UPDATE: Three new Argo character posters have arrived, featuring Alan Arkin's Lester Siegel, John Goodman's John Chambers and the actor/director himself, Ben Affleck, as CIA technical operations officer, Tony Mendez.

Following his increasingly confident efforts as director on Gone Baby Gone and The Town, Ben Affleck's ambitious Argo is almost upon us. To keep that pleasing fact foremost in our minds, here's a new poster.

It's a very different colour palette but the close-up on an unusually bearded star and the stripe that vaguely suggests something being redacted, puts us in mind of the Syriana posters of yore. That makes sense: Argo, like Syriana, is a serious political thriller with a heavyweight cast.

Unlike Syriana however, Argo's is a period setting, taking us back to 1979, and recounting the only recently revealed, stranger-than-fiction story behind the Iran Hostage Crisis. Six Americans managed to escape to the home of the Canadian ambassador, at which point the talents of "exfiltration specialist" Tony Mendez were called in. The extraordinary extraction plan saw the escapees masquerading as a film crew scouting Iranian locations. The CIA set up a fake production company, a screenplay was procured, and comics legend Jack Kirby provided some designs...

Chris Terrio's script is based on Joshua Bearman's 2007 Wired article, "How The CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick To Rescue Americans From Tehran". Affleck, aside from his behind-the-camera duties, is playing Mendez, and he's pulled in sterling support from Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Kyle Chandler, Clea Duvall, and Michael Parks, who's playing Kirby.

Argo (also the title of the fake film-within-the-film) is out in the UK on November 7.