News

New Amsterdam star Ryan Eggold and Tony Award-nominated Kevin Del Aguila will join the previously announced Daniel Dae Kim on Broadway this fall in David Henry Hwang’s much anticipated Yellow Face.

Eggold will be making his Broadway debut.

Complete casting for the production was announced today by the Roundabout Theatre Company, and also includes Francis Jue, Marinda Anderson, Greg Keller and Shannon Tyo.

Yellow Face, directed by Leigh Silverman, will begin previews on Friday, September 13, 2024, at Roundabout’s at Todd Haimes Theatre, with opening night on Friday, October 1, 2024, 227 West 42nd Street) on Broadway. The limited engagement runs through Sunday, November 24.

The synopsis: Inspired by real events, the playwright’s fictionalized doppelgänger protests yellowface casting in Miss Saigon, only to mistakenly cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play. This Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer finalist play is a laugh-out-loud farce about the complexities of race.

Kim,...

The staff of Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for its stories that uncovered recordings in which City Council members made racist remarks.

The recordings last year set off a furor at City Hall, leading to the resignation of City Council President Nury Martinez and other civic officials.

The Times‘ Christina House also won a Pulitzer for feature photography for images of a pregnant 22-year-old living on the street.

The Times‘ exposé on the City Council members conversation won in the breaking news category, beating two other finalists: Josh Gerstein, Alex Ward, Peter S. Canellos. Hailey Fuchs and Heidi Przybyla of Politico for their bombshell story on the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The Pulitzer jury moved their entry to breaking news from the national reporting category. The other finalist in the category was the staff of The New York Times for its coverage of...

A couple months after spotlighting the world’s greatest actress, the Criterion Channel have taken a logical next step towards America’s greatest actress. May (or: next week) will bring an eleven-film celebration of Jennifer Jason Leigh, highlights including Verhoeven’s Flesh + Blood, Miami Blues, Alan Rudolph’s Mrs. Parker, her directorial debut The Anniversary Party, and Synecdoche, New York, and a special introduction from Leigh. Another actor’s showcase localizes directorial collaborations: Jimmy Stewart’s time with Anthony Mann, an eight-title series boasting the likes of Winchester ’73 and The Man from Laramie. Two more: a survey of ’80s Asian-American cinema (Chan Is Missing being the best-known) and 14 movies by Seijun Suzuki.

That would be enough for one month (or two), but No Bears and Cette maison will have their streaming premieres, while Criterion Editions offers the Infernal Affairs trilogy (plus its packed set), Days of Heaven, and the aforementioned Chan Is Missing.

MGM sends James Stewart and Anthony Mann to Colorado high country locations for their third big-ticket western, a tight & tense psychological drama with a select cast: Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. Stewart’s anguished bounty hunter is a sick man on a mission he knows is self-destructive and just plain wrong; it’s the actor’s most fraught western performance. The landscape itself is psychological, with treacherous rocky outcroppings and a dangerous river. Even more impressive is the new restoration from Technicolor elements: this is one of the most beautiful westerns yet out on disc.

The Naked Spur

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1953 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date September 21, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown

Film Editor: George White

Production Illustrator: Mentor Heubner

Stunt Performers: Virginia Bougas, Ted Mapes,...

The reunion of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray for the new A24/Apple release “On the Rocks” comes 17 years after their first collaboration on the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation.” Such repeated pairings between directors and actors have been mainstay a in Hollywood since the earliest days of cinema. In the silent era, there were multiple films from D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance.

One of the great partnerships during the Golden Age of Hollywood was John Ford and John Wayne. Ford had actually befriended Wayne when the young man was doing odd jobs as well as extra work-including in few of the director’s films-at Fox Studios in the late 1920s. Wayne made his official film debut starring in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 epic western “The Big Trail.”

The film wasn’t a hit and Wayne found himself spending the decade doing “B” westerns including 1938’s...

Did star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann corner the market on upscale ‘A’ ’50s westerns? This beauty sends Stewart, Ruth Roman and Corrine Calvet on a breezy trek over a Canadian glacier, with Walter Brennan as a folksy, ditsy sidekick — not very original but endearing. John McIntire saves the day as a charmingly malevolent self-appointed Judge Roy Bean-type swindler and murderer — he’s so hilariously evil, even Stewart’s character is amused. The special edition has two aspect ratio versions, a full commentary and two film history featurette-docus.

The Far Country

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1955 / color / 1:88 + 1:2 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date November 12, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: James Stewart, Ruth Roman, Corinne Calvet, Walter Brennan, John McIntire, Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan, Steve Brodie, Connie Gilchrist, Robert J. Wilke, Chubby Johnson, Royal Dano, Jack Elam, Kathleen Freeman, Connie Van, Eugene Borden, John Doucette, Chuck Roberson.

Cinematography: William H. Daniels...

James Stewart in Anthony Mann’s The Far Country will be available on Blu-ray November 12th From Arrow Academy

An archetypal example of its genre, The Far Country is one of five superb westerns the screen legend James Stewart made with acclaimed Hollywood auteur Anthony Mann.

Mann s film tells of Jeff Webster (Stewart) and his sidekick Ben Tatum: two stoic adventurers driving cattle to market from Wyoming to Canada who come to logger heads with a corrupt judge and his henchmen. Ruth Romain (Strangers on a Train) plays a sultry saloon keeper who falls for Stewart, teaming up with him to take on the errant lawman.

An epic saga set during the heady times of the Klondike Gold Rush, The Far Country captures the scenic grandeur of northern Canada s icy glaciers and snow-swept mountains in vivid Technicolor. Mann s direction expertly steers the film to an unorthodox,...

Anthony Mann

As much as any other filmmaker who found a niche in a given genre, in the 10 Westerns Anthony Mann directed from 1950 to 1958 he carved out a place in film history as one who not only reveled in the conventions of that particular form, but also as one who imbued in it a distinct aesthetic and narrative approach. In doing so, Mann created Westerns that were simultaneously about the making of the West as a historical phenomenon, as well as about the making of its own developing cinematic genus. At the same time, he also established the traits that would define his auteur status, formal devices that lend his work the qualities of a director who enjoyed, understood, and readily exploited and manipulated a type of film's essential features.

Though he made several fine pictures outside the Western, Mann as an American auteur is most notably recognized for his work in this field,...

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture.

One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and actor.

This article will examine some of the great director & actor teams. It’s important to note that this piece is not intended as a film history survey detailing all the generally revered collaborations.

There is a wealth of information and study available on such duos as John Ford & John Wayne, Howard Hawks & John Wayne, Elia Kazan & Marlon Brando, Akira Kurosawa & Toshiro Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max Von Sydow, Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina/Marcello Mastroianni, Billy Wilder & Jack Lemmon, Francis Ford Coppola & Al Pacino, Woody Allen & Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese & Robert DeNiro...

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called – was a long time coming. A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture industry, was still fresh in the nation’s memory. What the genre rarely offered was dramatic substance.

Early Westerns often adopted the same traditions of the popular Wild West literature and dime novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries producing, as a consequence, highly romantic, almost purely mythic portraits the Old West. Through the early decades of the motion picture industry, the genre went through several creative cycles, alternately tilting from fanciful to realistic and back again. By the early sound era, and despite such serious efforts as The Big Trail (1930) and The Virginian (1929), Hollywood Westerns were,...