News

How now, what news: the Criterion Channel’s July lineup is here. Eight pop renditions of Shakespeare are on the docket: from movies you forgot were inspired by the Bard (Abel Ferrara’s China Girl) to ones you’d wish to forget altogether (Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing), with maybe my single favorite interpretation (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet) alongside Paul Mazursky, Gus Van Sant, Baz Luhrmann, Derek Jarman, and (of course) Kenneth Branagh. A neonoir collection arrives four months ahead of Noirvember: two Ellroy adaptations, two from De Palma that are not his neonoir Ellroy adaptation, two from the Coen brothers (i.e. the chance to see a DVD-stranded The Man Who Wasn’t There in HD), and––finally––a Michael Winner picture given Criterion’s seal of approval.

Columbia screwballs run between classics to lesser-seens while Nicolas Roeg and Heisei-era Godzilla face off. A Times Square collection brings The Gods of Times Square,...

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

Film Forum

Films by David Lynch, Tony Scott, David Cronenberg, and Jim Jarmusch play in “Out of the 80s,“ which includes Do the Right Thing on 35mm this Sunday; The Neverending Story plays on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Rumble in the Bronx and The Straight Story play on 35mm as part of “See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex” which also includes Boomerang and Trainspotting; an Agnieszka Holland retrospective begins; Mothra screens on Saturday.

Roxy Cinema

Altered States plays on 35mm this Friday; Saturday brings Knight of Cups; George Cukor’s It Should Happen to You plays on 16mm this Sunday.

Paris Theater

Seven, Old Joy, Come and See, and The Conformist all screen on a despair-inducing Sunday.

Metrograph

Films by Gus Van Sant and Alain Resnais play in an mk2 retrospective; retrospectives of Obayashi and Dieudo Hamadi...

If anyone deserves to be called a Hollywood legend, it's Jack Lemmon. John Uhler Lemmon III was born on February 8, 1925, in Newton, Massachusetts, to Irish Catholic parents. During World War II, Lemmon served as an ensign on the Naval aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain — it was only after the war ended and he graduated from Harvard in 1947 that his acting career began.

Lemmon's first feature film role was an uncredited appearance in 1949's "The Lady Takes a Sailor." In 1954, he landed a part opposite Judy Halliday in "It Should Happen to You," and the rest is cinematic history. The Massachusetts son is...

The post The 20 Greatest Jack Lemmon Roles, Ranked appeared first on /Film.

The Criterion Channel has unveiled their lineup for next month and it’s another strong slate, featuring retrospectives of Carole Lombard, John Waters, Robert Downey Sr., Luis García Berlanga, Jane Russell, and Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman. Also in the lineup is new additions to their Queersighted series, notably Todd Haynes’ early film Poison (Safe is also premiering in a separate presentation), William Friedkin’s Cruising, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorama.

The new restorations of Manoel de Oliveira’s stunning Francisca and Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli will join the channel, alongside Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, Bong Joon Ho’s early short film Incoherence, and Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta.

See the lineup below and explore more on criterionchannel.com.

#Blackmendream, Shikeith, 2014

12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet, 1957

About Tap, George T. Nierenberg, 1985

The AIDS Show, Peter Adair and Rob Epstein, 1986

The Assignation, Curtis Harrington, 1953

Aya of Yop City,...

Robert De Niro joked with Stephen Colbert during his sit-down on The Late Show a week ago, noting that when it came to his Tribeca Talk with Martin Scorsese, he’d ask a question, leave for coffee, and return minutes later to ask the next question.

That was hardly the case here today, as the two went back and forth onstage for more than 90 minutes at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, covering a majority of ground; from their collaborations together, such as Mean Streets, The King of Comedy and Casino, to those pics in which the Raging Bull Oscar winner did not star, i.e. Silence and The Wolf of Wall Street.

However, for those fans looking to hear more about their ninth team-up together, The Irishman, or see a clip from that upcoming Netflix movie, the duo didn’t dive into any great details.

Lively stars, good music and Bob Fosse-grade dancing favor Columbia’s forgotten-yet-rediscovered original musical remake, which turns the adventures of two sisters in Manhattan into an all-romantic gambol. Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon are young and fresh, but MGM alumnus Betty Garrett steals the show.

My Sister Eileen

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 108 min. / Street Date June 19, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Betty Garrett, Bob Fosse, Kurt Kasznar, Dick York, Lucy Marlow, Tommy Rall, Richard Deacon, Kathryn Grant, Queenie Smith.

Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.

Film Editor: Charles Nelson

Choreographer: Robert Fosse

Songs: Jule Styne, Leo Robin

Original Music: George Duning

Written by Blake Edwards, Richard Quine from the play by Joseph Fields, Jerome Chodorov, from stories by Ruth McKenney

Produced by Fred Kohlmar

Directed by Richard Quine

The making of a fun movie musical was rarely as easy as jumping up and shouting,...

Updated: Following a couple of Julie London Westerns*, Turner Classic Movies will return to its July 2017 Star of the Month presentations. On July 27, Ronald Colman can be seen in five films from his later years: A Double Life, Random Harvest (1942), The Talk of the Town (1942), The Late George Apley (1947), and The Story of Mankind (1957). The first three titles are among the most important in Colman's long film career. George Cukor's A Double Life earned him his one and only Best Actor Oscar; Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest earned him his second Best Actor Oscar nomination; George Stevens' The Talk of the Town was shortlisted for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. All three feature Ronald Colman at his very best. The early 21st century motto of international trendsetters, from Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and Turkey's Recep Erdogan to Russia's Vladimir Putin and the United States' Donald Trump, seems to be, The world is reality TV and reality TV...

The following is an essay featured in the anthology George Cukor - On/Off Hollywood (Capricci, Paris, 2013), for sale at www.capricci.fr.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a complete retrospective on the director, "The Discreet Charm of George Cukor," in New York December 13, 2013 - January 7, 2014. Many thanks to David Phelps, Fernando Ganzo, and Camille Pollas for their generous permission.

The Second-hand Illusion:

Notes on Cukor

Above: The Chapman Report (1962), A Life of Her Own (1950)

“There’s always something about them that you don’t know that you’d like to know. Spencer Tracy had that. In fact, they do all have that – all the big ones have it. You feel very close to them but there is the ultimate thing withheld from you – and you want to find out.” —George Cukor1

“Can you tell what a woman’s like by just looking at her?” —The Chapman Report...

Below you will find an index for all of our 66th Locarno Film Festival coverage by Adam Cook, Marie-Pierre Duhamel, and Celluloid Liberation Front.

Films

What Now? Remind Me by Joaquim Pinto (x two)

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism by Corneliu Poromboiu

Short Term 12 by Destin Cretton

Manakamana by Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez

Une autre vie by Emmanuel Mouret

Les grandes ondes (à l'ouest) by Lionel Baier

A Masque of Madness (Notes on Film 06-b, Monologue 02) by Norbert Pfaffenbilcher

On Death Row II by Werner Herzog

It Should Happen to You by George Cukor

Interviews

Abel Ferrara

Ben Rivers & Ben Russell...

“A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs has more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”

- Jg Ballard

The darker side of fame and the sinister aftertaste of success are recurring features in many of Cukor’s films, from What Price Hollywood? (1932) to Rich and Famous (1981); the American director often hinted at the anguishing emptiness lurking behind stardom. In It Should Happen to You (1954) Cukor pushes even further with his reflections on the elusive matter of celebrity and the role that mono-dimensional images play in projecting the illusion of limelight. Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday), an aspiring bigwig of nondescript qualities, meets Pete Sheppard (Jack Lemmon) in Central Park, where he is busy capturing “real things and real people” with his hand-held...

This will be the last top ten off the top of my head whole decade thingies for a bit -- we need to get to real articles but I've been swamped off blog. But these discussions are fun, don't you agree? The 1950s were the first film decade I was obsessed with in that when I was first becoming interested in cinema in the mid 80s, the 50s somehow came to signify Mythic Classic Hollywood to me, though cinema obviously stretched much much further back. So I guess I'll always be kind of attached to this decade when the movies got literally bigger (I do so prefer rectangulars to squares) and the era's stars really defined (at least for me) the concept of "Movie Star". I mean it's hard to argue with Liz, Brando, Clift, Dean, Monroe in all caps.

Which is why Giant is such a perfect 1950s movie...

With the meaning of celebrity becoming ever more ambiguous, and Andy Warhol’s notorious prediction coming true that eventually everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, the touching and delightful 1954 George Cukor-Garson Kanin-Judy Holliday-Jack Lemmon satirical New York comedy about fame, It Should Happen to You (available on DVD), seems now not only still most relevant but also downright prescient. Kanin, who wrote the original screenplay, initially called the picture (far more appropriately) A Name for Herself, but the studio thought it could do better and didn’t. (Columbia was the studio, which had become a major because of It Happened…...

With the meaning of celebrity becoming ever more ambiguous, and Andy Warhol’s notorious prediction coming true that eventually everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, the touching and delightful 1954 George Cukor-Garson Kanin-Judy Holliday-Jack Lemmon satirical New York comedy about fame, It Should Happen to You (available on DVD), seems now not only still most relevant but also downright prescient. Kanin, who wrote the original screenplay, initially called the picture (far more appropriately) A Name for Herself, but the studio thought it could do better and didn’t. (Columbia was the studio, which had become a major because of It Happened One Night, so maybe they figured there was magic in the words “it” and “happen”; they would later make It Happened to Jane.) Jack Lemmon, whose beguiling debut in pictures this was, always blamed the movie’s lackluster box office on its meaninglessly general title.

Last year, The Onion published an article satirizing Apple with fake news about an iPhone that can only be seen by the company's most loyal customers. It should have been reprinted this week in honor of the latest Apple pep rally held in San Franciso today. Before the event began, millions of people were not only curious, but already desired the rumored-to-be-unveiled iSlate or Apple Tablet or whatever it's actually called (yes, I've heard all the jokes), despite the fact that nobody really knew what it was (see Engadget's excellent rumor timeline). This madness has inspired today's pitch idea. Mainly due to the photographs in the Onion story, I'm obviously reminded of a little Hans Christian Anderson tale, the name of which would be altered slightly to ...

The Emperor's New iClothes

The satirical comedy (which probably couldn't legally get away with the "i" in the title) would be an adaptation...