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Now that they’ve set the year’s best film for a December 10 debut, the Criterion Channel have unveiled the rest of next month’s selection. John Waters’ films are inseparable from John Waters’ presence, making fitting Criterion’s decision to pair an eight-film retrospective (Multiple Maniacs to Cecil B. Demented) with his own “Adventures in Moviegoing” wherein the director extols virtues of Bergman, Chabrol, Barbara Loden, and Samuel Fuller. His own Polyester will have a Criterion Edition alongside the Bob Dylan doc Don’t Look Back, an iconic film in its own right and, I think, fitting companion to The Unknown with Lon Chaney, also streaming on Criterion. No Country for Old Men and Election receive likewise treatment; the latter appears in “MTV Productions,” a series featuring Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, The Original Kings of Comedy, and (coming close to Freddy Got Fingered for least-expected 2024 addition) Jackass: the Movie.

Three decades after making “Forrest Gump,” director Robert Zemeckis is once again looking back in time and pushing filmmaking boundaries as he reteams with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for his latest effort, “Here.”

Hanks and Wright play a married couple who are seen at many ages and life stages in the film, thanks to Zemeckis’ deft use of bleeding edge techniques including an AI-assisted aging and de-aging process to convey a lifetime. That meant paying meticulous attention to the specificity of a person’s body movements at a given age. To cite but one example, how one bounces off a couch as a nimble teenager is very different from how that same person gets up from a couch as a 60-something.

“You had to gear up for, in the morning you’re going to be 17, and in the afternoon you’re going to be 22,” Hanks tells Variety.

Hanks prepared...

With its body horror “The Substance” performing well at the box office, a rerelease of Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” currently underway, and a successful streaming channel offering artful cinema from around the world, you’d think the fine folks at Mubi might slow down and smell the roses, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Returning for its seventh season, Mubi is announcing a new installment of its award-winning audio-documentary series, “Mubi Podcast.” This new batch of episodes is inspired by film critic Tim Robey’s soon-to-be-published book, “Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops.”

Highlighting films such as “Sylvia Scarlett” (1935), “Sorcerer” (1977), and “Speed Racer” (2008), Robey’s book uncovers the history behind some of the entertainment industry’s biggest flops, contrasting their initial failure with the eventual acclaim they’d garner over time. Over six episodes, “Mubi Podcast” host Rico Gagliano will use this material as a guide,...

Sean Baker’s acclaimed and Oscar-tipped new comedy focuses on a sex worker, a story that led him to consult with those who live and work in that world

In Anora, a wilful young woman engaged in sex work is swept up in a Cinderella story. Anora, or Ani as everyone calls the titular character, who is played with mercurial force by Mikey Madison, cozies up with a rich young brat (Mark Eidelstein), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch with mob ties. Their whirlwind romance quickly unleashes clock-strikes-midnight chaos across Manhattan, Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

The movie, written and directed by Tangerine and The Florida Project’s Sean Baker, is a deliriously entertaining and moving screwball comedy that takes notes from Preston Sturges and Federico Fellini. Those film-makers, like Baker, have always been hyperaware of class and economics, accepting wholeheartedly that love and romance, with all its joys and tragedy,...

The Criterion Channel’s at its best when October rolls around, consistently engaging in the strongest horror line-ups of any streamer. 2024 will bring more than a few iterations of their spooky programming: “Horror F/X” highlights the best effects-based scares through the likes of Romero, Cronenberg, Lynch, Tobe Hooper, James Whale; “Witches” does what it says on the tin (and inside the tin is the underrated Italian anthology film featuring Clint Eastwood cuckolded by Batman); “Japanese Horror” runs the gamut of classics; a Stephen King series puts John Carpenter and The Lawnmower Man on equal playing ground; October’s Criterion Editions are Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Hunter, Häxan; a made-for-tv duo includes Carpenter’s underrated Someone’s Watching Me!; meanwhile, The Wailing and The Babadook stream alongside a collection of Cronenberg and Stephanie Rothman titles.

Otherwise, Winona Ryder and Raúl Juliá are given retrospectives, as are filmmakers Arthur J. Bressan Jr. and Lionel Rogosin.

With the elections less than two months away and the highly anticipated debate between former President Donald Trump and current vice president Kamala Harris on Sept 10, it’s time to revisit classic political movies. TCM is currently presenting a nine-week series “Making Change: The Most Significant Political Films of All Time.” Political films run the gamut from thrillers, to dramas (“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”), to the historical, to satirical comedies.

Speaking of satires, Preston Sturges received his one and only Oscar for his screenplay for 1940’s “The Great McGinty,” his smart, funny comedy about a hobo (Brian Donlevy) who rises to governor only to lose it all. Sturges had originally written a piece “The Story of Man” in 1933 with Spencer Tracy in mind. Tracy had just starred in 1933’s “The Power and the Glory,” which marked Sturges’ first film script. He attempted to sell it to Universal which also turned the story down; so,...

Back in 2016, Moma curator Dave Kehr programmed a series of restorations and rediscoveries from the early days of sound at Universal Studios. Across the country in Los Angeles, film historian Leonard Maltin looked at the schedule with envy and longing. “My mouth was watering,” Maltin told IndieWire. “I was so frustrated that I couldn’t just fly to New York and set up a futon in the lobby so I could go to all the films he was screening.”

Luckily, Maltin was able to see some of the films back in Hollywood when Universal archivist Bob O’Neil allowed him to sit in on screenings that had been set up to check answer prints. “I saw dozens of them,” Maltin said. “Some were good, many were unmemorable or downright bad, but every now and then I got lucky and found a real winner.”

Maltin wanted to share his discoveries with the Los Angeles film community,...

The seed for In & Out, according to screenwriter Paul Rudnick, was planted during the 1994 Academy Awards when Tom Hanks, accepting the best actor Oscar for Philadelphia, thanked his high school drama teacher, who was gay. What if, Rudnick wondered, that teacher lived in a small Indiana town and wasn’t gay—or, more to the point, what if that teacher was gay and just didn’t realize it yet?

The comic tone of Frank Oz’s film recalls the 1993 episode of Seinfeld titled “The Outing,” in which Jerry is falsely labeled as gay in a college newspaper. That episode’s refrain, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”—offered by the central characters as both a badge of liberal awareness and a declaration of their skittishness concerning the subject of gay sex—works as a comedic complement to the prestige orientation of something like Philadelphia. After all, the subject...

For many fans around the world, the films and TV shows that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe are among their top choices when it comes time kick back and relax with some comfort viewing. But for Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, making those pieces of entertainment is his job, he’s surrounded by Marvel entertainment for his entire work day. So when he needs comfort viewing, it’s time to turn to something outside the MCU. Speaking with Mashable, Feige revealed that his comfort viewing choices include Seinfeld, RoboCop, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the Friday the 13th franchise!

When asked for his go-to comfort watch choices, Feige answered, “During the pandemic, I started watching a lot of Thin Man movies from the ’30s and a lot of Frank Capra films from the ’30s. I sort of had a gap in my cinematic viewing of late ’20s to early ’40s,...

The Criterion Channel has unveiled its streaming lineup for August 2024, which features an eclectic mix of independent films showcasing the work of auteurs from around the world.

The boutique service will become the exclusive streaming home of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 comedy “Licorice Pizza,” and will celebrate the occasion by adding four more of his films to the channel: “The Master,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” and “Magnolia.” Anderson’s frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman will additionally be celebrated on the streaming service as part of a larger retrospective. Many of the late actor’s most iconic roles, including “Capote” and “Synecdoche, New York,” will be included, along with his sole directorial outing “Jack Goes Boating.”

The channel will also highlight several other prominent filmmakers including Preston Sturges, who helped pioneer the modern rom-com through films like “The Lady Eve” and “The Palm Beach Story,” and prolific Egyptian auteur Youssef Chahine.

The Criterion Channel’s August lineup pays tribute to auteurs of all kinds: directors, actors, and photographers, fictional or otherwise. In a notable act of preservation and advocacy, they’ll stream 20 titles by the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, here introduced by the great Richard Peña. More known (but fun all the same) is a five-title Paul Thomas Anderson series including the exclusive stream of Licorice Pizza, as well as a Philip Seymour Hoffman series that overlaps with Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love (a Criterion Edition this month), and The Master, plus 25th Hour, Love Liza, and his own directing effort Jack Goes Boating. Preston Sturges gets five movies, with Sullivan’s Travels arriving in October.

Theme-wise, a photographer series includes Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Blow-up, Close-Up, and Clouzot’s La prisonnière; “Vacation Noir” features The Lady from Shanghai, Brighton Rock, Kansas City Confidential, Purple Noon, and La piscine. Alongside the aforementioned PTA and Antonioni pictures,...

If Chris Marker and Preston Sturges ever made a film together, it might have looked something like Grand Tour, a sweeping tale that moves from Rangoon to Manila, via Bangkok, Saigon and Osaka, as it weaves the stories of two disparate lovers towards a fateful reunion. The stowaways could scarcely be more Sturgian: he the urbane man on the run, she the intrepid woman trying to track him down. Their scenes are set in 1917 and shot in a classical studio style, yet they’re delivered within a contemporary travelogue––as if we are not only following their epic romance but a director’s own wanderings.

Grand Tour, which delivered much-needed magic to this year’s Cannes Film Festival lineup, is directed by the one and only Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese filmmaker behind The Tsugua Diaries (an entertaining Covid joint from 2021), Arabian Nights (his epic 2015 triptych), and Tabu (a breakout from...

Much has been made about the smoky sexiness of Luca Guadagnino's "Challengers," notably the brief threesome scene near the beginning of the movie. While the scene is plenty sexy, it constitutes the bulk of the on-screen physicality of "Challengers," and it is, perhaps disappointingly, relegated to about 90 seconds of tongue kissing; Guadagnino's film is not the bisexual throuple film the ad campaign would have you believe it is. 

Instead, it's a soapy, recognizably classical love triangle about three bitter souls who were never able to get over that fateful make-out session. The three players involved were promising tennis champions in high school. There's Tashi (Zendaya), the hotshot celebrity that is already being courted by marketers. There's Patrick (Josh O'Connor), the rough-hewn, stubble-encrusted stud. And there's Art (Mike Faist), the talented jokester whose magic shell quickly hardens into a crunchy layer of jealousy. "Challengers" follows them, via flashbacks, through their...

Settle in, Mother Scratchers! We’re going back to the salad days of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s fabled partnership for the duo’s unconventional comedy about an unlikely courtship, unwanted house guests, a cigar-chomping pale rider, the best deals on furniture in the Southwestern portion of the United States, and baby stealing! Slap your ass, and don’t forget the Huggies because we’re revisiting the Coen Brothers’ 1987 crime comedy Raising Arizona.

The dynamic duo of Joel and Ethan Coen made the Hollywood scene in 1984 with the neo-noir crime drama Blood Simple. Featuring John Getz, Francis McDormand, and Dan Hedaya, Blood Simple helped define the brothers as a creative team to watch, with critics taking a shine to the thriller’s harsh Texas setting, twisting plot, and hypnotic characters. Not all filmmakers come out of the gate swinging, but the Coens delivered a haymaker for film buffs craving something dark,...

Like most movies, The Invisible Man travelled a long and winding road to the silver screen, and perhaps longer and more winding than most. As biographer James Curtis put it in his book James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, “The gestation of The Invisible Man was the lengthiest and most convoluted of all of James Whale’s films. It involved four directors, nine writers, six treatments, and ten separate screenplays—all for a film that emerged very much in harmony with the book on which it was based.” It was first suggested as a possible follow-up to Dracula (1931), perhaps as a vehicle for new star Bela Lugosi, but was dropped in favor of Frankenstein (1931) due to the complicated special effects it would require. After Frankenstein was an even bigger success, both director James Whale and star Boris Karloff were immediately attached to The Invisible Man and several...

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray sizzled as the duplicitous lovers in Billy Wilder’s exceptional 1944 film noir “Double Indemnity.” But that classic based on James M. Cain’s novel wasn’t their first pairing. Four years earlier, they played very different lovers in “Remember the Night,” which was penned by the brilliant Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen. The exquisite holiday film, ironically released in January of 1940, has become a Christmas favorite thanks to TCM, streaming services and DVDs.

MacMurray stars as Jack, a young New York City assistant district attorney. Stanwyck’s Lee has seen her share of bad breaks is on trial before Christmas for shoplifting a bracelet at a jewelry store. MacMurray decides to bail her out of jail for the holidays and ends up taking her back to his Indiana family farm where she is warmly welcomed by his mother and aunt. His mother (Beulah Bondi...

In the new Netflix documentary “Sly,” Sylvester Stallone reflects on a time in his career when he felt he lost his way — basically, a rare period during which he wasn’t making “Rocky” or “Rambo” movies. To hear Stallone tell it, taking a break from his two signature roles was misguided folly, corrected only when he wrote and directed “Rocky Balboa” in 2006 and followed it up with a new “Rambo” two years later.

“Sly” director Thom Zimny seems to more or less accept this version of film history, and if one’s only measure of value is box office grosses the idea has some validity; there’s no arguing with the fact that whenever Stallone strayed too far from his franchises (after “Rocky” and “Rambo” he managed to find one more with the “Expendables” series), audiences tended to stay away. Zimny doesn’t even need to spend much time on...

Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.

November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...

These last few years the Criterion Channel have made October viewing much easier to prioritize, and in the spirit of their ’70s and ’80s horror series we’ve graduated to––you guessed it––”’90s Horror.” A couple of obvious classics stand with cult favorites and more unknown entities (When a Stranger Calls Back and Def By Temptation are new to me). Three more series continue the trend: “Technothrillers” does what it says on the tin, courtesy the likes of eXistenZ and Demonlover; “Art-House Horror” is precisely the kind of place to host Cure, Suspiria, Onibaba; and “Pre-Code Horror” is a black-and-white dream. Phantom of the Paradise, Unfriended, and John Brahm’s The Lodger are added elsewhere.

James Gray is the latest with an “Adventures in Moviegoing” series populated by deep cuts and straight classics. Stonewalling and restorations of Trouble Every Day and The Devil, Probably make streaming debuts, while Flesh for Frankenstein,...

The awards team at Amazon, as the parent company of MGM, a division of which includes Orion, may have an unexpected awards contender on its hands with Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial debut American Fiction, an adaptation for Orion of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Princess Alexandra Theatre on Friday night.

A sharp and witty look at American racial dynamics — a Black academic (played engrossingly by the great Jeffrey Wright) grows frustrated that the only “Black books” that seem to find a wide (and white) audience are those that tread on stereotypes. So, he writes one himself under a pseudonym. The film plays like a Preston Sturges or Mel Brooks classic, packed with jokes as well as biting social commentary and often had the audience laughing out loud.

Amazon seemed to be waiting to see how the...

Director James Mangold drew from classic films, both contemporary and from the studio era, for the latest Indiana Jones film, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” This latest — and last — turn for Harrison Ford’s famed archaeologist gave Mangold many features to pull inspiration from, starting with 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” as directed by Steven Spielberg.

“When we talk about the ‘Raiders’ film, and even Steven’s work in general, which has always been a big influence on me, you have to kind of understand that Steven himself is highly influenced and inspired by the classical, Golden Age, Hollywood style,” Mangold told TheWrap. “So you’re talking about a compendium of influences.”

But when it came to crafting the character of Helena, played by “Fleabag” star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mangold went back to the 1940s screwball world of director Preston Sturges. “I had very much in mind Barbara Stanwyck...

Flying saucers and alien invasion movies were the trend in the 1950s. UFO sightings in Washington State in 1947 and the famous crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1948 had ignited a fever for all things alien. The movies soon followed the public interest with films like The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), This Island Earth (1955), Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957), and many more of varying levels of quality. Many of these science fiction/horror hybrids were aimed toward an audience of children and teenagers and often featured young people, but few placed the viewer so deeply in the child’s perspective as the 1953 classic Invaders from Mars.

In many ways, Invaders from Mars walked so that Invasion of the Body Snatchers could run just three years later. Much of this is due to its extremely low budget and independent production.

This year, all the Oscar-contending directors are nominated for original screenplay: the Daniels, Todd Field, Martin McDonagh, Ruben Östlund and Steven Spielberg (writing with Tony Kushner).

This is the first time it’s happened in AMPAS history.

The only year that came close was 2017, when all five helmers had written or co-written their scripts, though they didn’t all get writing noms.

So here’s Film History 101.

In Hollywood lore, Preston Sturges is often credited as the first scribe to become a hyphenate, as writer-director of the 1940 “The Great McGinty.” But as with all Hollywood “facts,” there is only an element of truth here.

In the next few years, he was joined by some heavyweights: Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) in 1941; Leo McCarey (co-writer of “Going My Way”); Billy Wilder (writing with Raymond Chandler) for “Double Indemnity” in 1944; and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Dragonwyck”), 1946.

However, a writer-director wasn’t an innovation.

Recently, I was pondering a question: who is the most recently celebrated filmmaker who wasn't also a writer? This is a much more difficult question to answer than you might think. Think of all the great auteurs of today from Barry Jenkins to Céline Sciamma to Bong Joon-ho. They all write their own material. They may work with co-writers, but when it comes to the act of putting words on the page, they have to be involved. All five of the Oscar nominees for Best Director this year also wrote their films' screenplays.

While writer-directors are the norm today, they were a rarity prior to the New Hollywood era of filmmaking. Directing and screenwriting were isolated positions that the studios hired separately and signed to contracts. You basically had Preston Sturges, Charles Chaplin, and Billy Wilder, and that was kind of it. It wasn't until the prevalence of the auteur...

It’s a nearly perfect tale of identity swaps and royal intrigues: Ronald Colman’s voice is velvet smooth as the poet-rogue François Villon, who uses his wits when dealing with Basil Rathbone’s (very strangely played) Louis XI. The real charm comes with lady-in-waiting Frances Dee (swoon) and the peasant firebrand Ellen Drew (double swoon). And don’t forget the sophisticated, semi-satirical screenplay by Preston Sturges. The refreshing Blu-ray discovery comes with a commentary by Julie Kirgo.

If I Were King

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1938 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 101 min. / Street Date February 7, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Frances Dee, Ellen Drew, C.V. France, Henry Wilcoxon, Heather Thatcher, Stanley Ridges, Alma Lloyd, Sidney Toler, John Miljan, Montagu Love, May Beatty, Henry Brandon, Darryl Hickman.

Cinematography: Theodore Sparkuhl

Costumer: Edith Head

Art Directors: Hans Drier, John Goodman

Film Editor: Hugh Bennett

Visual Effects: Gordon Jennings

Original Music:...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

A Preston Sturges retrospective continues, with The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, and Sullivan’s Travels all playing on 35mm this weekend.

Roxy Cinema

35mm showings of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse begin a Todd Solondz retro; the Leonard Cohen concert film Bird on a Wire screens this Saturday, as does Jonas Mekas’ Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol.

Museum of Modern Art

Always a highlight of the repertory year, To Save and Project presents the best in restored cinema; a Guillermo del Toro retrospective of his features and inspirations has its final weekend, marking your last chance to see Puss In Boots at MoMA.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on awards-snubbed films continues with Sirk, Ray, and McCarey; the rare Greek feature My Friend, Lefterakis screens this Sunday.

IFC Center

28 Days Later,...

Exclusive: Deadline hears that Warner Bros. Television is developing a limited series about Buster Keaton that has Oscar and Emmy winner Rami Malek playing the vaudeville-turned-silent comedy movie star.

Matt Reeves’ 6th & Idaho Productions, Malek and David Weddle are producing, and we understand that The Batman director is set to helm. Three-time Emmy winner Ted Cohen is in negotiations to write and serve as an executive producer on the project. James Curtis’ Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life is being eyed as the source material for the series, with negotiations underway by the studio to secure the book.

Daniel Pipski and Rafi Crohn from 6th & Idaho are also EPs.

The project is being primed to be shopped to streamers and networks; 6th & Idaho are under an overall deal at Warner Bros, as Deadline first told you. Reeves is also working on his Batman HBO Max spinoff series at Warners,...

More than four decades after the New Hollywood films of the ’60s and ’70s hit screens and became enshrined as a near-mythological period of artistic excellence in American cinema, the era’s attributes also become increasingly contrasted with current American cinema.

Nonconformity, provocation and experimentation were mainstream. Today, those qualities aren’t selling movie tickets but instead driving streamer subscriptions. And the big hits are all characterized by the packaged goods franchise hits that dominate box office to the almost total exclusion of personal cinema.

Which is a long explanation of why awards season is more essential than ever.

As someone who lived through and loved the New Hollywood films and filmmakers, this is the time of year when the hunger for the ambitious telling of difficult stories is sated.

In addition to Todd Field’s wonderful and already much-celebrated “Tár,” which has evoked positive comparisons to the best of New Hollywood giant Stanley Kubrick,...

Mitchell Leisen’s great Christmas-time tale has a brilliant screenplay by Preston Sturges and letter-perfect performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, threading the needle between light cynicism and well-earned sentiment. Sturges’ celebration of ‘country values’ is sincere and heartfelt, as is his affection for the supporting cast. The presentation includes two radio broadcasts plus a star-studded Paramount short subject for war bonds.

Remember the Night

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1940 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 94 min. / / Street Date December 19, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £18.99

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson, Sterling Holloway, Julius Tannen, Virginia Brissac, Fred ‘Snowflake’ Toones, Charles Arnt, Paul Guilfoyle.

Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff

Art Directors: Hans Drier, Roland Anderson

Costumes: Edith Head

Film Editor: Doane Harrison

Original Music: Friedrich Hollander

Written by Preston Sturges

Produced by

Directed by Mitchell Leisen

The 1940 feature Remember the Night made its comeback a few years ago just as...

Holidays loom, but don’t fear TBS marathons of A Christmas Story. If, like me, you once enacted some good and let studio classics stream on Criterion during family Christmas, you know the trip home will be easier with December’s additions. (People at Criterion: please don’t report me for logging into multiple devices.) As family arrives, drinks are downed, and questions about what you’ve been up to are stumbled through it’ll be nice to stream their “Screwball Comedy Classics” series—25 titles meeting some deep cuts (10 via Venmo if you’ve recently watched It Happens Every Spring).

Personally I’m most excited about the 11 movies in “Snow Westerns,” going as far back as The Secret of Convict Lake, as recently as Ravenous, with the likes of Wellman, Peckinpah, and Corbucci in-between. I personally cannot stand soccer but I appreciate the World Cup giving occasion for a series...

The history of cinema is a history of famous mustaches.

From Charlie Chaplin's legendary toothbrush to Burt Reynold's iconic cookie duster, to Groucho Marx's painted-on whiskers and Borat's silly soup strainer, you'll find beloved movie stars wearing fabulous facial hair throughout the entirety of the motion picture art form.

But as much as we all love stupendous stubble, there's one place you won't find any lip bristles, and that's on Henry Fonda's face in Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western "Once Upon a Time in the West." That's because the minute that Fonda, one of the most respected and beloved actors in Hollywood, arrived on set, Leone told him to take the damn thing off, and to change his eyes while he was at it.

It's not that Sergio Leone didn't stan a 'stache, he just had much more insidious plans for the movie star — plans that...

One of the most enjoyable South Korean action movies in recent years, 2017’s “The Outlaws” was a deft mix of brutal gang-warfare thrills and Keystone Cops comedics. It provided an ideal vehicle for Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee (“Train to Busan” and “Eternals”) as the police investigator whose hit-first-ask-permission-later methods regularly got the job done while infuriating his superiors.

That burly protagonist and his sidekicks are back in “The Roundup,” which despite a different directorial (newbie Lee Sang-yong replacing the prior edition’s Kang Yoon-seong) and writing crew, maintains the original’s strengths. It arguably kicks them up a notch further, . Pre-sold to most offshore territories, it’s currently playing U.S. and Canadian theaters as a Capelight Pictures release.

After a prologue showing the abduction of a wealthy young Korean in Ho Chi Minh City, we re-encounter our ham-fisted hero in 2008, four years after the earlier film’s events.

The latest in our series of writers highlighting lesser-seen gems is a recommendation of Whit Stillman’s acerbic Jane Austen adaptation

Though the novels of Jane Austen positively drip with witticisms, catty descriptive asides and zingy ironies, their film versions all too often tend to soft-sell the comedy. Emma Thompson’s elegant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was wry and knowing, though only the most hopeful of high-school English teachers would argue for it as genuinely side-splitting; Joe Wright’s take on Pride and Prejudice played up swooning romance over barbed interplay. Both the Paltrow- and Taylor-Joy-starring iterations of Emma are light, pastel-hued baubles, but more feathery than they are genuinely funny; the laughs only came with a rewrite as drastic as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.

Love & Friendship, then, is a delicious rarity: an Austen interpretation taken on by an established, distinctive comic film-maker, bent to his cockeyed sensibility even as it honours the zesty,...

The romantic comedy as we know it has been through four phases. It was born with “It Happened One Night” (1934), and the glory of the classic romantic-comedy period (Hepburn and Tracy and so on) was the ’30s and ’40s, though it extended into the ’50s with a movie like “Pillow Talk.” The form enjoyed a cultural resurgence starting in 1989 and ’90, with the release of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Pretty Woman.” You could call that the Age of Nora Ephron, since she kind of ruled over it; the fact that that era spawned the term “rom-com” says a lot about how love comedies, in their born-again popularity, were becoming a kind of consumer product. The third phase was the Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson era, when the sheer cheesiness of so many studio rom-coms became its own reward; the films were turning into guilty pleasures. Then there’s the phase we...

Jennifer Lopez knows a thing or three about media harassment and being in the public eye 24/7, but that only makes the far-fetched romantic comedy Marry Me seem even less tolerable or redeemable than it might have looked on paper. In its opening minutes, this slickly made, music-drenched concoction serves up a premise so massively implausible — that one of the hottest female singers on the planet would replace her cheating macho fiancé in front of a live TV audience with an ineffectual single dad math teacher in his 50s — that it can never recover. It is, in two words, perfectly preposterous.

Lopez, whose last feature was the far more provocative Hustlers three years ago, plays Kat Valdez, a not unconvincing version of the star herself; she’s a sizzling entertainer at the peak of her powers whose half-her-age singer-partner Bastian (Colombian musician Maluma) has the bright idea to get it on...

Every once in a while a movie studio would ruin what might have been a masterpiece — and Preston Sturges’ last-released Paramount comedy suffered exactly that. “Triumph Over Pain” was supposed to be something new, a daring blend of comedy and tragedy. Studio politics intervened and tried to turn it into a straight comedy. Disc producer Constantine Nasr oversees two extras that explain what happened in full detail; it’s a fascinating story of a brillant and successful writer-director at odds with his studio bosses. Joel McCrea, Betty Field and William Demarest star — and the show is still entertaining despite its problems.

The Great Moment

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1944 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Great without Glory, Immortal Secret, Morton the Magnificent, Triumph over Pain / Street Date February 1, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Joel McCrea, Betty Field, Harry Carey, William Demarest, Louis Jean Heydt, Julius Tannen, Edwin Maxwell, Porter Hall, Franklin Pangborn,...

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]

The post “97% of the Film Has No Green Screen in It”: Writer-Director Rawson Marshall Thurber on Red Notice first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Film history is filled with examples of screenwriters whose subsequent dazzling directorial careers have often eclipsed their brilliant roots as writers. Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Sam Peckinpah are only three of the American wordsmiths-turned-helmers that come to mind. This year’s Variety Creative Impact in Screenwriting honoree, Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino, has more than two decades of great screenwriting on his resume and he’s never lost his love for the scribe’s journey.

Sorrentino will appear in conversation with Variety features editor Malina Saval at an event on Oct. 17 at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

“I love writing much more than I love directing and this is probably due to my personality and my temperament,” says Sorrentino on a Zoom chat from his home in Rome where he’s prepping his next film, the Jennifer Lawrence-starrer “Mob Girl.”

No matter what accolades he gains as a helmer,...

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“Tomorrow’S News Today!”

By Raymond Benson

One wonders if Bond villain Elliot Carver ever saw the 1944 comedy-fantasy, It Happened Tomorrow. Carver’s evil plot involved making bad news happen so that his newspapers could scoop the headlines before other media outlets even learned about the events. “Tomorrow’s News Today!” was his slogan.

In the fanciful and entertaining It Happened Tomorrow, a newspaper man receives tomorrow’s news today, allowing him to write the piece and get it ready to go to the presses before the incident occurs.

French filmmaker René Clair had come to Hollywood in the early 1940s after working for a time in the U.K. He made a handful of pictures for different studios, namely I Married a Witch (1942) and And Then There Were None (1945). In-between those notable titles came It Happened Tomorrow, which was based on an...

Auteur! Auteur! Four of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees — Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”), Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”) and Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”) — have a writing credit on their films. Zhao, Fennell and Chung reaped bids for their scripting efforts.

Over the past decade, the majority of the Oscar-winning directors were also nominated for their screenplays. Last year, Boon Joon-Ho won Best Director and shared in the Original Screenplay award with Han Jan for their work on the Best Picture champ “Parasite.”

Though writer/directors getting Oscar love is the norm these days, that wasn’t always the case. When nominations were announced for the first Academy Awards, Charlie Chaplin was cited for both Best Actor and Comedy Direction for his 1928 masterpiece “The Circus,” which he also wrote and produced. But the academy decided to withdraw his name from the competitive classes and decided “that...

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 past round-ups here.

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)

Superlatives are fatuous, but Mads Mikkelsen’s final dance in Another Round was possibly one of the finest scenes of the year. It is here that Thomas Vinterberg tips his hand: in turns devastating and rambunctious, his latest neither glorifies nor condemns the magic––and sorrows––of day-drinking, but conjures a surprisingly sober study of a midlife crisis, climaxing in this moment of blissful catharsis. As a character-defining moment, it’s up there with Denis Lavant’s pirouettes at the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. – Leonardo G.

Where to Stream: Hulu

Audrey (Helena Coan)

Despite her status as one of the most iconic movie stars in history,...

The doings of the international art world often seem arcane and over the top, but never moreso than as depicted in The Man Who Sold His Skin. This is a madly dramatic and engrossing melodrama about a political refugee whose unique predicament bundles with it issues pertaining to personal and political identity, the Middle East quagmire, romantic rejection and the outer limits of art world presumption and extravagance. Tunisia’s shortlisted submission in the International Feature Oscar race is a very tasty couscous of fine ingredients and flat-out entertaining enough to warrant significant international exposure.

Tunisian director-screenwriter Kaouther Ben Hania’s follow-up to her 2017 Cannes Un Certain Regard selection Beauty And The Dogs is notable for its gutsy narrative moves, rich visuals and sheer drive, which marks her, along with her notably resourceful and elegant Lebanese cinematographer Christopher Aoun, as talents who should emerge even more decisively before long.

The...

The Criterion Channel has unveiled their March 2021 lineup, which includes no shortage of remarkable programming. Highlights from the slate include eight gems from Preston Sturges, Elaine May’s brilliant A New Leaf, a series featuring Black Westerns, Ann Hui’s Boat People, the new restoration of Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi.

They will also add films from their Essential Fellini boxset, series on Dirk Bogarde and Nelly Kaplan, and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned and Death in Venice, and more. In terms of recent releases, there’s also Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century and Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In.

Check out the lineup below, along with the teaser for the Black Westerns series. For weekly streaming updates across all services, bookmark this page.

The Adventurer, Charles Chaplin, 1917

Bandini, Bimal Roy, 1963

Behind the Screen, Charles Chaplin, 1916

Black Jack, Ken Loach, 1979

Black Rodeo, Jeff Kanew, 1972

Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen,...

The 2019 Best Picture Oscar winner “Green Book” is back in the conversation as the film’s star Viggo Mortensen starts rolling out his directorial debut “Falling,” where he plays a gay man taking care of his homophobic, ailing father. In “Green Book,” he played the driver of Dr. Don Shirley, the concert pianist played by Mahershala Ali, and some complained that the film played into white savior tropes. Shirley’s family publicly criticized the film as a misrepresentation of their relative, while other critics have condemned “Green Book” as simply the story of a bigot’s (in this case Mortensen’s character) redemption.

But Mortensen has continued to defend the film, and has insisted that it will “stand the test of time” in a new interview with The Film Stage (via The Playlist).

“The dumbass in that story was the white guy,” Mortensen said. “There was a steep learning curve for the character I played.

The director of Palmer helps us kick off our new season by walking us through some of his favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Bloodhounds Of Broadway (1989)

Salvador (1986)

True Believer (1989)

Palmer (2021)

Wonder Wheel (2017)

A Face In The Crowd (1957)

On The Waterfront (1954)

No Time For Sergeants (1958)

The Confidence Man (2018)

Lolita (1962)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

The Ghost Of Peter Sellers (2018)

The Marrying Man (1991)

The Ruling Class (1972)

The Krays (1990)

Let Him Have It (1991)

The Changeling (1980)

On The Border (1998)

Murder By Decree (1979)

Bigger Than Life (1956)

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

Fat City (1972)

Angel (1984)

Animal House (1978)

My Science Project (1985)

Lucía (1968)

Paper Moon (1973)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

The Great McGinty (1940)

I Married A Witch (1942)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Raging Bull (1980)

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

The Rider (2017)

The Mustang (2019)

Nomadland (2020)

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Conversation (1974)

The Godfather (1972)

The Godfather Part III (1990)

The Magnificent Ambersons...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Speaking after her tragic death at the age of 33, President Franklin D. Roosevelt testified to the legacy of Carole Lombard. “She is and always will be a star,” he stated in 1942, “one that we shall never forget, nor cease to be grateful to.” Although the president’s words were at least in part influenced by Lombard’s recent patriotic zeal (she died in a plane crash after traveling to sell war bonds), his comments resonated throughout the country, especially Hollywood, where the actress’s impact had been progressively pronounced for years. Her films were like a breath of fresh air to Depression-era audiences, adding silver screen levity to individuals seeking a brief reprieve from day-to-day hardship. By contrast, Lombard’s cinematic sphere was often one of glamour, romance, and, above all,...

Sony Classics’ “The Father” is an act of daring; it could have gone wrong in so many ways, but it works like gangbusters.

The film marks the movie debut of writer-director Florian Zeller, whose background is as a novelist and playwright; in many cases, that would send warning signals.

What’s more, it all takes place in one location, the apartment of Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), so it might have turned out to be a photographed stage play. Third, it toys with the audience, keeping them off-balance about what is real and what’s not.

Those are potential danger areas, but the film is so good that it defies all logic.

Movie adaptations of plays, from Eugene O’Neill to Neil Simon, usually look like filmed theater, and that’s Ok; they’re still enjoyable. But it’s magic when a filmmaker can set his movie in one space, yet it seems like pure cinema.

By Raymond Benson

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“Billy Wilder Goes To War”

By Raymond Benson

In 1943, Hollywood churned out dozens of war films in support of the U.S. involvement in the global conflict raging at the time. Many were cheaply made rush jobs, others were good “B” pictures, and a select group were “A” level, excellent pieces of celluloid that are now classics. All were essentially propaganda pictures made to lift the spirits of the American people and the troops who were able to see them. Rah Rah, Let’s Go Get ‘Em!

Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who had fled Germany as the Nazis gained power, settled in Hollywood in 1933 after a brief stint in France. He immediately found work as a talented screenwriter, ultimately earning his first Oscar nomination for co-writing Ninotchka (1939). As war heated up in the 1940s, Wilder then became, after the likes of Preston Sturges,...

It’s debatable whether Ethan Hawke has ever given a better performance in his long and impressive career than his turn as abolitionist John Brown in the Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird. He’s certainly not given a bigger one.

Brown was a passionate, bordering-on-unhinged opponent of slavery who led the battle through both “bleeding Kansas” and an attempt to rob a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Hawke embodies him underneath a wild, scraggly beard and an even wilder expression in his eyes. This version of Brown — a supporting character in the wild,...

The Lady Eve

Blu ray

Criterion

1941/ 94 min.

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, William Demarest

Cinematography by Victor Milner

Directed by Preston Sturges

In The Lady Eve a wealthy ophiologist named Charlie Pike and a sexy card shark named Jean Harrington fall in love. It’s a rapid-fire romance fueled by equal portions of love and lust and when the affair crashes and burns, director Preston Sturges simply restarts the movie: Jean reintroduces herself to Charlie as a British socialite named Eve and la affaire d’amour begins anew. The brazenness of her charade is part and parcel of Sturges’s own impudent take on the Human Comedy – the result is a screwball work of art.

Henry Fonda is Charlie and Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean – they meet aboard a cruise ship where Jean’s father, an avuncular but remorseless con man played by Charles Coburn, has pigeonholed Charlie as a sucker par excellence.