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Happy Holidays from The B-Side! Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.

Today we discuss the great Jack Lemmon with the great Mitchell Beaupre! Our B-Sides today include Cowboy, The April Fools, Tribute, and Out to Sea. There’s also a lengthy appreciation of Save the Tiger, which won Lemmon his second Oscar.

The three of us try to define how exactly Lemmon so perfectly encapsulated the average, American male for so many decades, while digging into his long career, that includes both filmmaker Billy Wilder and Walter Matthau. We discuss how Cowboy was ahead of its time, how The April Fools skates by on immense, charming chemistry, and how Tribute falters due to a stunted co-lead (sorry Robby Benson!).

There’s a lot in this episode. A true holiday gift! We...

There’s a reason Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is one of the greatest films ever made. Through Norma Desmond, Wilder not only explored the greatest fears and regrets of an artist but also how they cannot survive without narcissism and self-assurance. Norma’s butler, Max Von Mayerling, leaves behind his own existence because he knows Norma wouldn’t live another day if he weren’t there to remind her constantly what a great artist she had been. But you see, no matter how much she tried, she couldn’t make a “comeback.” It’s a bitter awakening for an artist, one they don’t want to hear, and that’s why Mayerling did his best to protect Norma from the real world, and especially from her own self. The story of Pablo Larrain’s Maria is no different.

Netflix’s film takes a look at the life of the...

Ang Lee will receive the Directors Guild of America’s highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award, it announced Tuesday. He will receive the award, which recognizes extraordinary achievements in the art of cinema and motion picture direction, at the 77th Annual DGA Awards on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025.

The visionary director has more than 20 credits to his name and is known for making films with emotional depth across a variety of genres. Lee’s most well-known works include 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” and 2013’s “Life of Pi,” both of which earned him directing Oscars, as well as 1995’s “Sense and Sensibility”; 2000’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which won the Oscar for best foreign language film; 2003’s “Hulk”; 2007’s “Lust, Caution”; and 2016’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” Lee, 70, made his feature directorial debut with the 1991 indie, “Pushing Hands,” and his most recent film was 2019’s sci-fi thriller, “Gemini Man.”

“Ang Lee is truly a master filmmaker.

When Kirk Douglas died in 2020 at the age of 103 (!), he left behind a massive legacy of over 90 films that even the most stalwart cineastes haven't been able to work their way through. Known for his affable smile and intense performances, Douglas is one of Hollywood's most famous leading men, and was the industry's most profitable actor throughout the 1950s. He was also a producing powerhouse, having started his own production company, Bryna Productions, which handled some of his best-known films. Bryna backed the Stanley Kubrick movies "Paths of Glory" and "Spartacus," as well as "The Vikings," "Seconds," "Seven Days in May," and, later on, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Douglas never lost sight of the evolving nature of film, rarely resting on trends or genres. 

In 1962, Bryna also backed a neo-Western called "Lonely Are the Brave." Set in the present day, "Brave" stars Douglas as a Korean War veteran...

Over the past 50-plus years, film historian Joseph McBride has been one of the great chroniclers and analyzers of American directors. His 1972 volume on Orson Welles was one of the first essential works on that great filmmaker, and in the years since, he has published the definitive biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Steven Spielberg — along with a couple more terrific books on Welles and one of the best tomes on screenwriting (“Writing in Pictures”) ever written.

McBride has always been expert at finding the intersection between biography and personal expression, as rigorous in his research as he is insightful in his visual and literary analysis. Now, he has turned his keen eye toward director George Cukor, and the result, “George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director,” is one of McBride’s most innovative works to date and indispensable for anyone interested not...

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Juror #2 is a legal thriller drama film directed by Clint Eastwood from a screenplay by Jonathan Abrams. The 2024 film follows Justin Kemp, an ordinary member who is called upon to serve as a jury member in a murder case. However, when he realizes that the suspect is not really the murderer, he tries to sway the jury without telling anyone the truth without anyone finding out the truth, because if it comes out, it will destroy his life. Juror #2 stars Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch, and Cedric Yarbrough. So, if you loved the thrilling courtroom drama, intense twists, and compelling characters in Juror #2, here are some similar movies you should check out next.

12 Angry Men Credit – United Artists

12 Angry Men is a legal thriller drama film directed by Sidney Lumet...

The Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece “The Godfather” (1972) has been voted the greatest Oscar Best Picture winner ever. The results are from a recent Gold Derby ballot cast by 29 of our film experts and editors, who ranked all 96 movie champs.

Ranking in second place is the Michael Curtiz classic “Casablanca” (1943). Following in third place is the powerful Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List” (1993). Rounding out the top five are Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II” (1974) in fourth place and Billy Wilder‘s “The Apartment” (196o) in fifth place.

At the bottom of the list of the Best Picture winners is “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952) from Cecil B. DeMille. Just above that film in the rankings are “Cimarron” (1931) from Wesley Ruggles, “The Broadway Melody” (1929) from Harry Beaumont, “Crash” (2005) from Paul Haggis, and “Around the World in 80 Days’ (1956) from Michael Anderson.

Our photo gallery above features the full top 10. See the complete rankings of all 96 films below.

The Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece “The Godfather” (1972) has been voted the greatest Oscar Best Picture winner ever. The results are from a recent Gold Derby ballot cast by 29 of our film experts and editors, who ranked all 96 movie champs.

Ranking in second place is the Michael Curtiz classic “Casablanca” (1943). Following in third place is the powerful Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List” (1993). Rounding out the top five are Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II” (1974) in fourth place and Billy Wilder‘s “The Apartment” (196o) in fifth place.

The worst among 96 Best Picture winners is “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952) from Cecil B. DeMille. Just above that film on the bottom of the rankings are “Cimarron” (1931) from Wesley Ruggles, “The Broadway Melody” (1929) from Harry Beaumont, “Crash” (2005) from Paul Haggis, and “Around the World in 80 Days’ (1956) from Michael Anderson.

Our photo gallery below features the full top 10. See the complete rankings of all 96 films below.

The holiday season is here, even if you wish that the Christmas season didn't truly start until after Thanksgiving. Naturally, movie studios have already begun to foist holiday movies upon the world, whether it's Hallmark-style straight-to-streaming fluff like "Hot Frosty" or the extremely big-budget action-adventure "Red One," starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans as an unlikely duo who have to team up to rescue none other than Santa Claus himself from being kidnapped and ruining the holiday altogether. But for those of us who may love films but want something a little different out of the movies that ring in the extended holiday season from Thanksgiving all the way through New Year's Day, try out these 12 movies for size. We won't get into any standard-issue "Is 'Die Hard' a Christmas movie?" debates in this list. Instead, let's just look chronologically at these 12 very different kinds of holiday movies.

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In 1953, Billy Wilder scored a critical and commercial success with his film adaptation of Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski's stage play "Stalag 17" (one of his 14 best films according to /Film). Set in a World War II Pow camp behind Nazi enemy lines, the movie is a rambunctious account of how imprisoned soldiers misbehave and attempt to make their captors' lives miserable. They're also ever on the verge of hatching a new escape plan, though they wind up having a rat in their ranks who complicates their efforts.

Given that World War II was a desperately bloody affair on both the European and Pacific fronts as the Allies fought to save civilization from the clutches of genocidal vermin, you might not think it appropriate for artists to find humor anywhere within the conflict. But the ability to laugh when...

Dustin Pittman with Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman holding up New York After Dark

In the first instalment of our conversation with photographer extraordinaire, Dustin Pittman, and music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, we start out with Gloria Swanson at her apartment (star of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard opposite William Holden), the early days with Danny Fields, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger (at Madison Square Garden), Patricia Field, Sex And The City, Susan Seidelman, Halston and the Halstonettes, Diana Vreeland, Liza Minnelli and US First Lady Betty Ford at Studio 54, the Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren connection to Mariann Marlowe and Frankie Savage’s Ian’s, staying with The Pretenders in London, Lucy Sante and her books, the shop 99, Max’s Kansas City, Ungaro’s, Régine’s, The Odeon, Lutèce or La Grenouille, and Dustin Pittman: New York...

Shot lists, storyboards, models, pre-viz: There are many different ways for a director, Dp, and a camera team to plot what a movie will look like before they start shooting. But cinematographer Kristen Correll and director Megan Park have a delightfully lo-fi, surprisingly useful approach to conceptualizing the world they’re about to create.

Correll told IndieWire that, as part of starting to talk about what the film would need and how they would shoot it, she had Park read aloud the script for “My Old Ass.”

She tries to do that with all her directors, because hearing a script helps Correll locate the exact tone she will need to create with her camera.

“The way I’m reading things in my head, I might think I have it correct, but then, you hear it from the writer/director and you’re like, ‘Ok, I got that wrong,’ or ‘I was spot on,...

Purists will argue that film noir was born in 1941 with the release of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and died in 1958 with Marlene Dietrich traipsing down a long, dark, lonely road at the end of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. And while this period contains the quintessence of what Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank originally characterized as film noir, the genre has always been in a constant state of flux, adapting to the different times and cultures out of which these films emerged.

Noir came into its own alongside the ravages of World War II, with the gangster and detective films of the era drastically transforming into something altogether new as the aesthetics of German Expressionism took hold in America, and in large part due to the influx of German expatriates like Fritz Lang. These already dark, hardboiled films suddenly gained a newfound viciousness and sense of ambiguity,...

Welcome to the dark side of the American dream.

The best film noir movies of all time are visions of a universally known truth not always spoken out loud: It can be really hard to live in America, and if you don’t have money, you have nothing. If Westerns are about “manifest destiny,” film noir is about what comes after. If you do finally get the swimming pool, you might end up face-down dead in it, like poor William Holden’s struggling screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard.” Or you may have entered a miserable marriage to get your gilded palace. In film noir, you might have that gilded palace all to yourself if you’re willing to murder for it. Take a look at “Double Indemnity.” This genre is all about recognizing that some success in America might not be attainable through legal means, and so working outside the law becomes a tantalizing temptation,...

The American Film Institute has announced that veteran director Francis Ford Coppola will receive its 50th Life Achievement Award. The honor has previously gone to filmmakers John Ford, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Mike Nichols, among many others. This comes after Coppola won our poll as the director most deserving of the AFI’s honor, so our readers are bound to be happy.

Kathleen Kennedy, Chair of the AFI Board of Trustees, said in a statement, “Francis Ford Coppola is a peerless artist — one who has created seminal works in the canon of American film, and has also inspired generations of filmmakers who now embody his artistry and his independent spirit. AFI is honored to present him with the 50th AFI Life Achievement Award.”

SEEFrancis Ford Coppola movies: 16 greatest films ranked worst to best

Coppola has divided critics with his latest film — the ambitious, self-funded epic “Megalopolis” — but...

Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it. We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she went to look at an apartment in one of his buildings. “In his head, I could see he was undressing himself and me, and I got out of there very fast,” MacLaine writes in her new book, “The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories From This Marvelous Lifetime.”

MacLaine is even more animated when I ask her what she made of the real estate developer turned Maga leader. “Did you hear me shriek?” she asks. “I think that says it all.” She pauses for dramatic effect before delivering a final, emphatic: “Yuck!”

Even at 90, MacLaine,...

Following the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, and Christopher Hampton’s musical Sunset Boulevard, adapted from Billy Wilder’s 1950 film by the same name, Jamie Lloyd returned with a revival of the theatrical version in October 2024. Starring The Pussycat Dolls’ Nicole Scherzinger as the lead, Lloyd turned the actress’ Broadway debut into a major hit.

Nicole Scherzinger | image: Joel Telling, licensed under Cc By Sa 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Using minimal style and set design, Jamie Lloyd brought back the iconic fashion, replicating the 50s era in Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard. But despite the excitement and ambition surrounding the Broadway show, let’s get straight to the fact that there’s no Hollywood ending. So while buckling up for some heartbreak and star-studded performance, let’s dive into the show and learn what to expect from it.

Lead Actresses Who Previously Appeared in Sunset Boulevard Shows

After music...

In June, Cats: The Jellicle Ball seemed to shake Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats like a bottle of champagne, joyfully letting the old, vexatious material burst out on the stage at the Perelman Arts Center with glittery effervescence. Now, returning to Broadway in a stripped-down West End transfer, the heavy bones of Sunset Boulevard—Webber’s ponderous music, Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s repetitive lyrics, the general plodding approach to Billy Wilder’s 1950 film—drag behind director Jamie Lloyd’s austere vision like a body bag.

Lloyd’s ethos is all about turning the audience toward the text and performance, sharpening the listener’s ear by stripping away all the trappings of traditional productions, including, most of the time, eye contact between actors. That worked splendidly for his Cyrano de Bergerac at Bam two years ago with James McAvoy, as Edmond Rostand’s play is about the power of language itself.

When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage adaptation of the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard premiered in London in 1993 and on Broadway the following year, it was arguably the last gasp of the ‘80s megamusical aesthetic — at least until shows like The Lion King and Wicked came along to tweak the formula. The success of blockbusters like Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon was driven as much by their large-scale spectacle as their musical craftsmanship. Probably more.

Audiences flocked to Cats for its then-revolutionary immersive junkyard staging and the climactic ascent to the heavens of faded feline Grizabella on an outsized tire. In Les Mis, it was the massive turntable and the big reveal of the Paris Uprising barricade. Phantom brought a huge chandelier crashing down on the stage and Miss Saigon flew in a helicopter to evacuate the last Americans at the end of the Vietnam War.

After spending months talking about his long-nurtured dream project, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola embraced the chance to depart from promo tour talking points.

Calling Megaloplis “a great adventure,” Coppola affirmed with a smile in accepting his DGA Honor on Thursday night, “I decided tonight I wouldn’t say anything I’ve been saying.”

After being given the award by his granddaughter, Gia, Coppola said he was delighted to spin yarns about “how the Director’s Guild was founded.” While he didn’t do so in linear fashion, the 85-year-old filmmaker had the audience in the palm of his hand as he recounted giants of cinema and his personal touchstones, paying tribute to masters like Billy Wilder, King Vidor and Samuel Goldwyn.

When he met Jean Renoir, Coppola recalled, the French filmmaker gave him a “beautiful smile” and shook his hand “like he was welcoming me to this profession that he loved so much.

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,...

This cynical, noir-adjacent film about a hotshot reporter who inserts himself into the story still stands the test of time

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The journalism industry today looks strikingly different to the journalism industry of 70-odd years ago, when Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece, Ace in the Hole, rolled into town. But if you think its messages might be outdated, au contraire: like Sidney Lumet’s Network (another vivisectional and scathingly cynical satire of media spectacle), the film remains strikingly relevant and scorchingly hot to the touch, told with cyclonic force and style.

A sensationally smug Kurt Douglas stars as Chuck Tatum, a hotshot city reporter who arrives in a small town hoping to land a story that’ll catapult him back to the big time. He marches into the news desk of a humble rag in Albuquerque, dripping bravado, bragging to the publisher about how he’s been fired from 11 newspapers.

Clint Eastwood's Hollywood career officially began in 1955 when he made a brief, uncredited appearance as a lab technician in Jack Arnold's "Revenge of the Creature." Nine years later, unhappy as a midlevel television star on the CBS Western series "Rawhide," he jetted off to Spain to make a different kind of Western with a very different kind of director named Sergio Leone. The result, "A Fistful of Dollars," changed the face of the genre forever, and set Eastwood down the path to becoming a filmmaker in his own right.

Eastwood's directing career got off to a curiously assured start with the wildly suspenseful thriller "Play Misty for Me," in which the tough, swaggering star of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Dirty Harry" played a victimized Bay Area disc jockey. No one expected this from Eastwood, and it's fair to say no one saw this hugely...

Steven Spielberg has always had an eye for the extraordinary. Normalcy surrounding the everyday facets of life was not intriguing enough for the director, even as a bright-eyed 20-something-year-old filmmaker. For him, only stories that defied imagination and completely transported the audience to a land of impossibilities interested him enough to make it into a movie.

The Sugarland Express [Credit: Universal Pictures]

From Spielberg’s bottomless curiosity was born films like Jaws, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jurassic Park. But it was also his need to unearth the mysteries of mankind that led Spielberg to tell stories based on true experiences, namely Schindler’s List, Catch Me If You Can, Empire of the Sun, Band of Brothers, and most importantly, The Sugarland Express – his feature directorial debut.

Steven Spielberg‘s Grand Hollywood Debut The Sugarland Express [Credit: Universal Pictures]

Even as a new kid on the block, Steven Spielberg showed enough chutzpah,...

Tomas Arana’s name might not be the first that comes to mind when thinking about great cinema. He’s not a “star” in the most commercial sense of the word.

To be sure, Arana has appeared in what we commonly refer to as blockbusters — Gladiator, The Bourne Supremacy or The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston — but it would be wrong to limit his career to those successes. Arana was Lazarus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the Detective Breuning in L.A. Confidential, Laginov in The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery, Walter in Sergio Corbucci’s Neapolitan Mystery, Damon in Michele Soavi’s The Sect and so much more. A veteran of experimental theater companies like La Mamma, Tomas Arana has done it all, and with a particular passion for Italy.

Arana became a good friend of Andy Warhol in the 1970s. The two first...

Spanish actress and director Paz Vega (Spanglish, Sex and Lucia, Rambo: Last Blood, The Oa, Netflix heist drama Kaleidoscope), who wrote and stepped behind the camera for her directorial debut Rita, which world premiered during the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival this summer, enjoys writing and directing, adding another layer to her creative endeavors. And she thinks more actors should feel empowered to direct.

She made the comments during a Tuesday keynote interview at the Iberseries & Platino Industria conference and market in Madrid that was titled “Changing Roles: Paz Vega and Her Transition From the Art of Acting to the Art of Directing.” She recently said in a THR interview that Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, and Federico Fellini were among her role models.

Vega wrote, directed and executive produced Rita and also plays a small part in it. “In some way, I had the idea to become...

Although Nicole Kidman recently accepted the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in recognition of her four-decade acting career, there is no indication that her life’s work is anywhere near finished. Indeed, according to Gold Derby’s racetrack odds, the 56-year-old is well on her way to picking up her sixth Oscar nomination for her lead performance in the critically acclaimed “Babygirl,” which would make her the 13th AFI honoree to subsequently earn film academy recognition in a competitive category.

The fact that Kidman’s life achievement award was presented by her pal and costar, Meryl Streep, is quite fitting given that she’s the only woman to go from being an AFI recipient to an Oscar contender. Since receiving the AFI honor in 2004, she has racked up a whopping eight bids, including a successful one for “The Iron Lady” (2012). A previous champ for “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1980) and...

Born in 1920, Walter Matthau was a celebrated performer on both the stage and screen, known for his gruff, rumpled persona. Let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Matthau turned to acting after serving in the United States Army Air Force during WWII. He became a frequent presence on the small screen with appearances in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Goodyear Playhouse,” and “The Du Pont Show of the Week” (which brought him an Emmy bid in 1963), to name a few. During this period he also appeared in several films, few of them comedies, including “A Face in the Crowd” (1957) and “Fail Safe” (1964).

At the same time, he gained increasing respect as a stage actor with Tony Award-winning performances in “A Shot in the Dark” (Featured Actor in a Play in 1962) and “The Odd Couple” (Actor in a Play in 1965). It was in the latter role of Oscar Madison,...

Leonard Asper’s Anthem Sports and Entertainment has acquired Hollywood Suite, an indie Canadian broadcaster of four HD movie channels.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but, pending regulatory approvals, Anthem will pick up the commercial-free movie channels with mostly Hollywood titles themed from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and distributed into 10 million homes across Canada.

Classic Hollywood movies on the Hollywood Suite menu include Tom Cruise’s Cocktail, The Abyss, the Tom Hanks comedy Turner & Hooch and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe.

Led by longtime Canwest TV head Asper, Anthem Sports & Entertainment is a holding company that owns Gravitas Ventures, Axs TV, HDNet Movies, Impact Wrestling, Fight Network, Tna Wrestling and GameTV, among other assets.

Asper aims to combine indie distributor Gravitas Ventures, acquired in 2021, and HDnet movies, home to blockbuster epics and vintage films, with Hollywood Suite as a...

To box the work of Sean Baker into a neat genre classification would be to miss what is so authentic and spontaneous about his unequivocally human and heartfelt storytelling. Of the same token, in elevating the narratives that exist on the margins of society to new, bold, cinematic heights, he allows many who’ve never been granted any importance to feel the only kind of value that being centered in a movie can offer. In this way, he’s using the various forms of cinema to expand the kind of stories the world is exposed to and with his latest, the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” does so in a way that draws on the magic of a fantasy romance, as well as the terror of a gangster thriller.

“I love tonal jumps. I love roller coasters,” Baker said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It is scary, though. It...

Nicole Scherzinger has left The Masked Singer. She wasn’t on the show last season because of a play she was starring in. She also didn’t return this season and has announced a new reality competition show she will appear on. However, her biggest news is her first role in a Broadway musical.

In an interview promoting the musical, Nicole opened up about her feelings that her industry had “discarded” her.

Nicole Scherzinger Says Her Industry Discarded Her

Nicole Scherzinger is preparing for a new role in a Broadway musical. This is her first chance on Broadway, and she seems excited about the possibility. She has been interviewing for the role, and in a recent discussion, she said she relates to the role because her industry “discarded” her.

Nicole Scherzinger | YouTube

That role is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. This is the same role for which she left The...

Keenan Ivory Wayans' 2004 comedy "White Chicks" was an oddity when it was released, and it's just as much an oddity now. The plot revolves around a pair of Black, male FBI agents who have to, for contrived reasons, disguise themselves as young, wealthy white women, and the comedy stems entirely from racial and gender juxtapositions the men experience. While there may have been an opportunity to write a penetrating criticism of race and gender, the filmmakers took no opportunities to be even the slightest bit profound. That, at any rate, seemed to be the critical consensus on "White Chicks," which was widely lambasted and was even declared by many to be one of the worst films of its year. 

And yet, and yet ... it keeps on drawing people in. As of this writing, "White Chicks" is the highest-rating comedy film on Netflix in the United States. Either the film has...

September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.

Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...

Jay Kanter, agent to superstar Hollywood clients including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly, died Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 97.

His son, Adam Kanter of Independent Artist Group, remembered his father as someone who conducted his entire career with “integrity and kindness.”

Kanter also inspired Jack Lemmon’s character in Billy Wilder’s classic comedy “The Apartment.”

Jay Kanter served in the U.S. Navy during WWII and started out working at McA, with mentoring help from Lew Wasserman. At just 22 years old, he was sent to pick up Brando at the train station and they became friends, with Brando becoming his longtime client.

He went on to represent stars including Warren Beatty, Gene Kelly and Ronald Reagan.

Kanter relocated to London when McA bought Universal, where he oversaw production for the studio in Europe. When the studio shut down European operations, he founded a production...

Jay Kanter, the high-powered Hollywood agent who represented Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe and served as the inspiration for Jack Lemmon’s character in the classic Billy Wilder film The Apartment, died Tuesday. He was 97.

Kanter died at his home in Beverly Hills, a spokesperson for the Independent Artist Group announced. His son Adam Kanter is a partner at Iag.

A favorite of mighty Music Corporation of America mogul Lew Wasserman, Kanter also spent seven years in England in the 1960s greenlighting European movies for Universal, produced films including the Elizabeth Taylor-starring X, Y and Zee (1972) and had a long business relationship with Alan Ladd Jr. at Fox and MGM.

When Brando was slumming around Paris after breaking out on Broadway in Streetcar Named Desire in the late 1940s, Kanter‚ then an McA junior agent, received a call from producer Stanley Kramer saying he wanted to hire...

Lorcan Finnegan’s “The Surfer,” screening at Taormina Film Festival following its premiere at Cannes, promises to be one of the year’s cult films. A bizarro mix of Kafka and Ozploitation, the film boasts a late phase Cage performance and a psycho-comedy that appears all the darker for its sunbaked setting. The Irish director of “Vivarium” and “Nocebo” spoke with Variety as the Mediterranean glittered tantalizingly in the distance.

Were you familiar with surfing culture before making the film?

I wouldn’t call myself a surfer, as I’m more of a skateboarder, and so I didn’t really know much about that culture. And this whole toxic masculinity stuff never really appealed to me, but I didn’t want to reject something, just because I didn’t know about it. It’s an interesting challenge.

Why did you choose Australia as the setting?

It was going to be California,...

Exclusive: Mandy Gonzalez, star of In The Heights, Hamilton and Aida, will play the role of Norma Desmond at select performances of Broadway’s upcoming Sunset Blvd., taking one performance a week with star Nicole Scherzinger taking all others.

Gonzalez will play her first performance on Tuesday, October 22. The casting was announced today by producers of the Jamie Lloyd-directed revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which begins previews at the St. James Theatre on Saturday, September 28 ahead of a Sunday, October 20 opening night.

Gonzalez said in a statement, “In my 25 years playing leading ladies on Broadway, I’ve never been more excited for a show. The role of Norma Desmond is iconic, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is masterful, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score is sumptuous. To reinterpret a timeless story with such raw sophistication, especially as the first Latina to take this role on Broadway, is a dream come true.

Song and dance man or gangster? Few stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era could claim they were equally well known for two such diverse genres. Yet, the legendary James Cagney worked hard to be able to make such a claim.

He was born on July 17, 1899, in New York City. His family was poor, and Cagney was sickly as a child. While growing up in a rough neighborhood, he learned a variety of skills, including tap dancing, street fighting, baseball and boxing. When he was 19, his father died, and he took odd jobs to help support his mother and siblings. On a whim, he auditioned for a role of a chorus girl in a local production. Although he had never had professional training, he landed the role and learned the dances from watching the other performers – and it never bothered him to dress as a girl and perform. Despite his mother...

America is in crisis. It’s the late 1960s, and President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade has yet to be fulfilled. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA, for short — has experienced a major setback when a launch rehearsal test for the Apollo 1 goes awry and all three crew members perish. The Russkies appear to have the lead in the Space Race, the public interest in conquering the stars is waning, and the organization’s funding is on the chopping block.

Billy Wilder was a prolific personality whose versatile content has captivated Hollywood’s hearts. Before making his entry into the industry, he worked as a screenwriter in Europe. His filmmaking and writing skills beautifully captured his sophisticated narrative that is prominently seen in projects like Double Indemnity and Casino Royale.

Casino Royale (1967) | Columbia Pictures

Wilder believed in the rapid advancement of technology as he predicted Hollywood’s downfall, which appears to be turning true.

Billy Wilder’s 1986 AFI Speech Seemingly Foretold Hollywood’s Decline

With a career spanning over five decades, Billy Wilder impressed Hollywood with his versatile filmmaking skills. He hugely contributed to Classic Hollywood cinema with his writing and directing skills, whose illustrious career included projects like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment.

Back in 1986, the late director was bestowed with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award. During the acceptance speech, he expressed...

Chemistry has always been Hollywood’s secret sauce, and, for rom-coms at least, the high-water mark remains the pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Most cineastes can name their first collaboration (Pillow Talk in 1959), but the others — Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) — don’t come to mind so quickly. As a brand, though, these two have more than endured in pop culture, and writers and directors have had to work harder and harder to find a way to recapture that magic, since we now know very well that it requires a great deal more than just putting a couple of good-looking famous people together.

Peyton Reed came close in 2003’s with his stylish, early-’60s period pastiche Down with Love, casting Renee Zellweger alongside Ewan McGregor, and Olivia Wilde certainly did not with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, lumbering Florence Pugh with Harry Styles in a risible ’50s-themed sci-fi.

For this week’s column, I spoke to Dawn Baillie, who is responsible for, or who has collaborated on, some of the most iconic American movie posters of the last four decades, from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to Barbie (2023). Her work is currently the focus of an extraordinary ongoing exhibition at Poster House in New York City.I asked her if she would humor me by selecting her top ten movie posters of all time, now a tradition for this column. She most graciously accepted the challenge. Baillie’s top ten and comments are listed below in descending order. She explained that these are all posters she “refers to often,” and presents her selection with the caveat that she could easily list 50 more. Dawn Baillie’S Top Ten Favorite Movie POSTERS1. USA one-sheet by Erik Nitsche for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA, 1950)When we talk about encapsulating...

Robert Towne, the screenwriter as superstar whose Oscar-winning work on the 1974 classic Chinatown is widely recognized as the gold standard for movie scripts, has died. He was 89.

Towne died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, publicist Carri McClure announced.

He also received Academy Award nominations for The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975) in the years surrounding his most famous work.

His takes on Los Angeles were etched with melancholy and painted the city as one of beauty and sadness. In Chinatown and Shampoo, gumshoe J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) and Beverly Hills hairdresser George Roundy (Warren Beatty) end up alone. (Towne collaborated often with those actors.)

This squinty vantage on Southern California, as a temptress who dashes hopes, also was evident in his script for Tequila Sunrise (1988), which starred Mel Gibson as a retired drug dealer, Kurt Russell as a cop and Michelle Pfeiffer as the femme fatale.

Towne also...

Susan Seidelman with Anne-Katrin Titze and music producer/99 Records founder Ed Bahlman: “Music has always been important in my movies.”

In the first instalment with Susan Seidelman on her memoir, Desperately Seeking Something (St. Martin’s Press), and her career as a filmmaker, we start out discussing the jacket choices for Susan Berman, Madonna, Ann Magnuson (Frankie in Making Mr. Right with John Malkovich), and Emily Lloyd.

Susan Berman as Wren in Smithereens and Madonna as Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan

We move on to the influence of Jacques Rivette’s Celine And Julie Go Boating, her love of Billy Wilder films, being named after...

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance focuses on a woman with a familiar problem. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a former actress and contemporary fitness guru on the wrong side of 40 for the entertainment industry, who, as represented here by Harvey (Dennis Quaid), wants to replace her with the next hot young thing. Working in an ultra-blunt style, Fargeat boils Elizabeth’s world down to a few signifiers, among them: Elizabeth’s retro fitness show stands in for fleeting fame; Harvey, one of the broadest caricatures that cinema has offered, is the male chauvinist underbelly of Hollywood, befitting his namesake; and a billboard outside of Elizabeth’s sprawling apartment physicalizes her shifting place in the public.

One of Fargeat’s best symbols, worthy of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, is the opening close-up of Sparkle’s Hollywood star as it’s installed and becomes just another bit of set dressing. A...

Exclusive: Tom Francis, the Olivier Award-winning actor who will reprise his West End portrayal of Joe Gillis in Jamie Lloyd’s West End production of Sunset Boulevard when the revival moves to Broadway this fall, has signed with Linden Entertainment.

Francis stars opposite Nicole Scherzinger, who plays Norma Desmond in the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Don Black-Christopher Hampton musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s 1950 film classic.

In addition to Scherzinger and Francis, West End cast members making the move to Broadway’s St. James Theatre include Grace Hodgett-Young (playing Betty Schaefer) and David Thaxton (Max Von Mayerling). Previews begin Sept. 28, with an opening night of Oct. 20.

Francis, who won the Best Leading Actor/Musical Olivier for his Sunset performance, can be seen on screen when he returns to Netflix’s You, currently filming its fifth and final season. His prior stage roles include &Juliet (Shaftesbury Theatre); What’s New Pussycat...

Billy Wilder was the six-time Oscar winner who left behind a series of classically quotable features from Hollywood’s Golden Age, crafting sharp witted and darkly cynical stories that blended comedy and pathos in equal measure. Let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Wilder was born to a family of Austrian Jews in 1906. After working as a journalist, he developed an interest in filmmaking and collaborated on the silent feature “People on Sunday” (1929) with fellow rookies Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer. With the rise of Adolph Hitler, Wilder fled to Paris, where he co-directed the feature “Mauvaise Graine” (1934). Tragically, his mother, stepfather and grandmother all died in the Holocaust.

After moving to Hollywood, Wilder enjoyed a successful career as a screenwriter, earning Oscar nominations for penning 1939’s “Ninotchka” and 1941’s “Hold Back the Dawn” and “Ball of Fire.” He...

Even a quarter-century later, box office victory still tastes sweet for Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal.

Reminiscing about their 1999 collaboration, Analyze This, during a Tribeca Festival / De Niro Con screening Friday, the pair swapped memories of sitting at De Niro’s former restaurant, Ago, on the Friday night the film opened..

Analyze This faced younger-skewing competition in Cruel Intentions, the Sarah Michelle Gellar/Reese Witherspoon/Ryan Philippe thriller, but came out decisively ahead. “The box office was coming in, and it was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. We’re crushing them!'” Crystal remembered. “It was one of the great nights of my life, to share this with this man, that we made this movie together and loved working...

Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound, their low-budget neo-noir debut feature from 1996, is both an outlier in a filmography subsequently defined by high-concept science fiction and an ur-text for the filmmakers’ overriding interest in the power of erotic and romantic love to liberate people.

The film concerns a plot by Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the moll of a mafia money launderer named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), to run out on her man with enough of his filthy lucre to set herself up for life. To do so, she woos Corky (Gina Gershon), her apartment complex’s handywoman and an ex-con, to act as her accomplice. But rather than simply use the woman as a patsy, Violet betrays more and more genuine interest in Corky, and the two grow ever closer as Caesar starts to piece together their scheme and things go increasingly awry.

There are two ways in which the Wachowskis immediately...

Have you ever wondered what it really means to put your heart and soul into a film? Steven Spielberg’s profound connection to Schindler’s List is compelling evidence of this very question, marking it as his most personal creation. The film, whose challenging production gradually turned into a passion project for the director, has since emerged as one of the most defining works that best explained the evil of the Holocaust.

Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List (1993) | Universal Pictures

Nonetheless, the journey to bring this heart-rending masterpiece to life was fraught with solemn notes of heartbreak, particularly for another acclaimed director. That being said, Billy Wilder, recipient of seven Academy Awards, envisioned Schindler’s List as a final ode to the loss of his own family during the Holocaust.

Spielberg once shared the tender yet devastating interaction between him and Wilder.

Exploring the What-Ifs: Billy Wilder & the Almost-Directed Schindler...