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Film Forum is turning back the clock to the ’80s and celebrating golden era cinemas with the New York premiere of Richard Shepard’s “Film Geek.”

Emmy winner Shepard writes and directs the cine-memoir feature centered on moviegoing in the ’70s and ’80s. “Film Geek” debuts as part of Film Forum’s “Out of the ’80s” programming, which includes over 50 films ranging from blockbusters to cult classics.

Films such as “Blue Velvet,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and more will screen at the theater. Actors such as Griffin Dunne and Isaac Mizrahi will revisit their own ’80s features, while directors like Charlie Ahearn, Charles Lane, and Jerry Schatzberg discuss their filmmaking styles.

The series is programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Repertory Artistic Director, and was inspired by Richard Shepard’s documentary “Film Geek.” The festival centers on the debut of “Film Geek,” which is...

“You know you can watch that at home, right?” Such was the advice directed my way by a wisecracking passerby while queued up for a screening at the 2024 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Hollywood, California. They were clearly not a festival passholder, but the indifference heard right there on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was another instance of the trampling of history that both the festival and its parent channel aim to counter.

Probably the most even-handed response to that trampling would be a reminder—to flip a well-known phrase—that a home is not a house (not a movie house anyway). The folks who flock to Los Angeles every year from all over the world to attend this festival, probably all subscribers or rabid devotees of the channel that bears its name, cough up a prodigious amount of money to do so. It’s clear that for them,...

The Runner released in the Criterion Collection on March 19th, 2024.

The Criterion Collection is my favorite place to explore and discover amazing cinematic releases that may have slipped under my radar. Straw Dogs, Mona Lisa and White Dog are some of my favorite films, all of which I first watched after they received a physical release through Criterion. The Runner has now joined that list.

The Runner Plot

Madjid Niroumand as Amiro in The Runner (1984)

Also Read: Criterion Collection Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons Review

A young Iranian orphan fends for himself, surviving by working odd jobs collecting glass bottles, shining shoes and selling ice water. Despite the harsh conditions he faces, his natural curiosity and imagination never waiver. He harbors a fascination for the airplanes and cargo ships that move in and out of the port city he calls home. While he dreams of escape, he...

For those of us who remember going to the movies in 1977, we were treated to Star Wars, Smokey And The Bandit, The Spy Who Loved Me, Airport 77, The Car, Orca and Capricorn One. There was a rich wealth of movies to choose from and a time when audiences in their local cinemas would cheer and clap for the heroes. Then on December 14, 1977, coming off the success of Jaws, that director Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece graced the screens. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind was the filmmaker’s next movie and, along with star Richard Dreyfuss and the magnificent score from composer John Williams, took audiences on a journey of mankind’s first meeting with aliens and let us know we are not alone in the universe.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning for Best Cinematography by Director of Photography Vilmos Zsigmond (The Sugarland Express...

Those attending the 15th annual TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood next month will have an opportunity to engage with Mel Brooks and Vitaphone, both born in 1926. One’s extinct, the other’s still going strong.

While Brooks, 97, will be on hand for a closing-night screening of his 1987 comedy Spaceballs, six Vitaphone vaudeville shorts from the 1920s will be projected in 35mm, with sound played back from their original 16-inch discs on a turntable designed and engineered by Warner Bros.’ postproduction engineering department.

Also announced Thursday:

• Steven Spielberg will participate in a Q&a with Howard Suber — the UCLA faculty member at the center of the recent six-part TCM documentary The Power of Film — ahead of a director’s cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977);

• Nancy Meyers and Alexander Payne, respectively, will introduce world premiere restorations of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and John Ford’s The Searchers...

Updated with more signatories: Reaction continues to The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech after his film won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film this month.

Some 1,215 Jewish show business professionals now have signed a letter denouncing the filmmaker’s speech, in which he decried the “dehumanization” of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. See the updated full list below.

“We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination,” the letter states (read it in full in full below).

This list includes among its signatories Eli Roth and Amy Sherman-Palladino, Amy Pascal, Debra Messing, Gail Berman, Hawk Koch, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gary Barber, Lawrence Bender, Tovah Feldshuh and Rod Lurie.

You can watch Glazer’s speech here,...

Clear your calendar, L.A. cinephiles! The American Cinematheque has announced the titles for its extraordinary 70mm festival taking place at the iconic Egyptian Theatre in the days after the movie palace reopens following a three-year restoration. Netflix, in partnership with the American Cinematheque, bought the cinema in 2020.

The 516-seat theater, which was the longtime home of the American Cinematheque before the refurbishment, will retain its full ability to project 70mm prints and also be one of only five cinemas in the U.S. capable of projecting nitrate film. That early form of celluloid prints is notable for its astounding sharpness and vivid colors — you’ve never seen Technicolor until you’ve seen it in nitrate — but it’s extremely flammable, which you know if you’ve seen “Inglourious Basterds,” and thus harder to handle for many projectionists today.

The festival “Ultra Cinematheque 70: Hollywood,” running from November 10 through November...

Karen Cooper, longtime director of New York City’s indie cinema gem Film Forum, says she’s stepping down at a good time, not just for her, but for the business. Despite all the naysayers and after slogging through Covid with the help of federal grants and weathering a slow recovery, Cooper said business is currently pretty lively at the lower Manhattan nonprofit cinema she’s run for the past 50 years.

She’s leaving her position this summer with Deputy Director Sonya Chung taking the reins July 1.

The Film Forum launched in 1970 on the Upper West Side with a 19,000 annual budget to show American independent films not playing in commercial cinemas. Cooper led it through three expansions, building it into a 6 million business with a range of programming and premieres from around the world. It’s been at its current location on West Houston Street since 1989. She counts New York...

In a major shift one of the nation’s premier arthouses, Karen Cooper will be exiting as director on June 30 after 50 years running the Film Forum in New York City. Deputy Director Sonya Chung will assume the role.

Cooper has led the nonprofit cinema since its first iteration in 1972 as a 50-seat loft space on the Upper West Side open only weekends, to a multi-million dollar operation with four screens and 500 seats in lower Manhattan. She’ll remain an advisor to Chung with a focus on programming premieres and fundraising

“To say this is a transitional moment would be a vast understatement – for virtually all of its history, Film Forum has been energetically and most ably guided by Karen, not least during the very challenging pandemic period from which we are emerging. My board colleagues and I are extremely grateful for her tenure, and excited that in Sonya we have...

Longtime Film Forum director Karen Cooper is parting ways with the nonprofit New York City cinema after half a century in the role.

Cooper will be succeeded by Sonya Chung, whose position goes into effect July 1. Film Forum’s board, headed by Gray Coleman, unanimously voted on the change in leadership in November 2022. Cooper will remain as an advisor to Chung, with a focus on programming premieres and fundraising.

“Running a business, any business, is about solving problems, and more importantly seeing around corners and solving them before they become problems. I have the highest regard for Sonya,” Cooper said of her successor. “She has superb taste in films and impeccable judgment on a wide range of administrative issues, ranging from finance to personnel. Knowing she was ready and willing to become Director gave me the luxury of stepping down at a time when the theater is financially solid, ceding...

Coming to Film Forum in New York City is “Black Women,” a 70-film screening series that spotlights 81 years – 1920 to 2001 – of trailblazing African American actresses in American movies.

Scheduled to run from January 17 to February 13, the series is curated by film historian and professor Donald Bogle, author of six books concerning blacks in film and television, including the groundbreaking “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films” (1973).

“Last year, Bruce Goldstein, the repertory programmer at Film Forum, asked me if there was something I was interested in doing, and this was a topic that I had been thinking about, because I recently updated my book on the subject, ‘Brown Sugar,’ which dealt with African American women in entertainment from the early years of the late 19th century to the present,” said Bogle. “That’s really the way it came about, and it just developed from there.

There have been at least four major “King Kong” movies — and another, “Godzilla vs. Kong,” is due early next year. And yet when fans of all ages think of the girl in the palm of the ape’s hand, they think not of Jessica Lange or Naomi Watts, but of the actress who first embodied her in 1933.

As we speak, New York’s popular indie house Film Forum is filling the next two weeks with movies that starred Fay Wray, the original Ann Darrow who tamed the giant ape. Also featured are movies written by Wray’s husband, Academy Award winner Robert Riskin. The program is done in conjunction with a new memoir by Victoria Riskin, the couples’ daughter and former president of the Writers Guild of America West.

“They were an early Hollywood power couple, each with a lasting legacy,” TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz said. “Wray is more easily identifiable,...

Stars: Viviane Romance, Michel Simon, Paul Bernard, Lita Recio | Written by Julien Duvivier, Charles Spaak | Directed by Julien Duvivier

The setting for this 1946 gem is a small French town, and the fast-moving plot concerns the murder of a local woman, Aurore Noblet. While the police are baffled by the killing, the locals are quick to assume the culprit: Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon), a reclusive and friendless man who’s too smart for his own good.

When the beautiful Lili (Vivian Romance) – Aka “Alice” – comes to town, she runs straight into the arms of her lover, Alfred (Paul Bernard). Alfred is, of course, the killer – and now the beneficiary of a purse containing 7,000 francs. However, Hire apparently has proof of Alfred’s guilt, so it is imperative that the scheming couple get him out of the way, and they will do so by blaming him for the murder of Noblet. Helpfully for them,...

For directing skill and sensual sophistication this psychologically intense murder tale equals or betters the most sophisticated American noirs. Julien Duvivier gives us Michel Simon as Monsieur Hire, a strange man loathed by his neighbors. Entranced by the woman he spies through his bedroom window, Hire doesn’t realize that she’s helping to frame him for murder, and then set him out like bait for a vengeful mob. The restored French classic is a beauty in every respect; the extras include a highly educational, must-see discussion of movie subtitling, by Bruce Goldstein.

Panique

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 955

1946 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 98 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 18, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Michel Simon, Viviane Romance, Paul Bernard, Charles Dorat, Lucas Gridoux.

Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer

Film Editor: Marthe Poncin

Special Effects: W. Percy Day

Original Music: Jean Weiner

Written by Julien Duvivier, Charles Spaak from a novel by...

After announcing a limited October theatrical release of Studiocanal's 4K restoration of John Carpenter's The Fog, Rialto Pictures has now unveiled a trailer for the 4K restoration, giving horror fans a closer look at Antonio Bay's high-def makeover.

Press Release: New York based Rialto Pictures will release John Carpenter’s landmark horror movie The Fog on October 26, in its first-ever major restoration. The horror classic, in a full 4K restoration from Studiocanal, opens October 26 for limited runs at the Metrograph, in New York, Landmark’s Nuart in Los Angeles, and The Music Box Theatre in Chicago.

Additional screenings will occur during the week of Halloween throughout the Alamo Drafthouse circuit and other specialty theaters.

Carpenter’s first post-Halloween venture into the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired, apocalyptic vein that he would continue to mine in films like The Thing (1982) and Prince of Darkness (1987), The Fog depicts the seaside California town...

It's a great time to be a John Carpenter fan. It was recently announced that Carpenter's Halloween is coming to 4K Ultra HD this September, with a 4K restoration of his classic horror film also scheduled to screen at Arrow Video FrightFest 2018, and now it's been revealed that Rialto Pictures will screen Studiocanal's 4K restoration of Carpenter's The Fog in select Us theaters on October 26th, bringing horror fans back to the haunted town of Antonio Bay just in time for Halloween:

Press Release: August 7, 2018 - New York based Rialto Pictures will release John Carpenter’s landmark horror movie The Fog on October 26, in its first-ever major restoration. The horror classic, in a full 4K restoration from Studiocanal, opens October 26 for limited runs at the Metrograph, in New York, Landmark’s Nuart in Los Angeles, and The Music Box Theatre in Chicago.

Additional screenings will occur during the week of...

Initially a bustling urban backdrop for this new and correspondingly modern medium known as cinema, New York City has been a focal point of American movies since the inception of the form itself. Movies were made to move, and no place moved like NYC. At first, it was the city alone that dazzled filmgoers: the sheer scope and scale of Manhattan’s topography, the size of the city’s towering skyscrapers, the clustered ebb and flow of its lively population. Then stories emerged out of this concrete jungle, stories born from the teeming metropolitan setting: immigrant tragedies, gangster tales, social dramas of class inequality and economic expansion. Before long, Hollywood coopted New York, and suddenly, the bi-coastal portrayal of the Big Apple featured posh penthouses, swanky nightclubs, and a decidedly one-sided representation of the haves and have-nots (Hollywood liked the haves). As an alternative, independent filmmakers took the city’s...

Just back from the 2017 TCM Classic Movie Festival with a few thoughts and thoughts about thoughts. I certainly held my reservations about this year’s edition, and though I ultimately ended up tiring early of flitting about from theater to theater like a mouse in a movie maze (it happens to even the most fanatically devoted of us on occasion, or so I’m told), there were, as always, several things I learned by attending Tcmff 2017 as well.

1) TCM Staffers Are Unfailingly Polite And Helpful

Thankfully I wasn’t witness, as I have been in past years, to any pass holders acting like spoiled children because they had to wait in a long queue or, heaven forbid, because they somehow didn’t get in to one of their preferred screenings. Part of what makes the Tcmff experience as pleasant as it often is can be credited to the tireless work...

Backstage is rounding up some of this week’s best, feel-good events in the busily beautiful city—everything actors should be seeing and doing to keep up with all the great arts and culture NYC has to offer. After all, training doesn’t just happen in the acting studio! 1. Watch and learn how to get into character.Watch actors portray cynical reporters and sensation-seeking editors in a special screening of 1931 classic, “The Front Page.” Afterward, join Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein for “Character Actors 101,” an illustrated talk celebrating the “real stars of Hollywood”, the character actors who appear again and again, that he first presented at the TCM Classic Film Festival. And you can get two tickets for the price of one! This double-feature event on April 27 is a must for actors. (Tickets: $8 for members, $14 for non-members.) 2. Experience the New Voices in Black Cinema festival.The festival, presented by BAMcinématek is in its seventh year,...

“It’s the most wonderful time/Of the year…” – Andy Williams

Well, yes and no. There is, after all, still about a week and a half to go before we can put the long national, annual nightmare of the tax season behind us. But it’s also film festival season, which for me specifically means the onset of the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival, the eighth iteration of what has become a perennial moviegoing event. More and more people flock to Hollywood Boulevard each year from all reaches of the country, and from other countries, to revel in the history of Hollywood and international filmmaking, celebrate their favorite stars (including, this year, beloved TCM host Robert Osborne, who died earlier this year and whose presence has been missed at the festival for the past two sessions) and enjoy a long-weekend-sized bout of nostalgia for the movie culture being referred to when...

Return of the Double Feature, a series programmed by Film Forum's Bruce Goldstein, opens on Friday and runs through September 13 in New York. Saturday sees a double bill of works by Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, "a singularly penetrating film noir that still jars after more than 50 years," as Jonathan Stevenson puts it. "In counterpoint, Contempt embraces domestic life, but it is scarcely less fraught and Godard is as merciless as ever." More goings on: A new restoration of Louis Malle’s debut film, Elevator to the Gallows, tours the country. Dennis Lim will be introducing and discussing films by David Lynch in Berkeley. The Austin Film Society's presenting new restorations of King Hu's A Touch of Zen and Dragon Inn. And Mubi's Daniel Kasman has curated a series of films by Hong Sang-soo for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. » - David Hudson...

Return of the Double Feature, a series programmed by Film Forum's Bruce Goldstein, opens on Friday and runs through September 13 in New York. Saturday sees a double bill of works by Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, "a singularly penetrating film noir that still jars after more than 50 years," as Jonathan Stevenson puts it. "In counterpoint, Contempt embraces domestic life, but it is scarcely less fraught and Godard is as merciless as ever." More goings on: A new restoration of Louis Malle’s debut film, Elevator to the Gallows, tours the country. Dennis Lim will be introducing and discussing films by David Lynch in Berkeley. The Austin Film Society's presenting new restorations of King Hu's A Touch of Zen and Dragon Inn. And Mubi's Daniel Kasman has curated a series of films by Hong Sang-soo for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. » - David Hudson...

All of my fantasies about meeting and talking to Anna Karina have been set in France, at her home, under constant worry of arrest, having just knocked on her door without an invitation. I ask her questions and she answers them all with tears in her eyes: "What was it like to act for Jean-Luc Godard, the man you loved, even when you were fighting like cats and dogs, even when he broke your heart? And how, in God's good name, did you manage to create performances that never age, that show no sign of origin, no influence, that absolutely confound me in the best possible way? How did you do it?” These fantasies found nourishment in the assumption that the icon of the French New Wave was fairly reclusive, not wanting to be bothered, certainly not wanting to talk anymore about those films, that time, that man. So imagine...

Silent comedy rules!  Harold Lloyd epitomizes 'twenties optimism while serving up the fun. Even better, he filmed this on the streets of New York, so we feel as if we stepped into a time machine. The great disc extras include input from New Yorker extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein. It's a great show for holiday viewing -- unless your family hates New York. Speedy Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 788 1928 / Color / 1:33 silent aperture / 86 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 8, 2015 / 39.95 Starring Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth, Byron Douglas, Brooks Benedict. Cinematography Walter Lundin Film Editor Carl Himm Original Music Carl Davis Written by John Grey, Lex Neal, Howard Rogers, Jay Howe Produced by Harold Lloyd Directed by Ted Wilde

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Criterion's Blu-ray of Harold Lloyd's 1928 comedy Speedy is a double pleasure. First, it reminds us that Harold Lloyd is a flat-out delight, as funny...

A long time in the making, Reach Me, from filmmaker/actor John Herzfeld brings ‘positive thinking’ and ‘self-help’ to the big screen. It stars a bevy of Herzfeld’s actor friends and friends of friends, including Sylvester Stallone, Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Connolly.

The title is one of a dozen or so newcomers opening in limited release this weekend. Music Box’s Happy Valley and Kino Lorber’s Monk With A Camera are among Friday’s debuting documentaries.

Happy Valley, named after the area where Pennsylvania State University is located, dives into the child sexual-abuse scandal that rocked Penn State, while Monk looks at an unlikely ascetic who gave up life in the fast lane.

Kino Lorber also is launching Iranian Western Vampire pic A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which it is releasing with Vice Films. The title, which was born out of a previous short film, debuted at Sundance in January.

Specialized distributor Rialto Pictures has acquired all U.S. rights to five first-run films from French giant Studiocanal. The five films, all U.S. premieres, will go out under Rialto’s new label “Rialto Premieres.” First release for Rialto Premieres will be director Clément Michel’s hit romantic comedy The Stroller Strategy, starring Raphaël Personnaz and Charlotte Le Bon. Also starring, French heartthrob Personnaz (The Princess of Montpensier, Anna Karenina) as a Parisian who accidentally becomes the guardian of an infant – then pretends to be his real father in order to win back Le Bon, the girlfriend who dumped him a year before. This will be Michel’s directorial debut, and the it is set to open at New York’s Angelika Film Center on June 14. Other first-run Studiocanal films in the new deal with Rialto include Hotel Normandy, starring Eric Elmosnino (Gainsbourg) and Helena Noguerra, and Demi-Soeur, directed by and starring Josiane Balasko. Since its founding, New York-based Rialto’s close partnership with Studiocanal has included major reissues of such jewels of the French company’s classic library as Grand Illusion, The Third Man, and Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. For the past year, Rialto has been the U.S. theatrical distributor of Studiocanal’s catalogue of over 2,000 titles. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “the gold standard of reissue distributors," New York-based Rialto Pictures was founded in 1997 by Bruce Goldstein. Adrienne Halpern joined him as co-president a year later, with Eric Di Bernardo joining the company as National Sales Director in 2002. Rialto’s vast library of classics includes films by Godard, Fellini, Renoir, Kurosawa, Buñuel, Costa-Gavras, Pontecorvo, Carol Reed, Michael Powell, Jules Dassin, Jean-Pierre Melville, and many others. 2012 marked Rialto’s fifteenth anniversary, a milestone celebrated with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The company’s re-releases this year include Godard’s rarely-seen Le Petit Soldat; Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film, Un Flic, starring Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve; Joseph Losey’s The Servant, written by Harold Pinter; and Claude Autant-Lara’s A Pig Across Paris (La Traversée de Paris), starring Jean Gabin. Also beginning in June, Rialto will tour “The Hitchcock 9” -- Alfred Hitchcock’s nine surviving silent films, all newly restored by the British Film Institute -- in collaboration with the BFI and Park Circus Films. The “Hitchcock 9” tour will kick off in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

The Fountainhead with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper Photo: Courtesy of TCM

Liza Minnelli, Kim Novak, Robert Wagner, Tippi Hedren and Debbie Reynolds in person. Black Narcissus, Vertigo, Cabaret, and The Fountainhead projected on gigantic screens at Grauman's Chinese and Egyptian Theatres. Could any classic film fan wish for more? You could. And, at this year's annual TCM Classic Film Festival, which takes place from April 12th through the 15th, you'd get more: Kirk Douglas, Stanley Donen, Angie Dickenson, Norman Lloyd, Rhonda Fleming, and Norman Jewison appearing at special events and screenings of Two for the Road, Chinatown, Casablanca, The Longest Day, and The Thomas Crown Affair. But before going on about this year's festival, a look back is essential.

Chinatown's Faye Dunaway and Jack NicholsonPhoto: Courtesy of TCM

TCM 2010 & 2011

TCM's 2010 festival featured an opening night restoration of George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954) starring Judy Garland and...

Filed under: Celebrity Interviews, Features

If you're a film fan, Bruce Goldstein has one of the most enviable jobs in cinema. As Director of Repertory Programming at New York's vaunted Film Forum, it's Goldstein's job to curate and acquire films for retrospectives, ranging from French Crime Wave, to Classic 3-D to Depression Era films.

As a new board member of the National Film Registry and Founder and Co-President of reissue film distributor Rialto Pictures, Goldstein is firmly entrenched in the film world. Yet it was an early passion for the medium that led him to where he is today. To celebrate Film Forum's upcoming Heist Films retrospective, we spoke to Goldstein about his unique position and forced him -- not at gunpoint -- to give us his Top 5 Heist Films in the series.

Continue Reading...

Not all of the great films that have become icons of cinema's history are given the pomp and circumstance of a theatrical re-release in celebration of its, presumably, long-lasting impact on the film industry. However, one such film is getting that special treatment, and it's not even a film made in the Us, or for that matter, by an American filmmaker. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (aka À bout de souffle) is being given the honor of a theatrical re-release in celebration of its 50th anniversary (news via Variety). The New Wave film was heralded as a groundbreaking innovation in filmmaking with its gritty cinematography and hyper jump cuts. Rialto Pictures, which the La Times cals "the gold standard of reissue distributors" handling re-releases of films from such acclaimed directors as Federico Fellini yo Akira Kurosawa, is responsible for the re-release of Breathless, which Rialto founder Bruce Goldstein says, "is in...

The William Castle Film Collection (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $80.95) assembles the master showman’s eight Columbia Pictures features in one set. Three (Zotz!, 13 Frightened Girls, The Old Dark House) are new to DVD. Only two are in color (Girls, House), but black and white works far better here to evoke film fear anyhow. Castle produced and directed them all (though he shares a producing credit with Hammer Films’ Anthony Hinds on the House remake). Three were scripted by Robb White (who also wrote Castle’s earlier gimmicky genre hits MacAbre and House On Haunted Hill) while Ray Russell and Robert Dillon racked up two scripts each and Starlog contributor Robert Bloch penned one.

The films (fantasies, thrillers, comedies) are grouped sort of by theme, two per disc. So, 13 Frightened Girls (a.k.a. The Candy Web) is teamed with 13 Ghosts for the triskaidekaphobia entry. Homicidal and Strait-jacket represent the murder,...

New York City's Film Forum will salute director Nicholas Ray with a 14-film retrospective, July 24 through August 6.

Born Nicholas Raymond Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin, Ray won a scholarship at age 16 to study drama and architecture at the University of Chicago, and would later earn a fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright. Following college, he moved to New York, where he joined Elia Kazan's Theatre of Action.

Upon moving to Hollywood, Ray was hired as an assistant for Kazan's first film, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." He made his directorial debut at Rko in 1947 with the noir classic "They Live By Night." After directing seven more pictures at Rko, Ray became a free agent and produced some of his most memorable work, including "Johnny Guitar," "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Bigger Than Life." Ray's Hollywood career ended after he collapsed from nervous exhaustion on a set in 1962. Remaining in ill health...

Bruce Goldstein, repertory program director of New York's Film Forum and founder of Rialto Pictures, will receive the Mel Novikoff Award at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs April 23 to May 7.

Named for the late San Francisco art and repertory film exhibitor Mel Novikoff (1922-1987), the award acknowledges an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.

The award will be presented on May 3 at 5 pm at the Castro Theatre, which will include an an onstage interview with Goldstein by Anita Monga, a 20-minute reel of Rialto Pictures trailers, and the screening of a 35mm print of Federico Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria," one of many films to benefit from Goldstein's dedication to restoring and revitalizing classics.

"We knew we had the right guy for this year's award when Bruce started recalling having dinner with Mel Novikoff in...

Marni Nixon will appear in person at The Film Forum for an on stage interview with Bruce Goldstein and award winning musical theater writer Stephen Cole. They will discuss her career and autobiography 'I Could Have Sung All Night', which will be avaliable for sale at the Forum. Admission is $20, $10 for Film Forum members. This event is on Monday February 23, and begins at 7:30pm.

Bank Night - the givea way series that helped movie theaters stay afloat during the Great Depression - is back at Film Forum in modern form.

Drawings for movie tickets and other merchandise will be held every Tuesday night during a monthlong series of movies from the '30s.

Film Forum will also lower its admission price to 35 cents (the average Manhattan ticket cost in 1933) for tomorrow's series opener, the innuendo-laden comedy "I'm No Angel" starring Mae West and Cary Grant, which is being shown with a program of vintage trailers,...

By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

DVD box sets remain the go-to gift for any film fan in your life -- they come in a range of sizes and prices, so that you can scale up or down depending on how much you like the recipient, and this time of year they're often discounted for last-minute holiday shoppers (and those treating themselves to a present). Here are the new or revamped box sets from 2008 that we've been eyeing:

Mystery Science Theater 3000 20th Anniversary Edition

Shout Factory, $59.99

"Mystery Science Theater 3000"'s inaugural release from Shout Factory (after many years and discs with Rhino Records) celebrates the show's 20th anniversary with a spiffy box set featuring four never-released-to-dvd episodes: "Werewolf" (with the "great" Joe Estevez), "Future War," "First Spaceship on Venus" and the long-awaited and highly coveted "Laserblast," the final episode on Comedy Central. The set also includes an 80-minute documentary on the show's MSTory,...