News

Phyllis Coates, the first actress to play Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane on television, only to leave the Adventures of Superman after just one season, has died. She was 96.

Coates, who also appeared in Republic Pictures serials and in such films as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, died Wednesday of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, her daughter Laura Press told The Hollywood Reporter.

A native of Wichita Falls, Texas, Coates first portrayed the headstrong Lois opposite George Reeves as the Man of Steel in the dark sci-fi movie Superman and the Mole Men (1951).

The success of that Lippert Pictures film — the first full-length theatrical feature starring the comic-book hero — led to the quick decision to start production on a syndicated show for television.

Coates segued to the series and got into jams as Lois in all 26 episodes of the first season...

Early in Aki Kaurismäki’s slender but enormously satisfying Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet), the male protagonist is invited by his buddy to go to Friday night karaoke. “Tough guys don’t sing,” he replies, in the signature affectless deadpan shared by all the Finnish master’s characters. But that tough guy turns out to be yearning for love, refusing to give up when a lost phone number and a series of other obstacles keep him from a woman he barely knows. In a sense the tough guy is also Kaurismäki himself, inhabiting a world defined by dourness and melancholy but always seeking pathways to comfort, hope and light.

The director had spoken of retirement after his beautiful Syrian refugee tale The Other Side of Hope in 2017, and this return after six years is waggishly described as a work previously believed to be lost. It’s an expansion of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy,...