Sierra/Affinity will handle international sales on “Rosewater,” the directorial debut of “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, the financing, production and foreign sales company announced on Wednesday. Sierra/Affinity will begin to talk with buyers at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

In order to make the movie, Stewart is taking a hiatus from hosting his popular late-night show, a satire of the day’s news and inane media coverage. The comedian will produce the film with Scott Rudin and OddLot Entertainment founder Gigi Pritzker.

Stewart also wrote the script, adapting BBC journalist Maziar Bahari’s best-selling memoir...

J.K. Simmons and Chris Elliott are joining Marisa Tomei and Hugh Grant in Castle Rock Entertainment's untitled romantic comedy from director Marc Lawrence ("Did You Hear About The Morgans?"), producer Martin Shafer announced on Wednesday.

The film follows Grant as a screenwriter who, thanks to an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, was on top of the world in 1998. Flash forward fifteen years later: His creativity has disappeared along with his wife and money, so he takes a gig teaching screenwriting at a small college on the East Coast. He expects to make some easy money and maybe find some easy co-eds, but doesn...

Candice Bergen will play Robin Williams’ wife in “A Friggin Christmas Miracle,” an upcoming comedy about a dysfunctional family during Christmas time,  Tom Rice of Sycamore Pictures, which is financing and producing the film, told TheWrap. Bergen’s character Donna Mitchler is the Wisconsin matriarch of said family.

Phil Johnston’s script follows Boyd (Joel McHale), Donna’s son, who forgets his son’s presents at home. To save Christmas, he ventures out on the road with his father Mitch (Williams) and brother Nelson (Clark Duke).

Duke just joined the cast this week, and his character speaks fluent Farsi...

Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up North American distribution rights to “12 O’Clock Boys,” Lofty Nathan’s documentary about dirt-bike riders in Baltimore, the independent distributor announced on Tuesday.

The film, which premiered earlier this month at the South by Southwest Film Festival, earned high praise. Indiewire’s Eric Kohn, for one, described the movie as “an ode to an outlaw sport few viewers may know much about” that “laments the perilous extremes to which its brash stars are drawn.” 

Nathan spent the past four years working on the film, getting to know the various characters from this group of daredevils. They are at once the bane of the Baltimore police and a haven for lost young teens.

Nathan tells the story through Pug, a kid who wants to join the eponymous clique.

“Lotfy...