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When Andrew Davis directed Chuck Norris in “Code of Silence” nearly 40 years ago, he established the template for the rest of his career: using the action genre to explore ideas he cared about.

In the case of “Code of Silence,” that meant a deep dive into Chicago racial tensions and the ethical complexities of police work. Davis’ skill at staging and shooting kinetic suspense grabbed audiences in that film and the terrific thrillers that followed, but what really separated him from his peers was the elegant integration of his own social conscience into the material. Whether the subject matter was the threat of nuclear proliferation in “The Package,” the CIA’s complicity in the international drug trade in “Above the Law” (Steven Seagal‘s first and easily best movie), or the moral and psychological cost of vengeance in “Collateral Damage,” Davis’ work has always been as thoughtful as it is dynamic.

Award-winning country singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, star of films such as Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid and A Star Is Born, has sadly died at the age of 88, it has been confirmed. The news was announced by Kristofferson's family on his official Instagram account last night, with a statement reading as follows: “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 28 at home. We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Born to Mary Ann and Lars Henry Kristofferson in Brownsville, Texas on 22 June, 1936, Kristoffer Kristofferson's pursuit of the creative arts began at a young age. Whilst his father's service in the U.S. Air Force seemed certain to push Kristofferson into a military career,...

Kris Kristofferson — the tough yet weary country music singer/songwriter behind “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” as well as the rugged leading man featured in romances like “A Star is Born” (1976) and westerns like “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” — has died at 88. He passed away in his home in Maui, Hawaii.

A statement released by his family reads, “We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

A proud son of South Texas, Kristofferson was also a military brat who often hopped around before finally settling in San Mateo, California. He went on to attend Pomona College where he excelled in rugby, American football, and track and field. At one point, he was even featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Kris Kristofferson, who attained success as both a groundbreaking country music singer-songwriter and a Hollywood film and TV star, died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii. No cause of death was given, but he was described as passing away peacefully while surrounded by family. He was 88.

Said his family in a statement, “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, Sept. 28 at home. We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.” The statement was offered on behalf of Kristofferson’s wife, Lisa; his eight children, Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake; and his seven grandchildren.

Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum,...

Paul Mazursky's 1986 comedy "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" is a sharp indictment of ultra-moneyed yuppie culture, which was running rampant during the Reagan administration. Culturally speaking, the mid 1980s saw a redoubled effort to enrich the already-wealthy and encourage rich people to become obsessed with conspicuous consumption. Many, many films and TV shows about Beverly Hills were released at this time, delving deep into the cockroach nest where America's wealthy classes gathered and cannibalized each other.

Prominent among these was Mazursky's film about a rich family, the Whitemans, that recently became wealthy thanks to a wire hanger manufacturing empire. The family are all empty and unhappy. Matriarch Barbara (Bette Midler) is attempting to fill her emptiness with increasingly strange renditions of New Age spirituality, while patriarch Dave (Richard Dreyfuss) is filling his own emptiness by having an affair with the family's live-in maid, Carmen (Elizabeth Peña). Their child...

When Gena Rowlands passed away last month at the age of 94, New Yorker critic Richard Brody referred to her as the greatest artist of all the actresses he had ever seen onscreen. It’s an assertion that might come across as hyperbole to someone who had never seen Rowlands’ collaborations with her husband John Cassavetes on “Faces,” “Minnie and Moskowitz,” “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Opening Night,” “Gloria,” and “Love Streams,” but even a cursory viewing of any of those performances quickly validates Brody’s claim. And while Rowlands’ work with Cassavetes is her most exalted (and properly so), she achieved great depths of emotional expression for other filmmakers like Woody Allen (“Another Woman”), Paul Schrader (“Light of Day”) and Paul Mazursky (“Tempest”) — not to mention her son Nick, who cast her in a beautiful late-career role in his tearjerker “The Notebook.”

This month both the American Cinematheque and the...

A laptop sits at the edge of the frame, its glow casting shadows across Romy (Nicole Kidman). Porn is playing. There are glimpses of a woman on all fours, gazing behind her at a man who coaxes her on with sneering encouragement. But the images are less important than the tinny voice emanating from them.

Gena Rowlands, whose seminal and fearless performance in “A Woman Under the Influence” inspired a generation and who starred in many other John Cassavetes features as well as the romance “The Notebook,” died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells, Calif. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by the office of her son’s agent. In June, Nick Cassavetes, who directed his mother in “The Notebook,” shared that the three-time Emmy winner and two-time Oscar nominee had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Rowlands’ role as Mabel Longhetti in the 1974 drama “A Woman Under the Influence,” written for her and directed by husband John Cassavetes, landed the actor the first of two Academy Award nominations. The other nom was for “Gloria” (1980), also directed by her husband. In November 2015, she was awarded an honorary Academy Award at the annual Governors Awards in recognition of her storied career.

“Working this long? I didn...

Jay Kanter, agent to superstar Hollywood clients including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly, died Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 97.

His son, Adam Kanter of Independent Artist Group, remembered his father as someone who conducted his entire career with “integrity and kindness.”

Kanter also inspired Jack Lemmon’s character in Billy Wilder’s classic comedy “The Apartment.”

Jay Kanter served in the U.S. Navy during WWII and started out working at McA, with mentoring help from Lew Wasserman. At just 22 years old, he was sent to pick up Brando at the train station and they became friends, with Brando becoming his longtime client.

He went on to represent stars including Warren Beatty, Gene Kelly and Ronald Reagan.

Kanter relocated to London when McA bought Universal, where he oversaw production for the studio in Europe. When the studio shut down European operations, he founded a production...

When IndieWire recently ranked the 25 best films of Alfred Hitchcock, it was probably no surprise to anyone that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the director’s sole attempt at a light romantic comedy, didn’t make the cut. Even Hitchcock himself tended to underrate the film, as when he told interviewer François Truffaut that “since I didn’t really understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written.” From a filmmaker who regularly dismissed movies he considered uncinematic as mere “photographs of people talking,” this was the ultimate self-directed insult.

Yet even a casual reappraisal of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” newly available in an exquisite Blu-ray special edition from Warner Archive, undermines Hitchcock’s claims about his own movie. While it would be a bridge too far to declare the film a masterpiece on a par with “Psycho” or “Rear Window,...

Bleecker Street’s new comedy “The Fabulous Four” finds Bette Midler doing what she does best: broad comedy with a touch of poignancy peeking out from just beneath the surface.

It’s a quality that characterizes many of Midler’s most memorable performances in films like “The First Wives Club,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” and “That Old Feeling,” and according to Midler, it’s been part of her approach since the beginning.

“When I worked live, starting from the time I was 19, I was very much aware of the melancholy underneath certain kinds of scenes,” Midler told IndieWire in a recent interview. “There’s a musical term for it: contrapuntal. ‘Miss M’ is loud and boisterous on the outside, but there’s an undercurrent of despair because it’s very hard to be a human being.”

In “The Fabulous Four,” Midler plays a widow who surprises her friends...

The opening minutes of Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s debut feature evocatively convey the feeling of falling in love. Two incredibly attractive people lock eyes at a party and then have a series of casual encounters in which their mutual attraction becomes obvious. Then we’re treated to a montage depicting their whirlwind courtship, marked by intense physical passion and the sort of over-the-top giddiness accompanying a brand-new relationship. Unfortunately, that sort of feeling doesn’t last forever. A mere six minutes into the film, there’s a cut to “seven years later,” when it becomes obvious that the now-married couple are experiencing serious relationship troubles.

But the Norwegian film isn’t really about a couple breaking up. It’s about a woman finally discovering who she is and what she needs, and as such it succeeds beautifully. Loveable, receiving its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, should find receptive audiences worldwide.

Phoebe Cates nearly ended Zach Galligan's career before she helped launch it.

Galligan was the New York City-born son of a corporate lawyer and a psychologist when, in his late teens, he landed his first major Hollywood audition. The film was Paul Mazursky's contemporized adaptation of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," and it promised to be a powerhouse actor's showcase what with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands already cast in the lead roles.

Mazursky and casting director Juliet Taylor were looking for a young actor to play the film's version of Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples who falls in love with Prospero's daughter Miranda. Given the production's pedigree, Galligan was competing against and reading with a who's who of up-and-coming performers, many of whom already had a movie or two under their belt.

One of these up-and-comers was Phoebe Cates, a showbiz kid who'd been on the...

Legendary Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, who died on Thursday after a long illness and a celebrated Hollywood film and TV career, revealed why he never sought dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship by acquiring an American passport.

“Because we don’t have the same sense of humor. It’s true. We don’t. I’m a Canadian through and through,” Sutherland told the CBC radio show Q with Tom Power in March during one of his last media interviews.

Sutherland, who had been living in recent years in Quebec, around 12 miles from the U.S. border, recalled giving that answer to an American border guard who asked why the Canadian actor, who already had a green card to work stateside, didn’t get an American passport to more quickly cross the border to complete errands.

“Anyway, I love the country. I’m very, very proud that they gave me a stamp,...

We're very sad to report that Donald Sutherland has passed away at the age of 88 after a long illness.

Sutherland appeared in countless movies and TV shows over the course of his six-decade career, taking on a wide range of roles. Early standouts include Pvt. Vernon Pinkley in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970), hippie tank commander Sgt. Oddball in Kelly’s Heroes (1970), and the titular private eye in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

Though he often played heroic characters, Sutherland also brought life to his share of villains, including a ruthless Nazi spy in Eye of the Needle (1981), and President Snow in the Hunger Games movies. He is also known for his devastating turn as a grieving father in Nicholas Roeg's sinister horror/thriller Don't Look Now (1973), which featured an infamously graphic (for its time) sex scene with Julie Christie.

The prolific actor's résumé also includes:...

Donald Sutherland, the tall, lean and long-faced Canadian actor who became a countercultural icon with such films as “The Dirty Dozen,” “Mash,” “Klute” and “Don’t Look Now,” and who subsequently enjoyed a prolific and wide-ranging career in films including “Ordinary People,” “Without Limits” and the “Hunger Games” films, died Thursday in Miami after a long illness, CAA confirmed. He was 88.

For over a half century, the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor, who received an honorary Oscar in 2017, memorably played villains, antiheroes, romantic leads and mentor figures. His profile increased in the past decade with his supporting role as the evil President Snow in “The Hunger Games” franchise.

Most recently, he appeared as Judge Parker on the series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” and in the “Swimming With Sharks” series in 2022. His other recent recurring roles include the series “Undoing” and “Trust,” in which he played J. Paul Getty, and features “Ad Astra” and “The Burnt-Orange Heresy.

How now, what news: the Criterion Channel’s July lineup is here. Eight pop renditions of Shakespeare are on the docket: from movies you forgot were inspired by the Bard (Abel Ferrara’s China Girl) to ones you’d wish to forget altogether (Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing), with maybe my single favorite interpretation (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet) alongside Paul Mazursky, Gus Van Sant, Baz Luhrmann, Derek Jarman, and (of course) Kenneth Branagh. A neonoir collection arrives four months ahead of Noirvember: two Ellroy adaptations, two from De Palma that are not his neonoir Ellroy adaptation, two from the Coen brothers (i.e. the chance to see a DVD-stranded The Man Who Wasn’t There in HD), and––finally––a Michael Winner picture given Criterion’s seal of approval.

Columbia screwballs run between classics to lesser-seens while Nicolas Roeg and Heisei-era Godzilla face off. A Times Square collection brings The Gods of Times Square,...

Rochelle Oliver, who starred on Broadway in Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and taught acting at New York’s respected Hb Studio since the 1970s, has died. She was 86.

Oliver died April 13, the Hb Studio announced. “Those who knew Rochelle will know what a luminous artist, sensitive and passionate teacher she was,” it said in an Instagram post. She died two days shy of her birthday.

For the big screen, Oliver starred in the Horton Foote-written 1918 (1985) and Courtship (1987) and appeared in such other films as The Happy Hooker (1975), Paul Mazursky‘s Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), John Sayles’ Lianna (1983), An Unremarkable Life (1989), Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman (1992) and Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending (2002).

She also recurred as Judge Grace Larkin on Law & Order from 1993-03.

A protégé of Uta Hagen — who also taught for decades at Hb and...

Dianne Crittenden, casting director on the original Star Wars who also worked on Pretty Woman, Spider-Man 2 and dozens of other films during a 40-year career, died March 19 at her home in Pacific Palisades. She was 82.

Her friend and colleague Ilene Starger confirmed her passing to Deadline.

Born on August 6, 1941, in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, NY, Crittenden got her start in the entertainment industry working with Howard Zieff, a photographer and director. They worked on advertising campaigns, TV commercials and films.

Her first project as casting director was Terrence Malick’s 1973 drama Badlands, starring Martin Sheen-Sissy Spacek, on which Bruce Springsteen based his song “Nebraska” a decade later. Crittenden worked on a few other films and TV shows, including the Emmy-winning 1976 Sally Field miniseries Sybil, before land the casting-director role of a lifetime — a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

After working with George Lucas on the iconic Star Wars,...

Variety will honor Molly Ringwald with the Variety Creative Vanguard Award at the Miami Film Festival on Saturday, April 6. The award will be for her outstanding career achievements, earning acclaim from critics and audiences alike.

Ringwald will participate in a Q&a about her extensive work in film and TV with Variety Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis.

“It’s important to remember that before Molly Ringwald was the iconic young star of John Hughes’ teen angst-driven comedies such as ‘Sixteen Candles,’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘The Breakfast Club,’ she first starred in Paul Mazursky’s contemporary update of Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest,’” said Steve Gaydos, Variety EVP of Global Content and Executive Editor. “This is important because the secret of Ringwald’s early success and career longevity is the simple fact she has always been one of American film and television’s most gifted and versatile actresses. Her dazzling work this...

There were movies about the Holocaust long before "Schindler's List." Superb movies. George Stevens' "The Diary of Anne Frank," Stanley Kramer's "Judgment at Nuremberg," Alan J. Pakula's "Sophie's Choice," and Paul Mazursky's "Enemies, a Love Story" (to name but a few) grappled with this staggeringly evil, carefully coordinated campaign of genocide so that moviegoers could, hopefully, comprehend how ordinary people could become bigoted, bloodthirsty monsters. The answers weren't comforting, but we couldn't move forward as a species without them.

Aside from the "how," there was another agonizing question that needed to be answered, one that was not as easy to dramatize: why didn't more people step up to stop this?

It doesn't take a great deal of research to realize that most good people were paralyzed by a mixture of cowardice and self-preservation. And while it is vital that we keep hammering home this observation for future generations,...

“Drive-Away Dolls” is an audacious lesbian road movie inspired by such Kings of the Bs as John Waters and Russ Meyer. Two young women (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) rent a drive-away car without knowing there’s cargo in the trunk that could get them in big trouble with a gang of criminals. Sure enough, thugs are soon chasing them down America’s highways.

Luckily, just about every man in the movie is a bumbling idiot. And not everyone keeps their head.

“Drive-Away Dolls” is the definition of ribald. These girls are as randy and on the make as any of their “Porky’s” counterparts. The movie wears no pretensions. It’s not going up for Oscars. It’s coming out in February, for Chrissakes!

To help promote the movie, filmmakers Ethan Coen — who accepted the Best Picture Oscar for “No Country for Old Men” back in 2008 with his usual creative partner,...

M3GAN (Universal Pictures), Taken 3 (20th Century Studios), Paddington 2 (Warner Bros.), Cloverfield (Paramount Pictures)Graphic: The A.V. Club (AP)

Historically and annually speaking, January is a bad month for Hollywood movies. It’s a “dump month,” that time of year when the major studios offload the projects in which they have no faith.

In 2012, the world’s film critics considered Federico Fellini’s 1963 Oscar-winning “8 ½” one of the 10 greatest films of all time. By 2022, Fellini’s landmark film had fallen out of the top 30.

Once upon a time, director/screenwriter/producer Martin Scorsese had reportedly cited it as his favorite film of all time. More recently it’s come in second for Scorsese, tucked behind Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Endlessly copied, cribbed from (both consciously and unconsciously) and parodied, it inspired Paul Mazursky’s 1970 film “Alex in Wonderland” (which includes a cameo by Fellini) and was the source material for the Tony-winning musical “Nine.”

Variety’s critic Bob Hawkins was effusive about the film straight out of the gate, reviewing it after its Rome premiere. He noted that it was “an exciting, stimulating monumental creation” and an example of what Hawkins’ deemed “the author-director picture par excellence.”

While Hawkins colorfully described...

Oscar-nominated actor Ryan O’Neal, who came to prominence on TV’s “Peyton Place” and became a top star of the 1970s in films including “Love Story,” “What’s Up, Doc?,” “Paper Moon” and “Barry Lyndon,” died Friday, his son Patrick said on Instagram. He was 82.

O’Neal was diagnosed with chronic leukemia in 2001 and with prostate cancer in 2012.

“Ryan was a very generous man who has always been there to help his loved ones for decade upon decade,” his son wrote. “My dad was 82, and lived a kick ass life. I hope the first thing he brags about in Heaven is how he sparred 2 rounds with Joe Frazier in 1966, on national TV, with Muhammad Ali doing the commentary, and went toe to toe with Smokin’ Joe.”

In later years, O’Neal’s acting work often took a backseat to media coverage on his personal travails, involving his combative relationship with longtime companion Farrah Fawcett,...

James Sanders in Celluloid Skyline: New York And The Movies quotes Deborah Kerr with Cary Grant in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember: “It’s the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York.”

In the first instalment with architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders, we discuss his timeless and profound book, Celluloid Skyline: New York And The Movies, in which he explores how deeply one informs the other. From Joan Didion’s wisdom to Cedric Gibbons’s dream sets in the sky, we touch on George Stevens’s Swing Time (starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and Robert Z Leonard’s Susan Lenox (with Greta Garbo and Clark Gable); East River running with Jill Clayburgh and Michael Murphy in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.

James Sanders with Anne-Katrin Titze: “One of the aspects of a mythic city is that it can go anywhere ”

The mansion...

After a world premiere at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and its North American premiere over the weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Noah Pritzker’s (Quitters) second film goes for a mix of Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, Paul Mazursky, Noah Baumbach and other white male filmmakers, past and present, who enjoy basking in the midlife marital crisis in which many guys find themselves trapped. While not on the level of those acclaimed filmmakers, in this case, Pritzker manages to cast his net wider into an early-, mid-, and late-life crisis over three generations of the men in the Pearce clan.

The result is an engaging indie exercise that’s for sale to any distributor who finds promise in a premise that might be a tough sell for mainstream buyers despite a game cast that lifts it up a notch or two. Art houses would seem to be its theatrical future,...

(Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we look at an Oscars category from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy's winner stands the test of time.)

As someone who frequently peruses the past years of the Academy Awards, more often than not the results just wash over me. Rarely are the winners the most exciting options, but I generally understand how and why a given person or film walked away with a trophy, even if they wouldn't have gotten my vote. People like to grouse about the results of the Oscars, but their whiffing on a massive scale actually doesn't happen as often as people claim it does.

Of course, there are those "What were they thinking?" moments, like "Crash" winning Best Picture and "That Thing You Do!" losing Best Song. Few make me scratch my head harder than Best Actor at the 1975 Oscars. It's a slate...

Michael Lerner, the longtime character actor who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as the artistically disinterested studio executive Jack Lipnick in “Barton Fink,” has died at the age of 81. The news was announced by Lerner’s nephew, actor Sam Lerner, on his personal Instagram page. While he did not offer any specifics about his uncle’s death, he used the post to pay tribute to the late Oscar nominee.

“We lost a legend last night,” Sam Lerner wrote. “It’s hard to put into words how brilliant my uncle Michael was, and how influential he was to me. His stories always inspired me and made me fall in love with acting. He was the coolest, most confident, talented guy, and the fact that he was my blood will always make me feel special. Everyone that knows him knows how insane he was— in the best way. I’m...

There are two types of Al Pacino performances. The first is the kind that announced him as an acting virtuoso in the 1970s. They're fully inhabited, imbued with a coiled intensity, and forever on the verge of crescendoing to rage or, on rare occasions (most movingly in Jerry Schatzberg's "Scarecrow"), joy. This is Pacino at his very best: restless, yet modulated. When he blows his top in "Dog Day Afternoon," screaming "Attica" at the cops posted outside the bank he's attempting to rob, the moment is earned. He's given us keen insight into the mental machinery that drives Sonny, and has us cheering along with the crowd, even though we're still not sure why he's been driven to such dead-end desperation.

The second type is the grotesque self-parody that's been grist for impressionists — none better than Bill Hader — and soundboard prank callers since he stole Denzel Washington's Oscar...

Exclusive: Steve Small and Gwen Osborne have today announced the launch of Convergence Entertainment Group, their new film production and financing company based in Los Angeles.

Convergence will operate as an independent studio, developing, financing and producing features for theatrical, broadcast and streaming markets. The company will utilize private equity funding to acquire top-level material and package projects with respected actors and filmmakers.

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Convergence plans to produce around half a dozen theatrical features per year for now, with hopes to expand its volume of production and financing as it continues to reach its growth objectives.

“Convergence aims to create a filmmaker and talent-friendly studio where...

In 1982, the same year Sir Ben Kingsley won his Best Actor Oscar for Gandhi, the year’s other big movie was Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Now, 40 years later, Kingsley has found his own E.T., a sort of combination of that classic with a bit of Cocoon, and perhaps The Father. But Jules, the new dramedy having its world premiere on opening night of the Sonoma Film Festival, marches to its own sweet beat, and represents yet another game attempt to bring that older adult audience back to theaters. A smart distributor should take a close look.

Directed by industry veteran producer and director Marc Turtletaub and written by Gavin Steckler, this slight but engaging, even quirky little film, is a crowd-pleaser that presents Kingsley with a role that fits like a glove, and one we haven’t seen him often do, especially with a full head of hair.

Charlie Kaufman will receive the Writers Guild of America West’s 2023 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. The prize recognizes members of the WGA who have “advanced the literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter,” according to a statement released by the guild.

The recognition comes 23 years after Kaufman’s first WGA Awards nomination, for “Being John Malkovich” — a groundbreaking surrealist classic directed by Spike Jonze that also earned Kaufman his first Academy Award nomination, a Golden Globe nod and an Independent Spirit Award win for Best First Screenplay.

Also Read:

‘The Fabelmans,’ ‘Women Talking,’ ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Land Writers Guild Nominations

Reteaming with Jonze, he turned his own painful writer’s block while adapting Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief” into the mind-bending film “Adaptation,” which again earned him nominations from the WGA and the Academy. He won both awards...

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman will be this year’s recipient of the WGA West’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. The lifetime achievement award, which goes to members who have “advanced the literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter,” will be presented March 5 during the 75th annual Writers Guild Awards at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

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“A true visionary, Kaufman’s legacy is undeniable,” the guild said.

He won an Oscar and a WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay for 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and received Oscar and WGA nominations for...

Donn Cambern, the film editor who used his musical background to help make Easy Rider a masterpiece and 15 years later shared an Oscar nomination for cutting Romancing the Stone, has died. He was 93.

Cambern died Wednesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of complications from a fall three weeks ago, a family spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Los Angeles native edited Blume in Love (1973), Willie & Phil (1980) and Tempest (1982) for Paul Mazursky, Twins (1988) and Ghostbusters II (1989) for Ivan Reitman and worked on five Burt Reynolds starrers, including Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) and The Cannonball Run (1981).

Cambern also received an editing credit on The Last Picture Show (1971), though Peter Bogdanovich insisted that he was the editor on that.

He was honored with a career achievement award from the American Cinema Editors in 2004, and three years later, he became the first recipient of the Motion Picture Editors Guild’s Fellowship and Service Award.

Donn Cambern, the Oscar-nominated Romancing the Stone film editor whose credits also include Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show and Ghostbusters II and was a longtime president of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, died Wednesday, his family told the guild. He was 93.

Born on October 9, 1929, in Los Angeles, Cambern came from a showbiz family. His father was in the music-publishing business, and his mother played harp on movie soundtracks including Top Hat for the Rko Pictures orchestra. He graduated from UCLA in 1952 and landed a gig at Disney as a messenger.

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He began his career in 1960s television, serving as music editor for episodes of I Spy, That Girl and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir along with scores of...

Alejandro González Iñárritu (Bardo) is set to receive the Cinema Audio Society’s Filmmaker of the Year honor at the 59th Cas Awards, taking placing at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown hotel on March 4.

This will be the 18th year that Cas bestows its Filmmaker Award. Past recipients include Gil Cates, George Clooney, Bill Condon, Jonathan Demme, Jon Favreau, Taylor Hackford, Richard Linklater, James Mangold, Rob Marshall, Paul Mazursky, Jay Roach, Sir Ridley Scott, Henry Selick, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Joe Wright and Edward Zwick.

The Cinema Audio Society will also this year honor five-time Oscar nominee Peter J. Devlin, Cas (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) for its Career Achievement Award, as previously announced. Its recognition of Iñárritu will follow the release of his latest awards-contending feature, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths — his first made in Mexico in over 20 years, which has been described as his most personal to date.

As a filmmaker, Noah Baumbach has always been a dyed-in-the-wool dramatic realist, talky coastal neurotic division. He hasn’t always been as good at it as he is today; “The Squid and The Whale” (2005), the divorce drama that established his reputation and is held in supremely high regard by many cinephiles, isn’t half the movie that “Marriage Story” is. The latter film was Baumbach’s culminating achievement after 25 years as a writer-director, and it brought his strengths to a new pitch of mastery: his ability to nail the dynamics of troubled relationships in all their frayed layers, his extraordinary skill with actors, and the nimble levity of his dialogue, which emerges from the human comedy as surely it did in the great films of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky.

With “Marriage Story,” Baumbach enjoyed the kind of success that independent filmmakers dream of. So it’s no surprise, in a way,...

By the early 1980s, Hollywood thought it had Robin Williams pegged. Based on four mostly successful seasons of "Mork & Mindy" and two explosively funny HBO specials ("Off the Wall" and "An Evening with Robin Williams), he was a whirling dervish of hilarity who existed to light up your living room. He was easily one of the best, most agile-minded comedians on the planet, but his talent was specialized. If you wanted to hear Elmer Fudd sing Bruce Springsteen's "Fire," Robin Williams was your man. No one wanted to see him straitjacketed in a dramatic role.

Paul Mazursky believed otherwise. Though the writer-director of comedic character studies originally conceived of "Moscow on the Hudson" as a star vehicle for ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was to play a Russian ballet dancer who defects during a stop in New York City, he quickly adjusted the screenplay for Williams when Misha passed.

Exclusive: Karen Gillan (Thor: Love and Thunder) will star opposite Margaret Sophie Stein (Bullets Over Broadway), Jermaine Fowler (Sorry to Bother You), Kevin Nealon (SNL) and Talia Balsam (Divorce) in the Lisa Steen-directed comedy Late Bloomers from We’re Doin’ Great and Park Pictures, which has wrapped production in Brooklyn, NY.

The film written by Anna Greenfield is loosely based on her experience living in Brooklyn in her 20s. It centers on Louise (Gillan), an aimless millennial who drunkenly breaks her hip, landing her in physical therapy. There, she makes an elderly Polish Bff (Stein) who speaks no English. And it’s this unlikely friendship that gives her the courage to face what she’s been running from all along: Her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. Fowler plays Louise’s Craigslist roommate/landlord Brick, with Nealon and Balsam as her parents.

Late Bloomers marks the feature directorial debut of Greenfield’s frequent collaborator,...

As the Venice Film Festival prepares to celebrate its 90th anniversary, researchers have reconstructed how Stanley Kubrick’s first film, now known as “Fear and Desire,” came to screen on the Lido in 1952.

The screening of the film, initially titled “Shape of Fear,” took place at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido on Aug. 18, 1952, in a section called Festival of the Scientific Film and Art Documentary.

Basically, Kubrick’s debut was invited for a special screening after not making the cut for competition due to “the length and character of the film,” as an exchange of letters between the 23-year-old Kubrick and then Venice chief Antonio Petrucci attests (see below).

The whole story has been reconstructed for the first time in the letters and documents preserved in the archives of the fest’s parent organization, the Venice Biennale, ahead of an international conference celebrating the 90th anniversary of the world’s oldest film festival,...

Antonio Campos, creator of the new HBO Max miniseries The Staircase, walks hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante through his favorite films noir.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Afterschool (2008)

The Devil All The Time (2020)

Rashomon (1950) – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (1996)

Raw Deal (1948) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

T-Men (1947) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)

House of Bamboo (1955) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Pickup On South Street (1953) – Sam Hamm’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Reign of Terror (1949)

Detour (1945) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Scarlet Street (1945)

The House on 92nd Street (1945) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Barry Lyndon (1975) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

The Killing (1956) – Michael Lehmann’s trailer commentary

Kiss of Death (1947) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Kiss of Death...

Not long after attending my first Cannes Film Festival almost 35 years ago, I was still green and naïve enough to ask long-time Cannes attendees why the famed French fest held such a powerful place in the pecking order of international film gatherings. The late Richard Corliss, Time magazine’s peerless and beloved film critic, answered warmly and succinctly, with his own more worldly query: “Would you rather be in Germany in the winter or the South of France in the spring?”

Corliss had a point, but in the decades since I’ve tucked my own couple of dozen Cannes fests under my belt, I’ve compiled my own list of reasons why Cannes remains the one film festival that people who’ve never been to a film festival have heard about and wish they could go to, and know that if a film has scored there, it must be worth their time.

Actress-director Anjelica Huston may have been born into film royalty and may have fulfilled that royal destiny by becoming the third generation, after actor grandfather Walter and director-actor-writer father John Huston, to score Oscar gold, but her early innings were not the stuff cinema dreams are made of.

“Casino Royale” is the film where she first appeared, as an uncredited young teen 55 years ago this month. It is largely regarded as an overcooked comedy fiasco, or as Variety deemed it back then, “an attempt to spoof the pants off the James Bond.” The film had no less than five directors, including her father, John.

Variety was kinder to John Huston’s 1969 film “A Walk with Love and Death,” Anjelica’s first starring role, but most other outlets were tougher on the film and Huston’s performance, and it came and went with little notice.

In a vain attempt to overcome that fate,...

Alan Ladd Jr., the revered Hollywood producer and studio executive who saved Star Wars when Fox wanted to shut down production and gained vindication when he received an Oscar for Braveheart after being dumped by MGM, has died. He was 84.

Ladd, who headed production at Fox, Pathe Entertainment and MGM (in two stints) and ran his own outfit, The Ladd Co., with great success, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles.

“With the heaviest of hearts, we announce that on March 2, 2022, Alan Ladd, Jr. died peacefully at home surrounded by his family,” his daughter Amanda Ladd-Jones wrote on social media. “Words cannot express how deeply he will be missed. His impact on films and filmmaking will live on in his absence.”

As a studio executive and producer, Ladd — the son of screen idol Alan Ladd (This Gun for Hire, Shane) — had a hand in 14 best picture nominees. His imprint...

Our annual tradition of Fantasy Double Features asks the year's Notebook contributors to pair something new with something old, with the only requirement being the films have to have been freshly seen this year.Part diary of memorable viewing during 2021, part creative prompt to think about how cinema's present speaks to its past (and vice versa), the 14th edition of our end of year poll weaves between theater-going and home-viewing so seamlessly as to suggest that early pandemic impediments from last year are now quite normal. Yet clearly that hasn't stopped us from watching, being delighted by, and thinking about movies, and the wonderful combinations below are testaments to the dynamic, idiosyncratic, and interactive vitality of moviegoing wherever and however its being practiced.CONTRIBUTORSJett Allen | Paul Attard | Jennifer Lynde Barker | Susana Bessa | Michael M. Bilandic | Ela Bittencourt | Johannes Black | Joshua Bogatin | Alex Broadwell | Celluloid Liberation Front | Lillian Crawford | Adrian Curry...

Four-time Oscar nominee Ridley Scott will receive the Cinema Audio Society Filmmaker Award at the 58th Annual Cas Awards, taking place at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown on March 19, 2022.

The prolific director-producer who most recently helmed 20th Century Studios’ The Last Duel and MGM and United Artists Releasing’s House of Gucci is being recognized for a nearly 60-year career that has also seen him direct such classics as Thelma & Louise, Alien, Black Hawk Down, Blade Runner and Gladiator, while exec producing such acclaimed series as The Good Wife, The Good Fight and Raised by Wolves.

Scott is the 17th Cas Filmmaker honoree. Past recipients of the award include George Clooney, James Mangold, Steven Spielberg, Joe Wright, Jon Favreau, Jay Roach, Richard Linklater, Edward Zwick, Jonathan Demme, Rob Marshall, Taylor Hackford, Henry Selick, Paul Mazursky, Bill Condon, Gil Cates, and Quentin Tarantino.

“The Cinema Audio Society has long regarded...

Ridley Scott will receive the Cinema Audio Society filmmaker award at the 58th Annual Cas Awards on March 19, 2022, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown.

The filmmaker is behind this year’s awards contenders “House of Gucci” and “The Last Duel.”

“The Cinema Audio Society has long regarded Sir Ridley as a legendary director and bold visionary producer,” Cas President Karol Urban said in a statement. “It is with immense anticipation that we prepare for this year’s awards knowing we will have the opportunity to physically gather as industry professionals representing our craft to salute Sir Ridley’s contribution to creative storytelling.”

Producer and director Scott is renowned for his works on films such as “Thelma & Louise,” “Alien,” “Black Hawk Down” and “Blade Runner.”

While his epic film “Gladiator” won the Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards for best picture, Scott still has yet to receive an Academy Award.

Taking place across outdoor venues in all five boroughs of New York City, the Tribeca Film Festival will celebrate its 20th anniversary June 9-20, screening a bevy of features, shorts, TV series, podcasts and games in what is being billed as the first major in-person film festival to take place in North America since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Managing all the logistics to mount a proper in-person festival despite such circumstances would be a tall enough order, but the task of assembling a credible festival lineup across multiple disciplines, despite a near-total shutdown of film production for months, could have been quite a challenge on its own. It was something that Tribeca’s festival director Cara Cusumano was apprehensive about as the festival prepared to open for submissions last summer, but it turned out she needn’t have worried.

“We didn’t know what to expect, submissions-wise,” she says.

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...