Sony Pictures Classics has snapped up Andy Garcia‘s Diamond, taking worldwide rights to the actor-director’s long-gestating Los Angeles noir following its buzzy Cannes Film Festival premiere. The deal covers all territories except France, Germany, Italy and CIS.
Written, directed, produced by and starring Garcia, Diamond transports a 1940s-style gumshoe into present-day Los Angeles. Garcia plays Joe Diamond, a private detective who dresses in vintage three-piece suits, narrates his days in hardboiled voiceover and carries a traumatic past. He’s an urban legend with a knack for cracking cases the LAPD can’t. When a wealthy widow (Vicky Krieps) hires him to prove she didn’t kill her husband, Diamond works the case in the shadow of a rival police detective (Brendan Fraser).
Garcia has said the film is just as a much a love letter to classic L.A. noirs as it seems. In its announcement, Sony Pictures Classics compared the film to the great Philip Marlowe mysteries of the past.
The film premiered out of competition on the Croisette in May — Garcia’s first return to Cannes since Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007 — drawing warm reviews. THR’s critic summed it up as “a nostalgic crime flick with heart.”
