which runs from September 22-29, then the announcement that came today about their final wave of programming should make up your mind. With these additions, just about every film on our radar will be making an appearance at this year's fest! Read on for the details.

From the Press Release

Fantastic Fest is excited to announce its final wave of feature film programming including the world premiere of The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence on opening night courtesy of IFC Midnight and Comic-con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope on closing night.

The Human Centipede became a cultural sensation after its premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2009, where it won Best Horror Film and Best Actor. The festival is excited to welcome back director Tom Six and producer Ilona Six with the second installment of the depraved series.

Wow. In two weeks, Michael and I will begin our 14 hour drive from St. Louis to Austin. We are super excited to be attending and giving you guys advance reviews of films that, more than likely, every horror and genre loving freak out there will want to read. The final wave has been announced and while we only see that we got one more hit on our prediction list, I’m still happy with what was announced. We will be attending the World Premiere of The Human Centipede Part 2: Full Sequence and the new film from the directors of Inside, Livid. Much more is in store so read beyond the break.

From the Press Release:

Fantastic Fest is excited to announce its final wave of feature film programming including the world premiere of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence on opening night courtesy of IFC Midnight and Comic-con Episode...

We're mere weeks away from the craziest genre films in the world invading Austin, Texas for Fantastic Fest 2011. They've already announced not one [1], but two waves [2] of films that'll screen at the festival and now the third and final wave has been revealed. It includes the opening night, world premiere of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, the closing night U.S. premiere of Morgan Spurlock's new documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, the much anticipated Juan of the Dead, Sundance darling Take Shelter, a 30th anniversary screening of An American Werewolf in London with Rick Baker in person and poster by Olly Moss and more. Plus, Drafthouse CEO Tim League will be fighting bare-knuckle brawler James Quinn McDonagh to usher in the a screening of the documentary [3] Knuckle. Read the full third wave of films and see some hype videos for the fight after the jump.

By Sean O’Connell

Hollywoodnews.com: Only the folks at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin would try and use the words “Fantastic” and “Human Centipede” in the same sentence. Yet it’s that unique taste in spectacular genre cinema that keeps thousands flocking to Fantastic Fest in Austin each fall, and this year’s slate shouldn’t disappoint.

Tom Six’s sequel to his vile “Human Centipede” will hold its world premiere on opening night of this year’s Fantastic Fest, which runs Sept. 22-29 in Austin, Tex.

Other notable films programmed for this year’s fest include a retrospective screening of John Landis’s “An American Werewolf in London,” the Texas premiere of Jeff Nichols’s “Take Shelter,” and Morgan Spurlock’s “Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope,” which will close this year’s event.

The full slate is below:

A Boy And His Samurai (2011)

Us Premiere

Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura,...

Details are about Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's French dystopian flick are scant, but Twitch calls it "a slyly hilarious commentary on capitalism gone badly wrong." The satirical elements are certainly clear in this full trailer for the film, but there is also a pervasive darkness throughout, which stops this from being a laugh-out-loud black comedy.

The film's IMDb page takes a slightly blunter approach when describing the movie: "In the future, society's weak are killed and used for meat."

The film will screen at the 2011 Sitges Film Festival.

Enjoy the full trailer after the break.

Carré Blanc is Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's first feature scine his 2003 award winning short Le pays des Ours.

You might like: Mutants

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How about a dose of dystopian sci-fi to start your week? Twitch has posted a very mesmerizing trailer for a French sci-fi film called Carré Blanc from filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti. It looks incredibly weird and twisted, but Twitch has seen it and has great things to say. Here's how they describe the film: "Carre Blanc is a near future arthouse science fiction picture that fuses the dark absurdism of Franz Kafka with the icily precise visuals of a Tarkovsky, the picture is a slyly hilarious commentary on capitalism gone badly wrong." Unfortunately it's in French without any subtitles, but it still looks great and intrigues me anyway. Watch the first official trailer for Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Carre Blanc via Twitch: Here's the only IMDb logline: In the future, society's weak are killed and used for meat. Maybe that gives away too much? Carré Blanc is both written and directed by...