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Dustin Pittman with Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman holding up New York After Dark

In the first instalment of our conversation with photographer extraordinaire, Dustin Pittman, and music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, we start out with Gloria Swanson at her apartment (star of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard opposite William Holden), the early days with Danny Fields, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger (at Madison Square Garden), Patricia Field, Sex And The City, Susan Seidelman, Halston and the Halstonettes, Diana Vreeland, Liza Minnelli and US First Lady Betty Ford at Studio 54, the Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren connection to Mariann Marlowe and Frankie Savage’s Ian’s, staying with The Pretenders in London, Lucy Sante and her books, the shop 99, Max’s Kansas City, Ungaro’s, Régine’s, The Odeon, Lutèce or La Grenouille, and Dustin Pittman: New York...

Shot lists, storyboards, models, pre-viz: There are many different ways for a director, Dp, and a camera team to plot what a movie will look like before they start shooting. But cinematographer Kristen Correll and director Megan Park have a delightfully lo-fi, surprisingly useful approach to conceptualizing the world they’re about to create.

Correll told IndieWire that, as part of starting to talk about what the film would need and how they would shoot it, she had Park read aloud the script for “My Old Ass.”

She tries to do that with all her directors, because hearing a script helps Correll locate the exact tone she will need to create with her camera.

“The way I’m reading things in my head, I might think I have it correct, but then, you hear it from the writer/director and you’re like, ‘Ok, I got that wrong,’ or ‘I was spot on,...

Purists will argue that film noir was born in 1941 with the release of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and died in 1958 with Marlene Dietrich traipsing down a long, dark, lonely road at the end of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. And while this period contains the quintessence of what Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank originally characterized as film noir, the genre has always been in a constant state of flux, adapting to the different times and cultures out of which these films emerged.

Noir came into its own alongside the ravages of World War II, with the gangster and detective films of the era drastically transforming into something altogether new as the aesthetics of German Expressionism took hold in America, and in large part due to the influx of German expatriates like Fritz Lang. These already dark, hardboiled films suddenly gained a newfound viciousness and sense of ambiguity,...

Welcome to the dark side of the American dream.

The best film noir movies of all time are visions of a universally known truth not always spoken out loud: It can be really hard to live in America, and if you don’t have money, you have nothing. If Westerns are about “manifest destiny,” film noir is about what comes after. If you do finally get the swimming pool, you might end up face-down dead in it, like poor William Holden’s struggling screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard.” Or you may have entered a miserable marriage to get your gilded palace. In film noir, you might have that gilded palace all to yourself if you’re willing to murder for it. Take a look at “Double Indemnity.” This genre is all about recognizing that some success in America might not be attainable through legal means, and so working outside the law becomes a tantalizing temptation,...

The American Film Institute has announced that veteran director Francis Ford Coppola will receive its 50th Life Achievement Award. The honor has previously gone to filmmakers John Ford, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Mike Nichols, among many others. This comes after Coppola won our poll as the director most deserving of the AFI’s honor, so our readers are bound to be happy.

Kathleen Kennedy, Chair of the AFI Board of Trustees, said in a statement, “Francis Ford Coppola is a peerless artist — one who has created seminal works in the canon of American film, and has also inspired generations of filmmakers who now embody his artistry and his independent spirit. AFI is honored to present him with the 50th AFI Life Achievement Award.”

SEEFrancis Ford Coppola movies: 16 greatest films ranked worst to best

Coppola has divided critics with his latest film — the ambitious, self-funded epic “Megalopolis” — but...

Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it. We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she went to look at an apartment in one of his buildings. “In his head, I could see he was undressing himself and me, and I got out of there very fast,” MacLaine writes in her new book, “The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories From This Marvelous Lifetime.”

MacLaine is even more animated when I ask her what she made of the real estate developer turned Maga leader. “Did you hear me shriek?” she asks. “I think that says it all.” She pauses for dramatic effect before delivering a final, emphatic: “Yuck!”

Even at 90, MacLaine,...

Following the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, and Christopher Hampton’s musical Sunset Boulevard, adapted from Billy Wilder’s 1950 film by the same name, Jamie Lloyd returned with a revival of the theatrical version in October 2024. Starring The Pussycat Dolls’ Nicole Scherzinger as the lead, Lloyd turned the actress’ Broadway debut into a major hit.

Nicole Scherzinger | image: Joel Telling, licensed under Cc By Sa 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Using minimal style and set design, Jamie Lloyd brought back the iconic fashion, replicating the 50s era in Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard. But despite the excitement and ambition surrounding the Broadway show, let’s get straight to the fact that there’s no Hollywood ending. So while buckling up for some heartbreak and star-studded performance, let’s dive into the show and learn what to expect from it.

Lead Actresses Who Previously Appeared in Sunset Boulevard Shows

After music...

In June, Cats: The Jellicle Ball seemed to shake Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats like a bottle of champagne, joyfully letting the old, vexatious material burst out on the stage at the Perelman Arts Center with glittery effervescence. Now, returning to Broadway in a stripped-down West End transfer, the heavy bones of Sunset Boulevard—Webber’s ponderous music, Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s repetitive lyrics, the general plodding approach to Billy Wilder’s 1950 film—drag behind director Jamie Lloyd’s austere vision like a body bag.

Lloyd’s ethos is all about turning the audience toward the text and performance, sharpening the listener’s ear by stripping away all the trappings of traditional productions, including, most of the time, eye contact between actors. That worked splendidly for his Cyrano de Bergerac at Bam two years ago with James McAvoy, as Edmond Rostand’s play is about the power of language itself.

When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage adaptation of the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard premiered in London in 1993 and on Broadway the following year, it was arguably the last gasp of the ‘80s megamusical aesthetic — at least until shows like The Lion King and Wicked came along to tweak the formula. The success of blockbusters like Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon was driven as much by their large-scale spectacle as their musical craftsmanship. Probably more.

Audiences flocked to Cats for its then-revolutionary immersive junkyard staging and the climactic ascent to the heavens of faded feline Grizabella on an outsized tire. In Les Mis, it was the massive turntable and the big reveal of the Paris Uprising barricade. Phantom brought a huge chandelier crashing down on the stage and Miss Saigon flew in a helicopter to evacuate the last Americans at the end of the Vietnam War.

After spending months talking about his long-nurtured dream project, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola embraced the chance to depart from promo tour talking points.

Calling Megaloplis “a great adventure,” Coppola affirmed with a smile in accepting his DGA Honor on Thursday night, “I decided tonight I wouldn’t say anything I’ve been saying.”

After being given the award by his granddaughter, Gia, Coppola said he was delighted to spin yarns about “how the Director’s Guild was founded.” While he didn’t do so in linear fashion, the 85-year-old filmmaker had the audience in the palm of his hand as he recounted giants of cinema and his personal touchstones, paying tribute to masters like Billy Wilder, King Vidor and Samuel Goldwyn.

When he met Jean Renoir, Coppola recalled, the French filmmaker gave him a “beautiful smile” and shook his hand “like he was welcoming me to this profession that he loved so much.

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,...

This cynical, noir-adjacent film about a hotshot reporter who inserts himself into the story still stands the test of time

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The journalism industry today looks strikingly different to the journalism industry of 70-odd years ago, when Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece, Ace in the Hole, rolled into town. But if you think its messages might be outdated, au contraire: like Sidney Lumet’s Network (another vivisectional and scathingly cynical satire of media spectacle), the film remains strikingly relevant and scorchingly hot to the touch, told with cyclonic force and style.

A sensationally smug Kurt Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, a hotshot city reporter who arrives in a small town hoping to land a story that’ll catapult him back to the big time. He marches into the news desk of a humble rag in Albuquerque, dripping bravado, bragging to the publisher about how he’s been fired from 11 newspapers.

Clint Eastwood's Hollywood career officially began in 1955 when he made a brief, uncredited appearance as a lab technician in Jack Arnold's "Revenge of the Creature." Nine years later, unhappy as a midlevel television star on the CBS Western series "Rawhide," he jetted off to Spain to make a different kind of Western with a very different kind of director named Sergio Leone. The result, "A Fistful of Dollars," changed the face of the genre forever, and set Eastwood down the path to becoming a filmmaker in his own right.

Eastwood's directing career got off to a curiously assured start with the wildly suspenseful thriller "Play Misty for Me," in which the tough, swaggering star of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Dirty Harry" played a victimized Bay Area disc jockey. No one expected this from Eastwood, and it's fair to say no one saw this hugely...

Steven Spielberg has always had an eye for the extraordinary. Normalcy surrounding the everyday facets of life was not intriguing enough for the director, even as a bright-eyed 20-something-year-old filmmaker. For him, only stories that defied imagination and completely transported the audience to a land of impossibilities interested him enough to make it into a movie.

The Sugarland Express [Credit: Universal Pictures]

From Spielberg’s bottomless curiosity was born films like Jaws, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jurassic Park. But it was also his need to unearth the mysteries of mankind that led Spielberg to tell stories based on true experiences, namely Schindler’s List, Catch Me If You Can, Empire of the Sun, Band of Brothers, and most importantly, The Sugarland Express – his feature directorial debut.

Steven Spielberg‘s Grand Hollywood Debut The Sugarland Express [Credit: Universal Pictures]

Even as a new kid on the block, Steven Spielberg showed enough chutzpah,...

Tomas Arana’s name might not be the first that comes to mind when thinking about great cinema. He’s not a “star” in the most commercial sense of the word.

To be sure, Arana has appeared in what we commonly refer to as blockbusters — Gladiator, The Bourne Supremacy or The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston — but it would be wrong to limit his career to those successes. Arana was Lazarus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the Detective Breuning in L.A. Confidential, Laginov in The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery, Walter in Sergio Corbucci’s Neapolitan Mystery, Damon in Michele Soavi’s The Sect and so much more. A veteran of experimental theater companies like La Mamma, Tomas Arana has done it all, and with a particular passion for Italy.

Arana became a good friend of Andy Warhol in the 1970s. The two first...

Spanish actress and director Paz Vega (Spanglish, Sex and Lucia, Rambo: Last Blood, The Oa, Netflix heist drama Kaleidoscope), who wrote and stepped behind the camera for her directorial debut Rita, which world premiered during the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival this summer, enjoys writing and directing, adding another layer to her creative endeavors. And she thinks more actors should feel empowered to direct.

She made the comments during a Tuesday keynote interview at the Iberseries & Platino Industria conference and market in Madrid that was titled “Changing Roles: Paz Vega and Her Transition From the Art of Acting to the Art of Directing.” She recently said in a THR interview that Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, and Federico Fellini were among her role models.

Vega wrote, directed and executive produced Rita and also plays a small part in it. “In some way, I had the idea to become...

Although Nicole Kidman recently accepted the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in recognition of her four-decade acting career, there is no indication that her life’s work is anywhere near finished. Indeed, according to Gold Derby’s racetrack odds, the 56-year-old is well on her way to picking up her sixth Oscar nomination for her lead performance in the critically acclaimed “Babygirl,” which would make her the 13th AFI honoree to subsequently earn film academy recognition in a competitive category.

The fact that Kidman’s life achievement award was presented by her pal and costar, Meryl Streep, is quite fitting given that she’s the only woman to go from being an AFI recipient to an Oscar contender. Since receiving the AFI honor in 2004, she has racked up a whopping eight bids, including a successful one for “The Iron Lady” (2012). A previous champ for “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1980) and...

Born in 1920, Walter Matthau was a celebrated performer on both the stage and screen, known for his gruff, rumpled persona. Let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Matthau turned to acting after serving in the United States Army Air Force during WWII. He became a frequent presence on the small screen with appearances in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Goodyear Playhouse,” and “The Du Pont Show of the Week” (which brought him an Emmy bid in 1963), to name a few. During this period he also appeared in several films, few of them comedies, including “A Face in the Crowd” (1957) and “Fail Safe” (1964).

At the same time, he gained increasing respect as a stage actor with Tony Award-winning performances in “A Shot in the Dark” (Featured Actor in a Play in 1962) and “The Odd Couple” (Actor in a Play in 1965). It was in the latter role of Oscar Madison,...

Leonard Asper’s Anthem Sports and Entertainment has acquired Hollywood Suite, an indie Canadian broadcaster of four HD movie channels.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but, pending regulatory approvals, Anthem will pick up the commercial-free movie channels with mostly Hollywood titles themed from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and distributed into 10 million homes across Canada.

Classic Hollywood movies on the Hollywood Suite menu include Tom Cruise’s Cocktail, The Abyss, the Tom Hanks comedy Turner & Hooch and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe.

Led by longtime Canwest TV head Asper, Anthem Sports & Entertainment is a holding company that owns Gravitas Ventures, Axs TV, HDNet Movies, Impact Wrestling, Fight Network, Tna Wrestling and GameTV, among other assets.

Asper aims to combine indie distributor Gravitas Ventures, acquired in 2021, and HDnet movies, home to blockbuster epics and vintage films, with Hollywood Suite as a...

To box the work of Sean Baker into a neat genre classification would be to miss what is so authentic and spontaneous about his unequivocally human and heartfelt storytelling. Of the same token, in elevating the narratives that exist on the margins of society to new, bold, cinematic heights, he allows many who’ve never been granted any importance to feel the only kind of value that being centered in a movie can offer. In this way, he’s using the various forms of cinema to expand the kind of stories the world is exposed to and with his latest, the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” does so in a way that draws on the magic of a fantasy romance, as well as the terror of a gangster thriller.

“I love tonal jumps. I love roller coasters,” Baker said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It is scary, though. It...

Nicole Scherzinger has left The Masked Singer. She wasn’t on the show last season because of a play she was starring in. She also didn’t return this season and has announced a new reality competition show she will appear on. However, her biggest news is her first role in a Broadway musical.

In an interview promoting the musical, Nicole opened up about her feelings that her industry had “discarded” her.

Nicole Scherzinger Says Her Industry Discarded Her

Nicole Scherzinger is preparing for a new role in a Broadway musical. This is her first chance on Broadway, and she seems excited about the possibility. She has been interviewing for the role, and in a recent discussion, she said she relates to the role because her industry “discarded” her.

Nicole Scherzinger | YouTube

That role is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. This is the same role for which she left The...

Keenan Ivory Wayans' 2004 comedy "White Chicks" was an oddity when it was released, and it's just as much an oddity now. The plot revolves around a pair of Black, male FBI agents who have to, for contrived reasons, disguise themselves as young, wealthy white women, and the comedy stems entirely from racial and gender juxtapositions the men experience. While there may have been an opportunity to write a penetrating criticism of race and gender, the filmmakers took no opportunities to be even the slightest bit profound. That, at any rate, seemed to be the critical consensus on "White Chicks," which was widely lambasted and was even declared by many to be one of the worst films of its year. 

And yet, and yet ... it keeps on drawing people in. As of this writing, "White Chicks" is the highest-rating comedy film on Netflix in the United States. Either the film has...

September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.

Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...

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...

Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe and served as the inspiration for Jack Lemmon’s character in the classic Billy Wilder film The Apartment, died Tuesday. He was 97.

Kanter died at his home in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Independent Artist Group announced. His son Adam Kanter is a partner at Iag.

A favorite of mighty Music Corporation of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter also spent seven years in England in the 1960s greenlighting European movies for Universal, produced films including the Elizabeth Taylor-starring X, Y and Zee (1972) and had a long business relationship with Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and MGM.

When Brando was slumming around Paris after breaking out on Broadway in Streetcar Named Desire in the late 1940s, Kanter‚ then an McA junior agent, received a call from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wanted to hire...

Lorcan Finnegan’s “The Surfer,” screening at Taormina Film Festival following its premiere at Cannes, promises to be one of the year’s cult films. A bizarro mix of Kafka and Ozploitation, the film boasts a late phase Cage performance and a psycho-comedy that appears all the darker for its sunbaked setting. The Irish director of “Vivarium” and “Nocebo” spoke with Variety as the Mediterranean glittered tantalizingly in the distance.

Were you familiar with surfing culture before making the film?

I wouldn’t call myself a surfer, as I’m more of a skateboarder, and so I didn’t really know much about that culture. And this whole toxic masculinity stuff never really appealed to me, but I didn’t want to reject something, just because I didn’t know about it. It’s an interesting challenge.

Why did you choose Australia as the setting?

It was going to be California,...

Exclusive: Mandy Gonzalez, star of In The Heights, Hamilton and Aida, will play the role of Norma Desmond at select performances of Broadway’s upcoming Sunset Blvd., taking one performance a week with star Nicole Scherzinger taking all others.

Gonzalez will play her first performance on Tuesday, October 22. The casting was announced today by producers of the Jamie Lloyd-directed revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which begins previews at the St. James Theatre on Saturday, September 28 ahead of a Sunday, October 20 opening night.

Gonzalez said in a statement, “In my 25 years playing leading ladies on Broadway, I’ve never been more excited for a show. The role of Norma Desmond is iconic, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is masterful, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score is sumptuous. To reinterpret a timeless story with such raw sophistication, especially as the first Latina to take this role on Broadway, is a dream come true.

Song and dance man or gangster? Few stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era could claim they were equally well known for two such diverse genres. Yet, the legendary James Cagney worked hard to be able to make such a claim.

He was born on July 17, 1899, in New York City. His family was poor, and Cagney was sickly as a child. While growing up in a rough neighborhood, he learned a variety of skills, including tap dancing, street fighting, baseball and boxing. When he was 19, his father died, and he took odd jobs to help support his mother and siblings. On a whim, he auditioned for a role of a chorus girl in a local production. Although he had never had professional training, he landed the role and learned the dances from watching the other performers – and it never bothered him to dress as a girl and perform. Despite his mother...

America is in crisis. It’s the late 1960s, and President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade has yet to be fulfilled. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA, for short — has experienced a major setback when a launch rehearsal test for the Apollo 1 goes awry and all three crew members perish. The Russkies appear to have the lead in the Space Race, the public interest in conquering the stars is waning, and the organization’s funding is on the chopping block.

Billy Wilder was a prolific personality whose versatile content has captivated Hollywood’s hearts. Before making his entry into the industry, he worked as a screenwriter in Europe. His filmmaking and writing skills beautifully captured his sophisticated narrative that is prominently seen in projects like Double Indemnity and Casino Royale.

Casino Royale (1967) | Columbia Pictures

Wilder believed in the rapid advancement of technology as he predicted Hollywood’s downfall, which appears to be turning true.

Billy Wilder’s 1986 AFI Speech Seemingly Foretold Hollywood’s Decline

With a career spanning over five decades, Billy Wilder impressed Hollywood with his versatile filmmaking skills. He hugely contributed to Classic Hollywood cinema with his writing and directing skills, whose illustrious career included projects like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment.

Back in 1986, the late director was bestowed with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award. During the acceptance speech, he expressed...

Chemistry has always been Hollywood’s secret sauce, and, for rom-coms at least, the high-water mark remains the pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Most cineastes can name their first collaboration (Pillow Talk in 1959), but the others — Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) — don’t come to mind so quickly. As a brand, though, these two have more than endured in pop culture, and writers and directors have had to work harder and harder to find a way to recapture that magic, since we now know very well that it requires a great deal more than just putting a couple of good-looking famous people together.

Peyton Reed came close in 2003’s with his stylish, early-’60s period pastiche Down with Love, casting Renee Zellweger alongside Ewan McGregor, and Olivia Wilde certainly did not with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, lumbering Florence Pugh with Harry Styles in a risible ’50s-themed sci-fi.

For this week’s column, I spoke to Dawn Baillie, who is responsible for, or who has collaborated on, some of the most iconic American movie posters of the last four decades, from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to Barbie (2023). Her work is currently the focus of an extraordinary ongoing exhibition at Poster House in New York City.I asked her if she would humor me by selecting her top ten movie posters of all time, now a tradition for this column. She most graciously accepted the challenge. Baillie’s top ten and comments are listed below in descending order. She explained that these are all posters she “refers to often,” and presents her selection with the caveat that she could easily list 50 more. Dawn Baillie’S Top Ten Favorite Movie POSTERS1. USA one-sheet by Erik Nitsche for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA, 1950)When we talk about encapsulating...

Robert Towne, the screenwriter as superstar whose Oscar-winning work on the 1974 classic Chinatown is widely recognized as the gold standard for movie scripts, has died. He was 89.

Towne died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, publicist Carri McClure announced.

He also received Academy Award nominations for The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975) in the years surrounding his most famous work.

His takes on Los Angeles were etched with melancholy and painted the city as one of beauty and sadness. In Chinatown and Shampoo, gumshoe J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and Beverly Hills hairdresser George Roundy (Warren Beatty) end up alone. (Towne collaborated often with those actors.)

This squinty vantage on Southern California, as a temptress who dashes hopes, also was evident in his script for Tequila Sunrise (1988), which starred Mel Gibson as a retired drug dealer, Kurt Russell as a cop and Michelle Pfeiffer as the femme fatale.

Towne also...

Susan Seidelman with Anne-Katrin Titze and music producer/99 Records founder Ed Bahlman: “Music has always been important in my movies.”

In the first instalment with Susan Seidelman on her memoir, Desperately Seeking Something (St. Martin’s Press), and her career as a filmmaker, we start out discussing the jacket choices for Susan Berman, Madonna, Ann Magnuson (Frankie in Making Mr. Right with John Malkovich), and Emily Lloyd.

Susan Berman as Wren in Smithereens and Madonna as Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan

We move on to the influence of Jacques Rivette’s Celine And Julie Go Boating, her love of Billy Wilder films, being named after...

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance focuses on a woman with a familiar problem. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a former actress and contemporary fitness guru on the wrong side of 40 for the entertainment industry, who, as represented here by Harvey (Dennis Quaid), wants to replace her with the next hot young thing. Working in an ultra-blunt style, Fargeat boils Elizabeth’s world down to a few signifiers, among them: Elizabeth’s retro fitness show stands in for fleeting fame; Harvey, one of the broadest caricatures that cinema has offered, is the male chauvinist underbelly of Hollywood, befitting his namesake; and a billboard outside of Elizabeth’s sprawling apartment physicalizes her shifting place in the public.

One of Fargeat’s best symbols, worthy of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, is the opening close-up of Sparkle’s Hollywood star as it’s installed and becomes just another bit of set dressing. A...

Exclusive: Tom Francis, the Olivier Award-winning actor who will reprise his West End portrayal of Joe Gillis in Jamie Lloyd’s West End production of Sunset Boulevard when the revival moves to Broadway this fall, has signed with Linden Entertainment.

Francis stars opposite Nicole Scherzinger, who plays Norma Desmond in the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Don Black-Christopher Hampton musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film classic.

In addition to Scherzinger and Francis, West End cast members making the move to Broadway’s St. James Theatre include Grace Hodgett-Young (playing Betty Schaefer) and David Thaxton (Max Von Mayerling). Previews begin Sept. 28, with an opening night of Oct. 20.

Francis, who won the Best Leading Actor/Musical Olivier for his Sunset performance, can be seen on screen when he returns to Netflix’s You, currently filming its fifth and final season. His prior stage roles include &Juliet (Shaftesbury Theatre); What’s New Pussycat...

Billy Wilder was the six-time Oscar winner who left behind a series of classically quotable features from Hollywood’s Golden Age, crafting sharp witted and darkly cynical stories that blended comedy and pathos in equal measure. Let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Wilder was born to a family of Austrian Jews in 1906. After working as a journalist, he developed an interest in filmmaking and collaborated on the silent feature “People on Sunday” (1929) with fellow rookies Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer. With the rise of Adolph Hitler, Wilder fled to Paris, where he co-directed the feature “Mauvaise Graine” (1934). Tragically, his mother, stepfather and grandmother all died in the Holocaust.

After moving to Hollywood, Wilder enjoyed a successful career as a screenwriter, earning Oscar nominations for penning 1939’s “Ninotchka” and 1941’s “Hold Back the Dawn” and “Ball of Fire.” He...

Even a quarter-century later, box office victory still tastes sweet for Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal.

Reminiscing about their 1999 collaboration, Analyze This, during a Tribeca Festival / De Niro Con screening Friday, the pair swapped memories of sitting at De Niro’s former restaurant, Ago, on the Friday night the film opened..

Analyze This faced younger-skewing competition in Cruel Intentions, the Sarah Michelle Gellar/Reese Witherspoon/Ryan Philippe thriller, but came out decisively ahead. “The box office was coming in, and it was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. We’re crushing them!'” Crystal remembered. “It was one of the great nights of my life, to share this with this man, that we made this movie together and loved working...

Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound, their low-budget neo-noir debut feature from 1996, is both an outlier in a filmography subsequently defined by high-concept science fiction and an ur-text for the filmmakers’ overriding interest in the power of erotic and romantic love to liberate people.

The film concerns a plot by Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the moll of a mafia money launderer named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), to run out on her man with enough of his filthy lucre to set herself up for life. To do so, she woos Corky (Gina Gershon), her apartment complex’s handywoman and an ex-con, to act as her accomplice. But rather than simply use the woman as a patsy, Violet betrays more and more genuine interest in Corky, and the two grow ever closer as Caesar starts to piece together their scheme and things go increasingly awry.

There are two ways in which the Wachowskis immediately...

Have you ever wondered what it really means to put your heart and soul into a film? Steven Spielberg’s profound connection to Schindler’s List is compelling evidence of this very question, marking it as his most personal creation. The film, whose challenging production gradually turned into a passion project for the director, has since emerged as one of the most defining works that best explained the evil of the Holocaust.

Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List (1993) | Universal Pictures

Nonetheless, the journey to bring this heart-rending masterpiece to life was fraught with solemn notes of heartbreak, particularly for another acclaimed director. That being said, Billy Wilder, recipient of seven Academy Awards, envisioned Schindler’s List as a final ode to the loss of his own family during the Holocaust.

Spielberg once shared the tender yet devastating interaction between him and Wilder.

Exploring the What-Ifs: Billy Wilder & the Almost-Directed Schindler...

One major complaint against Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds, who are currently some of the biggest names in Hollywood, is they play it too safe with their movies. Despite having starred in dramas early in their career, since their rise to fame in Hollywood, both actors have limited themselves in a bubble and are known for playing themselves in most movies.

But things couldn’t be more different with Tom Cruise, arguably the biggest movie star on the planet, and one of the major recipes behind it is the actor’s willingness to learn.

Tom Cruise Is Always Willing to Expand into New Territories

Tom Cruise | Credit: Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount Pictures)

Unlike Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds’ filmography, which feels like an extension of their brand, Tom Cruise has always been in the game following his passion for the art form. While it wasn’t until he was...

The femme fatale is a figure that dates back centuries. In Greek mythology there were The Sirens, whose song dragged sailors to the depths of the seas, as well as Clytemnestra — wife, seductress, and ultimately murderer of King Agamemnon. Even Eve can be considered one for luring Adam into eating the forbidden fruit. But it was motion pictures that elevated the archetype to common nomenclature, starting at the form’s inception with characters played by actresses like Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, then flourishing in the ‘40s and ‘50s with the popularity of pulp crime narratives.

Bombshells like Rita Hayworth and Barbara Stanwyck came to define the femme fatale, with directors like Charles Vidor and Billy Wilder wielding their strength against the hapless men who populate their films. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw a revitalization of the character type with the rise of erotic thrillers. Glenn Close and Sharon Stone...

Courtesy of Studiocanal

by James Cameron-wilson

Hard to believe today, but Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 drama was a flop. A glum, perhaps cynical, claustrophobic piece of film noir shot in black-and-white, The Small Back Room was released just four years after the end of the Second World War – and it was not what postwar audiences wanted to see. Indeed, it is hardly one of the most celebrated titles in the Powell/Pressburger catalogue and I, for one, had never seen it before. Even so, having just watched this consummately photographed and magically restored work, I would say without hesitation it is one of my very favourite Powell and Pressburger films.

With the psychological complexity of a good play and replete with telling touches, it blends both the disciplines of Hollywood film noir with the Expressionism of the Weimar cinema of Germany, but with its own ineffable, stiff upper lip Englishness.

Marilyn Monroe‘s star burned brightly and briefly before her untimely death in 1962 at age 36. Yet she managed to enter the pop culture lexicon with just a handful of films, becoming Hollywood’s most memorable sex symbol. In honor of her birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1926, Monroe started off as a model before moving into acting with a series of bit parts, most notably in “All About Eve” and “The Asphalt Jungle,” both released in 1950. She became a leading lady with a trio of 1953 titles: the noir “Niagara,” the musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the romantic comedy “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

She became iconic thanks to Billy Wilder‘s “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), in which she played a young woman tantalizing her married neighbor (Tom Ewell). Her image was forever burned into our memories thanks to...

Nihilism and neon-popped lust collide in Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s Portuguese-language “Motel Destino,” set in a love motel so sordid that lay tourists should best avoid it, and only criminals and castaways are likely to check in. The “Invisible Life” director’s steamy psychosexual thriller set in the sweatiest armpit of the equator speaks melodrama and noir but with a Brazilian accent, Aïnouz returning to his home state of Ceará to shoot on his own turf for the first time in five years. The writer/director lifts from classics such as Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat” and Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” but also from ‘70s Brazilian sex comedies to tell a perverse yarn of extramarital betrayal turned murderous. But while the pre-“Body Heat” noirs he’s channeling could only suggest rather than spell out sex, Aïnouz goes graphic — and relentlessly — in an arthouse-only erotic genre piece that...

Chicago – One of the most reliable and relatable character actors in film is Greg Kinnear. The actor, Oscar nominated for “As Good As It Gets,” has been working steadily in film and TV ever since he made a splash on the scene with “Talk Soup.” From there he was cast in the remake of “Sabrina,” and his roles ascended from there. His latest film role is in “Sight.”

Rating: 3.5/5.0

One of America’s great Eye Doctor/Scientists is Ming Wang (Terry Chen), a Chinese-American immigrant who came from nothing to become one of the world experts on curing blindness through breakthrough discoveries. When a case of a blind girl from India falls on his lap, it leads to one of this greatest sight reviving ideas, with help from his colleague Misha Bartnovsky (Greg Kinnear). In this incredible true story, Wang goes over his life in flashback, including his survival during...

The first iteration of the Cannes Film Festival, planned for 1939, was scuppered when Germany invaded Poland to trigger the start of World War II. But when the festival finally got off the ground in 1946, Indian cinema came out swinging. Mounted shortly after the conclusion of the war, the first “real” Cannes Film Festival featured competition entries from Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend), Roberto Rossellini (Open City), and David Lean (Brief Encounter). In the spirit of post-war peace and reconciliation, the competition jury, headed by French historian Georges Huisman, handed the top prize — then the Grand Prix — to films from 11 of the 18 countries represented that year.

This included India, with Chetan Anand’s social-realist drama Neecha Nagar, and, for a decade at least, the country was a regular fixture in Competition. After Anand came V. Shantaram with Amar Bhoopali (1952), then Raj Kapoor with Awaara (1953), and Bimal Roy with Do Bigha Zamin...

Roxanne Rosedale, the glamorous model and actress who assisted host Bud Collyer on the 1950s game show Beat the Clock and appeared in the Marilyn Monroe-starring The Seven Year Itch, has died. She was 95.

Known professionally as Roxanne, she died May 2 in an assisted care facility in her birthplace of Minneapolis, her daughter Ann Roddy told The Hollywood Reporter.

Roxanne became a hugely popular TV star after she joined CBS’ Beat the Clock, from Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions, in 1950. She would introduce the contestants — who were tasked with completing complicated, outrageous stunts in an allotted time — snapped photos with a Sylvania camera and posed alongside the winners’ prizes. (Watch an episode here.)

While on the show, she made the covers of such magazines as Life, Look and (with Collyer) TV Guide and even had a doll named for her. The blue-eyed Roxanne Dolls featured a Beat the Clock...

World War II was still raging in May 1944. The allied invasion of Normandy — aka D-Day — was just around the corner on June 6th. Americans kept the home fires burning and escaped from the global conflict by going to the movies. Two of the biggest films of the year, Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way” and George Cukor’s “Gaslight,” recently celebrated their 80th anniversaries.

Actually, “Going My Way” had a special “Fighting Front” premiere on April 27th: 65 prints were shipped to battle fronts and shown “from Alaska to Italy, and from England to the jungles of Burma.” The sentimental comedy-drama-musical arrived in New York on May 3rd.

And it was just the uplifting film audiences needed. Bing Crosby starred as Father O’Malley, a laid-back young priest who arrives at a debt-ridden New York City church that is run by the older, set-in-his ways Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald). The elder...

Luca Guadagnino believes filmgoers will endorse his Zendaya movie Challengers because it delivers “a canon of Hollywood golden age comedy – seductive fun with queerness.” The movie’s “big sell” is a shot of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor kissing one another in various configurations.

Challengers is establishing itself as a Gen Z “date movie,” with a 75% female audience, mostly under the age of 24. Its high-powered social media campaign triggered a $25 million opening weekend globally, defying the pre-summer box office torpor.

The movie has also been well received by Gen Z reviewers who are faithful to their lexicon of film criticism – male characters are approvingly deemed “heteroflexible,” females “polyamorous,” etc.

It was a surprise to his fans that Guadagnino, an Italian filmmaker, set out to make an American-set sports movie (he is not a sports fan) about a tennis world to which he was alien. As with his other films,...