NEW YORK -- The greatest living film director started out as a kid named Marty who I met in 1967 when he was fresh out of New York University. Now he is Martin Scorsese, the director even other directors would…
You walk into the hotel room, and Robert Rodriguez slaps a video into the machine. "Here's the movie that let me know it was all possible," he says. "It's called 'Bedhead.' I shot it starring my brothers and sisters. It…
At the very end of John Turturro's new film "Mac," after all of the credits have rolled, there is a scratchy tape recording from a telephone answering machine. "John? John?" a voice asks, and then the voice complains about the…
Things might be easier, John Sayles sometimes thinks, if he were just starting out--if he had no track record. Then investors might be quicker to roll the dice by putting money into one of his movies. But he's made eight…
She was, a critic once wrote, the last of the silent stars - because her eyes almost made it unnecessary for her to speak. She was a movie superstar for 20 years, but more than that, she was a role…
The first time I saw Harvey Keitel in a movie marks, in a way, the beginning of my career as a film critic. It was November of 1967. I had been a reviewer for seven months, and was looking at…
NEW YORK -- Preaching in the words and style of Malcolm X, standing sometimes in the same places where he stood, Denzel Washington began to understand the man's power. "You get up in front of a hundred or a thousand…
NEW YORK -- A week or two before the world press premiere of his film "Malcolm X," Spike Lee said he would prefer to be interviewed by African-American journalists, when possible. He never made a demand that only blacks talk…
When he made his first movie, back in the mid-'60s, William Friedkin was such a foe of capital punishment, he took it as his subject. His documentary defended Paul Crump, a man on Death Row in Illinois. Friedkin didn't think…
"That was my bedroom window, right up there," Hugh Hefner said. He was standing on the grass in the front yard at 1922 N. New England, with half a dozen friends and relatives who had joined him on a trip…
Great Movies