News

Hollywood is reeling from the death of Al S. Ruddy, the Oscar-winning producer of such iconic films as The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby. Ruddy passed on May 25 at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center after a brief illness. The multi-hyphenate filmmaker was 94.

“Al was truly one of the great Hollywood mavericks,” The Offer director Dexter Fletcher said in a statement. “One of the last Mohicans who created great movies which still influence and inspire to this day. From humble beginnings to the highest of Hollywood accolades. His was an incredible journey. Achieved through the sheer power of his determination, strong will, irrepressible energy and charm and a rarely matched love for the art of film.”

Fletcher’s Paramount+ miniseries The Offer chronicles the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. It stars Miles Teller as Ruddy and immortalizes the visionary producer’s meticulous work on the 1972 classic.

For his feature debut,...

Albert S. Ruddy, who earned two Best Picture Oscars for producing The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby and co-created TV shows including Walker, Texas Ranger and Hogan’s Heroes, died May 25 at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center after a brief illness, a family spokesman said. He was 94.

Ruddy is one of nine producers ever to earn two or more Best Picture Oscars, and has the distinction of winning them with the largest interval in between — 32 years.

He recently was portrayed by Miles Teller in the Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, which chronicles Ruddy’s experience making the 1972 film that Coppola directed and adapted with Mario Puzo from the latter’s bestselling novel.

Related: Peter Bart: ‘The Offer’ Spins A Mafia Tale About ‘The Godfather’ That’s Really More Fiction Than Fact

“Al was truly one of the great Hollywood mavericks,” The Offer director Dexter Fletcher said in a statement. “One of...

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Brad Pitt Wants to Fuck a Cartoon in “Cool World”

If Robert Zemeckis’ “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” is one of the wonders of the cinematic world, then Ralph Bakshi’s “Cool World” is its under-trafficked, overly adult gift shop. The 1992 flop is worth walking through at least once — though I wouldn’t pick up anything from its metaphorical floor.

Embraced by lovers of animated baddies and so-wrong-it’s-right gems everywhere, this dark medium-blending fantasy film was intended to be Bakshi’s big comeback after a ten-year movie hiatus, arriving...

The new Max Original series, "Looney Tunes Cartoons", stars Warner Bros 'Bugs', 'Daffy', 'Porky', 'Tweety' and a whole lot more "...serving up an all-new season of mayhem", now streaming on HBO Max:

"...'Bugs' hops to the basketball court for an ultimate game of streetball, 'Porky' spends a relaxing afternoon with his nephew 'Cicero..

"...'filled with soothing music, chainsaws, fire and broken windows and 'Daffy' lends his wing to Porky as an emotional support duck..." 

Click the images to enlarge...

On the Warner Bros. lot in the summer of 2019, a soundstage housing a basketball court flanked by greenscreens hosted four-time NBA Mvp LeBron James, who — while talking to the occasional cardboard cutout of Daffy Duck — played against a small armada of local collegiate athletes wearing motion-capture suits. The cheering fans on the sidelines included Batman sidekick Robin, murderous clown Pennywise and Game of Thrones’ White Walkers, with CG spectators like King Kong to be added later. At the center of this Warners-sponsored fever dream was Malcolm D. Lee.

During the course of a career that established him as ...

On the Warner Bros. lot in the summer of 2019, a soundstage housing a basketball court flanked by greenscreens hosted four-time NBA Mvp LeBron James, who — while talking to the occasional cardboard cutout of Daffy Duck — played against a small armada of local collegiate athletes wearing motion-capture suits. The cheering fans on the sidelines included Batman sidekick Robin, murderous clown Pennywise and Game of Thrones’ White Walkers, with CG spectators like King Kong to be added later. At the center of this Warners-sponsored fever dream was Malcolm D. Lee.

During the course of a career that established him as ...

The stakes of the original 1996 “Space Jam” were always silly: To keep the beloved Looney Tunes out of the clutches of an uninspired alien businessman who wanted to use their visage to trump up his failing amusement park, the tribe enlisted Michael Jordan to play a space-set basketball game to earn their freedom. That concept is strange enough (though not strange enough to keep the film from making over $250 million at the box office and capturing the hearts and minds of an entire generation of kids); even stranger was that this blatantly commercial film was about the dangers of, well, commercialization. Free the Tunes from a life of corporate servitude by sticking them inside a ridiculous blockbuster designed to sell merchandise for a major entertainment conglomerate and one of the biggest sports franchises in the world? Oh, the irony.

That it took 25 years for Warner Bros. to cook up a...

The new Max Original series, "Looney Tunes Cartoons", stars Warner Bros 'Bugs', 'Daffy', 'Porky', 'Tweety' and a whole lot more "...serving up an all-new season of mayhem", now streaming on HBO Max:

"...'Bugs' hops to the basketball court for an ultimate game of streetball, 'Porky' spends a relaxing afternoon with his nephew 'Cicero..

"...'filled with soothing music, chainsaws, fire and broken windows and 'Daffy' lends his wing to Porky as an emotional support duck..." 

Click the images to enlarge...

The dearth of African contenders in the main competition at this year’s Berlinale might come as no surprise to the continent’s perennially disappointed filmmakers. One could argue — not unfairly — that Africa is still underrepresented at the world’s top film festivals.

But you wouldn’t have to look hard to find emerging African voices in festival strands like Berlin’s Panorama, Toronto’s Contemporary World Cinema, or Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. That many of these films are from first- and second-time directors bodes well for a continent still grappling to reclaim its own narrative.

Three years after Senegal’s Alain Gomis won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for his Kinshasa-set drama “Félicité,” other kudos for African filmmakers have followed. The past 12 months alone have seen Sudanese director Suhaib Gasmelbari’s documentary “Talking About Trees” scoop a pair of prizes in last year’s Berlinale; Sudan’s Amjad Abu Alala...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWanuri Kahiu on the set of RafikiRafiki director Wanuri Kahiu has announced her latest project, an adaptation of Octavia Butler's 1980 Wild Seed, produced by Viola Davis and written by novelist Nnedi Okorafor. Butler's novel follows two immortal African beings whose tumultuous rivalry takes them across pre-colonial West Africa to a plantation in the American South. Recommended VIEWINGFrom March 20–April 2, Vdrome is screening Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil's documentary Inaate/Se/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./]. The film "imagines new indigenous futures, looking simultaneously backward and forward." The new trailer for Hong Sang-soo's Grass is at once simple and cryptic, conveying one of many mysteries encountered by a young writer observing intimate interactions in a bustling cafe. The dreamy, video game-inspired images of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel's Jessica Forever come to life in a new trailer.

Exclusive: Amazon Prime Video is developing Wild Seed, a drama series based on the first book in Octavia E. Butler’s acclaimed Patternist sci-fi series, from Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee Productions.

Co-written by award-winning sci-fi novelist Nnedi Okorafor and Rafiki filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu who is set to direct, Wild Seed is a love (and hate) story of two African immortals who travel the ages from pre-Colonial West Africa to the far, far future. Doro, a killer who uses his power to breed people like livestock, encounters Anyanwu, a healer who forces him to reassess his millennia of cruel behavior: for centuries, their personal battles change the course of our world as they struggle against the backdrop of time — master vs slave, man vs woman, killer vs healer.

Davis, Tennon and Andrew Wang, JuVee’s head of television development, executive produce with Kahiu, Okorafor, along with Ernestine Walker...

Michael Parks, longtime Hollywood mainstay and beloved character actor and singer, has passed away at the age of 77. The news was announced by filmmaker Kevin Smith, who took to his Instagram to share that “the best actor I’ve ever known” and his “cinematic muse,” had died. No cause of death was named.

Smith directed Parks in both his “Tusk” and “Red State,” having relished the longtime actor’s career since first seeing him in Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Though Parks’ career stretched back to 1960, when he made his screen debut on TV’s “Zane Grey Theater,” in recent years, the supporting standout had enjoyed a revival at the hands of both Quentin Tarantino (who Smith deemed Parks’ “biggest fan”) and Smith, who continued to craft roles for the singular actor.

I hate to report that my cinematic muse #michaelparks has passed away. Michael was, and will likely forever remain,...

Brian G. Hutton, the director of classic war films Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes, has died. He was believed to be 79.Born in 1935, the New Yorker had a brief acting career before migrating to the other side of the camera. He studied acting at Elia Kazan’s famous Actors Studio in Hell’s Kitchen, before heading to the West Coast under the patronage of legendary Casablanca producer Hal Wallis.Arriving in Los Angeles, he quickly scored theatre gigs, staging plays and teaching acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. During the mid-to-late ‘50s he landed acting roles in TV staples like Gunsmoke and Perry Mason, as well as Kirk Douglas Western Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and Elvis musical King Creole.Soon after Hutton came to the attention of Universal Studios’ New Horizons programme. The studio’s low-budget production scheme for young directors afforded him his first experience of directing work,...