An interview with actors Dante Basco, Caroline Goodall and Charlie Korsmo, screenwriters James V. Hart and Malia Scotch Marmo and Hart’s son Jake about the thirtieth anniversary of Steven Spielberg's Hook.
A tribute to the late, great Richard Donner.
A tribute to one of the best cinematographers of all time.
A tribute to the legendary Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci.
Odie Henderson shares his favorites and highlights from this year's New York Film Festival.
A recap of the latest New York Film Festival and review of Woody Allen's newest film after its world premiere there.
The latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming services, including The Infiltrator, Cafe Society, Blood Father, and a Criterion edition of Boyhood.
A review of Woody Allen's new film, which just premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
A shorts program that includes work by Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda and Jean Renoir.
25 indie directors to know; RIP Kirk Kerkorian; Designs of "Dick Tracy"; Tim Burton pays tribute to Christopher Lee; Preview of BAMcinemaFest.
Lateral tracking shots can get to the heart of a film more quickly and succinctly than any other technique. What are your favorites?
Shrouded behind the frostbitten windows of an idling vehicle, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) peers out at the snow-covered French countryside where a political assassination takes place. Driven by another member of Mussolini's Fascist government, the jittery man in the backseat has traveled through the night to reach this mission, but it is in the journey that Bernardo Bertolucci's striking 1970 drama, "The Conformist," takes shape. An adaptation of Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel, the film details the inner working of cowardice, using Marcello as a supposed idealist defined by his cage in 1930s Italy, and through his pitiful struggle against independence explores its futility at every turn.
• "The Outer Limits" (original series) is available on Netflix (DVD), Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video. • "In Cold Blood" is available on Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray) and Amazon Instant Video. • "Cool Hand Luke" is available on Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray) and Amazon Instant Video. • "American Beauty" is available on Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray) and Amazon Instant Video. • "Road to Perdition" is available on Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray).
by Jeff Shannon Eyes Wide Open: A Single Artist's Vision
Ask anyone who's devoted their life to the study and appreciation of movies and they can probably tell you exactly when they were "bitten by the movie bug," that moment of personal epiphany that sparked an all-consuming passion for what is arguably the greatest, most powerful medium of artistic expression.
In my case, it was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" that literally changed my life. That's an influential milestone I share with many cinephiles who came of age in the 1950s and '60s, especially those "movie brats" (among them James Cameron, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) who were drawn to imaginative visions of the future. Because I'd spent most of my childhood outdoors or casually enjoying Disney films and other kid-friendly fare, I didn't see Kubrick's visionary masterpiece until it played a return engagement at Seattle's glorious Cinerama Theater, in 1971, when I was nine years old.
(With its huge, curved Cinerama screen, the Cinerama is still the only theater in Seattle capable of showing "2001" as Kubrick intended. It exclusively hosted the film's original 77-week Seattle run beginning in April 1968, and the fully restored 70-millimeter print of "2001" had its world premiere there, appropriately enough, in 2001, two years after the aging cinema was purchased and beautifully renovated by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's now one of only three theaters in the world -- along with the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford England -- equipped to exhibit three-panel Cinerama, requiring three synchronized projectors for the only seven films created in the three-strip Cinerama process, including 1956's "This Is Cinerama" and 1962's "How the West Was Won." Starting this week [Sept. 30th] and running through mid-October, Seattle's Cinerama is hosting a "70mm Festival" of 15 films, including "2001," that originally premiered there.)
Like no other film before it, "2001" opened my eyes to the power of a single artist's vision and led me to understand the supremacy of a great director. I didn't know it then, but I'd discovered the basis of auteur theory, and while it would be foolish to deny that film is (to echo that award-acceptance cliché) the most collaborative of all art forms, it's no contradiction to embrace the Kubrick quote that greets all visitors to kubrickfilms.com, Warner Bros.' authorized Kubrick website: "One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film." (Disregard "man"; Kubrick would've been the first to include female filmmakers in his statement.)
Marie writes: Why a picture is often worth a thousand words...Production still of Harold Lloyd in "An Eastern Westerner" (1920)
Call it a bloodbath. Not literally, of course, but it sure felt like one.
It was a Friday afternoon in late spring 1993 at The American Film Institute. The Class of 1992, which had pretty much killed itself making short films ("cycle projects") since starting the program in September, was waiting for a list. Dreading it, too. Because everybody'd known all year that of 168 "Fellows," as AFI calls them --- only 40 (or just 8 across 5 disciplines - directing, producing, cinematography, editing, production design) would be invited back, making that coveted Second Year cut for the opportunity to produce a second year film.
A top secret selection committee debated late into the day. Even I, then Special Projects Coordinator and right hand to the Dean of Studies, didn't know who was meeting. There was tension everywhere, clinging like the humidity of a Midwestern summer, as the committee decided, and the Fellows waited.
TORONTO -- I can't identify with a lot of the families I see in movies. They aren't like my family and I doubt if they're like anyone's. The family in "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" isn't like anyone else's family, either, but I never doubted for a moment that it existed. The movie could be advertised with a line like, "Apart from the fact that my dad was an alcoholic novelist and we were raised in the expatriate colony in Paris in the 1960s, I had a typical American childhood."
TELLURIDE, Colo. For its 25th anniversary celebration, which more or less coincides with the first century of film, the Telluride Film Festival is plunging gleefully into the past. Although there's the usual selection of premieres, at least half of the screenings this year are retrospectives: a look at 1928, the last great year of silent film; personal selections from the festival's guest programmers over the years, and a salute to black-and-white cinematography.
“Kramer vs. Kramer,” the drama of a child custody fight, won nine Academy Award nominations on Monday – and so, in a surprise, did "All That Jazz," about a Broadway director’s self-destruction.
Great Movies
