It’s a rare type of cinephile who wasn’t introduced to the idea of film as more than just idle entertainment by the ritual of the Academy Awards. And it’s an even rarer type of cinephile who didn’t soon thereafter vehemently reject the Oscar as the ultimate barometer of a film’s artistic worth. Those of us who started off with The Godfather, Schindler’s List, All About Eve, or Casablanca all eventually got around to Out of Africa, Around the World in 80 Days, The Greatest Show on Earth, Cimarron, and Cavalcade. First loves being first loves, we still find ourselves regressing if for only one night a year, succumbing to the allure of instant canonization even as it comes in the form of repeated slap-in-the-face reminders of Oscar’s bracing wrongness: Gladiator, Braveheart, Chicago, Crash. In that sense, consider this project part cathartic exorcism and part...
- 3/17/2024
- by Slant Staff
- Slant Magazine
Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.
November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...
November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...
- 10/24/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Rarely one finds a friend on the Criterion Channel—discounting the parasitic relationship we form with filmmakers, I mean—but it’s great seeing their March lineup give light to Sophy Romvari, the <bias>exceptionally talented</bias> filmmaker and curator whose work has perhaps earned comparisons to Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman but charts its own path of history and reflection. It’s a good way to lead into an exceptionally strong month, featuring as it does numerous films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara, newfound cult classic Arrebato, and a number of Criterion editions.
On the last front we have The Age of Innocence, Bull Durham, A Raisin in the Sun, The Celebration, Merrily We Go to Hell, and Design for Living. There’s always something lingering on the watchlist, but it might have to wait a second longer—March is an opened floodgate.
See the full...
On the last front we have The Age of Innocence, Bull Durham, A Raisin in the Sun, The Celebration, Merrily We Go to Hell, and Design for Living. There’s always something lingering on the watchlist, but it might have to wait a second longer—March is an opened floodgate.
See the full...
- 2/21/2022
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
The Berlin International Film Festival has set its full slate for the upcoming 2021 edition. Berlinale usually follows Sundance with a February festival, but the pandemic has forced organizers to develop a new festival format for 2021. The 71st Berlin International Film Festival is set to take place with the “Industry Event” from March 1 to 5, which will include the European Film Market (EFM), the Berlinale Co-Production Market, the Berlinale Talents, and the World Cinema Fund in online forms. From June 9 to 20, 2021 the Berlinale will launch a “Summer Special” with numerous film presentations in Berlin, both at indoor and outdoor cinemas.
Included in the March event is the traditional film festival slate, which includes the main Berlinale Competition lineup as well as sidebar sections such as Berlinale Special & Berlinale Series, Encounters, Berlinale Shorts, Panorama, Forum & Forum Expanded, Generation, Perspektive Deutsches Kino, and Retrospective. With the exception of the Retrospective, the films will be shown at the March event.
Included in the March event is the traditional film festival slate, which includes the main Berlinale Competition lineup as well as sidebar sections such as Berlinale Special & Berlinale Series, Encounters, Berlinale Shorts, Panorama, Forum & Forum Expanded, Generation, Perspektive Deutsches Kino, and Retrospective. With the exception of the Retrospective, the films will be shown at the March event.
- 2/11/2021
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Closing out a year in which we’ve needed The Criterion Channel more than ever, they’ve now announced their impressive December lineup. Topping the highlights is a trio of Terrence Malick films––Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The New World––along with interviews featuring actors Richard Gere, Sissy Spacek, and Martin Sheen; production designer Jack Fisk; costume designer Jacqueline West; cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey; and more.
Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.
Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.
Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.
Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.
- 11/24/2020
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
This article marks Part 3 of the Gold Derby series reflecting on films that contended for the Big Five Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted). With “A Star Is Born” this year on the cusp of joining this exclusive group of Oscar favorites, join us as we look back at the 43 extraordinary pictures that earned Academy Awards nominations in each of the Big Five categories, including the following 11 films that scored a pair of prizes among the top races.
At the 4th Academy Awards ceremony, “Cimarron” (1931) made Oscar history as the first motion picture to ever score nominations in the Big Five categories. On the big night, the western took home the top prize in Best Picture, as well as the Oscar in Best Adapted Screenplay (Howard Estabrook). Not as successful were the picture’s director, Wesley Ruggles, topped by Norman Taurog (“Skippy”), and the leads,...
At the 4th Academy Awards ceremony, “Cimarron” (1931) made Oscar history as the first motion picture to ever score nominations in the Big Five categories. On the big night, the western took home the top prize in Best Picture, as well as the Oscar in Best Adapted Screenplay (Howard Estabrook). Not as successful were the picture’s director, Wesley Ruggles, topped by Norman Taurog (“Skippy”), and the leads,...
- 10/11/2018
- by Andrew Carden
- Gold Derby
Constance Cummings in 'Night After Night.' Constance Cummings: Working with Frank Capra and Mae West (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Actress Went from Harold Lloyd to Eugene O'Neill.”) Back at Columbia, Harry Cohn didn't do a very good job at making Constance Cummings feel important. By the end of 1932, Columbia and its sweet ingenue found themselves in court, fighting bitterly over stipulations in her contract. According to the actress and lawyer's daughter, Columbia had failed to notify her that they were picking up her option. Therefore, she was a free agent, able to offer her services wherever she pleased. Harry Cohn felt otherwise, claiming that his contract player had waived such a notice. The battle would spill over into 1933. On the positive side, in addition to Movie Crazy 1932 provided Cummings with three other notable Hollywood movies: Washington Merry-Go-Round, American Madness, and Night After Night. 'Washington Merry-Go-Round...
- 11/5/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Constance Cummings: Actress in minor Hollywood movies became major London stage star. Constance Cummings: Actress went from Harold Lloyd and Frank Capra to Noël Coward and Eugene O'Neill Actress Constance Cummings, whose career spanned more than six decades on stage, in films, and on television in both the U.S. and the U.K., died ten years ago on Nov. 23. Unlike other Broadway imports such as Ann Harding, Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, and Claudette Colbert, the pretty, elegant Cummings – who could have been turned into a less edgy Constance Bennett had she landed at Rko or Paramount instead of Columbia – never became a Hollywood star. In fact, her most acclaimed work, whether in films or – more frequently – on stage, was almost invariably found in British productions. That's most likely why the name Constance Cummings – despite the DVD availability of several of her best-received performances – is all but forgotten.
- 11/4/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...
- 8/9/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Above: French poster by Boris Grinsson for You’ll Never Get Rich (Sidney Lanfield, USA, 1941).In the new edition of Film Comment, out this week, I write about British airbrush artist Philip Castle and his iconic poster for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The other man behind that poster, aside from Kubrick himself, was producer, director and writer Mike Kaplan who, at the time, was Kubrick’s marketing guru.Kaplan, who has been collecting movie posters, as well as art directing them, for 35 years, is a tireless proselytizer for the art form and his latest project is a labor of love and a pure delight. Gotta Dance! The Art of the Dance Movie Poster, a book he wrote and curated, was born out of a touring exhibition of his own personal collection that he has been exhibiting around the country for the past few years. Its latest stop is...
- 3/21/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
The 85-year history of the Academy Awards is rife with statistical oddities, and one that has the potential to play out this Sunday is among the most intriguing: a split between the films that win Best Picture and Best Director.
Though conventional wisdom has long held that only one film will walk away with both prizes on Oscar night, many pundits are predicting that the awards will instead go to two different movies this year, with "Gravity" director Alfonso Cuaron expected to snag the Best Director statuette, while "12 Years a Slave" (or "American Hustle," depending on where your loyalties lie) is the favorite to win Best Picture.
While such a split has occurred just 22 times since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out trophies in 1929, four of the first five ceremonies produced a divide between the Best Director and Best Picture prizes. "Wings," dubbed the original...
Though conventional wisdom has long held that only one film will walk away with both prizes on Oscar night, many pundits are predicting that the awards will instead go to two different movies this year, with "Gravity" director Alfonso Cuaron expected to snag the Best Director statuette, while "12 Years a Slave" (or "American Hustle," depending on where your loyalties lie) is the favorite to win Best Picture.
While such a split has occurred just 22 times since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out trophies in 1929, four of the first five ceremonies produced a divide between the Best Director and Best Picture prizes. "Wings," dubbed the original...
- 2/26/2014
- by Katie Roberts
- Moviefone
Irene Dunne movies: Five-time Best Actress Academy Award nominee starred in now-forgotten originals of well-remembered remakes In his August 2007 Bright Lights article "The Elusive Pleasures of Irene Dunne," Dan Callahan explained that "the reasons for Irene Dunne’s continuing, undeserved obscurity are fairly well known. Nearly all of her best films from the thirties and forties were remade and the originals were suppressed and didn’t play on television. She did some of her most distinctive work for John Stahl at Universal, and non-horror Universal films are rarely shown now. Practically all of her movies need to be restored; even her most popular effort, The Awful Truth (1937), looks grainy and blotchy on its DVD transfer, to say nothing of things like Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939), or Rouben Mamoulian’s High, Wide, and Handsome (1937), two key Dunne films that have languished and deteriorated in a sort of television/video purgatory.
- 9/12/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Fred MacMurray movies: ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’ Fred MacMurray is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" today, Thursday, August 7, 2013. Although perhaps best remembered as the insufferable All-American Dad on the long-running TV show My Three Sons and in several highly popular Disney movies from 1959 to 1967, e.g., The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Boy Voyage!, MacMurray was immeasurably more interesting as the All-American Jerk. (Photo: Fred MacMurray ca. 1940.) Someone once wrote that Fred MacMurray would have been an ideal choice to star in a biopic of disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon. Who knows, the (coincidentally Republican) MacMurray might have given Anthony Hopkins a run for his Best Actor Academy Award nomination. After all, MacMurray’s most admired movie performances are those in which he plays a scheming, conniving asshole: Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944), in which he’s seduced by Barbara Stanwyck, and Wilder...
- 8/8/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
For moviegoers growing up in the last 20-30 years, big is the new normal. I’m talking about those big-budget, over-produced, effects/action-packed extravaganzas that are as expected and routine an arrival as a commuter bus, and never more so than during the summer months. Come a rise in temperatures, there’s an almost ceaseless parade of these megabuck behemoths through multiplexes starting in May and continuing until the kids go back to school, one rolling out almost every week.
Consider these May-August releases and their eye-popping price tags:
5/4: Marvel’s The Avengers — $220 million
5/11: Dark Shadows — $150 million
5/18: Battleship — $209 million
5/25: Men in Black 3 — $250 million
6/8: Prometheus — $120-130 million
7/3: The Amazing Spider-Man — $220 million
7/20: The Dark Knight Rises — $250 million
7/31: Total Recall — $200 million
8/5: The Expendables 2 — $100 million
For those of you who haven’t been keeping count, that’s a little over $1.7 billion in productions...
Consider these May-August releases and their eye-popping price tags:
5/4: Marvel’s The Avengers — $220 million
5/11: Dark Shadows — $150 million
5/18: Battleship — $209 million
5/25: Men in Black 3 — $250 million
6/8: Prometheus — $120-130 million
7/3: The Amazing Spider-Man — $220 million
7/20: The Dark Knight Rises — $250 million
7/31: Total Recall — $200 million
8/5: The Expendables 2 — $100 million
For those of you who haven’t been keeping count, that’s a little over $1.7 billion in productions...
- 6/29/2012
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
In 1993, audiences gazing on the truly imposing sight of dinosaurs come to life in Jurassic Park felt the same sense of jaw-dropping awe displayed by the movie’s human characters. Nothing in movie history could compare to what Steven Spielberg and his CGI crew were able to put on the screen: not the herky-jerky stop-motion-animated lizards of 1950s monster-on-the-loose movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), nor the pet store lizards made up to look like supposedly threatening beasts in Irwin Allen’s back lot The Lost World (1960), and certainly not a man in a rubber reptile suit rampaging through a miniature Tokyo in the original Godzilla (1954). But as impressive a sight as it was, once the novelty of Jurassic’s CGI creations wore off, so did some of their appeal.
Jurassic Park earned a whopping $350.5 million domestic gross, and while its sequels were, without question, major box office successes, none...
Jurassic Park earned a whopping $350.5 million domestic gross, and while its sequels were, without question, major box office successes, none...
- 1/2/2011
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
The Russian impresario had a profound effect on 1920s film-making, yet he never made a movie himself
Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes sparked a revolution in taste after the first world war, taking modernism out of the salon and into the music hall. The splendid exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, currently showing at the V&A, covers the impresario's legacy in music, dance, fashion, painting, and literature; but less well documented is the spell he cast over British film. Michael Powell, who drew on 1920s memories of the Diaghilev milieu for The Red Shoes, was just one among a generation of cineastes who found inspiration in the same source.
Ballet sequences held a special appeal for the likes of Anthony Asquith and Thorold Dickinson, who cast the young Audrey Hepburn as a ballerina in Secret People; but their interest went beyond merely recording dance on film.
Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes sparked a revolution in taste after the first world war, taking modernism out of the salon and into the music hall. The splendid exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, currently showing at the V&A, covers the impresario's legacy in music, dance, fashion, painting, and literature; but less well documented is the spell he cast over British film. Michael Powell, who drew on 1920s memories of the Diaghilev milieu for The Red Shoes, was just one among a generation of cineastes who found inspiration in the same source.
Ballet sequences held a special appeal for the likes of Anthony Asquith and Thorold Dickinson, who cast the young Audrey Hepburn as a ballerina in Secret People; but their interest went beyond merely recording dance on film.
- 12/22/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
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