New York Film Festival Will Open With ‘Captain Phillips’

Jasin Boland Mahat Ali, Tom Hanks and Faysal Ahmed in a scene from “Captain Phillips.”

For a film series that in the first few of its 51 annual programs began with works from directors like Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the New York Film Festival has more recently used its prestigious opening-night slot to spotlight more visible, mainstream and star-studded efforts. Those descriptions all apply to “Captain Phillips,” a new motion picture with Tom Hanks that will make its premiere as the opening-night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival, its organizers said Monday.

Directed by Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne Supremacy,” “United 93″) and based on real-life events, “Captain Phillips” stars Mr. Hanks as the commanding officer of the Maersk Alabama, a United States-flagged cargo ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009. The film will receive a theatrical release from Sony Pictures in October.

Kent Jones, the director of programming and selection committee chairman for the New York Film Festival, said in a statement that “Captain Phillips” was a “tough, tense, real-life thriller, capped by the remarkable performances of Tom Hanks and four brilliant first-time Somali actors,” and he hailed Mr. Greengrass as “a master of immersive reality-based narratives set along geopolitical fault lines.”

This year’s New York Film Festival will run from Sept. 27 to Oct. 13. In recent years its opening-night selections have included “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher; “Carnage,” Roman Polanski’s adaptation of “God of Carnage”; and Ang Lee’s film version of “Life of Pi.”