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November 2024, Criterion Channel is set to deliver an exceptional lineup of films that will excite cinephiles and casual viewers alike. The month promises a rich exploration of genres, featuring a strong selection of Coen Brothers classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and The Big Lebowski (1998), along with their more recent works like A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Noir and crime enthusiasts will revel in an array of titles, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gilda (1946), and The Big Heat (1953), showcasing the genre’s iconic narratives and stylistic depth. International cinema also shines through with compelling French dramas like Fat Girl (2001) and Dheepan (2015), highlighting diverse storytelling from around the globe.

The lineup doesn’t shy away from classic drama, featuring timeless films like On the Waterfront (1954) and Seven Samurai (1954), which continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Additionally, viewers can look forward to a variety of documentary and experimental films, including Wild Wheels...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

Rather than a dark comedy, Owen Kline’s directorial debut Funny Pages is perhaps more akin to slowly unfolding tragedy with a number of gut-busting gags. The story follows Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), a 17-year-old aspiring cartoonist from an upper-middle-class background who drops out of high school to make his dream a reality. Moving into a damp New Jersey basement that’s basically a dungeon and crossing paths with Image Comics color-separator-turned-petty-criminal Wallace (Matthew Maher), Robert’s misguided journey may be painfully relatable for anyone who’s alienated loved ones through an intense dedication to niche interests.

With a very selective filmography after his breakout role in The Squid and the Whale as a 13-year-old, appearing only for friends the Safdie brothers (who returned the favor producing Funny Pages) and Michael Bilandic, Kline emerges an exciting new voice in cinema. Ahead of his film’s release, we were lucky enough to...

Helping you stay sane while staying safe… featuring Leonard Maltin, Dave Anthony, Miguel Arteta, John Landis, and Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Plague (1979)

Target Earth (1954)

The Left Hand of God (1955)

A Lost Lady (1934)

Enough Said (2013)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)

Heaven Can Wait (1978)

Down to Earth (2001)

Down To Earth (1947)

The Commitments (1991)

Once (2007)

Election (1999)

About Schmidt (2002)

Sideways (2004)

Nebraska (2013)

The Man in the Moon (1991)

The 39 Steps (1935)

Casablanca (1942)

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Night Walker (1964)

Chuck and Buck (2000)

Cedar Rapids (2011)

Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

Duck Butter (2018)

The Good Girl (2002)

The Big Heat (1953)

Human Desire (1954)

Slightly French (1949)

Week-End with Father (1951)

Experiment In Terror (1962)

They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)

Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall (1987)

Airport (1970)

Earthquake (1974)

Drive a Crooked Road (1954)

Pushover (1954)

Waves (2019)

Krisha (2015)

The Oblong Box (1969)

80,000 Suspects (1963)

Panic In The Streets (1950)

It Comes At Night (2017)

Children of Men (2006)

The Road (2009)

You Were Never Really Here...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Braguino (Clément Cogitore)

Le Cinéma Club excels in presentation—opening their clean website every Friday reveals a free, new, conveniently sized film playing alongside original written content—but more important is their reach: time and again they’re screening unavailable, underseen, sometimes thought-missing work by auteurs established and upcoming alike. Their current program concerns recent documentaries—starting today is French filmmaker Clément Cogitore’s Braguino, which surveys two rival families in images merging you-are-there immediacy with stunning high-definition clarity. At 49 minutes the experience is ideal for your dense quarantine lineup. – Nick N.

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

Columbia Noir

To celebrate their one-year anniversary, The...

The Criterion Channel launches Monday, replacing that void left in cinephile hearts everywhere after the shuttering of FilmStruck just four months ago.

Subscribers can expect very little difference on the new service that wasn’t previously available on the Criterion Collection’s home at FilmStruck.

The service’s core, permanent library available on launch day is the over 1,000 movies, 350 shorts and 3500 supplemental materials that make up the Janus Film library. These are the classic arthouse films that for decades have been a mainstay in DVD restorations as part of the Criterion Collection.

Also Read: Why the New Criterion Channel Streaming Service Won't Be a 'Netflix Killer'

Criterion President Peter Becker referred to The Criterion Channel as “an art house at your house,” adding that the library is made up of the “last name” filmmakers that any movie buff should know well: (Michelangelo) Antonioni, (Jean-Luc) Godard, (François) Truffaut, (Akira) Kurosawa,...

In just two weeks, a cinematic haven will launch. After the demise of FilmStruck left cinephiles in a dark depression, The Criterion Channel has stepped up to the plate to launch their own separate service coming to the U.S. and Canada on Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS, and Android and Android TV devices. Now, after giving us a taste of what is to come with their Movies of the Week, they’ve unveiled the staggeringly great lineup for their first month.

Along with the Criterion Collection and Janus Films’ library of 1,000 feature films, 350 shorts, and 3,500 supplementary features–including trailers, introductions, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, video essays, commentary tracks, and rare archival footage–the service will also house films from Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate, IFC Films, Kino Lorber, Cohen Media, Milestone Film and Video, Oscilloscope, Cinema Guild, Strand Releasing, Shout Factory, Film Movement,...

The Criterion Channel, the streaming service that is bringing classic films back online after the widely lamented shutdown last fall of WarnerMedia’s FilmStruck, has set the lineup for its launch on April 8. (See it below.)

The channel features the same Criterion Collection and Janus Films titles that were on FilmStruck, which went dark last fall, prompting a backlash among a long list of A-list directors, not to mention thousands of fans of the service. FilmStruck had been an effort to take the DNA of Turner Classic Movies into the streaming realm, with hundreds of Criterion titles at its core. Original programming from FilmStruck will also be back on the new channel, including Adventures in Moviegoing, Meet the Filmmakers, Observations on Film Art and 10 seasons of John Pierson’s Split Screen.

Subscriptions are $10.99 per month or $99.99 a year. A promotional offer lowers the lifetime price for those who sign up...

Out of the ashes of FilmStruck comes the Criterion Channel, which is launching April 8 and has announced an exciting first slate of new programming being added onto the streaming platform throughout its first month. When the service goes live next month it will be the exclusive streaming home for the Criterion Collection and Janus Films’ library of more than 1,000 classic and contemporary films. Original series that aired on FilmStruck will be back on the Criterion Channel, including “Adventures in Moviegoing,” “Meet the Filmmakers,” and “Observations on Film Art.”

In addition to its extensive library, Criterion Channel will be adding new films daily. The first new addition to the service on April 8 will be a spotlight on Columbia Pictures’ history of film noir through 11 movies: “My Name Is Julia Ross”; “So Dark the Night” (Joseph H. Lewis, 1946); “The Big Heat” (Fritz Lang, 1953); “Human Desire” (Fritz Lang, 1954); “Drive a Crooked Road” (Richard Quine,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954) is showing from June 28 - July 28, 2018 in the United Kingdom as part of Human Beasts: A Fritz Lang Double Bill.The ringmaster and the architect—in the history of cinema, before the New Hollywood, before the French New Wave, there may be no directors who complement each other as well as Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang. The surface parallels are evident enough: both began their careers in silent cinema, made their most canonical masterpiece in the 1930s, fled to Hollywood as fascism took over Europe, and returned to their homelands after the war to make their final films. Both have a somewhat totemic place in film history, and in neither case is the totem the whole story. As much as he signifies cinematic humanism, Renoir could be an unsentimental and deeply cynical storyteller. And for all the dark cities,...

Pop stars write closing credit songs all the time. But the story behind Elvis Costello’s moving song “You Shouldn’t Look at Me That Way,” about an older woman’s complicated allure, is crazy. Producer Barbara Broccoli and Peter Turner went to see his show at the London Palladium and were shocked to see a photo of Gloria Grahame on the stage. When they went backstage, they asked Costello to write a song for “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” starring Annette Bening as the aging Hollywood actress who has an affair with younger actor Peter Turner (Jamie Bell).

Read More:Annette Bening Finds the Truth in the Very Strange Tale of Gloria Grahame and ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’

Costello had hung out with Alan Bleasdale, the playwright of one of the plays Turner starred in during that period. But while Costello is a film buff...

What an astounding actress Annette Bening is. And she’s at her very best in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool playing Gloria Grahame, a screen siren of the 1940s and 1950s. Here, however, we pick up with the actress during her last years, from 1979 to 1981, when she died of breast cancer at the age of 57. Instead of hitting all the familiar beats – fading bombshell desperately holding on to her past glory – Bening brings Graham to thrilling life as the complicated woman she was till the end.

Grahame made her...

Wow! Fritz Lang's second western is a marvel -- a combo of matinee innocence and that old Germanic edict that character equals fate. It has a master's sense of color and design. Robert Young is an odd fit but Randolph Scott is nothing less than terrific. You'd think Lang was born on the Pecos. Western Union Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1941 / Color /1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / Street Date November 8, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Randolph Scott, Robert Young, Virginia Gilmore, Dean Jagger, John Carradine, Chill Wills, Slim Summerville, Barton MacLane, Victor Kilian, George Chandler, Chief John Big Tree, Iron Eyes Cody, Jay Silverheels. Cinematography Edward Cronjager, Allen M. Davey Original Music David Buttolph Written by Robert Carson from the novel by Zane Grey Produced by Harry Joe Brown (associate) Directed by Fritz Lang

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Darryl Zanuck of 20th Fox treated most writers well, was good for John Ford...

Glenda Jackson: Actress and former Labour MP. Two-time Oscar winner and former Labour MP Glenda Jackson returns to acting Two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson set aside her acting career after becoming a Labour Party MP in 1992. Four years ago, Jackson, who represented the Greater London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, announced that she would stand down the 2015 general election – which, somewhat controversially, was won by right-wing prime minister David Cameron's Conservative party.[1] The silver lining: following a two-decade-plus break, Glenda Jackson is returning to acting. Now, Jackson isn't – for the time being – returning to acting in front of the camera. The 79-year-old is to be featured in the Radio 4 series Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money, described on their website as a “mash-up” adaptation of 20 Emile Zola novels collectively known as "Les Rougon-Macquart."[2] Part 1 of the three-part Radio 4 series will be broadcast daily during an...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

‘Starry Eyes’: The feel disturbed movie of the year

This film is at its very core a success story. A very demented, gory, horrifying and darkly comical success story – one with tinges of satanic cult horror wrapped in psychological terror. The plot follows a young aspiring actress, Sarah, as she is called back to audition for a horror film that is being produced by a mysterious production company that pushes her to her limits – a dark exchange for fame and fortune… click here to read the article.

‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I’ is all prologue

In a previous review of the second instalment of The Hunger Games series for this website, I expressed some dismay that Catching Fire didn’t really have a conclusion to speak of, with its cliffhanger ending reminding me less of The Empire Strikes Back and more of The Matrix Reloaded orPirates of...

In the Mood For Love

Written and Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Hong Kong, 2000

A film centered on the human desire for affection, Wong Kar-Wai utilizes his poetic filmmaking style to construct In the Mood For Love, a movie that follows two individuals in their struggling marriages. Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and Mr. Chow (Tony Chiu Wai Leung) yearn for adoration in marriages where their spouses have found it elsewhere. The movie asks its audience to reflect on the morality of their feelings. Although they never physically connect, is their growing emotional attachment overstepping the boundaries of 1960s Chinese culture? And from our perspective, does it even matter, as their own partners have already found comfort in one another? The beauty of this movie is that it alludes more than it does showcase, for story purposes, which forces viewers to critically think about the complexity of marriage and human need.

In the Mood For Love...

A couple of weeks ago, on what would have been Gloria Grahame’s 89th birthday (the actress died in 1981, her last years poignantly documented in the memoir Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool), I searched for a poster that would best represent her. The best that I could find was the Belgian poster for Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, but it became clear to me that poster artists had rarely captured one of the most distinctive and glorious faces in Hollywood. Most of the images of Grahame in posters just don’t look like her.

All of which leads me to In a Lonely Place, perhaps Grahame’s best film and one of my all-time favorites, the posters for which I’ve been looking for an excuse to feature. Nicholas Ray’s 1950 doomed romance about a cynical screenwriter with a hot temper who falls in love with the actress...

A rundown of the impacts those iron horses have made on the silver screen

This week's Clip joint is by John Carvill. Think you can do better? Email your idea for a future Clip joint to adam.boult@guardian.co.uk.

Ever since the infamous arrival of the Lumiere Brothers' locomotive at La Ciotat Station in 1895, trains have been cinematically significant. Those big old iron horses always made for suitably impressive and technologically exciting cinematic subject matter, of course; but they also offered a compelling metaphor for the experience of cinema itself. Consider, for example, the complex relationship between motion and stasis inherent in each of these experiences: the sedentary train passenger, on a moving train, watching through the 'frame' of a window as the slumbering countryside apparently whips by; the eyes of the seated cinema audience member, presented with a sufficiently swift and numerous succession of static celluloid frames,...

William Friedkin's 1975 interview with Fritz Lang

If you happen to be in the market for Fritz Lang Christmas ornaments, they do exist, though they don't come cheaply. At any rate, much of the third issue of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism (the successor to Movie, the print journal Ian Cameron edited from 1962 to 2000) is given to the second part of its Fritz Lang dossier featuring — and I should mention before you start clicking that these are PDFs — Stella Bruzzi on Fury (1936), Vf Perkins on You Only Live Once (1937), Edward Gallafent on The Return of Frank James (1940), Adrian Martin on Scarlet Street (1945), Peter William Evans on The Big Heat (1953), Deborah Thomas on Human Desire (1954) and Peter Benson on Moonfleet (1955).

Also in this issue: Christian Keathley on Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Alex Clayton on Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake and John Gibbs on Jamie Thraves's...

Martin Scorsese's Paradiso Outdoor Cinema, St Germans

Scorsese isn't the first person you picture paddling in a Cornish estuary, but Port Eliot Festival has persuaded him to curate a season of evening double bills. His selection is defiantly old school – 1974's Murder On The Orient Express is the most recent. There are sumptuous epics such as The Leopard and The Red Shoes, and classic noirs Human Desire and The Narrow Margin. For more up-to-date fare (and more shelter), the parallel Paradiso Piccolo indoor event has newer documentaries and features including Project Nim, Velvet Goldmine and author Kevin Sampson introducing his rock'n'roll saga Powder.

Port Eliot, Thu to 24 Jul

The Flipside With Jenny Agutter, London

From The Railway Children to Walkabout, Logan's Run to An American Werewolf In London, Jenny Agutter has long occupied a special place in the hearts (and fantasies) of a certain demographic. Those foragers of the...

Remember our friends from a couple of weeks ago, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam? The ones who tried to argue that feminism ruined sex because it makes women less willing to be sexually submissive? Well, you can expect to hear a lot more about them over the next few weeks, as they have a book out: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire. I can't tell if the experiment they're referring to in that subtitle is their own work or the existence of the internet, but given the general attitudes of the authors, I'm guessing it's the egomaniacal one. The book describes analysis of a billion internet searches about sex from around the world, and is being reported on as a scientific study. Which it ain't. Nobody in this day and age publishes scientific studies as books. They publish them as articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Festival-goers will be able to enjoy director's 'own subtle, spectral presence' through his playful choice of films

Martin Scorsese's four specially chosen double bills at the Port Eliot Festival is another reminder of his reputation as someone committed to preserving movie history. It's also part of the new curatorial fashion in film festivals: a big name will be asked to curate (sometimes at long-distance) a strand by personally selecting a number of films with a unifying idea or theme and then putting their name to the resulting event, perhaps with some well-chosen words for the programme. The local organisers do the legwork, locating the actual cans of film, or DVDs, and scheduling the projections.

Scorsese's choices here are droll, and the presence of a railway viaduct at Port Eliot is significant. Murder On The Orient Express is about a murder on a train. Hitchcock's North By Northwest has legendary train scenes.

Director to curate four night season at Cornish festival with Brunel viaduct providing backdrop to outdoor screenings

Even legendary Hollywood director Martin Scorsese has never had a set like this to play with – a giant screen by a river under the stars, with a backdrop of trains rumbling across a towering viaduct designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Scorsese, who is curating The Director's Cut, a unique four-night film season at the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall this June, clearly agonised over an opening film that would live up to the grandeur of the setting in 4,000 acres of Humphry Repton-designed parkland.

Trains and clouds of steam were obviously essential ingredients, and he considered both Shanghai Express (1932), with the luminous Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, or Hitchcock's thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938).

His final choice may surprise devotees of Raging Bull or Gangs of New York: his opener is Murder on the Orient Express...

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Gloria Grahame.

Take One: The Big Heat (1953)

When you think of Film Noir, you think of hard-boiled anti-heroes in fedoras, smoking, permanently with gun. But in some noirs it’s ladies first. Fritz Lang’s dirty, masterful noir par excellence The Big Heat has a first-rate femme fatale in Grahame’s Debby Marsh. Thank 20th Century Fox for replacement pleasures then: Grahame stepped in when original pick Marilyn Monroe’s fee became too high, giving the the film an extra sprinkling of salty sass. She excelled in each moment, whether heartfelt or hardened; I can only hazard a guess that Monroe might have made Debby’s eventual desperation too pleading. Under Grahame’s control Debby’s desperate dilemma was frenetic and wrenching. Never has the rapid flush of devastation been so well conveyed on screen as when she runs to Glenn Ford’s apartment to beg for cover.

One of the downsides of going to the Rotterdam Film Festival (more on which next week) was having to miss a whole week of Film Forum’s essential “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” retrospective which continues through February 10th. To search through Lang’s American posters (and the foreign posters for his American films) is to skulk through a world of fisted revolvers, prison cell bars, street corner shadows, knives, nooses, and dames in various stages of manhandled distress; a world of heightened emotions and febrile desperation with barely a smile to be seen.

While the foreign posters are often the most striking (like the French poster, above, for one of my very favorite American Langs, You Only Live Once), what many of the original American posters have going for them are their lurid taglines which up the ante of Langian doom another notch or two. Rancho Notorious: “Where anything goes ...for a price!

There seems to be no exhausting the raw eyeball pleasure to be had from old-fashioned handmade (or semi-handmade, or whatever) animation, and we may be well living through a pop renaissance of it.

The eruptions below the Pixar/Dreamworks budget tier have been spectacular and international, beginning perhaps with 2003's "The Triplets of Belleville," learning from Miyazaki, Oshii, Aardman and the Quays, moving on to Kim Moon-saeng's "Sky Blue," machinima, "The Corpse Bride," "A Scanner Darkly," "Persepolis," "Coraline," "Waltz with Bashir," "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Mary & Max," "Sita Sings the Blues," "Fear(s) in the Dark," "The Secret of Kells," and now the Belgian nonpareil "A Town Called Panic."

The variety of toolboxes and styles at work seem limitless (the seductive but uniform look of pure 3D computer animation is getting tiresome just as other approaches proliferate), but it's the personal engagement that makes most of the films sing.

Many of...

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson

Rating (out of 5): ****

Out of all the movies under-represented on DVD, film noir likely makes up a huge chunk of them. Thankfully, Warner Home Video and Sony Pictures have been digging deep in their vaults and releasing a series of box sets. Coming up later this month, Warner unleashes Volume 5 in their series, while Sony releases the second edition of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics. As with Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1 (2009), this new box kicks off with a Fritz Lang classic. Made on the heels of The Big Heat (1953) with the same cast, Human Desire (1954) never caught on in quite the same way, perhaps because its ending doesn't seem to carry the same kind of punch; it sort of winds down, rather than exploding.

With last week's release of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 2 (Human Desire, The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, City of Fear and Pushover), do yourself a favor. Trust me (and you'll thank me later). It will only take a few hours. Stop thinking about/reading all of the various tabloid drama screaming in your face every morning, stop spending too much money on disappointing movies in the theaters, and settle into a bonafide great movie, a movie not enough people have ever seen -- Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall. "Mixing fear and the ridiculous can be very exciting." -- Jacques Tourneur Nightfall is a work of striking juxtapositions and tones that by picture end, come off like an unforgettably disarming person -- you're charmed, discombobulated, even slightly disturbed, and you're not sure what to make of it all. You just know you...

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A Single Man In my opinion this is easily the best film being released this week. However, as much as I enjoyed it, I am not sure I would recommend it as a buy, though if I were to add it to my basket I would say the Blu-ray is the way to go as director Tom Ford does a lot of work with color in this film that adds to the overall emotion of the story and would make for an excellent high-definition presentation. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The sequel hits limited theaters this coming Friday and David Fincher is prepping an American remake. See the original before all that happens and find out what everyone is talking about, that is if you decide you don't want to read the books first. Brooklyn's Finest This isn't...

Tchaikovsky, WMDs, and 3-D highlight this week's choice selections of DVD announcements. Normally we proceed in order of release date, but we are going to jump ahead immediately to the unveiling of Disney's Fantasia on Blu-ray. Just a few days ago on their Movie Rewards Facebook page, a posting described a "Blu-ray combo pack" of the classic 1940 merging of animation and classical music as coming to the market on Dec. 7. That listing appears to have now been taken down. No specifics were listed but according to Disney's Movie Rewards Member Advocate, Penny Costley, "both Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 will be released this fall/winter on DVD and Blu-ray Disc Combo Pack." Mark Pearl Harbor Day as a tentative date until a more official announcement but any time before Christmas is a true gift for us all...with Blu-ray players.

Coming back to June 22, Sony will be releasing Michael Hoffman's...

More good news for my favorite film genre! Back in May, I attended and wrote about the great “I Wake Up Dreaming” noir film festival at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, hosted by Elliot Lavine. Showcasing old and rare B-movies from the 30s to the 50s, the festival was so successful that it was extended for another week.

Consider this a further extension two changing seasons later, as starting this Thursday Mr. Lavine will once again bring 22 rare noir gems to the Roxie for two weeks of betrayals, knife-sharp suspense and treacherous women.

This time around, the films are newly restored 35mm archive prints from Columbia Pictures—directed by acclaimed directors like Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, and king of gimmicks William Castle. As with “I Wake Up Dreaming,” the films are shown as double features: two films for $11.

This collection offers a couple of noir-horror hybrid,...

Oscar nominee Nina Foch has died in Los Angeles. She was 84.

The actress fell ill while teaching at the University of Southern California on Thursday. She died the following day of complications from a long-term blood disorder.

Foch had been a teacher at USC for 40 years.

Born in Holland in 1924, she started out as a B-movie star in films like My Name Is Julia Ross in the mid-1940s and became a favourite in film noir movies like Human Desire and The Dark Past.

Foch also appeared in classics A Song to Remember, An American in Paris, The Ten Commandments and Executive Suite, for which she was Oscar nominated as a Best Supporting Actress.

She also earned an Emmy Award nod in 1980 for her work on an episode of Lou Grant.

Glenn Ford, the laconic actor best known for his roles in Gilda, Blackboard Jungle, and as Jonathan Kent, the adoptive father in Superman, died Wednesday (8/30) in Los Angeles. Ford had suffered a series of strokes over the last ten years and was in failing health. He was 90. Ford played the strong but silent type, most frequently on the range in films such as The Rounders and 3:10 to Yuma, but just as effectively in urban settings such as his role as the put-upon teacher in Blackboard Jungle. Born May 1st, 1916 as Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Quebec, Canada did not seem a likely start for a man to become a box-office draw in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. When his family moved to Southern California at age 8, however, Ford became smitten with all things show business, leading to high school plays and West Coast stage productions. Under contract with the notoriously difficult Harry Cohn at Columbia Ford was requested to change his name to something catchier. He salvaged what he could of his birth name, keeping his last name and switching his first to Glenn, after his father's birthplace of Glenford, Wales. Ford labored for several years in productions that ranged from the broad serialized comedy of Blondie Play Cupid to program westerns such as Texas (which also starred contemporary and sometimes rival for acting parts, William Holden). But Ford found particular on-screen chemistry with Rita Hayworth and their 1946 noir classic Gilda catapulted them both into stardom. Ford played Hayworth's ex-lover, who is put into the tempting position of watching over her by her unsuspecting crime-boss husband. The sultry turn for Hayworth made her a superstar and Ford a leading man, assuring work for him for the next two decades, including several more films with Hayworth (The Loves of Carmen and Affair in Trinidad). In The Big Heat Ford was given the chance to work with Fritz Lang, a true craftsman (and again in Human Desire), and the actor also starred in lesser films of Frank Capra (Pocketful of Miracles) and Vincente Minelli. The second film Ford made with Minelli, a collaboration called The Courtship of Eddie's Father, was quite popular and inspired a television show of the same name. More often than not, however, he took direction from under-appreciated, work-for-hire helmers such as Budd Boetticher and George Marshall. His work in the `70s was largely restricted to television, of varying quality. In 1978 his brief role as Jonathan Kent, the man who adopts Kal-El in Superman, Ford lent some moral heft and humanity to the film as the warm counterpart to Kal-El's Krypton father, Marlon Brando's cold intellectual, Jor-El. Ford was married to famed dancer-actress Eleanor Powell for 16 years (1943-1959) and they had one son, Peter. Powell passed away in 1982. Peter hosted a gala birthday celebration at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on Ford's 90th birthday in May (featuring a restored 35mm print of Gilda) but, due to setbacks in his health, the actor was unable to attend and sent a videotaped message in his stead.