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Billy Crystal is thinking back on his formative years in Martin Scorsese’s classroom.

On the Dec. 15 episode of the “Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist” podcast, Crystal talked about his time being taught by Scorsese at New York University.

“He was a graduate student at the time, just doing his first movie, called ‘Who’s That Knocking at My Door.’ And it was 1968, 1969, 1970,” Crystal remarked on the podcast.

Crystal went on to describe Scorsese’s looks: “[He] had a big beard and granny glasses and hair down to his shoulders. He looked like everybody. He’d stand behind you while you were editing your film and he would be very scary, because he would look and he was so intense and he would speak very quickly — even then — he spoke quicker then because he was, you know, 50 years younger.”

Scorsese would reference Howard Hawks always using wide shots in his films as...

Academy Award-winning actor Humphrey Bogart’s life might have turned out a whole lot different had he taken to heart criticism his parents showered on him through his entire early life, calling him an “inadequate” actor and scholar, and an outright “failure.” But a distinctive, raspy voice, the character in his face that he once said had “taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there,” and that unparalleled talent for playing an emotionally complex tough guy — all fueled by an incredible drive — made him a Hollywood legend. And, as told in the new documentary streaming today, “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” five women in his life defined the trajectory of his career.

“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is chock full of never-before-seen photos and is told using Bogart’s own words from letters, diaries and historical interviews as the narrative backbone. But what makes the...

Hollywood’s pre-Code era saw filmmakers venturing out on the frontiers of free expression, testing the limits of humor and taste in their depictions of social and sexual mores with relatively little organized interference. While the Hays Code wasn’t strictly enforced until 1934, there were instances before then when Will Hays’s power, along with the loudly professed moral outrage of various individual state censorship boards, was used to directly alter the content of motion pictures, including Howard Hawks’s influential gangster film Scarface.

After being greeted with initial handwringing over its supposed glorification of crime and violence, producer Howard Hughes caved to demands from the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America to add a declamatory prologue calling on the federal government to deal with organized grime, reshoot a different ending that was more harshly judgmental of its protagonist, and tack on an unnecessary subtitle, The Shame of a Nation,...

Hatari! (4Kuhd) (4K Uhd) Click Here To Buy Hatari! Available December 10th Legendary director Howard Hawks re-teams with “The Duke” John Wayne, who stars as the leader of a group of highly skilled professional game hunters in Africa. Only they don’t use bullets—they capture the ferocious big game with strong ropes and cameras for zoos and circus attractions. It is an exciting business that pits man against beast. “Hatari” is Swahili for “danger”—and also the word for action, adventure, romance and broad comedy in this two-fisted Hawks effort that provides rousing entertainment ... Read more...

It hardly needs repeating, but director John Carpenter is known for making multiple horror classics, including "Halloween," "The Fog," "Christine," "The Thing," "Prince of Darkness," "In the Mouth of Madness" and "Vampires." Although Carpenter doesn't have a notable, recognizable style or motif in his filmography (apart from recurring actors) he does seem to possess a subtle, natural mastery of filmmaking craft that makes all his films, even the bad ones, imminently watchable.

Carpenter loves horror, of course, but oddly, he's not a horror guy at heart. He possesses an old-world workman's attitude when it comes to filmmaking, just sort of sussing out, by instinct, how to shoot a scene, regardless of genre. Carpenter has given multiple interviews where he's talked about monster movies and sci-fi flicks that inspired him, but moreso, Carpenter talks about the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, two American filmmakers best known for their high-profile Westerns.

For over fifty years, Francis Ford Coppola has been a towering, and often controversial, figure in American Cinema. His filmography is one of the most legendary of all time and includes some of the greatest movies ever made like The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), and more. It also includes wild swings—One from the Heart (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—which sometimes paid off, but sometimes did not. This year, his forty-year-in-the-making passion project Megalopolis finally hit screens for the general public after a festival run that provoked a mixed critical response to say the least. It is a gigantic movie made on a huge budget with vast, and sometimes impenetrable, ideas. His very first film, however, was a much more modest project, made on a minuscule budget, and…it was a horror movie.

Dementia 13 (1963) is very much a...

Prime Video’s “Killer Heat” is a new mystery thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Nick Bali, a private investigator. It shows Nick traveling to Greece to investigate the shocking death of a wealthy man named Leo Vardakis. Nick is hired by Penelope, Leo’s identical twin brother’s wife. The film takes place entirely on a scenic island and relies on the moodiness of the setting as it unravels new bits of information. It seems heavily inspired by the Hollywood noir classics that redefined the genre conventions decades ago. Fans of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and movies like “Killer Heat,” featuring slow-burn mysteries, can check out this thriller on Prime Video.

This 2024 film is based on Jo Nesbø’s short story – “The Jealousy Man.” The film is directed by Philippe Lacôte, known for directing “Night of the Kings,” a critically acclaimed fantasy drama. Besides Gordon-Levit, the film also stars Shailene Woodley and...

Under the best of conditions, Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" was never going to be an easy sell to a studio, nor to moviegoers. Written in 1971, seven years before the writer-director's "The Deer Hunter" won five Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), the film was to be an epic account of the Johnson County, Wyoming range wars waged by cattlemens' associations versus alleged rustlers (many of whom were simply small farmers and ranchers). This might all sound terribly exciting, fraught with action even, but even on a commercial success like "The Deer Hunter," Cimino evinced an unconventional method of storytelling. He liked to soak the audience in the distinct lives of his characters so that the small and/or massive tragedies of their lives -- and just about everyone meets a tragic terminus in Cimino's prime work -- resonate with a sense of the personal. He wants us to know these people.

[The following story contains spoilers from Anora.]

It’s the scene of the movie and perhaps of the season: Halfway through his sex-worker dramedy Anora, director Sean Baker somehow puts on the board a 28-minute real-time scene in which a pair of heavies out of an ’80s action-comedy seek to rein in Mikey Madison’s tough-but-vulnerable escort as she fights back.

What starts as something broad and comedic soon morphs into a much more disturbing tableau — a piece of violent misogyny that implicates a culture of toxic masculinity, class elitism and even the audience itself. Soon it will be hard to go anywhere in film circles without hearing about it.

“I wanted to do a set piece centered on a real-time home invasion and it fleshed out from there,” Baker told the audience at the Palme d’Or winner‘s 2024 New York Film Festival premiere Saturday night, explaining how the ambitious and shape-shifting sequence came to be.

Like most of the cinema’s recurring images and sensations, there’s no precise “first movie” about the maladjusted, dissatisfied, wounded soul, but the floodgates about this most serious of fellows seemed to open just after World War II. The late 1940s and early ’50s witnessed the infiltration of the New York theater, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kramer, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Nicholas Ray, and so on—directors, scribes, or actors whose meal tickets more often than not depended on their ability to write the counter-mythology to V-Day utopia. They asked, amid the fanfare and the ticker-tape parades, “Is this all there is?”

Deities such as Brando and James Dean were responsible for taking that particular ship into orbit, but John Garfield was a pioneer of sorts, as early as 1938’s Four Daughters, where his appearance in such a genteel trifle was no less jarring than a Martian invasion.

“Anybody got a match?” When 19-year-old Lauren Bacall cast a smoldering glance toward Humphrey Bogart in the 1944 film noir “To Have and Have Not,” she stuck the landing of her Hollywood debut with a precision few stars have achieved before or since. Chin down, eyes lifted, she eclipsed one of the most seasoned leading men in the industry. Even before she uttered one of cinema’s greatest innuendos — “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and…blow” — she had walked away with the film. Critics raved, hailing her as the next Marlene Dietrich and claiming she had better chemistry with Bogart than Ingrid Bergman had in “Casablanca.”

Director Howard Hawks had plucked the Brooklyn-born teenager from obscurity after seeing her in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. After changing her name from Betty to Lauren and instructing her to keep her voice in its naturally low register,...

You used to hear the refrain from horror film fanatics with a lot more frequency – the original was so much scarier.

And while this is still true to some degree (the films of John Carpenter have been remade with an oddly uniform lousiness), there are still plenty of horror films that have been remade well. Sometimes the remakes are just as good as the original. In rare cases, it even surpasses the original.

Here is our definitive list of the very best horror remakes ever.

(United Artists) “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978)

Don Siegel’s 1956 classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is based on Jack Finney’s story “The Body Snatchers,” which was serialized in Collier’s in 1954 and published as a novel shortly after, has been remade several times over the years. But the very best iteration is still the 1978 version, the first since Siegel’s, from director Philip Kaufman and writer W.D. Richter.

This year’s Telluride Film Festival was not short on mononyms. There was Martha, as in Stewart, the subject of R.J. Cutler’s excellent Netflix documentary “Martha.” There were Angelina, Pablo, and Maria, as in, respectively, Jolie, Larrain, and Callas, the subject of the Netflix biographical drama “Maria.” There was Trump, as in the former president, who is played to perfection by Sebastian Stan in “The Apprentice.” And there was Bing, the Great Dane who won over audiences in the tearjerker “The Friend.”

But with due respect given to the acclaimed names above, none made a bigger impact on the festival than “Anora.” Sean Baker’s bold, hilarious, exhilarating new film had its North American debut in Colorado over Labor Day weekend, and the Palme d’Or winner played to packed houses and was often mentioned as a standout among attendees. During its screening on Sunday morning at the Werner Herzog Theater,...

Diane Lane whips out her copy of the same Slim Keith book I’ve loved for years: “Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life.” It details her love affair and marriage to Hollywood auteur Howard Hawks, how she befriended Ernest Hemingway when Hawks was wrangling the rights to “To Have and Have Not,” and her discovery of Harper’s Bazaar covergirl Lauren Bacall to play “Slim” in the movie, a character based on Keith.

An entire chapter is devoted to her deep and loving friendship, during and after her marriage to uber-agent Leland Hayward, with gay novelist Truman Capote, who eventually betrayed her with his infamous Esquire article, “La Cote Basque 1965.” At that moment, as dramatized in the FX series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” Keith (Lane) and her best pal, New York socialite Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), angrily turned their backs on Capote (Tom Hollander), who had...

Blu-ray collectors, rejoice. The Criterion Collection unveiled its November 2024 slate of releases this week, and the month looks like an embarrassment of riches for cinephiles looking to expand their physical media collections. The boutique distributor will be rolling out six new titles, several of which have long been coveted by Criterion fans: “Funny Girl,” “Paper Moon,” “Demon Pond,” and “Scarface,” along with new 4K editions of “Godzilla” and “Seven Samurai.”

William Wyler’s 1968 film adaptation of the musical “Funny Girl” marked Barbara Streisand’s big screen debut, turning the actress into one of Hollywood’s biggest stars overnight and earning her an Oscar for Best Actress on her first nomination. The film quickly became a cultural phenomenon and has remained one of the most popular (and quoted) movie musicals of all time.

Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” is widely regarded as one of the greatest showcases for a child actor in film history.

Marking perhaps their biggest 4K month yet, the Criterion Collection’s November lineup runs between some of the company’s oldest titles, flagship newer(ish) releases, and a contemporary auteur’s career peak. The inevitable (but welcome!) follow-up to Janus’ theatrical rerelease is a big upgrade for Seven Samurai, Criterion’s second-ever DVD release––hopefully this portends Grand Illusion someday soon. Likewise, Godzilla grows from format to format as if an irradiated lizard.

Two movies somehow not in the Criterion Collection despite every neuron telling me otherwise, Howard Hawks’ Scarface gets 2,160 pixels, nearly equal to the number of bullets sprayed from Tony Camonte’s Tommy gun; and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon. Onto movies in color: William Wyler’s Funny Girl should only look dazzling in such resolution, while The Shape of Water means you now need two hands to count the number of Guillermo del Toro films given Criterion’s anointment.

Earlier this year, we heard that Ian Nathan, author of Alien Vault, Terminator Vault, Stephen King at the Movies, The Legend of Mad Max, and books about filmmakers James Cameron, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, the Coppolas, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Clint Eastwood, is teaming up with Creatorvc, the production company behind documentaries like the In Search of Darkness trilogy, In Search of Tomorrow, and First Person Shooter to bring us a documentary called Aliens Expanded, a 4-hour examination of writer/director James Cameron’s 1986 classic Aliens. Digital copies of that documentary can be ordered at This Link – and now it has been announced that Nathan and Creatorvc are continuing their working relationship with The Thing Expanded, a documentary that aims to be the ultimate companion to John Carpenter’s The Thing!

Copies of The Thing Expanded are available for pre-order through TheThingExpanded.

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival returns this week with what is perhaps the strongest lineup festival director Giona A. Nazzaro has conjured up during his short but impactful four-year tenure. Across the festival’s official competitions, you can find new works by arthouse leaders like Hong Sang-soo, Wang Bing, Radu Jude, and Ben Rivers — all world premieres. Hollywood will also be present on the Piazza Grande with an expansive retrospective titled The Lady with the Torch set to be mounted at the fest to celebrate the centennial of Columbia Pictures.

Neapolitan filmmaker Gianluca Jodice’s latest feature The Flood, a historical drama about the last days of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s reign opens the festival on August 7. The film stars Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet, who will be handed one of the festival’s career achievement awards. The festival will also honor Jane Campion, Shah Rukh Khan, Alfonso Cuarón,...

This article contains spoilers for "Twisters."

As the title suggests, the main attraction in "Twisters" are the multiple tornadoes, forces of nature that range from EF1s to terrifyingly disastrous EF5s. Given that the film's story involves several groups of storm chasers tooling around Oklahoma, attempting to devise a way of mitigating a tornado once it's formed, it would seem likely that director Lee Isaac Chung's biggest influences on the film would include other natural disaster movies, adventure films, and so on.

Yet, just like the original "Twister," "Twisters" has more going on beneath the surface. Just as storm chasers Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Tyler (Glen Powell), and Javi (Anthony Ramos) are struggling with various ethical issues surrounding the study of tornadoes and how to best help with the after effects of their arrival, they're also caught in a love triangle, with Kate fielding longtime colleague and friend Javi's...

A movie is, if you'll bear with me, not dissimilar from a twister: It typically isn't just made up of one thing. A film can contain a multitude of disparate genres, themes, tones, and elements inside of itself. This shouldn't be surprising, given that cinema is, at its core, a reflection of the human experience, and human beings are fascinatingly diverse creatures.

The business part of show business tends to forget that last point often, if only because films are easier to sell when reduced to a single aspect -- and, frankly, so are people. Ultimately, typecasting does artists a disservice, as it did when director Lee Isaac Chung was announced to helm the follow-up to Jan de Bont's 1996 "Twister," cheekily titled "Twisters." While Chung's attachment to the sequel seemed like another instance of an indie filmmaker leaving personal projects behind to make a blockbuster, such typecasting implies...

This week sees the release of Twisters, the second entry in the Twister saga that no one really wanted or needed. I mean, the first movie came out so long ago that audiences were positively blown away at the sight of a CGI cow flying through the air, as if it were something from Avatar or a train pulling into a train station.

While the co-writer of Twister, the late Michael Crichton, may have gone to great lengths to create the plot lines for novels like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and The Great Train Robbery, for the tornado-based blockbuster he admitted that he borrowed heavily from a TV documentary and a classic screwball comedy.

Reportedly, Crichton became “fascinated” with tornadoes after seeing them discussed in an episode of Nova, the long-running PBS science show. But while he and his wife Anne-Marie Martin, who co-wrote Twister, discussed the possibility of...

While its often the world premieres that get the most buzz out of any major film festival, look to their restorations lineup (if they are smart enough to have one), and a treasure trove of classics sure to be better than most premieres await. Ahead of their official lineup being unveiled on July 23, the Venice Classics slate is here, featuring films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Fritz Lang, Frederick Wiseman, Howard Hawks, Nagisa Ōshima, Anthony Mann, Lina Wertmüller, and many more.

“The programme of Venice Classics includes the commemoration of several important anniversaries.” said Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera. “First and foremost, the centennial of the birth of Marcello Mastroianni, the most beloved and celebrated Italian actor in the world, whom we will see in The Night (La notte), one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s finest films. It has been fifty years since the death of Vittorio De Sica, who in The Gold of Naples...

The writer of Jurassic Park. The director of Speed. The star of Mad About You. The quaint Clinton-era notion that a major action blockbuster could be produced with, as the major antagonist, an atmospheric condition and not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East or France. Twister is so 1990s it hurts, but the pain isn’t as exquisite as revisiting a movie you once, for any number of pubescent reasons, loved as a child and now realize is a whirling roar of detritus.

When Twister came out, the traditional ’80s model blockbuster appeared to be on its last legs. Films like John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero and Kevin Reynolds’s Waterworld made the idea of a central masculine anchor, be he mountainously monolithic or sensitively willowy, seem as ruinous as letting a young Turk hotshot direct your studio’s big epic did in the early ’80s during the...

Writer/director Ti West has been one of horror’s most compelling, original voices since his 2005 debut “The Roost,” but with his last three movies, his filmmaking skills have risen to a whole new level. He had taken a six-year break from features when he released “X” in 2022, but the movie was well worth the wait; the 1970s-set story of an adult film cast and crew who find themselves under siege by a murderous couple, “X” was daring, scary, and funny — it was also immaculately crafted, with a precision and purposefulness in the framing and lensing that elevated it above most of the exploitation films from which it took inspiration. West shot “X” back-to-back with its prequel “Pearl,” an even more meticulously designed — and completely different in tone and style — period piece, this one an origin story for one of the first film’s killers set in 1918.

Now, West has...

A case could be made that Howard Hawks is one of the greatest American directors of all time. His career spanned from the silent era in the mid-1920s all the way to 1970, and along the way, he made some of the most memorable classics the film industry has ever seen. Hawks directed one of the first gangster movies, made two of the best screwball comedies of all time with "Bringing Up Baby" and "His Girl Friday," created two of the best Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall films ever (and an influential noir classic) with "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep," and directed at least three classic John Wayne Westerns in the form of "Red River," "Rio Bravo," and "El Dorado." Not too shabby.

But everyone has to start somewhere, and Hawks got a job working as a propman during the summers in the earliest days of Hollywood.

Plot: An epic saga of the various groups who try to settle the ever-expanding horizon of the old West.

Review: Kevin Costner’s Horizon might be the most ambitious movie undertaking since Lord of the Rings. Think about it – Kevin Costner has sunk a huge chunk of his own personal fortune into making an epic Western saga, with a second movie only weeks away from hitting theatres, regardless of whether or not the first makes him any money. If that weren’t enough, he’s already started shooting pieces of the third film, and he’s sworn he’ll be making a fourth film as well. Given the scope of his ambitions, it’s hard to truly judge Horizon – Chapter 1 as a standalone film, with it so clearly part of a much bigger whole.

Running three hours (with credits), Costner, who also directed, produced and co-wrote the film (with Jon Baird...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published May 19, when the movie world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It hits theaters beginning today in previews before going wide Friday.

There can be no doubt if there is one person bound and determined to keep Hollywood’s long history of Westerns alive, it has been Kevin Costner. Ok, well Clint Eastwood too.

And that has been true right from the beginning of Costner’s career, when he played the freewheeling scene stealer Jake in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado in 1985. He also made an impression as the title star of 1994’s Wyatt Earp. But his real mark on the genre has been not just as an actor but also as director and producer behind the scenes, first with his Best Picture Oscar-winning 1990 pic Dances with Wolves and 2003’s terrific Open Range with co-star Robert Duvall. For the past few seasons he...

“Is it a gift or is it not a gift that you can only play the age you are?”

It’s a rhetorical question Diane Lane asks — but doesn’t pretend to have the answer to — and also a thought she embraces.

“I am grateful for it,” she says. “And I’m optimistic that I’m at the right age to play some interesting people.”

Interesting is one of the many things that could be said about Slim Keith. In FX’s “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” Lane plays the real-life socialite, who was among the women that acclaimed novelist Truman Capote collected like prized confidantes in the 1960s, before using the secrets they entrusted to him as thinly veiled material for his final unfinished novel, “Answered Prayers.”

A California native, Keith was the pinnacle of elite society and style in the mid-20th century. She was a force in...

Alien didn’t just spring fully formed out of the heads of director Ridley Scott and writers Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and David Giler. Its combination of “monster on the loose” and “haunted house in space” scenario was perhaps the ultimate distillation of a long line of sci-fi and horror pictures that had come before it, from quick B-movie cheapies to some of the genre’s most elegant offerings. What Alien did under the visionary hand of its director, however, was meld all those influences together in a way that transcended the schlockier elements of the film’s influences and elevated the more artistic and meaningful ones. The result wasn’t just a monster movie, but a psychosexual nightmare with Lovecraftian overtones and a sense of existential dread.

It was also a film that impacted countless others in the 45 years since its release (it came out in May...

“We really led with our hearts for everything we watched,” said 77th Cannes Film Festival Jury President Greta Gerwig on what was a fiercely competitive year.

In a Cannes that delivered a Demi Moore comeback pro-femme horror film Substance, a ground breaking trans noir Spanish-lingo musical in Emilia Perez, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120M passion project Megalopolis, it was Sean Baker’s dark romantic comedy about a sex worker, Anora that transcended this year’s jury.

“It was an embarrassment of riches this year in terms of cinema,” exclaimed Gerwig, “we (the jury) could have been talking into next week.”

Anora follows a stripper who falls for a Russia oligarch’s son. He loves her so much, he marries her, much to the chagrin of his family. Chaos ensues.

Said Gerwig on why they chose it: “There was something that reminded us of a classic, there were structures of Lubitsch and Howard Hawks.

After two weeks of nonstop cinema, the moment of truth finally arrived. The winners of the 77th Cannes Film Festival were announced at a gala ceremony on Saturday night.

The Palme d’Or, the fest’s top honor, went to Sean Baker’s sex worker screwball comedy Anora. A nervous and shaking Baker took the stage and thanked the jury, saying he still “couldn’t believe it.” Baker said winning Cannes’ top prize has been “my singular goal as a filmmaker for the past 30 years.”

Baker also singled out Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, two veteran directors with films in Cannes competition this year, as major inspirations. Baker has come far, going from shooting his 2015 feature Tangerine on an iPhone5s to winning the Palme d’Or. He is the first American director to win the Palme since Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life in 2011.

Commenting on the jury’s decision,...

As expansive and iconic as its title suggests, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West certainly seemed to be written in John Ford’s blood, from the vast wide-angle visions of Monument Valley that Leone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli luxuriated in, to the railroad-based, future-of-America economic landscape that serves as a backdrop to a number of bandit-versus-bandit power plays. Henry Fonda, with that methodical, stately stroll of his and those killer blue eyes barely visible from under the rim of his hat, can be seen and heard throughout, sending a shiver of great nostalgia up one’s spine. Ripened and tanned by years of desert sunlight, Ford’s Wyatt Earp is back in the saddle again.

But that particular pace and posture that Fonda had become known for in such films as My Darling Clementine, matched with the devious glint in those baby blues, now took...

In Our Day.In the cinema, as elsewhere, the notion of “late style” has become a critical commonplace—shorthand for dealing with an artist’s “mature” work, particularly when said artists are dismissed or misunderstood after a period of acclaim. The problem with shorthand, of course, is that not everyone can read it, the result being that appeals to “late style” can come across as abdications of critical responsibility, promissory notes that have yet to be fulfilled. Such debts are in many cases eventually paid, obscure references to “late style” giving way to fuller, more perspicuous accounts of an artist’s achievement. Few would now dispute the considered analyses of how Howard Hawks, pivoting on the success of Rio Bravo (1959), made a deliberate move into the late-career languor of Hatari! (1962), Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), and Red Line 7000 (1965). In the case of Hong Sang-soo, however, this critical due has yet to...

For the last two years in a row, one of the major premieres at the Cannes Film Festival has been a mainstream film that works with the trappings and tropes of the Western genre. But there’s not much connection between Martin Scorsese’s Oklahoma-set 1920s period piece “Killers of the Flower Moon,” one of the hits of last year’s festival, and Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga,” which had its premiere at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on Sunday evening.

For Scorsese, approaching that location and time period meant thinking hard about what he could bring to a genre that he felt had peaked with directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks in the 1940s and ’50s, and essentially been ended by Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western “The Wild Bunch” in the late 1968s.

Costner, though, has little interest in revisionist thinking about the genre; “Horizon” is proudly,...

Gary Cooper was a two-time Oscar winner who starred in dozens of movies before his death in 1961, but how many of those titles remain classics? Let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1901, Cooper got his start in silent movies, most notably the aerial drama “Wings” (1927), which won the very first Academy Award as Best Picture. He would collect his own statuette as Best Actor for another WWI film: the biographical drama “Sergeant York” (1941). Directed by Howard Hawks, it helped create Cooper’s screen persona of an ordinary man capable of extraordinary courage in the face of adversity.

He won a second Best Actor trophy for playing a similar character in Fred Zinnemann‘s western “High Noon” (1952), which cast him as a retired marshal who must stand up to a gang of killers arriving on the noon train. Cooper earned additional nominations for similarly idealistic,...

Obviously it wasn’t by design, but the early-1950s renewal of the western genre, aided in large part by the success of Winchester ’73, which heralded a career second act for both its director, Anthony Mann, and its star, James Stewart, was answered in other quarters of the industry by multiple endeavors to take the once disreputable genre, previously dismissed as Roy Rogers/Saturday-matinee bunkum, all the way into the hallowed halls of state-sanctioned, capital-a art. And, as it happened, the two westerns that made a big runner-up showing at the 1952 and 1953 Oscars, High Noon and Shane, respectively, also served, by virtue of holding what wide swaths of the future cinephile demographic would come to view as Vichy letters of transit, as high-value targets for skeptics of the official cultural narrative.

These auteurist critics and film buffs, whose philosophy acquired definite contours some 10-odd years later, observed a different watershed moment: Rio Bravo.

The The Thing (1982) episode of Wtf Happened to This Horror Movie? was Written by Cody Hamman, Edited by Joseph Wilson, Narrated by Jason Hewlett, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

John Carpenter’s The Thing (watch or buy it Here) didn’t go over well at all when it was released in 1982. Ignored by movie-goers, it was a box office failure. Reviled by critics, it even saw Carpenter being labelled a pornographer of violence by some reviewers. It was such a disappointment for the studio, they took another project away from Carpenter as punishment. But it gradually found its audience, building up a cult following. And soon, a legion of fans and critics alike began calling it one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It didn’t take long for The Thing to go from being known as reprehensible trash to being considered an all-time classic.

Clint Eastwood was already 30 years old when he landed his breakout role in the CBS Western "Rawhide." The actor had spent much of the 1950s getting by on bit parts in B movies (most notably the Jack Arnold monster duo of "Revenge of the Creature" and "Tarantula"), and guest roles on TV series like "Maverick" and "Death Valley Days," so you'd think he would've been thrilled. But Eastwood was displeased with his character Rowdy Yates, who, early on in the series' run, was a wet-behind-the-ears ramrod. At his age, he was eager to play a grown, capable man with enough years behind him to allow for a bit of mystery.

Eastwood's restlessness coincided with a shift in filmmakers' approach to the Western genre. Though maestros like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher had allowed for moral ambiguity in their movies, the vast majority of Westerns were white...

There wasn't a more capable director of massive, widescreen Westerns working in Hollywood during the 1950s and '60s than John Sturges. Whether classical ("Gunfight at the O.K. Corral") or somewhat unconventional ("Bad Day at Black Rock"), Sturges could frame a mountainous expanse or stage a gunfight with the best of them. He thrived when working with big casts and specialized in discovering stirring nuances in characters that would've been walking cliches in more typical genre flicks.

Sturges was also efficient, which came in handy when managing expensive studio productions populated with big egos. His biggest challenge in this department might've been "The Magnificent Seven," the 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Seven Samurai." Yul Brynner, then a hugely popular movie star (largely on the strength of his Academy Award-winning performance in "The King and I" and his portrayal of Ramses in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments"), controlled...

Remakes are always a tricky proposition. Some of the greats both in the horror genre and elsewhere are actually remakes, whether it’s a loose one or not. Be it The Magnificent Seven coming from Seven Samurai or The Thing being birthed into imitation dog from the Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks original. I talk about The Thing A Lot but obviously it’s for a reason. You could also throw The Fly in that same category too while we are here. Those are some of the examples of the good but unfortunately, things can go downhill and fast. You have harmless ones like the Friday the 13th remake or Texas Chainsaw, the annoyingly unnecessary like Halloween and Amityville Horror, or the egregiously awful like The Fog and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Like them or loathe them, or in our case both, they are here to stay, and each...

Private Investigator John Sugar (Colin Farrell) wears a black suit for all occasions and never drives anything but his classic Corvette. He’s unflappably calm, prefers to listen rather than talk, and absolutely doesn’t know how to let a case go once he’s started working on it—especially if it involves a missing woman. Watching Sugar, it’s as if one of Humphrey Bogart or Glenn Ford’s hardboiled gumshoes stepped straight out of their smoky, monochrome realm and into our full-color world of smartphones and social media.

Though Sugar is set in modern-day L.A., the series finds him tasked with a case suited to his anachronistic sensibilities. In fact, it’s one cribbed straight from The Big Sleep: A rich, reclusive movie producer, Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), hires Sugar to track down his wild-child granddaughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler). And more similarities to the Raymond Chandler...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will celebrate the centennial of Columbia Pictures with an expansive retrospective titled The Lady with the Torch, mounted in collaboration with the studio’s parent company, Sony.

Organized in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse, The Lady with the Torch will be curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato, an annual festival in Bologna dedicated to film history and film restoration. The official unveiling will take place at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Locarno has said the retrospective will present the studio in “all its glory,” shining a light on lesser-known genre filmmakers like Max Nosseck, Seymour Friedman, and William A. Seiter, as well as celebrating auteurs like Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, George Stevens, and John Ford. After launching at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, running August 7-17, the retrospective will tour the world. The Retrospective will...

The glut of movie podcasts makes it hard to prioritize any single show. But there’s been unique pleasure in One Handshake Away, which allows directors to reflect on titans of yesteryear who host Peter Bogdanovich once interviewed––supplemented by audio of those decades-old conversations and creating a wild bridge in film history. Drawing direct paths from Alfred Hitchcock to Guillermo del Toro, Orson Welles to Rian Johnson, Don Siegel to Quentin Tarantino, it emphasizes just how quickly cinema history could be collapsed by a figure of Bogdanovich’s experience and just how much was lost with his passing.

The latest episode picks up from Bogdanovich’s passing. Guillermo del Toro’s now on hosting duties and his guest is Greta Gerwig, who discusses the films of Howard Hawks and their influence on her work––particularly the John Barrymore and Barbara Stanwyck performances that informed Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in Barbie.

The Mother and the Whore.Jean Eustache orbited the world of criticism without ever fully falling into it. His intellectual biographer, Alain Philippon, describes him as a marginal figure at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s and yet actively involved in the debates unfolding in its offices.1 Though Eustache was close with future Cahiers editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli and the magazine championed his films from the start, his critical output was minuscule. He started contributing to Cahiers only after completing his first short, Bad Company (1963). Even then, he wrote little, publishing a few brief pieces on some early films by Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Costa-Gavras. Luc Moullet would later admit that prior to Bad Company, he thought him the only person at Cahiers “that had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.”2 Indeed, Eustache was often at the offices to pick up his wife, who was employed as a secretary at the magazine.

Remakes have always been and will always be a tricky proposition. You could have something as pure and wonderful as 1982’s The Thing, which is objectively better than the revered Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby version, but be trapped in purgatory for way too long before it is decided that its proper and loved. There’s a bunch that are better in different ways or at least thoroughly enjoyable in their own right like John Carpenter’s masterpiece, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and of course David Cronenberg’s The Fly. While you can argue the horror vs sci fi merits of any of these movies, their quality can’t be disputed. When it comes down to what you can or can’t remake, I think the gloves are off at this point. There’s very few sacred cows left and sometimes a remake can help. Something...

Exclusive: Following a competitive bidding situation, Shout! Studios has acquired North American rights to The Dead Don’t Hurt, the Western written, directed, produced by and starring Viggo Mortensen (Thirteen Lives) which world premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, where star Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) was honored with the TIFF Tribute Performer Award.

Acquired from Talipot Studio, Recorded Picture Company, Perceval Pictures, and HanWay Films, the film marks Mortensen’s second effort on both sides of the camera on the heels of 2020 father-son drama Falling. Pic will be released across all major entertainment platforms, beginning with a wide theatrical launch this summer.

A story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s, The Dead Don’t Hurt centers on Vivienne Le Coudy (Krieps), a fiercely independent woman who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holgen Olsen (Mortensen). After meeting Olsen in San Francisco, she agrees...

This was a well-kept secret. Two years since his passing we’ve learned of Peter Bogdanoivch’s podcasting project One Handshake Away, which saw the late-in-life filmmaker sit down with modern luminaries. The first two episodes, out today, feature Guillermo del Toro and Quentin Tarantino discussing personal favorites, the former Alfred Hitchcock and the latter Don Siegel––a normal concept made novel by integrating unheard audio from Bogdanovich’s prodigious start interviewing the deceased filmmakers decades ago.

Later episodes will feature conversations with Rian Johnson and Ken Burns; after Bogdanovich’s passing, del Toro continued the series by speaking to Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy, and Allison Anders. Integrated into these are audio of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and (believe it or not!) Orson Welles. It’s immediately evident that the company of a fellow auteur puts del Toro and Tarantino at ease, the subjects elevating them to enthusiasm––well and...

Late auteur Peter Bogdanovich is still just a handshake away per his posthumous podcast, “One Handshake Away.”

Prior to Bogdanovich’s January 2022 death, the filmmaker recorded a series of interviews with fellow directors such as Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Ken Burns, and Rian Johnson to discuss their biggest cinematic influences.

Per Deadline, Bogdanovich named the podcast “One Handshake Away” to honor the relationship between contemporary directors and pioneering filmmakers, with each filmmaker being “one handshake away” from one another in film history.

After Bogdanovich’s passing, del Toro took over the podcast and recorded the final three episodes, interviewing Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy, and Allison Anders, which included discussing the works of Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, and Raoul Walsh.

Filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Don Siegel, Orson Welles, and John Ford were reexamined in episodes Bogdanovich recorded; the podcast additionally features exclusive archival interviews with Hitchcock, Welles, and Ford that have...

Exclusive: Peter Bogdanovich, the director of Hollywood classics such as The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, may have died two years ago but he left behind a “love letter to film.”

The critic-turned-filmmaker was working on One Handshake Away, a podcast series that saw him in conversation with some of the greatest living filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Rian Johnson and Ken Burns framed through a series of never-before-heard archival interviews with legends including Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and John Ford.

After Bogdanovich’s death, del Toro took over for the final three interviews with Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy and Allison Anders.

Each episode pays homage to a master and offers insight and perspective on the influence and impact the legends who came before them had on their career and filmmaking.

Bogdanovich discussed Hitchcock with del Toro, Don Siegel with Tarantino, Welles with Johnson and Ford with Burns.

Those who fought in World War II are considered the Greatest Generation. And executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman paid homage to these young men who risked life and limb during the global conflict in their award-winning 2001 HBO series “Band of Brothers” and 2010’s “The Pacific.” And now they’ve taken to the not-so-friendly skies in their latest World War II series, Apple TV +’s “Masters of the Air.”

Created by John Shiban and John Orloff, “Masters of the Air” is based on the 2007 book: “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the War Against Nazi Germany,” the series starring Austin Butler focuses on the 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group stationed in England. It was known as the “Bloody Hundredth” because of the high causalty rate.

Watching the series, one can’t help but remember the numerous bombardier films produced by Hollywood...