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Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

Here are the coolest horror collectibles unveiled this week!

Thanksgiving Steelbook 4K from Sony

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving carves into Steelbook 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital on October 15 via Sony. The slasher is presented in 4K with Dolby Vision, approved by director Eli Roth, and Dolby Atmos.

Jeff Rendell penned the script, based on the faux-trailer from 2007’s Grindhouse. Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, and Gina Gershon star.

Special features include: two new making-of featurettes; commentary by Roth and Rendell; deleted and extended scenes; outtakes; Behind the Screams; Gore Galore; and Massachusetts Movies: Eli & Jeff’s Early Films; a letter to the fans from Roth.

The Thing Pop from Funko

As if the inclusion of The...

Darryl Hickman, a child actor in Leave Her to Heaven and The Grapes of Wrath, died at 92 on Wednesday, May 22, his family said. No cause was given.

Hickman appeared in more than 40 films, having been a contract player at Paramount and MGM.

He portrayed the youngest member of the Joad family, Winfield, in John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, as well as a role as the younger version of Van Heflin’s character in the 1946 noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

In 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven, Hickman played Danny, younger brother to Cornel Wilde’s Richard. Danny was disabled by polio and when he comes to live with Richard and his wife, Ellen (Gene Tierney). He drowns by Ellen’s hand in the middle of a lake due to jealousy of Richard’s affection for the boy.

In 1951, he briefly retired from acting to enter a monastery,...

Exclusive: Zero Gravity Management has signed Nigerian filmmaker Editi Effiong, whose debut feature The Black Book last year established itself as Netflix’s most viewed English-language African film.

Debuting at No. 3 on the platform in September 2023, The Black Book made Netflix’s Top 10 in more than 69 countries. The revenge thriller centers on Paul Edima (Richard Mofe-Damijo), a bereaved deacon who takes justice into his own hands when his son is framed for a kidnapping, fighting a corrupt police gang to absolve him. Effiong wrote, directed and produced the film, which was made for $1 million.

A creative entrepreneur with business interests in advertising, technology and film, Effiong in 2018 founded Anakle Films, a company dedicated to telling the next generation of African stories through film, which also saw Netflix snap up its first two theatrical releases, Up North and The Setup. In 2020, the company partnered with the U.S. Mission in Nigeria and U.

At a moment of war and deep division in the Middle East, a film co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian is already a victory in and of itself. But the gripping sports drama Tatami, which follows a female judo champ whose career is severely jeopardized by Iran’s government during an international tournament, is more than just a promising collaboration between two filmmakers hailing from opposing sides of the conflict.

Set during one nail-biting day at the world championship in Tbilisi, Tatami — whose title refers to the mat where judoka fighters engage in combat — is both a riveting story of an athlete trying to achieve gold for the first time, and a searing political thriller where Iranian women are subjected to persecution, intimidation and possibly kidnapping at the hands of their country’s far-reaching authoritarian regime. Vibrantly helmed and performed, with co-director and Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

FilmOne Entertainment, the Nigerian distributor and production company, has gone into production on the first movie to cash in on the $1 million film fund it launched with China’s Huahua Media and South Africa’s Empire Entertainment in December.

“Kambili,” by director Kayode Kasum, is the first of what FilmOne co-founder Moses Babatope expects to be a slate of eight-10 films that the fund will co-finance. The tripartite pact lays the groundwork for stronger ties between the creative industries of Africa’s two biggest economies and the world’s second-largest film market, at a time when the Chinese government has aggressively moved to boost its soft power across the continent.

FilmOne announced in November that it would be partnering with Nigeria’s Corporate World Entertainment and Huahua on the first co-production between the two countries, “30 Days in China,” the latest installment of the hit comedy franchise starring Nigerian actor-comedian Ayo Makun,...

Boxing Wednesdays. Wrestling on Fridays. Stoker Thompson is on Paradise City’s Wednesday card, fighting after the main event. He’s been 20 years in the game and is sure he’s just one punch away from big paydays. But there’s one thing Stoker doesn’t yet know: his manager wants him to take a dive tonight.

The Set-Up comes out swinging as one of the great films about the so-called sweet science. Robert Wise directs, shaping real-time events into an acclaimed and unsparing film-noir look at the stale-air venues, bloodthirsty fans, ring savagery and delusional dreams of boxing’s palooka world. Robert Ryan embraces perhaps his fi nest screen hour as Stoker. Audrey Totter, an icon of the noir genre like Ryan, plays Stoker’s steadfast wife. In a sport that would take their last flicker of dignity, the Thompsons are reclaiming theirs.

Robert Wise directs film noir icons...

Warning: spoilers for Pet Sematary ahead!

The 2019 remake of Pet Sematary is now busy terrifying a whole new generation of Stephen King fans, but it's technically been giving people nightmares ever since the publication of King's horror novel back in 1983. The modern take on the story follows the same basic story, but it still makes a few shocking changes to its source material. If you're curious about how King's book ends rather than the new twist on the story, we're here to break things down for you. Let's get spooky, shall we?

The Set-Up

The book begins by introducing us to Louis Creed, a doctor and father of two from Chicago who gets a job opportunity to be director of the University of Maine's campus health service. He and his wife Rachel leap at the opportunity for a more easygoing life and more time to spend with their young kids,...

So much time, so few movies to see. Scratch that. Reverse it.

Running a little later than usual this year, the 2018 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival gets under way this coming Thursday, screening approximately 88 films and special programs over the course of the festival’s three-and-a-half days, beginning Thursday evening, and no doubt about it, this year’s schedule, no less than any other year, will lay out a banquet for classic film buffs, casual film fans and harder-core cinephiles looking for the opportunity to see long-time favorites as well as rare and unusual treats on the big screen. I’ve attended every festival since its inaugural run back in 2010, and since then if I have not reined in my enthusiasm for the festival and being given the opportunity to attend it every year, then I have at least managed to lasso my verbiage. That first year I wrote about...

Kevin O'Morrison, a playwright and character actor who appeared in such films as The Set-Up and Sleepless in Seattle, has died. He was 100.

O'Morrison died Dec. 11 at a senior living facility in Lynnwood, Wash., his cousin Jim Davidson told The Hollywood Reporter.

O'Morrison played a prizefighter in the classic film noir boxing drama The Set-Up (1949), directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan, and was another pugilist in The Golden Gloves Story (1950). In Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993), he portrayed Meg Ryan's father, Cliff.

Occasionally billed as Kenny O'Morrison, he made his movie debut in...

John Flynn's The Outfit (1974), a brutally efficient bit of business based glancingly on Richard Stark’s procedurally inquisitive and poetic crime novel of the same name, is a movie that feels like it’s never heard of a rounded corner; it’s blunt like a 1970 Dodge Monaco pinning a couple of killers against a Dumpster and a brick wall. I say “glancingly” because the movie, as Glenn Kenny observed upon The Outfit’s DVD release from the Warner Archives, is based less on the chronologically unconcerned novel than an idea taken from it. On the page Stark's protagonist, the unflappable Parker, his face altered by plastic surgery to the degree that past associates often take a fatal beat too long to realize to whom it is they are speaking, assumes the detached perspective of a bruised deity, undertaking the orchestration of a series of robberies administered to Mob-run businesses...

In 1985, the movie version of “Clue” was released, and there was predictable teeth-gnashing among critics over the blasphemy of making a feature film based on a board game. But as “Clue” co-star Michael McKean noted years later, “There’s a very good movie called ‘The Set-Up,’ Robert Wise boxing picture, which is based on a poem that’s barely one page long about a boxing match. You could make a good movie, or a sh-tty one, based on anything.” So let’s be clear, then: “The Angry Birds Movie” isn’t pointless because it’s based on an app. It...

Photo by Donnacha Kenny"Congratulations, Tom; you're one of the lucky eight per cent!" —Stir of Echoes (1999)Joliet, Illinois is probably the American city which more people have dreamed more fervently of escaping than any other. But after spending four hours in 'Prison Town'—long synonymous far and wide with incarceration—I was sad to leave; I'll be glad one day to return. Fortunately, such matters are questions of personal choice. Many of the area's residents, including those not serving custodial sentences, have little realistic option but to remain—trapped by personal, social and/or economic circumstances that can feel as confining as any 6-by-8 cell. "Joliet, or "J-Town", is racially diverse and is known as a crime-ridden city, although the area has shown much improvement since the 1990's... The east side is generally known as the ghetto side and the west side is known as middle class, even though...

The Set-Up

Written by Art Cohn

Directed by Robert Wise

U.S.A., 1949

A boxer’s career is a strange beast. Keeping in mind that all professional athletes eventually feel the strain caused by years of exertion on their body, boxing is a different matter altogether. The objective is, literally, to beat the other fellow up before he or she strikes one too many hits on one’s noggin first. Small wonder, then, that boxers in their early to mid 30s are considered old, past their prime. One good punch however, one great right or left hook can shoot a career into the stratosphere. The problem is that for so many unfortunate fighters, they either lack the skill or the luck to land said potent strike. Of all the sports analogies that can relate to the proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, few can compare to that of the boxer, a...

Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...

The Digital Era: Real-time Films From 2000 To Today

40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, film purists warned that digital still didn’t look as good as celluloid, but that didn’t stop at least three innovative filmmakers from boldly going where no filmmaker had gone before. Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) was the first star-supported (Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgard, Holly Hunter, among many others) single-shot project since Rope, underlining that earlier film’s timelessness. If Run Lola Run could do one story three times, then Timecode would do three or four stories one time: the movie is four separate ninety-minute shots shown all at the same time, each in one quadrant of the screen. Where do you look?...

What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them apart from fewer than 50 of their filmmaking peers? Sorry, “comedy” or “drama” isn’t right. If you’ve looked at this article’s headline, you’ve probably already guessed that the answer is that they’ve all made “real-time” films, or films that seemed to take about as long as their running time.

The real-time film has long been a sub-genre without much critical attention, but the time of the real-time film has come. Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), which was shot and edited so as to seem like a real-time film, floated away with the most 2014 Oscars,...

A quarter-century ago, Kevin Costner hit a double-play, following up "Bull Durham" with "Field of Dreams" and becoming king of the sports movie. Twenty-five years later, as "Field of Dreams" marks its 25th anniversary (it was released on April 21, 1989), Costner is back with "Draft Day." The movie's about football, not baseball, and Costner's character plays in the executive suite, not on the field, but his mere presence still offers a reminder of great sports movies past.

And after all, isn't nostalgia a key element of sports movies? "Field of Dreams" makes this explicit -- we long for the sports heroes of our childhood, for a supposed long-gone golden age of our preferred sport, as a way of connecting with our past and bridging the generational divide that separates us as adults from our parents. Sports movies offer more than just the drama of winners and losers, or the journey from dream to achievement,...

Audrey Totter, the radio actress who became a silver screen star by playing femme fatales in 1940s film noir including Lady in the Lake has died. Totter's daughter, Mea Lane, tells the Los Angeles Times that her mother died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 95 and had recently suffered a stroke. Totter was under contract with MGM starting in 1944. After landing a small part in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Totter went on to a series of roles as tough talking blondes. Her breakthrough came with Lady in the Lake, the 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe detective tale.

Stylish film noir star known for her role in Lady in the Lake

I was kissed by Audrey Totter. At least, I share that experience with anybody who has seen Lady in the Lake (1947), when Totter plants her lips on the subjective camera, the surrogate for Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. The film, directed by Montgomery, and based on the Raymond Chandler novel, was shot so that the whole story is seen literally through Marlowe's eyes.

The role of the gold-digging tigress magazine editor Adrienne Fromsett, who hires the private eye to find the missing wife of her publisher, was a breakthrough for Totter, who has died aged 95. Previously, she had been in a dozen movies, her hair colour and accent varying so much from film to film that she dubbed herself "the feminine Lon Chaney of the MGM lot".

Montgomery chose Totter for the part because of her versatility as a radio actor.

Los Angeles (AP) - Audrey Totter, the radio actress who became a silver screen star by playing femme fatales in 1940s film noir including "Lady in the Lake," has died.

Totter's daughter, Mea Lane, tells the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/JrDjQZ) her mother died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 95 and had recently had a stroke.

Totter was under contract with MGM starting in 1944. After landing a small part in "The Postman Always Rings Twice," Totter went on to a series of roles as tough-talking blondes.

Her breakthrough came with "Lady in the Lake," the 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe detective tale. She also appeared in the thriller "The Unsuspected" and the boxing drama "The Set-Up."

After retiring to raise a family, Totter later resurfaced on television.

___

Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com...

Peter O’Toole: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ actor, eight-time Oscar nominee dead at 81 (photo: Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence in David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’) Stage, film, and television actor Peter O’Toole, an eight-time Best Actor Academy Award nominee best remembered for his performance as T.E. Lawrence in David Lean’s epic blockbuster Lawrence of Arabia, died on Saturday, December 14, 2013, at a London hospital following "a long illness." Peter O’Toole was 81. The Irish-born O’Toole (on August 2, 1932, in Connemara, County Galway) began his film career with three supporting roles in 1960 releases: Robert Stevenson’s Disney version of Kidnapped; John Guillermin’s The Day They Robbed the Bank of England; and Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents, starring Anthony Quinn as an Inuit man accused of murder. Two years later, O’Toole became a star following the release of Lawrence of Arabia, which grossed an astounding $44.82 million in North America back in 1962 (approx.

Femme fatale Audrey Totter: Film noir actress and MGM leading lady dead at 95 (photo: Audrey Totter ca. 1947) Audrey Totter, film noir femme fatale and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player best remembered for the mystery crime drama Lady in the Lake and, at Rko, the hard-hitting boxing drama The Set-Up, died after suffering a stroke and congestive heart failure on Thursday, December 12, 2013, at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles County. Reportedly a resident at the Motion Picture and Television Home in Woodland Hills, Audrey Totter would have turned 96 on Dec. 20. Born in Joliet, Illinois, Audrey Totter began her show business career on radio. She landed an MGM contract in the mid-’40s, playing bit roles in several of the studio’s productions, e.g., the Clark Gable-Greer Garson pairing Adventure (1945), the Hedy Lamarr-Robert Walker-June Allyson threesome Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), and, as an adventurous hitchhiker riding with John Garfield,...

Audrey Totter, the blond starlet who made her mark in such 1940s film noir classics as Lady in the Lake, The Set-Up and High Wall, has died. She was 95. Totter, who had a stroke and suffered from congestive heart failure, died Thursday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center, her daughter Mea told the Los Angeles Times. A former radio actress in Chicago and New York who signed a contract with MGM for $300 a week in 1944, Totter had a career in films that was short-lived but memorable. Her breakthrough came in Lady in the Lake

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Born to Kill

Written by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay

Directed by Robert Wise

U.S.A., 1947

Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) is in Reno, Nevada for a few days to settle a divorce. She stays at a nearby ‘bed and breakfast’ type establishment where the fun natured caretaker Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard) and neighbor Laurey Palmer (Isabel Jewell) seem to spend more time drinking and laughing than anything else. Upon visiting a casino one evening, Helen makes eye contact with a tall, square-jawed handsome man named Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney), whose family name suites him perfectly. Sam, prone to violent outbursts driven by jealousy and lust, knows Laurey too, even having dated her. When discovering she has a new boyfriend, Sam murders them both in cold blood in a manner that would make Jason Voorhees proud. Sam them follows Helen to San Francisco, hoping to cozy up with the her as well.

From a silent Hitchcock movie to the story of a boxer who dreams of being a great violinist, Danny Leigh explores cinema's enduring love of the fight game

Boxing was there at the very dawn of cinema. As early as 1894, film-makers were shooting prize fights: the fast and furious physical spectacle was perfect for the new medium of motion pictures. Soon, scores of directors had been drawn to boxing – not just for the violence but for the drama of fighters' lives. In 1927, Hitchcock made The Ring, a silent tale of a pugilistic love triangle that is his one and only original screenplay. While many boxing movies reached greatness, even the most ordinary could still thrill with a canny sprinkling of what became genre staples: wise old trainers, crooked promoters, fixes, comebacks, wives who can't bear to look. In fact, plenty of boxing films are really about the women behind the men.

Tension

Directed by John Berry

Screenplay by Allen Rivkin

U.S.A., 1949

Who is the infamous femme fatale? From what dark depths of humanity was she born and will men ever be able to truly resist her seductive moves? Such queries can spark endless discussions, among them the quality of the actresses who have portrayed them throughout the decades, especially in the early days of the noir genre. What appears to be all showmanship and flash hides the real talents of the actresses interpreting the roles. Not everyone can pull off the task with flying colours. Some actresses simply have the ‘fatale bug.’ Jane Greer was one of the most popular of her contemporaries, her role in Out of the Past being the most celebrated. Another talented, seductive thespian of the time that should not be overlooked is Audrey Totter, who made quite a career for herself with a great many roles in noir films.

The Movie Pool feels oh-so-pretty over the West Side Story 50th Anniversary Blu-ray!

Blu-ray Specs

Release Date: November 15, 2011

Rating: Not rated

Running Time: 153 minutes

Aspect Ratio: 2.20:1

Audio: English 7.1 DTS-hd Master Audio, English 4.0 Dolby Digital, Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, French 5.1 DTS

Subtitles: English for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Spanish, French

Special Features: "Pow! The Dances of West Side Story" viewing mode, Music Machine viewing mode, "A Place for Us: West Side Story's Legacy" documentaries, West Side memories, Storyboard-to-film comparison montage, theatrical trailers.

Audio Commentary: Song commentary by Stephen Sondheim

The Set-up

A New York City gang member (Richard Beymer) falls in love with a girl (Natalie Wood) from a rival Puerto Rican gang. When the two gangs battle each other, the pair find their secret love tested, especially when tragedy strikes. Winner of ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1961.

Directed by: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

The Delivery...

"Born to play beautifully tortured, angry souls, the actor Robert Ryan was a familiar movie face for more than two decades in Hollywood's classical years, his studio ups and downs, independent detours and outlier adventures paralleling the arc of American cinema as it went from a national pastime to near collapse." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "A little prettier and he might have been one of the golden boys of the golden age. But there could be something a touch menacing about his face (something open and sweet too), which bunched as tight as a fist, and his towering height (he stood 6 foot 4) at times loomed like a threat. The rage boiled up in him so quickly. It made him seem dangerous…. The two dozen features in a Film Forum series dedicated to Ryan and opening [today] includes dazzlers, solid genre fare, some curiosities and a few duds. Most...

"It's all in the eyes," Robert Ryan once said of film acting. "That's where you do most of your work."

But was it true of Ryan himself? His own narrow and heavily lidded brown eyes often registered as black disks in the lighting schemes of the late 40s and early 50s—that is, when they weren't overwhelmed by his massive forehead and his thick tangle of dark hair, or a pair of tragic eyebrows that threatened to merge with the numerous crags in his face as he entered middle age. Not to mention his lanky, extremely powerful physique. Take a close look at Ryan in The Set-Up or On Dangerous Ground and you'll get a sense of the relative frailty and delicacy of most male movie stars. In the post-war era, only Burt Lancaster was as physically imposing (Kirk Douglas was always fit but he was self-contained and self-motivated, even...

The Movie Pool saddles up to watch The Long Riders on Blu-ray!

Blu-ray Specs

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 enhanced for widescreen televisions

Running Time: 100 minutes

Rating: R

Audio: English Mono DTS-hd Master Audio, French Mono, Italian Mono, Dutch Mono

Subtitles: English Subtitles for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish

Special Features: Theatrical Trailer

The Set-up

This true western tale follows the exploits of Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers, and how their lives intersected with the Miller and Ford brothers. The four sets of brothers are played by real-life acting brothers: James Keach plays Jesse James, Stacy Keach plays Frank James, David Carradine plays Cole Younger, Keith Carradine plays Jim Younger, Robert Carradine plays Bob Younger, Dennis Quaid plays Ed Miller, Randy Quaid plays Clell Miller, Christopher Guest plays Charlie Ford, and Nicholas Guest plays Robert Ford.

Director: Walter Hill

Screenplay: Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith,...

FX has another great show on their hands in the new boxing drama, Lights Out.

The show stars veteran character actor Holt McCallany as Patrick “Lights” Leary, an aging former heavyweight champion of the world. Holt’s been acting for 20 years working with some of the best directors around; David Fincher, David O. Russell, Lawrence Kasdan, Brian De Palma. His films have included Three Kings, Fight Club and many others.

This is his first opportunity at headlining a show and I have to say, he is absolutely wonderful.

I had a chance to speak to Holt and executive producer Warren Leight on a conference call where they talked about the show, his training regimen and his advice to actors.

For the full interview, click the audio link above or download from iTunes.

Holt, how did you get involved? What was it about the role that said, “I must do this?...

  Robert Ryan on TCM: The Set-up, Crossfire, Billy Budd Schedule and synopses from the TCM website: 3:00 Am Trail Street (1947) Bat Masterson fights to make Kansas safe for wheat farmers. Cast: Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys. Dir: Ray Enright. Bw-84 mins. 4:30 Am Return of the Badmen (1948) A farmer falls for the female leader of a band of notorious outlaws. Cast: Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys. Dir: Ray Enright. Bw-90 mins. 6:15 Am Flying Leathernecks (1951) A World War II Marine officer drives his men mercilessly during the battle for Guadalcanal. Cast: John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Jay C. Flippen. Dir: Nicholas Ray. C-102 mins. 8:00 Am Men In War (1957) Two enemies join forces to save their men during a retreat from the North Koreans. Cast: Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Robert Keith. Dir: Anthony Mann. Bw-98 mins. 10:00 Am Crossfire (1947) A crusading district attorney investigates the [...]...

Robert Ryan (left) in Robert Wise‘s The Set-Up Robert Ryan, one of the greatest Hollywood actors of the studio era — or any other era — will have his Turner Classic Movies Day on Friday, Aug. 13. Friday the Thirteenths don’t get any luckier. On Robert Ryan Day, TCM will present thirteen of the actor’s films as part of its "Summer Under the Stars" series. [Full Robert Ryan schedule.] Ryan can be seen at his best in three movies being shown on TCM: Edward Dmytryk‘s Crossfire (1947), Robert Wise‘s The Set-Up (1949), and Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd (1962). In Crossfire, Ryan plays a Us World War II veteran who has more in common with the Nazis than he (and others) would care to believe. (In the movie, his victim is a Jewish man; in future director Richard Brooks‘ novel, it was a gay man.) For his role as the psycho bigot, Ryan [...]...

French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix.

Jean-jacques Beineix:

Divas and Lions and Moons, Oh My!

By Alex Simon

The Noveulle Vague, or “French New Wave” was launched by a group of film critics and cinefiles who began France’s legendary Cahiers du Cinéma magazine in the 1950s. With Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1959, the movement was launched, emphasizing behavior over aesthetics, content over form, and pastiche of other film genres (particularly those born in the U.S., with a healthy dollop of Italian neorealism) over the more traditional narratives of French films from years past. Francois Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda (see our interview with her below) Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette all fell under the spell of magazine co-founder and theorist Andre Bazin, laying the groundwork for a series of articles, monographs and critiques that formed the so-called “auteur theory,” (or more specifically “"La politique des auteurs" ("The policy of authors,...

Director Robert Wise, who won two Academy Awards for directing two of the most successful movie musicals of all time, West Side Story and The Sound of Music, died of heart failure yesterday; he was 91. Wise, who had just celebrated his birthday on Saturday, was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center after suddenly falling ill. Recently, the filmmaker had reportedly been in good health, and his wife, Millicent, was out of the country at the San Sebastian Film Festival, participating in a retrospective of her husband's work. An extremely versatile director whose films ranged from drama to horror to sci-fi to musicals, Wise got his start at RKO Studios as an assistant editor, a job he got thanks to his brother, who was in the studio's accounting department. Working his way up the ladder to full editor, Wise edited such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and My Favorite Wife before nabbing an Academy Award nomination for editing the legendary Citizen Kane. He also worked with filmmaker Orson Welles on The Magnificent Ambersons, and was involved in that movie's drastic re-editing, which was requested by RKO while Welles was out of the country; the missing footage from Ambersons, and Wise's falling-out with Welles over the final product, later became the stuff of legend. Two years after Ambersons, Wise was given his first job directing The Curse of the Cat People, which he co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch. Working on B pictures for RKO through the 40s, including the Boris Karloff vehicle The Body Snatcher, Wise came to the attention of critics with his prizefighter film The Set-Up (1949), which took place in real time. His films in the 50s were notably more high profile, starting with the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still; he also helmed So Big, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and I Want to Live, which won him his first Oscar nomination and a Best Actress award for Susan Hayward. In 1961, Wise attempted his first musical, an adaptation of the Broadway hit West Side Story, on which he worked (and reportedly clashed) with choreographer and co-director Jerome Robbins. The film, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer (neither of whom did their own singing), was a massive hit and won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and directing honors for Wise and Robbins - neither thanked the other in their acceptance speeches. After making the creepily effective black-and-white thriller The Haunting (1963), Wise went back to musical territory with The Sound of Music (1965), the small story of a governess (Julie Andrews) in Austria that turned into a very, very big hit. Critically lambasted but a fervent, almost rabid favorite with audiences, it went on to become the highest-grossing movie ever released at that time, saved 20th Century Fox from imminent bankruptcy in the wake of Cleopatra, and won Wise his second Oscar in addition to Best Picture. Wise's output after The Sound of Music was scattershot in quality, and as he grew older he worked less frequently, but he helmed a number of notable pictures in the 60s and 70s: The Sand Pebbles, his last Best Picture nominee; the ill-fated Julie Andrews vehicle Star!; modernistic sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain; possession horror flick Audrey Rose; and the first Star Trek movie, appropriately titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The director's last feature film was Rooftops (1989), an attempt at a contemporary urban musical. Wise went on to become the president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Directors Guild of America, and found a devoted fan in filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who was said to be instrumental in getting Wise the American Film Institute's lifetime achievement award in 1998. Wise is survived by his wife, Millicent, and a son from a previous marriage. --Prepared by IMDb staff...