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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,...

Like most of the cinema’s recurring images and sensations, there’s no precise “first movie” about the maladjusted, dissatisfied, wounded soul, but the floodgates about this most serious of fellows seemed to open just after World War II. The late 1940s and early ’50s witnessed the infiltration of the New York theater, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kramer, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, and so on—directors, scribes, or actors whose meal tickets more often than not depended on their ability to write the counter-mythology to V-Day utopia. They asked, amid the fanfare and the ticker-tape parades, “Is this all there is?”

Deities such as Brando and James Dean were responsible for taking that particular ship into orbit, but John Garfield was a pioneer of sorts, as early as 1938’s Four Daughters, where his appearance in such a genteel trifle was no less jarring than a Martian invasion.

Lisandro Alonso: “The Searchers is the main example of what a Western was by John Ford, films which I really admire.” (Chiara Mastroianni and Robert Alan Packard in Eureka)

Lisandro Alonso’s Delphic Eureka, co-written with Martín Caamaño and Fabian Casas (which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and was a Main Slate selection of the New York Film Festival), begins with Murphy (Viggo Mortensen) approaching a town in the old Wild West on a buckboard, driven by a nun. She cannot be trusted, so much is clear, and as though she were the coachman transporting Dr. Van Helsing to his destination in Transylvania, she tells her passenger that this is as far as she can go. In the saloon he will encounter El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni channeling Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar), and a messy, loud and altogether corrupt atmosphere that...

Some sitcom actors only ever get one really great role, but Jim Backus had several. The actor, who played wealthy Wall Street regular Thurston Howell III on the popular castaway series "Gilligan's Island," had already made a name for himself by the show's premiere in 1964. He'd appeared regularly on the radio before TV was the dominant media of the time, and voiced the nearly blind cartoon character Mr. Magoo beginning in 1949. Backus also played a key role in Nicholas Ray's 1955 teen movie "Rebel Without A Cause," portraying the father who falls short when James Dean's angsty antihero Jim Stark needs him.

A few years before "Gilligan's Island," Backus even got his own show, aptly named "The Jim Backus Show" in the style of the time. In the Backus-led series, which was also called "Hot Off the Wire," the actor played a man named Mike O'Toole, who was attempting...

Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.Illustrations by Lucy Jones.What happens to the body at a film festival? Over the course of the Locarno Film Festival, we tried—as much as decency allows—to investigate this very broad question. These responses seek to tie together the films we’ve seen with our embodied experiences of Locarno, both inside and outside of the cinema, grappling with the limits of our attention, our exhaustion, and our desires. Bitter Victory.Pierre Jendrysiak:Far from the expected glamor, attending a film festival can sometimes feel like the trek through the desert pictured in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957): a dreamy haze, almost a struggle. Under the heat of the Locarno sun, one wanders the streets, looking for a nice bartender to refill their water bottle, a little bit...

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

Bam

A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg has assembled an all-35mm retrospective of films that inspired his new feature, including work by Lynch, Lubitsch, Nicholas Ray, and Tsai; the 50th-anniversary restoration of The Conversation begins a run.

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Johnnie To retrospective has begun, featuring the director in-person.

Anthology Film Archives

An Ingrid Caven retrospective includes films by Fassbinder and Eustache; work by Joseph Cornell, Tony Conrad, and Bruce Conner plays in “Essential Cinema.”

Film at Lincoln Center

An essential retrospective of Brazil’s L.C. Barreto Productions continues.

Roxy Cinema

Faces and A Woman Under the Influence screen.

Museum of the Moving Image

A retrospective of the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden continues; two films by Joanna Hogg screen on Saturday; Young Frankenstein and The Warriors have standalone showings, the latter on 35mm.

Film Forum

The Searchers...

Metrograph presents Shinji Sômai x 3, a program of recent restorations anchored by a week-long run of Moving, the latest of Sômai's films to be restored and re-released, beginning August 2 at Metrograph In Theater. P. P. Rider and Typhoon Club round out the series, with both of Sômai's earlier works arriving on Metrograph At Home on August 9.

“I can say with absolute conviction that no Japanese filmmaker makes a film without being conscious of Shinji Sômai's existence… [Sômai] convinced the Japanese audience at the time that ‘cinema is not dead yet.'… For anyone who wants to see a movie that has the power to change and sustain your life, I urge you to see Shinji Sômai's films.” —Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Shinji Sômai's tragic death at age 53 in 2001 robbed Japanese cinema of one of its foremost talents, a poet of alienation, frustration, and youthful revolt whose 13 films show a distinct and compassionate perspective,...

A certain type of cinephile weeb (hello) esteems maybe no post-New Wave Japanese director more highly than Shinji Sômai, but it’s the nature of such fandom that his brilliance––expertly plotted, emotionally precise films shot in some of the most incredible long takes (Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion should be the benchmark)––hadn’t quite gone westward. Except he’s suddenly a filmmaker of the moment, and after last year’s retrospective at Japan Society the age of ruddy DVD rips is gone: Cinema Guild released Typhoon Club on a 4K Uhd, one might expect the same of P.P. Rider, and next Friday brings their theatrical rerelease of Moving, arguably the ideal starting point for his work.

Metrograph will begin a retrospective of all three on Friday, August 2, and we’re pleased to debut its trailer. Here’s their official summary: “Shinji Sômai’s tragic death at age...

John Waters’s Cry-Baby is the ideal companion piece to the filmmaker’s 1988 hit Hairspray. That film takes place in the early ’60s, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, and deals in a lighthearted fashion with thorny issues of racial segregation, while Cry-Baby uses its mid-’50s setting to poke fun at class conflict in staid Eisenhower-era Baltimore. And both films are perfectly realized period pieces awash with the music of their respective eras: Hairspray focusing on soul and R&b, Cry-Baby packed with catchy rockabilly and doowop numbers.

Cry-Baby focuses on Wade Walker (Johnny Depp), the leader of a redoubtable gang of “drapes,” a Baltimorean spin on the greasers of the time. Events begin to echo Romeo and Juliet once Cry-Baby, who’s known for driving girls crazy for the way he’s able to shed a single tear, makes a play for Allison (Amy Locane), the...

As expansive and iconic as its title suggests, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West certainly seemed to be written in John Ford’s blood, from the vast wide-angle visions of Monument Valley that Leone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli luxuriated in, to the railroad-based, future-of-America economic landscape that serves as a backdrop to a number of bandit-versus-bandit power plays. Henry Fonda, with that methodical, stately stroll of his and those killer blue eyes barely visible from under the rim of his hat, can be seen and heard throughout, sending a shiver of great nostalgia up one’s spine. Ripened and tanned by years of desert sunlight, Ford’s Wyatt Earp is back in the saddle again.

But that particular pace and posture that Fonda had become known for in such films as My Darling Clementine, matched with the devious glint in those baby blues, now took...

For as long as “teenager” has been a demographic, there have been stories about teens breaking free from the status quo. While a lot of the modern great teen rebellion media is confined to the world of TV — where shows like “Euphoria” attract constant buzz — the archetypal troubled teen story remains 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause.” Starring James Dean in unquestionably his defining role, a rebellious teen struggling with his demons in L.A., Nicholas Ray’s film spoke to young people at the time with its story of high schoolers struggling with, and going against, the social pressures that bring them down. Over the years it became a touchstone because its themes and its honesty transcends generations.

As the teen film has evolved and morphed as a genre, there’s always been room for stories of iconoclastic youth who don’t fit in with the status quo. Oftentimes, these...

When screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides was asked about the complex layers of meaning running through his adaptation of Mickey Spillane‘s classic crime novel “Kiss Me Deadly,” he denied having any conscious intention of exploring the post-wwii anxieties that gave the film its jittery core. “People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script,” he told an interviewer. “About the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn’t think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun.” Bezzerides may have been just “having fun,” but in the process, he and director Robert Aldrich crafted one of the greatest noirs of all time, an apocalyptic detective story that looks into the heart of 1950s America and sees annihilation.

It’s one of several stone-cold masterpieces written by the novelist-turned-screenwriter, whose work is being properly acknowledged by the...

Barbra Rush, the prolific actress best known for roles in 1953’s It Came From Outer Space and long runs on Peyton Place and All My Children, has died. Her daughter confirmed Rush’s passing to Fox News on Sunday. She was 97.

Rush had a near 60-year career. In the ’50s and ’60s, she worked on the big screen with Paul Newman (three times), Kirk Douglas, Rock Hudson, Dean Martin, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Richard Burton. In addition to pulpier fare like Prince of Pirates and Taza, Son of Cochise, Rush did a trio of films with Douglas Sirk — The First Legion, Magnificent Obsession and Captain Lightfoot — and Bigger Than Life with Nicholas Ray.

By the late 1960s, Rush had segued mostly to TV, appearing in mainstays of the period such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, The Fugitive, Marcus Welby, M.D., McCloud, Maude, Ironside and Mannix.

Rush appeared in...

Barbara Rush, the classy yet largely unheralded leading lady who sparkled in the 1950s melodramas Magnificent Obsession, Bigger Than Life and The Young Philadelphians, has died. She was 97.

Rush, a regular on the fifth and final season of ABC’s Peyton Place and a favorite of sci-fi fans thanks to her work in When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953), died Sunday in Westlake Village, her daughter, Fox News senior correspondent Claudia Cowan, announced.

“My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition,” Cowan said. “It’s fitting she chose to leave on Easter as it was one of her favorite holidays and now, of course, Easter will have a deeper significance for me and my family.”

A starlet at Paramount, Universal and Fox whose career blossomed at...

Cinephiles will have plenty to celebrate this April with the next slate of additions to the Criterion Channel. The boutique distributor, which recently announced its June 2024 Blu-ray releases, has unveiled its new streaming lineup highlighted by an eclectic mix of classic films and modern arthouse hits.

Students of Hollywood history will be treated to the “Peak Noir: 1950” collection, which features 17 noir films from the landmark film year from directors including Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston.

New Hollywood maverick William Friedkin will also be celebrated when five of his most beloved movies, including “Sorcerer” and “The Exorcist,” come to the channel in April.

Criterion will offer the streaming premiere of Wim Wenders’ 3D art documentary “Anselm,” which will be accompanied by the “Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing” collection, which sees the director curating a selection of films from around the world that have influenced his careers.

Contemporary cinema is also well represented,...

April’s an uncommonly strong auteurist month for the Criterion Channel, who will highlight a number of directors––many of whom aren’t often grouped together. Just after we screened House of Tolerance at the Roxy Cinema, Criterion are showing it and Nocturama for a two-film Bertrand Bonello retrospective, starting just four days before The Beast opens. Larger and rarer (but just as French) is the complete Jean Eustache series Janus toured last year. Meanwhile, five William Friedkin films and work from Makoto Shinkai, Lizzie Borden, and Rosine Mbakam are given a highlight.

One of my very favorite films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story plays in a series I’ve been trying to program for years: “Hong Kong in New York,” boasting the magnificent Full Moon in New York, Farewell China, and An Autumn’s Tale. Wim Wenders gets his “Adventures in Moviegoing”; After Hours, Personal Shopper, and Werckmeister Harmonies fill...

Filmax has acquired international rights to Spanish thriller “Nina,” the new feature written and directed by Andrea Jaurrieta (“Ana by Day”) that bows at this week’s Málaga Film Festival as one of its higher profile titles in main competition.

Loosely based on the play of the same name by José Ramón Fernández, which borrows elements of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” “Nina” tells the story of a woman, an actress, who returns to her home town on Spain’s rugged northern coast seeking to take revenge on a celebrated writer. As she encounters past acquaintances, including a once close childhood friend, and faces dark memories, she begins to question whether vengeance is the only way forward.

“Nina” stars Goya-winning actress Patricia López Arnaiz (“Ane is Missing”) as the titular character and San Sebastián Silver Shell winner Darío Grandinetti, famed for his performance in Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her,...

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

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Denis Villeneuve’s work also brings the director’s programming choices, among them films by Godard, Resnais, Cassavetes, and Wong Kar-wai.

Roxy Cinema

Bob Fosse’s Star 80, The Piano Teacher, The Pillow Book, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and End of Night all play on 35mm.

Anthology Film Archives

As retrospective of Haitian cinema continues, films by Hollis Frampton and Ernie Gehr play Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Film Forum

“Sapph-o-rama” continues with films by Nicholas Ray, Jonathan Demme, Lizzie Borden, and more; a 4K restoration of Pandora’s Box has begun a run; a print of The Third Man continues, while the Harold Lloyd film Hot Water shows on 35mm this Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A retrospective of snubbed performances brings films by Scorsese, Elaine May, Jonathan Demme, and Gus Van Sant...

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

Film Forum

“Sapph-o-rama” highlights lesbian cinema with films by Chantal Akerman, Nicholas Ray, Ulrike Ottinger, and more; a 4K restoration of The Pianist and The Third Man on 35mm continue; A Hard Day’s Night plays on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A retrospective of snubbed performances brings films by Cassavetes, Jonathan Demme, and more; The Gods of Times Square and a print of Prince’s vastly underrated Under the Cherry Moon both play on Sunday.

Metrograph

The series “Dreamlike Visions” puts modern master Alain Gomis front-and-center.

Roxy Cinema

Carpenter’s Christine, Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and Secretary all play on 35mm.

Museum of Modern Art

As the massive run of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films continues, a retrospective of Finnish filmmaker Ilkka Järvi-Laturi begins.

IFC Center

A Dario Argento series continues; Audition, Basket Case 3,...

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

Museum of Modern Art

A massive run of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films begins; “To Save and Project,” continues.

Film at Lincoln Center

“Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s” brings films by Tati, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray (x2), Godard, Straub-Huillet, Pasolini, and more.

Film Forum

“Sapph-o-rama” highlights lesbian cinema with films by Chantal Akerman, Lizzie Borden, Ulrike Ottinger, Yvonne Rainer, Celine Sciamma, and more; a 4K restoration of The Pianist, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, and The Third Man continue; a print of Calamity Jane plays on Sunday.

IFC Center

As Francis Ford Coppola’s latest recut, One from the Heart: Reprise, continues, Bertrand Bonello’s masterpiece Coma gets a New York premiere and a Dario Argento series begins; Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar plays late.

Roxy Cinema

Cronenberg’s Crash and Keith McNally...

For better or worse, Elvis Presley and Jesse James are two of America’s rebel icons. Elvis lost out on the opportunity to play the Western outlaw for reasons beyond his control. Another famous actor of the era replaced him. Regardless, the Western genre became a significant part of the singer’s career.

The director of ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ wanted Elvis Presley to play Jesse James

Nicholas Ray was a film director known for making movies about outcasts. His filmography includes King of Kings, In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and, most famously, Rebel Without a Cause. According to the book Elvis Films Faq: All That’s Left to Know About the King of Rock’ n’ Roll in Hollywood, Ray wanted the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll to star in his movie The True Story of Jesse James. The director wanted James to come across as a sex symbol,...

In his fascinating book about Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino said Elvis Presley almost appeared in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the most beloved Westerns of the 1960s. Another source says the director’s claim is dubious. Regardless, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid inspired one of the best movie themes of its era.

Warren Beatty and Elvis Presley could have been ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’

In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino discussed the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “After [Steve] McQueen dropped out of the role of the Sundance Kid, before [Robert] Redford, it was offered to Warren Beatty,” he said. “Naturally, if Beatty did it he wanted to play Butch Cassidy (a nonstarter because that role had always been Newman’s). But if they had gone for it, Beatty wanted to do it with Elvis Presley as Sundance.”

The book Elvis Films Faq: All...

Joan Evans, the daughter of screenwriters and goddaughter of Joan Crawford, who starred opposite Farley Granger in her first three films and with Audie Murphy in a pair of Westerns, has died. She was 89.

Evans died Oct. 21 in Henderson, Nevada, her son, John Weatherly, told The Hollywood Reporter.

She also toplined the Charles Lederer-directed On the Loose (1951), playing a suicidal teenager in the drama written by her parents, Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert; portrayed Irene Dunne’s daughter in the fantasy It Grows on Trees (1952); and enlisted in the U.S. Navy with Esther Williams in the musical comedy Skirts Ahoy! (1952).

Evans played the love interest of Granger’s character in the title role of Roseanna McCoy (1949), a drama loosely based on the family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The two worked together again in the 1950 releases Our Very Own and Edge of Doom, a bleak film noir directed by Mark Robson.

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...

Italian American actor won herself iconic status with the 1959 film where she played a woman ‘passing’ as white

Lelia Goldoni, the actor best known as the female lead in John Cassavetes’ groundbreaking film Shadows, has died aged 86. The news was first reported by the Wrap, who said that her manager Jd Sobol announced that she died on Saturday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey.

Goldoni had become involved with Shadows as a result of the acting workshop Cassavetes had started in 1956 – before which, according to Cassavetes, she had no professional acting experience. The film itself arose from an improvised audition sketch Cassavetes had performed for acting guru Lee Strasberg about two black siblings who “passed” for white. Having elaborated the idea into a full-length film, Cassavetes asked Goldoni to play the sister to brothers Hugh Hurd and Ben Carruthers; her character became the central figure of the film,...

Carmen Sevilla, the Spanish-born actor who starred in the Oscar-nominated 1958 film Vengeance and played Mary Magdalene in Nicholas Ray’s 1961 Biblical epic King of Kings, died Tuesday of Alzheimer’s disease and pneumonia at a hospital in Madrid. She was 92.

Her death was reported by her son to the Europa Press new agency.

Born in Seville, Spain, Sevilla launched her show business career as a dancer in the 1940s but had pivoted to film acting by the end of the decade. During the 1950s she became one of Spanish cinema’s most popular stars.

Her starring role in writer-director Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1958 La Venganza (Vengeance) made her an international star as the film became the first Spanish film nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Sevilla became more widely known in the U.S. with King of Kings, in which she played a beautiful Mary Magdalene opposite Jeffrey Hunter’s equally attractive Jesus.

The Golden Age of Hollywood gave us a plethora of phenomenal acting pairs that would appear together in film after film. We had Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and many more. In a time where franchises and intellectual properties were not ruling Hollywood, pairing two actors together again was its own form of franchising. They were similar kinds of movies, but each told different stories with the actors playing different characters. The chemistry was all you needed to get people to come back for more.

One of the best pairings of the era was obviously Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Not only were both of them phenomenal actors who had scintillating on-screen chemistry, but there was also the added factor that the two became a couple and were married until Bogart's death in 1957. Over the course of their partnership,...

Hot on the heels of their love-it-or-hate-it niche hit "Beau Is Afraid", Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix are evidently ready to run it back.

According to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, who has shot all three of Aster's films, the filmmaker's next movie will be "Eddington." Aster has been dropping hints about this project for the last four years, but he's been especially chatty about it during the press tour for "Beau Is Afraid." Per World of Reel, the confirmation came from Pogorzelski as he was speaking at a seminar in Nashville.

What is "Eddington?" If you've been following Aster's career since his 2018 breakout "Hereditary," you know all about it. If not, allow me to fill you in.

Aster Is Ready To Ride Strange In The Saddle

Five years ago, Aster revealed during a Reddit Ama that "Eddington" was nearly his first movie. Per Aster:

"Although it's sort of a — I don't...

Life World

Film Stage contributor Matthew Danger Lippman hosts a screening of Tom Green’s masterpiece Freddy Got Fingered this Friday, with tickets for $5 at the door, on the occasion of its 22nd anniversary. (Read Matthew’s interview with Green for the 20th.)

Film at Lincoln Center

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s early feature Passion has begun screening (read our interview with him here) while a series of films selected by Ari Aster begins, featuring films by Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Tai, and more.

Roxy Cinema

The Bedroom Window, featuring the Huppert-Guttenberg romance you never knew you wanted has 35mm showings Friday and Saturday, while Barbarella plays on the latter; on Sunday, new cult sensation For the Plasma screens, while Meg “U.S. Girls” Remy hosts a (currently sold-out) screening of Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue that includes music videos.

IFC Center

Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation shows in a...

As many a therapist’s coach has witnessed, in favour of running day to day as a cohesive unit many a family opt for the (perhaps not healthiest) strategy of pushing the simmering tensions they hold against one another to the background. But what if there was a way for you to have a much need cathartic vent, free from the worry of hurting the feelings of those you hold dearest? Filmmaker Daniel Turvil may have found a possible solution with This Much, So Far, his short film about a suburban dad who gathers a stand in cast of life-like dolls so he can deliver a torrent of unflattering home truths to his kin. It’s a film that does a great job of deploying the talents of actor Adam James, whose frenzied performance of Turvil’s high concept script is just as terrifying as it is captivating. Dn is...

Misfits and Outlaws: Jim Jarmusch's Cinema of Outsiders is now showing on Mubi in many countries.The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.In Permanent Vacation (1980)—Jim Jarmusch’s underseen, undercooked, wholly unpolished first feature—Aloysius “Christopher” Parker (Chris Parker), a disaffected young drifter who recalls the ’50s Jazz-Age hipster and presages the ’90s slacker, wanders around a bombed-out Manhattan without an agenda. He dances in his apartment as his indifferent girlfriend smokes out the window. He talks to various strangers: a concessions attendant at a repertory house, a streetwise saxophone player, a disturbed man who believes he’s in a war zone. Eventually, he steals a car and uses the profits to board a steamer ship to Paris, content to roam as if he’s a tourist on a… well, you know.It's almost beside...

Ari Aster’s nearly-three hour journey Beau Is Afraid, described by the filmmaker himself as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” will arrive a bit earlier than expected. Now set to debut on April 14 in New York and LA before expanding wide the following week, including IMAX screens, we’ve received more context for what to expect thanks to a new series the director curated for Film at Lincoln Center.

Set to run April 14-20 at the NYC venue, selections include works by Alfred Hitchcock, Jiří Menzel, Guy Maddin, Albert Brooks, Nicholas Ray, Powell and Pressburger, Tsai Ming-liang, Jacques Tati, and more. “This eclectic and unexpected collection of masterworks drawn from seven decades of film history across a range of genres and production contexts sheds light on the inspirations and influences behind one of the most compelling directorial voices in Hollywood today,” notes the press release.

Aster also recently let...

Los Angeles is such a large and sprawling city, it doesn't have a singular identity. As can be seen from the wide variety of movies set here, neighborhoods in the east, south, and west of LA, from the beaches to the vast San Fernando Valley, all have extremely different flavors. LA is a city of transplants and immigrants, and I'm no exception, as I moved here 6.5 years ago from the UK. Most of the best-known LA movies were made by outsiders trying to get to grips with a city that in one sense is dominated by the movie industry but also has a rich cultural life outside of that.

One of the best ways to discover LA is through documentaries, such as "City of Gold" (2015), "Los Angeles Plays Itself" (2003), and "Dogtown and Z-Boys" (2001). Like most people, my perception of LA was entirely built by the movies I watched growing up,...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month, including David Easteal’s The Plains (one of the best films we saw on the festival circuit last year), Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy, Koji Fukada’s 10-part series The Real Thing, Bruce Labruce’s Saint-Narcisse, and more.

Additional highlights include three films by Joan Micklin Silver, additions to their Lars von Trier series, Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville, Sally Potter’s Orlando, Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, and more.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

April 1 – Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley

April 2 – Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman

April 3 – The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers, directed by Helke Sander | What Sets Us Free? German Feminist Cinema

April 4 – Saint-Narcisse, directed by Bruce Labruce

April 5 – Jaime Francisco, directed by Javier Rodríguez | Brief Encounters

April 6 – Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin...

Good news for those who wish to know what their Twitter feed’s jacking off to: the Criterion Channel are launching an erotic thriller series that includes De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the Wachowskis’ Bound, and so many other movies to stir up that ceaseless, fruitless “why do movies have sex scenes?” discourse. (Better or worse than middle-age film critics implying they have a hard-on? I’m so indignant at being forced to choose.) Similarly lurid, if not a bit more frightening, is a David Lynch retro that includes the Criterion editions of Lost Highway and Inland Empire (about which I spoke to Lynch last year), a series of shorts, and a one-month-only engagement for Dune, a film that should be there in perpetuity.

Retrospectives of Harold Lloyd, Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, and shorts by Fanta Régina Nacro round out the big debuts,...

Exclusive: Luxury labels are “naturally evolving” toward producing and making their own indie feature films, says Charles Finch, founder and chief executive of Finch and Partners, the consulting firm that has been the prime mover in enabling “a synergy of content” between the entertainment sector and the crème de la crème of brands.

Related Story Breaking Baz: Ruth Wilson On “Huge Act Of Stamina” Needed To Perform For 24 Hours With 100 Men On London Stage; Mud, Glorious Mud For ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ Related Story NFL Playoffs Fuel Broadcast Viewing In January; Prime Video Sees Largest Jump In Streaming Usage Due To 'Jack Ryan,' Nielsen Says Related Story Ruby Stokes On What She Misses Most About 'Bridgerton' After Series Exit

For 25 years, Finch tells Deadline, “we have either represented studios in helping to promote their programming or we have brought enormous luxury deals to artists, and...

Tom Luddy, the understated co-founder and artistic director of the Telluride Film Festival who championed world cinema, spotlighted overlooked gems and saluted legends during his near half-century run with the event, has died. He was 79.

Luddy died peacefully Monday in Berkeley, California, after a long illness, Telluride senior vp public relations Shannon Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.

“The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,” Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger said in a statement. “I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some.

“But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He...

Babylon (2022).Hollywood has been making movies about movies for almost as long as there have been movies. This is not surprising given the town’s penchant for self-mythologizing; the dramatic potential of silver-screen fame, always an Icarus flight on wax wings melting in the California sun; and the allure of a glimpse behind the scenes into the factory where the dreams are made. It would be hypocritical to mock the self-importance of a place that exerts such an inexhaustible fascination—on me, I own, and probably on you—and Hollywood’s addiction to turning the cameras on itself has produced a few masterpieces of clear-eyed ambivalence. It has also revealed, even in less successful efforts, a strain of insecurity and self-loathing under the celebratory tinsel. Some films portray the industry as crass and cruel, spitting out used-up stars and corrupting artistic integrity; some exploit chaotic, unhinged movie sets for laughs or thrills.

We love this Fritz Lang western even though it’s not particularly good; only in hindsight do we realize that the brilliant director’s intentions may have been compromised. High-key lighting does Marlene Dietrich no favors, but she scores good scenes performing with Arthur Kennedy (revenged crazed cowpoke) and Mel Ferrer (tranquilized gunslinger). Lang fans will be impressed by the gaudy, over-bright restored Technicolor, and we can always blame Howard Hughes.

Rancho Notorious

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1952 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 89 min. / Available at Amazon.com / General site Wac-Amazon / Street Date January 10, 2023 / 21.99

Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, Lloyd Gough, William Frawley, Jack Elam, George Reeves, Frank Ferguson, Dan Seymour, John Doucette, Dick Elliott, Russell Johnson, Charlita.

Cinematography: Hal Mohr

Production Designer: Wiard Ihnen

Dietrich’s wardrobe designed by: Don Loper

Editorial Supervisor: Otto Ludwig

Original Music: Emil Newman

Written by Daniel Taradash, Silvia Richards

Produced by Howard Welsch

Directed...

Farewell to Tom Verlaine, for some of us the greatest American rock guitarist not named “Hendrix.” Verlaine, who died Saturday at 73, could hit cosmic heights that no other guitar virtuoso could reach. He made his bones in the 1970s with Television, the garage band who created a new kind of psychedelic sublime in the Cbgb punk scene. Television made two of the Seventies’ best guitar albums, Marquee Moon and Adventure, until they fell apart, just as they were hitting their musical peak. But the music Verlaine got out of his...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed a raft of titles across strands and also 33 film projects vying for coin at the coproduction market.

Selections for the topical Perspektive Deutsches Kino strand from emerging German talent include “Seven Winters in Tehran” by Steffi Niederzoll, “Elaha” by Milena Aboyan, “Ararat” by Engin Kundag, “The Kidnapping of the Bride” by Sophia Mocorrea, Fabian Stumm’s “Bones and Names,” “Long Long Kiss” by Lukas Röder, Tanja Egen’s “On Mothers and Daughters,” “Ash Wednesday,” by João Pedro Prado and Bárbara Santos, “Nuclear Nomads” by Kilian Armando Friedrich and Tizian Stromp Zargari and “Lonely Oaks” by Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff.

All the selected films in the strand will compete for the Heiner Carow Prize and the Compass-Perspektive-Award, both of which are endowed with €5,000.

A 4K restoration of David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” will open the Berlinale Classics section, which also includes Oliver Schmitz’ “Mapantsula,...

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda earned an Oscar nomination with his 2018 family drama, "Shoplifters." His film pulled heartstrings organically, subtly, and unforgettably. The director's humor resonated with audiences around the world, and his earlier films also manage to feel both meditative and packed to the brim at once. So when I heard Kore-eda was making a road film with some incredible South Korean actors, including Song Kang-Ho of "Parasite" and Bae Doona of "The Host," I was overjoyed.

"Broker" stars the K-pop idol Iu (real name: Lee Ji-eun) as a young woman who leaves her baby in front of a baby box. The baby is then abducted by two men, portrayed by Song Kang-ho and Dong-won Gang, who plan to illegally facilitate an adoption. The mother comes back for her child and encounters the baby brokers, and, wanting to make sure her baby has a better life than she did, she decides...

Humphrey Bogart is practically the face of film noir. While not quite a genre, the very flexible film movement reflected America's malaise following the Great Depression and eventually World War II. There was a grimness and heightened sense of realism to the movies, often made on lower budgets and with a documentary intensity. Even when the movies ended happily, as many did, the feelings unearthed in the telling of the story would be left unresolved to gnaw at viewers indefinitely.

Bogart, the Broadway actor turned B-movie character actor turned one of the biggest stars in the world, fit the mood perfectly. His scars and trademark lisp separated him from his more conventionally beautiful peers and gave him a natural feel for the hardboiled material. His way with dialogue — spat out with ferocity or tenderness — colored the films as well. His cinematic stature, helped by his refusal to do television, also...

Director Luca Guadagnino on the set of Bones And All. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures For his new film Bones And All, director Luca Guadagnino beautifully combines many of the extraordinary qualities of his previous two projects, the mesmerizing one-two punch of Call Me By Your Name and...

The inarguably true cliché about Jean-Luc Godard was that the late filmmaker, who died this week at the age of 91, was a rule-breaker, an artist whose style changed the course of film history by revealing the medium for everything it had already been and pointing to the future of what it could eventually be. Obviously, his body of work has been influential — but that’s an understatement.

And not only for his extensive, time- and media-spanning filmography, ranging from his cucumber-cool debut, Breathless, to the didactic political experiments of the 1960s and 1970s,...

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Gary Nelson, who directed the Disney films Freaky Friday and The Black Hole, served as the in-house helmer on the first two seasons of Get Smart and called the shots for scores of other shows, has died. He was 87.

Nelson died May 25 in Las Vegas of natural causes, his son Garrett Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter.

His father was Sam Nelson, who served as an assistant director on such landmark films as The Lady From Shanghai (1947), All the King’s Men (1949), Some Like It Hot (1959) and Experiment in Terror (1962) and was a co-founder, along with King Vidor and others, of what would become the DGA.

Gary Nelson started out as an A.D., too, working on films including Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), before he got a big break thanks to his future wife,...

No more enjoyable conversation grudge match can be had than pitting James Dean against Marlon Brando in a Hollywood Heartthrob showdown. Which do prefer? The rough, raw honesty of Brando in László Benedek's "The Wild One," wherein he plays a humming, human motorcycle engine, tanked up on erotic, rebellious energy and living to subvert paradigms and dismiss 1950s squareness? Or the brooding, poetic angst of Dean in Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause," a sensitive, mature soul -- even a little kooky -- who may sometimes let pride get the better of him, but who would be content to form his own blissful, star-gazing queer polycule with a pair of classmates. 

Each of the actors was also sexually open at a time when queerness was notoriously repressed and pilloried; remember when Rock Hudson and Liberace were "ladies men"? Commonly attributed to Dean is the quote "No, I'm not homosexual.

First things first: Yes, Luca Guadagnino still wants to make a sequel to “Call Me By Your Name” with Timothée Chalamet as the soul-searching Elio, but he wouldn’t put it in those terms. “A sequel is an American concept,” the filmmaker said during an interview at the Telluride Film Festival. “It’s more like the chronicles of Elio, the chronicles of this young boy becoming a man. It is something I want to do.”

For now, though, Guadagnino has already satiated his desire to collaborate with the actor who became a star as a result of that 2017 romance. With “Bones and All,” Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich have transformed Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 cannibal into a gothic plunge into the ’80s-era midwest. Equal parts “Badlands” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” the movie is a sensitive look at the kind of marginalized characters who populate all of Guadagnino’s films.

A scrawny Chalamet plays Lee,...

While he may not be as well-known today as Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder, director Nicholas Ray had a fantastic run during the '50s working across a range of genres from film noir ("In a Lonely Place") to war saga ("Flying Leathernecks"), coming-of-age teen angst ("Rebel Without a Cause") to westerns, the strangest of which is undoubtedly "Johnny Guitar." Shot in gaudy Trucolor, it stands apart from other studio westerns of the day, maybe because it isn't really a western at all -- It's more like a twisted gothic psychodrama that just happens to be set in the Old West.

Although the title refers to Sterling Hayden's nonchalant protagonist, Mr. Guitar takes a back seat for much of the movie, just one of many of Ray's subversive twists to the standard western formula. Instead, the main focus is the bitter rivalry between Vienna (Joan Crawford), a steely saloon keeper,...

Unlike many classic movies about World War 2, "Casablanca" was made during the war. The film was released in 1942, just under a year after America entered the conflict, and is set a year earlier in the eponymous Moroccan city. Club owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) discovers that his old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Heinrid), both Nazi resistance fighters, are in Casablanca and looking to escape to America.

The film shows Casablanca as a refugee hub, full of unique characters scattered to the winds by Nazi oppression of their homelands. Rick, the sole American in the cast, becomes an avatar of his country's role in the war; he's initially neutral but ultimately chooses the right side. Underlining this, the film is set mere days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which pushed America into the war.

"Casablanca" and its connection to contemporary events helped make it a hit.