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Richard Gere began his professional film career in 1975, appearing in the crime thriller "Report to the Commissioner." In 1976 and 1977, he secured notable supporting roles in "Baby Blue Marine" and "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," before securing his first leading role in 1978's "Bloodbrothers," a coming-of-age drama about two Italian-American brothers living in the Bronx. That same year, Gere appeared in Terrence Malick's dreamy "Days of Heaven," more or less securing him as a permanent Hollywood fixture. Gere has been working steadily ever since, using his affable on-camera charm and approachable good looks to remain one of the industry's most reliable movie stars. His high-profile marriage to model Cindy Crawford in 1991 only added to the actor's status as a sex symbol.

Gere often takes roles that require more razzle-dazzle than deep acting range, but Gere has been nominated for Golden Globes and Emmys, and won a SAG Award, so he's no slouch as a thespian.

Screwball comedy movies, rare screenings of epic box office disaster: Library of Congress’ Packard Theater in April 2014 (photo: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in ‘The Awful Truth’) In April 2014, the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper, Virginia, will celebrate Hollywood screwball comedy movies, from the Marx Brothers’ antics to Peter Bogdanovich’s early ’70s homage What’s Up, Doc?, a box office blockbuster starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Additionally, the Packard Theater will present a couple of rarities, including an epoch-making box office disaster that led to the demise of a major studio. Among Packard’s April 2014 screwball comedies are the following: Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (Saturday, April 5) — actually more zany, wacky, and totally insane than merely "screwball" — in which Groucho Marx stars as the recently (un)elected dictator of Freedonia, abetted by siblings Harpo Marx and Chico Marx, in addition to Groucho’s perennial foil,...

Oscar-winning Danish director of Babette's Feast

In April 1988, a week before his 70th birthday, the film director Gabriel Axel, who has died aged 95, walked up on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to receive the best foreign language film Oscar for Babette's Feast (1987), the first Danish movie to achieve that honour. In a mixture of Danish and French, the slim, grey-bearded, bespectacled Axel quoted a line from the character of the General in the film: "Because of this evening, I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible."

It was the pinnacle of Axel's long career and marked the beginning of a resurgence of Danish cinema. (Another Danish film, Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror, won the foreign language Oscar the following year.) Despite several fine films, there was previously little in Axel's oeuvre to predict the perfection of Babette's Feast.

The title Babette's Feast doesn't immediately jump out at me as a film I need to see immediately, but to know this Danish film bested Au Revoir Les Enfants (read my Blu-ray review here) at the 1988 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film certainly causes me to change my mind. While I wouldn't say director Gabriel Axel's film is better than Malle's Enfants, which is a personal all-timer of mine, but it is a multi-layered story with drama in corners you can't expect heading in. Adapted from the 1950 short story of the same name (read it here) by Karen Blixen (writing as Isak Denisen who also wrote the story that inspired Out of Africa), the film takes place in a small village in 19th century Denmark, a town Denisen described as a "child's toy-town of little wooden pieces". The story centers on two sisters who grew up here under the watchful eye of their father,...

Babette’s Feast won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987 and was the first Danish production to ever take the prestigious award. It started a hot streak of sorts, when the following year Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror pretty much ran the table, claiming the Oscar, the Palme d’Or and the Golden Globe, further confirming to the world that the Danish film industry had arrived. While the Danes would not win another Oscar until 2010, for Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, this tiny nation of just under six million souls has become a capital of cinematic creativity, boasting such talented filmmakers as Lars van Trier, Per Fly, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nicolas Winding Refn, to name a few. If the grand moralist dirges of Carl Th. Dreyer define Danish cinema of the WWII generation, then Babette’s Feast must be considered the nation’s inspirational...

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey | Smashed | Neil Young Journeys | Chasing Ice | Love Crime | Dead Europe | UFO | False Trail | Code Name: Geronimo | Tinkerbell And The Secret Of The Wings | Babette's Feast | Baraka | What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (12A)

(Peter Jackson, 2012, Us) Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Andy Serkis. 169 mins

So the three-movie idea is more likely down to financial demands than creative ones, and the now-notorious higher frame rate reduces cinematic spectacle to pin-sharp TV movie, but this is terrifically wrought escapism. Freeman is the perfect lead, too. But what could have, should have been a masterpiece ends up a fantasy epic with too much epic and not enough fantasy.

Smashed (15)

(James Ponsoldt, 2012, Us) Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul. 81 mins

Winstead shows impressive range as a young alcoholic teacher trying to get back on track. The familiar subject feels fresh applied to a new demographic.

Gabriel Axel's film about a giant repast bequeathed on a 19th-century Danish religious community still charms 25 years on

The complacent and nauseating word "foodie" is often used in connection with Gabriel Axel's 1987 film, now rereleased in cinemas. But if you're salivating over the food, you're missing the point. The film is based on a short story by Danish author Karen Blixen, whose memoirof Out of Africa was famously adapted for the cinema in 1985. In 19th-century Denmark, spinster sisters Filippa (Bodil Kjer) and Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) are honouring the memory of their late father, a stern preacher, by doing good works and hosting prayer groups, having long since rejected the pleasures of love, marriage and children. Into these old women's lives comes a mysterious Frenchwoman, Babette (Stéphane Audran), an acquaintance of a former dejected suitor, a refugee from the French civil war.

Babette agrees to work as their cook and housekeeper; and,...