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Life moves fast in Big Sky country.

Supernatural alum Jensen Ackles has been promoted to series regular for the just-announced Season 3, TVLine has learned. His guest appearance in the ABC drama’s upcoming Season 2 finale was first revealed Thursday.

More from TVLineL.A. Law Revival Doa at Abcabc Orders The Rookie Spinoff to Series, Plus Gina Rodriguez Comedy and Hilary Swank DramaABC Renews Big Sky, The Wonder Years, A Million Little Things, Plus 2 Others

“I have tangled more than a few times with cartel elements,” Ackles’ character, Beau Arlen, tells Katheryn Winnick’s Jenny in the preview for the May...

You’d think the songs that we call one-hit wonders — I’ve always applied the term interchangeably to bands and songs — would, by their nature, have the quality of novelty singles. A lot of them do, like “Come On Eileen” or “I’m Too Sexy” or “Spirit in the Sky” or “867-5309 (Jenny)” or “96 Tears.” But occasionally there’s a one-hit wonder that’s so transcendent it qualifies as one of the greatest pop songs you’ve ever heard — which makes it all the more mysterious that the band in question never came within a million miles of replicating its sublimity or success. I’m thinking of songs like “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone, or the song that may be the greatest one-hit wonder of them all: “Take On Me” by the Norwegian synth-pop trio A-ha.

As the new documentary “A-ha: The Movie” makes clear,...

After a six-year hiatus, Korean cinema is set to return to the Chinese big screen in wide release at last.

This Friday, Dec. 3, Chinese cinemas will run the 2020 comedy “Oh! My Gran (Oh! Moon-Hee),” official posters said Wednesday. Directed by Jeong Se-Gyo and written by Kim Soo-jin, the title stars Na Moon-hee as Moon-hee, the titular spirited grandma suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who, along with her dog, are the only witnesses of a hit-and-run accident that leaves her grandchild unconscious. The film tells the story of the sleuthing that ensues when she remembers a clue to the culprit.

When Seoul deployed the Thaad U.S. missile defense system in 2016, Beijing expressed its displeasure with a ban on Korean film and culture imports. A Korean film hasn’t had a proper theatrical outing in the mainland since 2015’s “The Assassination,” co-written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon.

Seven Korean films were...

The Conners on Wednesday revealed that the late Roseanne Conner sought divine intervention before her untimely death.

Nearly three years after losing her mother, Darlene stumbled upon a note scribbled in Roseanne’s Bible — a note presumably written sometime in 2018, shortly before her accidental opioid overdose. The cry for help read as follows:

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“Dear God,...

Welcome Dan, aka Comic Concierge, back to Nerdly with his new YouTube channel dedicated to all things comics. From weekly new releases to graphic novels. Comics are for everyone but the key is finding the right one. Comic Concierge is here to help with that journey, with a range of videos discussing everything from weekly pick-ups, dollar-bin dives, comic book theory, analysis and more!

Top 10 Comic Covers for May 2021: Nightwing, Ice Cream Man, Black Panther and more…

With it being the end of the month I’m starting a new tradition of looking at the best covers to come out this May. Be warned this may be a different approach than you are used to.

Time Stamps:

00:00 – Opening

02:31- Jenny Zero #1

04:48 – Strange Adventures #10

08:06 – Ice Cream Man #24

10:37 – Snow Angels #4

12:52 – Black Widow #7

14:52 – Black Panther #25

16:37 – Dead Dogs Bite #3

19:15 – Rorschach #8

21:09 – X-Men #20

23:09 – Nightwing...

Each half-hour episode of the new anthology “Solos” is a theater actor’s dream, making it a fitting project for Constance Wu. “I’m a theater actor. I’ve been a theater actor since I was 10,” attests the star of the episode titled “Jenny,” in which she delivers a 20-minute monologue. “The way we shot was in five different chunks from different angles,” explains Wu in her exclusive interview with Gold Derby about the fifth installment of the science fiction miniseries (watch the video above). Amazon just released all seven episodes on their Amazon Prime Video platform in time for 2021 Emmy Awards eligibility; Wu contends in the Best Movie/Limited Supporting Actress race for her guest role.

She says about this type of material, “Having to do it for a job, it’s been a while, but I hope it won’t be so long a while again because I...

This week’s Big Sky this week put a pretty fine point on the nefarious goings-on down at the ol’ Kleinsasser ranch. And if you read no farther than the end of this paragraph, know this: Rand is one messed-up dude.

But you’re going to want to keep going, if for no other reason than to find out what fate befell Cassie after that sheriff’s deputy kidnapped her in the previous episode. Read on for the highlights of “No Better Than Dogs.”

More from TVLineA Million Little Things Recap: Happily Ever After, After AllThe Conners Reveals How Mark...

In 2008, the year Kings of Leon dominated airwaves with one-two punch of ”Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto appeared online with an obscure idea for the first-ever truly digital form of money: bitcoin. More than twelve years later, the Southern Rock band is now trying to use the hot technology at the core of cryptocurrencies to re-ignite their career, in what tech boosters say could make for a revolution in how artists sell their work and support themselves.

The technology is called an Nft,...

Eric Church will follow up his 2018 album Desperate Man with three new albums. Collectively titled Heart & Soul and spanning 24 tracks, the albums will be released over a week in April: Heart on April 16th, one titled & on the 20th, and Soul on April 23rd. Preorders begin January 29th.

The reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year announced his ambitious plan in a video dispatch to his fan club, the Church Choir. Heart features nine songs, including the previously released “Stick That in Your Country Song” and “Crazyland,” along with new song “Heart on Fire,...

Exclusive: The Vampire Diaries alum Jason MacDonald is set for a recurring role in Fox’s This Country, Jenny Bicks’ and Paul Feig’s remake of the BBC comedy.

In the half-hour series, a documentary crew goes to a small town to study young adults and their current concerns. Their focus is the daily lives of cousins Kelly (Chelsea Holmes) and Shrub Mallet (Sam Straley) and their idiosyncratic surroundings. Seann William Scott, Aya Cash, Taylor Ortega, YouTuber Krystal Smith and Justin Linville also star.

MacDonald will play Kelly’s (Holmes) father, Bobby.

This Country is based on the eponymous BBC Three series, which ran on the British public broadcaster’s youth-skewing network for three seasons from 2017-20. The BAFTA-winning series, which was written by and starred Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, was set in the Cotswolds in rural England.

This Country is produced by Lionsgate, BBC Studios, Fox Entertainment and Feigco Entertainment.

Exclusive: Desmin Borges is set for a recurring role in Fox’s This Country, Jenny Bicks’ and Paul Feig’s remake of the BBC comedy.

In the half-hour series, a documentary crew goes to a small town to study young adults and their current concerns. Their focus is the daily lives of cousins Kelly (Chelsea Holmes) and Shrub Mallet (Sam Straley) and their idiosyncratic surroundings. Seann William Scott, Aya Cash, Taylor Ortega, YouTuber Krystal Smith and Justin Linville also star.

Borges will play Jimmy Jameson, the rival editor to Cheryl (Cash) in the town next to Flatch. Borges will join the series, currently filming in North Carolina, beginning in Episode 2. Feig is directing the series’ first three episodes.

This Country is based on the eponymous BBC Three series, which ran on the British public broadcaster’s youth-skewing network for three seasons from 2017-20. The BAFTA-winning series,...

A stop-motion animated short film that took on a life of its own and snowballed into all sorts of creative items after Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was introduced to Sundance auds in 2011. We can now add a feature film to the mix. Currently in post-production and with a truncated title Marcel the Shell, the voice cast includes Isabella Rossellini and of course creative collab in Jenny Slate. The project that put Dean Fleischer-Camp on our map was 2016’s Fraud – an experimental, trippy journey into home movies from one family’s Youtube channel that you absolutely need to put in your viewing list.…...

These days, director William Dieterle is best remembered for his dreamy, stylized melodramas of the mid-to-late 1940s, but in his own time his greatest successes were mostly sturdy prestige biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. A key transitional film was 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced a supernatural element to Dieterle’s work and paved the way for a return to the German expressionist style in which he had worked as an actor. Before the delirious flights of fancy to come, however, Dieterle made one last return […]

The post Tennessee Johnson, I Spit on Your Grave and Adaptation: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

These days, director William Dieterle is best remembered for his dreamy, stylized melodramas of the mid-to-late 1940s, but in his own time his greatest successes were mostly sturdy prestige biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. A key transitional film was 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced a supernatural element to Dieterle’s work and paved the way for a return to the German expressionist style in which he had worked as an actor. Before the delirious flights of fancy to come, however, Dieterle made one last return […]

The post Tennessee Johnson, I Spit on Your Grave and Adaptation: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Fox has issued its first series order for the 2021-22 broadcast season.

The network has picked up mockumentary “This Country,” from writer Jenny Bicks and director Paul Feig, to series. The news comes around nine months after Fox ordered a pilot for the show based on the British series of the same name created by Daisy Cooper and Charlie Cooper.

“This Country” is a half-hour series which sees a documentary crew go to a small town to study young adults and their current concerns. Their focus is the daily lives of cousins Kelly (Chelsea Holmes) and Shrub Mallet (Sam Straley) and their idiosyncratic surroundings. The show will also star Seann William Scott, Aya Cash, Taylor Ortega, YouTuber Krystal Smith and Justin Linville.

“Fueled by Jenny and Paul’s imaginative wit and distinct comedic voices, we knew ‘This Country’ was a special project from the moment we heard their pitch,” said Fox Entertainment president Michael Thorn,...

Welcome back for another round of Severin Round-Up! The fine folks there keep digging through the cinematic tomb in search of treasures. Here’s three more they’ve unearthed:

Satan’s Slave (1980): At this juncture in life, I know next to nothing about Indonesian horror; the remake of this film that came out a short while ago certainly awakened a need to explore further. And while they are ostensibly similar, the original, as it turns out, can’t be beat for atmosphere and chills.

When the matriarch of the family dies, a father, his two children, and their housekeeper are left to fend for themselves. When mom comes back from the grave to visit, the son decides that some black magic is necessary to keep the monsters at bay.

Effective dead designs and a tightening grip of claustrophobia await those who delve into Satan’s Slave; director Sisworo Gautama Putra (Primitives...

Similar to how he did in 2015’s “Kill a Word,” Eric Church personifies emotions and troublesome states of mind in his new song “Crazyland.” The ballad, out Friday, is the third release off Church’s to-be-announced next album.

Church wrote the new track with Michael Heeney and Luke Laird (who himself released a solo song this week). Together, the songwriters ascribe human characteristics to words and phrases like “Sad,” “Regret,” “All My Fault,” and “I Told You So” — an accompanying lyric video emphasizes the words by capitalizing them like proper names.

MollywoodIt is an appreciable trend that actors of the newer generation seem to embrace any sort of role with joy.CrisSreenath BhasiIt's unlikely to be the image you would want people to have of you. A gigantic crown on your head, a hideous laugh, a chase on a rainy terrace, an assault to weepy background music and then the final smirk on the face. Roshan Mathew, a favourite with critics, had begun his film career with a forgettable rapist character, one among a few, assaulting a homemaker while proudly announcing that she’d be the sixth. Puthiya Niyamam, a movie with stars like Mammootty and Nayanthara in the lead, was remembered for other reasons. It was a year later that Roshan’s face became more familiar even as he played one of the many young people — most making their debut — in a college romance called Aanandam. Just as you thought...

Fred Willard, best known for his roles in Best in Show, This Is Spinal Tap, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Modern Family, died of natural causes at the age of 86, according to Variety.

“It is with a heavy heart that I share the news my father passed away very peacefully last night at the fantastic age of 86 years old,” his daughter Hope Willard tweeted on Saturday. “He kept moving, working and making us happy until the very end. We loved him so very much! We will miss him forever.”

Willard first came into national consciousness as the sidekick to Martin Mull’s host on the nightly Fernwood 2 Night. He is well known as part of the revolving troupe of actors – including Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy – assembled by director Christopher Guest.

“How lucky that we all got to enjoy Fred Willard’s gifts,” Guest’s wife,...

By Todd Garbarini

One of the most frustrating things that I find true of lackluster movies is that following the passage of time, usually several decades, a film that was initially, and often rightfully, considered a stinker is then later touted as “the original classic!” Generally, these accolades are tied-in with advertising to promote and ultimately sell product and give the uninitiated and the curious a reason to buy the film sight-unseen. Efren C. Piñon’s Blind Rage (1976) isn’t necessarily a bad film, it just isn’t a particularly good one. Despite its 82-minute running time, the film feels twice as long and that’s never a good sign.

Blind Rage is a good example of an interesting premise executed in a fashion that can best be described as pedestrian. A product of 1970’s “chopsocky” cinema, the opening credits play over the vocals of Helen Gamboa singing the title track,...

For the Centennial of one of Oscar's largely forgotten superstars, we asked Team Experience to pick one of her films to watch.

by Paolo Kagoaoan

We’ve done centennials here before but this one comes with some degrees of difficulty. It doesn’t help that someone changed her name from Phylis Lee Isley into the whitest name in the world, and that the person who gets more Google results for that name is a curler. As a Canadian I can’t say anything bad about curling, but shouldn't a Best Actress Academy Award winner be on at least equal standing to a Gold medallist? Look up all the women who have had five Oscar nominations and a win and imagine the world forgetting them. Explaining Jones to friends is equally difficult, even to people in the film industry who know her second husband's name, David O. Selznick.

I’d only...

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas ChauvinIn an earlier dispatch I wrote on the extraordinary documentary Pharos of Chaos, a captivating long-form interview with actor Sterling Hayden that came about when the West German critic and filmmaker, Wolf-Eckart Bühler, tracked him down to get permission to adapt his 1963 memoir, Wanderer. The film that resulted is Der Havarist (1984), and reading about both films in the festival catalog, I assumed that the documentary would be a mere supplement to this feature adaptation, yet the opposite turned out to be true. Pharos of Chaos ranges widely without a lot of historical detail and is reliant—but thereby thrives—on the screen presence of Hayden and bountiful detail of character. Der Havarist, far from a straight staging or telling of Hayden’s life, is more multi-form and Brechtian, using several actors (including Rüdiger Vogler and musician Hannes Waader) to play Hayden by reciting passages from the book,...

David O. Selznick’s marvelous romantic fantasy ode to Jennifer Jones was almost wholly unappreciated back in 1948. It’s one of those peculiar pictures that either melts one’s heart or doesn’t. Backed by a music score adapted from Debussy, just one breathy “Oh Eben . . . “ will turn average romantics into mush.

Portrait of Jennie

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&W w/ Color Insert / 1:37 flat Academy / 86 min. / Street Date October 24, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe.

Cinematography: Joseph H. August

Production Designers: J. MacMillan Johnson, Joseph B. Platt

Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin, also adapting themes from Claude Debussy; Bernard Herrmann

Written by Leonardo Bercovici, Peter Berneis, Paul Osborn, from the novella by Robert Nathan

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by William Dieterle

Once upon a time David O. Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie was an...

Imagine that you’re one of the most powerful people in the film business. The sun is just starting to set on another ominously hot September day, but everything looks beautiful and infinite through the floor-to-ceiling windows of your sleek Hollywood office. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that you’re living the dream, because even your wildest fantasies were never this good. The check you got to direct your second “Star Wars” movie had so many digits on it that it looked more like a business card, and the next check someone writes you is going to be blank. And then — pop! — it happens. You get another one of those magical Big Ideas that minted you as a modern titan: What the world truly needs right now is another live-action American remake of a phenomenally popular Japanese anime.

Perfect. A foolproof plan. Sure, Netflix wouldn’t tell you...

David O. Selznick’s absurdly over-cooked western epic is a great picture, even if much of it induces a kind of hypnotic, mouth-hanging-open disbelief. Is this monument to the sex appeal of Jennifer Jones, Kitsch in terrible taste, or have Selznick and his army of Hollywood talents found a new level of hyped melodramatic harmony? It certainly has the star-power, beginning with Gregory Peck as a cowboy rapist who learned his bedside manners from Popeye’s Bluto. It’s all hugely enjoyable.

Duel in the Sun

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1946 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 144 min. / Special Edition / Street Date August 15, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Butterfly McQueen, Charles Bickford, Tilly Losch.

Cinematography Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan and Harold Rosson

Production Designer J. McMillan Johnson

Film Editor Hal C. Kern, John Saure and William H. Ziegler

Original Music Dimitri Tiomkin

Written by Niven Busch,...

Ronald Colman: Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month in two major 1930s classics Updated: Turner Classic Movies' July 2017 Star of the Month is Ronald Colman, one of the finest performers of the studio era. On Thursday night, TCM presented five Colman star vehicles that should be popping up again in the not-too-distant future: A Tale of Two Cities, The Prisoner of Zenda, Kismet, Lucky Partners, and My Life with Caroline. The first two movies are among not only Colman's best, but also among Hollywood's best during its so-called Golden Age. Based on Charles Dickens' classic novel, Jack Conway's Academy Award-nominated A Tale of Two Cities (1936) is a rare Hollywood production indeed: it manages to effectively condense its sprawling source, it boasts first-rate production values, and it features a phenomenal central performance. Ah, it also shows its star without his trademark mustache – about as famous at the time as Clark Gable's. Perhaps...

This isn’t the only Alfred Hitchcock film for which the love does not flow freely, but his 1947 final spin on the David O. Selznick-go-round is more a subject for study than Hitch’s usual fun suspense ride. Gregory Peck looks unhappy opposite Selznick ‘discovery’ Alida Valli, while an utterly top-flight cast tries to bring life to mostly irrelevant characters. Who comes off best? Young Louis Jourdan, that’s who.

The Paradine Case

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 125 min. / Street Date May 30, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Gregory Peck, Alida Valli, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton, Louis Jourdan, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Tetzel.

Cinematography Lee Garmes

Production Designer J. McMillan Johnson

Film Editors John Faure, Hal C. Kern

Original Music Franz Waxman

Writing credits James Bridie, Alma Reville, David O. Selznick from the novel by Robert Hichens

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

There...

Makoto Shinkai, the rising Japanese animator whose heartbreaking, hyper-saturated films marry the delicate beauty of Hayao Miyazaki with the workaday wistfulness of Yasujirō Ozu, has always gravitated towards stories that take place in the space between people.

His breathtaking 22-minute breakthrough, a homemade project called “Voices of a Distant Star,” lucidly illustrated Shinkai’s preoccupation with distance and how the immediacy of modern communication has had the perverse effect of clarifying our isolation from one another. Effectively a more compelling (and much more compact) anime precursor to “Interstellar,” the 2002 short traces a high school crush as it’s stretched across the length of an intergalactic war — the boy stays on Earth and the girl goes off to fight aliens in the farthest reaches of space, but their feelings for one another are soon contorted by the cruelty of relative time.

Read More: Makoto Shinkai’s ‘Your Name’ Joins Studio Ghibli...

Expatriate Francis Lederer is a cultured menace in UA's revisit of the Dracula myth, made just before Hammer Films staked its claim on the horror genre. Avid Hitchcock fans may find the storyline very familiar, when European cousin Bellac strikes up a 'special' relationship with his American cousin Rachel. The Return of Dracula Blu-ray Olive Films 1958 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 77 min. / Street Date October 18, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Francis Lederer, Norma Eberhardt, Ray Stricklyn, Virginia Vincent, John Wengraf. Cinematography Jack MacKenzie Film Editor Sherman A. Rose Original Music Gerald Fried Written by Pat Fielder Produced by Arthur Gardner, Jules V. Levy Directed by Paul Landres

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Levy-Gardner-Laven producing combo, minus Arnold Laven this time out, assemble what was probably their most successful drive-in cheapie for United Artists. Promoting their secretary Pat Fielder to screenwriter, they had already done okay with a contemporary, non-Gothic vampire story...

On the centennial of the Easter Uprising and just a few days past St. Patrick's Day, Whv present's Neil Jordan's biopic epic of Ireland's most beloved patriotic hero -- a militant who stood up to the English occupiers. It's the role that should have cemented Liam Neeson's stardom. Michael Collins Blu-ray The Warner Archive Collection 1996 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 132 min. / Street Date March 22, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Julia Roberts, Alan Rickman, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Charles Dance, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Ian McElhinney. Cinematography Chris Menges Film Editors J. Patrick Duffner, Tony Lawson Original Music Elliott Goldenthal Produced by Stephen Wooley Written and Directed by Neil Jordan

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Irish politics must be in ascendance, as this St. Patrick's Day Warner Bros. has bumped its Irish patriot biopic up to Blu-ray status. A DVD of it came out only a year before. It's...

Two obscure Robert Wise titles reach Blu-ray release this month, both direct follow-ups to some of the auteur’s more iconic works. First up is 1962’s Two for the Seesaw, a romantic drama headlined by Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine following the famed 1961 title West Side Story. But the decade prior would fine Wise unveiling one of his most stilted efforts, The Captive City (1952), a sort-of noir procedural which followed his sci-fi social commentary The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Providing John Forsythe with his first starring role (a performer who would find his most famous roles decades later on television, as Blake Carrington in “Dynasty,” and of course, the famous voice in “Charlie’s Angels”), it has to be one of the most unenthusiastic renderings of organized crime ever committed to celluloid. A scrappy journalist defies the mob ruled police force and a slick Mafia boss in a tired...

Les Soviets plus l’électricitéFrance’s central place within film culture may have its ups and downs when it comes to adventurous film-making, but its reputation as a hub of international film viewing holds strong. Yet beyond the central role of Cannes in the yearly festival rigmarole, and references to the riches of the Paris film-going scene and to vaguely understood state subsidies, little attention is actually paid to the wider infrastructures of a film-going culture which, after all, provided more ticket sales for Uncle Boonmee than the rest of the world combined. To say this is not to trumpet French exceptionalism far and wide: Olaf Möller has spoken lovingly of the key role of film programming on West German television in the 1970s, and Italian critics would no doubt be able to provide similar insight into the workings of Rai 3 or the myriad smaller festivals which continue to...

A few years ago the editors of Shadowlocked asked me to compile a list of what was initially to be, the ten greatest movie matte paintings of all time. A mere ten selections was too slim by a long shot, so my list stretched considerably to twenty, then thirty and finally a nice round fifty entries. Even with that number I found it wasn’t easy to narrow down a suitably wide ranging showcase of motion picture matte art that best represented the artform. So with that in mind, and due to the surprising popularity of that 2012 Shadowlocked list (which is well worth a visit, here Ed), I’ve assembled a further fifty wonderful examples of this vast, vital and more extensively utilised than you’d imagine – though now sadly ‘dead and buried’ – movie magic.

It would of course be so easy to simply concentrate on the well known, iconic,...

"The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth–that, and no more; with sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses–the delicacy, too–belonging to that time."—"The Professor's House," Willa CatherHis last words, in a hospital four months later, are said to have been 'Mind your own business!' addressed to an enquirer after the state of his bowels. Friends got to the studio just before the wreckers' ball. Pictures, a profusion, piles of them, littered the floor: of 'a world that will never be seen except in pictures'"—"The Pound Era," Hugh Kenner***Heart Of FIREOften when I go to a movie, usually one made before 1960, I think about the opening scene of The Red Shoes, of Marius Goring and his...

Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...

Olivia de Havilland on Turner Classic Movies: Your chance to watch 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' for the 384th time Olivia de Havilland is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” star today, Aug. 2, '15. The two-time Best Actress Oscar winner (To Each His Own, 1946; The Heiress, 1949) whose steely determination helped to change the way studios handled their contract players turned 99 last July 1. Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing any de Havilland movie rarities, e.g., Universal's cool thriller The Dark Mirror (1946), the Paramount comedy The Well-Groomed Bride (1947), or Terence Young's British-made That Lady (1955), with de Havilland as eye-patch-wearing Spanish princess Ana de Mendoza. On the other hand, you'll be able to catch for the 384th time a demure Olivia de Havilland being romanced by a dashing Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood, as TCM shows this 1938 period adventure classic just about every month. But who's complaining? One the...

The craft stores know something you don’t know. That’s right. It’s time for the 2014 Halloween Season TV Preview! This is where we let you know about the time and channel for everything we can find on TV having to do with Halloween or Horror for the month of October and sometimes late September. This will include holiday specials, horror movies, TV show premier dates and Halloween episodes of your favorite series as well as documentaries that might be considered scary. Anything and everything that might get your ghost good.

I always start with TCM because you can tell they take such care in developing their lineup. Be sure to check out their Thursday nights. This is truly a unique year for that station.

A quick note: We are not going to be able to get it all. So many different markets and channels and providers… it’s...

Apart from the three sneak screening titles that will stir up the buzz in the coming days, Julie Huntsinger and Tom Luddy’s 40th edition of the Telluride Film Festival excels in bringing a concentration of solid docus from the likes of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog who this year cuts the ribbon on a theatre going by his name and introduces Death Row, a pinch of Berlin Film Fest items (Gloria, Slow Food Story, Fifi Howls from Happiness) Palme d’Or winner (this year Abdellatif Kechiche will be celebrated), upcoming Sony Pictures Classics items (Tim’s Vermeer, The Lunchbox), Venice to Telluride to Tiff titles (Bethlehem, Tracks and Under the Skin), the latest Jason Reitman film (Labor Day) and the barely known docu-home-movie whodunit (by helmers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine) The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden which features narration from the likes of Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger and Connie Nielsen.

"I felt the past closing around me like a fog, filling me with a nameless fear..."

A cinema tragedy: the phrase can probably best be exemplified by the fact that Charles Laughton directed only one film, and that film is so great that one can only wonder at what we've been deprived of.

Another actor, Martin Gabel, a character thesp with a bulbous head and a genuine talent for playing creeps, likewise directed one film only: the blacklist put paid to his career. The level of tragedy is harder to assess, since Gabel's only movie as director is very good, but not a masterpiece on the level of Night of the Hunter. But The Lost Moment (1947) is mysterious, romantic, atmospheric and altogether intriguing; and if Gabel were set to build on this starting point and improve still further, we may well have been deprived of a truly major cinematic talent.

I’ve finally made it to the grand master of the bravura sequence, or, more specifically, of the ending bravura sequence, King Vidor.

It isn’t surprising that a producer as knowledgeable as Selznick often ran to the services of the two major champions of “slice of cake” cinema and strong sequences, Hitchcock (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case) and Vidor (Bird of Paradise, Duel in the Sun, Light’s Diamond Jubilee, even Ruby Gentry), who, without a doubt, made the best films for Selznick.

Love Never Dies, Wild Oranges, Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread, Comrade X, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and their terrific denouements once made me write that Vidor was a director of film endings. No doubt I was exaggerating, but it isn’t for nothing that he hesitated for a long time between several different endings for The Crowd. I was also exaggerating because...

Scripted by Peter Morgan in a manner that is marshmallow to the hard treacle toffee of his Frost/Nixon, this is a consoling, romantic, inspirational movie in the mid-1940s manner of Portrait of Jennie and A Guy Named Joe, which the film's co-producer, Steven Spielberg, remade as Always. The film begins with as stunning a special-effects sequence as I've ever seen, in which a tsunami sweeps over an Asian holiday resort. It then proceeds to tell three rather dull stories of people having near-death experiences: a French TV reporter (Cécile de France) who survives the tsunami; an American blue-collar worker (Matt Damon) embarrassed by his ability to get in touch with the hereafter; and a working-class lad from south London who wants to contact his dead twin brother.

The tales are eventually intertwined at a London book fair in a way many will find ludicrous and others be swept away by.

“I am not an ideologue,” José Luis Guerín says matter-of-factly. “I need characters.” Judging by the lukewarm response that has greeted his latest film, Guest, it’s a dicey stance for a director of art house cinema to take these days. Early reviewers have praised Guerín’s images but questioned the structure of the film, which often finds him wandering through Third World cities and inviting conversations about hot-button topics like immigration, colonialism, and religion. That he does so without any pretense of deep sociopolitical analysis makes Guest something of an anachronism: it’s a politically-interested film in an observational mode, more humble and curious than didactic.

In 2006, after premiering his previous film, In the City of Sylvia, Guerín decided to spend a year traveling the world by accepting every festival invitation he was offered. He carried a consumer-grade Dv camera with him wherever he went and very gradually built...

Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner in Robert Siodmak's The Killers Ava Gardner is Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month of November. The Gardner film series begins tonight with a presentation of about a dozen movies in which the sultry actress can be seen in starring and supporting roles, and in lots of bit parts as well. I'm not a fan of Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), a well-regarded film noir that earned the director an Academy Award nomination, but Gardner is excellent in a star-making turn and so is Elwood Bredell's black-and-white cinematography. Albert Lewin's generally dismissed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) I find quite affecting, chiefly because of Gardner's performance as a woman who finds love in death. Though not as gripping or atmospheric, Pandora reminds me of William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie, released three years earlier. Ava Gardner, in a role intended for Judy Garland...

Like other film lovers of my generation, I was not yet born when Phylis Isley began her auspicious acting career during America's post-wwii boom. With no revival houses in the small Virginia town in which I grew up, I first saw the films of the luminous actress whom we now know as Jennifer Jones on a black-and-white television screen in the early 1960s. Some of the classic films starring the iconic yet underrated actress that left early, indelible impressions were Love Is A Many Splendored Thing (1955), The Portrait of Jennie (1948), Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), and Madame Bovary (1949). Each performance evokes a rare level of passion and a connection to other worlds, which became the actress's trademarks. They awakened in me an exuberance for classic American film that...

"Jennifer Jones, 90, an actress who won an Academy Award for playing a saint in The Song of Bernadette and became a popular sinner in Hollywood melodramas including Duel in the Sun and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif," reports Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post.

"Jennifer Jones remains one of the more controversial actresses in the Hollywood cinema," writes Richard Lippe in Film Reference. "In general, her professional and personal involvement with David O Selznick has been given a prominence that has colored assessments of Jones's distinctive contribution to 1940s cinema. Interestingly, the central issue is not that Jones lacked talent or screen presence. The longstanding criticism is that Selznick, because of his commitment to Jones, had no critical distance and, with King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, tried to fashion an erotic identity for her, making Jones into a ridiculous creation." Still,...

The late Jennifer Jones experienced the classic Tinseltown story of discovery and stardom, but also endured depression and death. Brittany Murphy was just the latest to follow in her footsteps

Mrs Simon, Mrs Selznick, Mrs Walker, Phylis Isley, Jennifer Jones – all of those names were offered her, like landlines in the storm, and she gazed on all of them with insufficient belief or conviction. There was a time, in the 80s and the 90s, when I did everything I could to get Jennifer Jones to speak to me, or just to see me so that she might decide she could speak to me. And all the time I was asking her, or her lawyers, I had another Mrs Selznick crowing in my ear in her best Pierre Hotel witch act, "She doesn't have anything to say. She won't remember. She doesn't care to remember."

Well, she's dead now, at 90. Gore Vidal...

Hollywood star who won an Oscar for her role as a saintly peasant girl in the 1943 film The Song of Bernardette

On the day of her 25th birthday, 2 March 1944, a fresh-faced, hitherto unknown performer stepped on to the stage of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, in Los Angeles, to receive her best actress Oscar for her performance in the title role of The Song of Bernadette. It was officially the debut of Jennifer Jones, who has died aged 90. She had appeared four years earlier under her real name of Phyllis Isley, but only in a Dick Tracy serial and a B-western. (Actually, she had been born Phylis, but had added an "l".)

Ingrid Bergman, nominated for her performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls, said of The Song of Bernadette: "I cried all the way through, because Jennifer was so moving and because I realised I had lost the award." Jones,...

The world lost one of the last actresses of Hollywood's golden era yesterday, as Jennifer Jones passed away. At 90 years old, she certainly lived a long and successful life, though certainly one that was touched by its share of tragedy.

Jones is probably best known for her Oscar-winning performance in The Song of Bernadette, and for being the wife of legendary producer David O. Selznick. But she starred or costarred in a number of great films, including Duel in the Sun, Since You Went Away, Portrait of Jennie, Madame Bovary, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and many more. She was right up there with Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, but her intensely private life didn't encourage the kind of stardom they enjoyed. But she was an enchanting and luminous actress, and very far removed from the majority of actresses working today. If you've never seen a Jones film,...

Actress Jennifer Jones, who won an Academy Award for her performance in The Song of Bernadette, died Thursday at her home in Malibu; she was 90. The recipient of four other Oscar nominations, Jones was known as Phylis Walker early in her career, when she was married to actor Robert Walker, whom she met in acting school. However, it was producer David O. Selznick who "discovered" her, changed her name, groomed her for a big-screen career -- and later married her after she divorced Walker. Under Selznick's guidance, she made her first big film, The Song of Bernadette, the story of a French peasant girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary near the village of Lourdes. The movie catapulted her to fame and an Oscar, and roles in 40s hits such as Since You Went Away, Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie, and the notorious-for-its-time Duel in the Sun followed. In the 50s she appeared in the cult hit Beat the Devil, the hit drama Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and the massive flop A Farewell to Arms, produced by her husband. After Selznick's death in 1965, she mostly retired from acting, making her last screen appearance in the disaster movie The Towering Inferno. Jones is survived by her son, Robert Walker Jr....