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Getting a film made is far easier said than done. That's why most Hollywood movies are based on pre-existing material -- both to try and speed up the process of generating a story itself, and to have some assurance that there's an audience for the story. This mentality has led to truly original movies becoming something of a rarity. Truth is, Hollywood has always looked to existing IP (intellectual property).What's new about today's situation is that the IP they're generally tapping tends to be of a short-form or experiential variety: either remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels to older movies, or TV shows, comic books, and video games.

In the early decades of cinema, however, the main source for adaptations was literature. Where comics, games, TV and other movies are all visual mediums and come pre-loaded with their own imagery, books are a covenant between the author and reader's imagination,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Museum of Modern Art

As the career-spanning Johnnie To retrospective continues, a Samuel L. Jackson series includes Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Jungle Fever on 35mm.

Bam

A Duras-Akerman double bill plays Sunday.

Film at Lincoln Center

NYFF Revivals continues with films by Robert Bresson, Raymond Depardon, and Clive Barker, Compensation, and more.

Film Forum

A George Stevens retrospective begins; restorations of The Devil, Probably and Lancelot du lac continue; Shane screens on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives

“Kill Yr Landlords” includes work by John Schlesinger, Hal Ashby, and Nikos Papatakis; films by Dovzhenko and Dreyer play in “Essential Cinema.”

Roxy Cinema

Apocalypse Now: Final Cut plays Friday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A Frank Oz retrospective begins; Burden of Dreams and Fitzcarraldo both screen.

Metrograph

Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, Lolita, and...

For comedy fans of a certain age, watching VHS copies of the 1982 concert film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” until the tape fell off of the spools was a rite of passage. Until Eddie Murphy‘s “Raw” dethroned it later in the 1980s, it was the most successful stand-up special of all time, and understandably so; marking Pryor‘s return to the stage after the freebasing accident that almost killed him, it was not only hilarious but revealing and poignant — the passage toward the end of the film in which Pryor personifies his crack pipe and acts out his own struggles with it is one of the most potent depictions of addiction ever put on screen.

The problem is that those VHS copies, as well as the blurry transfers on cable television where “Sunset Strip” was a staple for years, captured the greatness of Pryor’s performance but...

With his long hair, sunglasses and bellbottoms, Hal Ashby was the epitome of the 1970s flower child, even though he was a decade older than most of the filmmakers working at the time. Though his flame burned brightly and briefly, he left behind a series of classics that signified the nose-thumbing, countercultural attitude of the era, with a bit of humanism and heart thrown in for good measure. Let’s take a look back at all 12 of his films, ranked worst to best.

Born on September 2, 1929 in Utah, Ashby ambled around before becoming an apprentice editor for Robert Swink, working for Hollywood legends William Wyler and George Stevens. He moved up the ranks to become an editor for Norman Jewison, with whom he shared a fraternal and professional relationship. They cut five films together, including “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (1966), which earned him his first Oscar nomination,...

September 8 marks the birthday of actor and comic legend Peter Sellers. The British star had achieved acclaim on the stage, in recordings and most famously on the radio, particularly for the “The Goon Show,” the popular comedy series regularly heard on the BBC.

However, it was in film where Sellers achieved his greatest worldwide success. He was nominated for his first Academy Award in 1959 for co-writing and producing the live-action short “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” Sellers also received two other Oscar nominations, as Best Actor for 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove” (from Stanley Kubrick) as well as for 1979’s “Being There” (from Hal Ashby).

Sellers won the Best Actor Golden Globe for “Being There” and was nominated on five other occasions, including three times for “The Pink Panther” series (from Blake Edwards) in which he portrayed bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the role for which he will likely be best remembered.

September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.

Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...

The 20th anniversary HollyShorts Film Festival is set to honor a quartet of major Hollywood talents, from industry veterans to an up-and-coming star.

Actor Tom Skeritt, actor-director Alden Ehrenreich, director Catherine Hardwicke, and young actress Lexi Underwood will receive laurels at the prestigious Oscar-qualifying festival, which runs from August 8-18.

HollyShorts will present its Luminary Award to Ehrenreich in recognition of his work in front of and behind the camera. Ehrenreich’s directorial debut, Shadow Brother Sunday, screened last year at HollyShorts following its world premiere at Tribeca Festival.

‘Shadow Brother Sunday’

“I was very flattered to have my film Shadow Brother Sunday included in this wonderful festival last year and had a great time meeting all those involved,” Ehrenreich said in a statement. “I am even more flattered – flattered times two – to be chosen to receive this special honor. I am proud to see the Los Angeles film community gather and support each other.

Touché Amoré have announced a new album, Spiral in a Straight Line, arriving October 11th, as well as a Fall 2024 US tour. The band also offered up the lead single, “Nobody’s.”

The trek kicks off after Touché Amoré’s September 26th appearance at the Louder Than Life festival with a hometown Los Angeles gig on October 9th. The month-long run will hit other major cities such as Chicago, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia before wrapping up on November 3rd in Boston. A loaded support bill includes Soul Glo, Portrayal of Guilt, and Soft Blue Shimmer.

Get Touché Amoré Tickets Here

A Live Nation ticket pre-sale for select dates begins Thursday (July 25th) at 10 a.m. local time using the code Strum. General ticket sales start Friday (July 26th) at 10 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster. Fans can also look for deals or get tickets to sold-out dates via StubHub, where your...

Norman Jewison was the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who has tackled a number of controversial topics and social issues in his work, crafting mainstream entertainments with a political point of view. But how many of his titles remain classics? Let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1926 in Toronto, Jewison cut his teeth in television before moving into directing with a number of light farces, including the Doris Day vehicles “The Thrill of It All” (1963) and “Send Me No Flowers” (1964), her last collaboration with Rock Hudson. His career took a turning point with his first drama, “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), which also kicked off his collaborations with film editor Hal Ashby, himself a future director. His next film, the darkly comedic “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (1966), earned him his first Oscar nomination in Best Picture.

He hit the Oscar jackpot the...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSThe Souvenir Part II.Equity, the British entertainment industry trade union, has greeted the incoming Labour government—the first in fourteen years, having won in a landslide—with demands for reforms to the government’s arts funding.Meanwhile, across the Channel, snap French parliamentary elections resulted in an upset victory for the leftist coalition Nouveau Front Populaire over Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which had promised to privatize, at least partially, the national television and radio broadcaster, amid other cutbacks.IATSE has released more details regarding its tentative contract with AMPTP, including allowances and limitations around the use of artificial intelligence.Teamsters Local 399 is still bargaining with AMPTP and may still be far from resolving issues...

The highly anticipated third film in Ti West‘s X trilogy, MaXXXine is finally here, and the fans of the franchise are loving it. With a setting of the 80s when the real-life Night Stalker murders took place, the final film in the X trilogy follows the story of Maxine Minx as she finally gets her big break into the film industry, but when a mysterious serial killer begins to kill the starlets of Hollywood, Maxine’s future in the City of Angels comes into danger. MaXXXine stars Mia Goth in the lead role with Elizabeth Debicki, Halsey, Lily Collins, Sophie Thatcher, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan, Giancarlo Esposito, Chloe Farnworth, and Bobby Cannavale starring in supporting roles. So, if you loved the glitz, glamour, murder, and mystery in MaXXXine, here are some similar movies you could watch next.

Pearl (Prime Video) Credit – A24

Pearl is the second film...

Ti West’s “MaXXXine” has slashed its way into theaters. And the third film in the trilogy that began with 2022’s “X” and continued with the prequel “Pearl,” is perhaps the installment most steeped in other movies. This is a movie where, when a character is threatening Maxine (Mia Goth), the porn star that survived the events of “X” and now, circa “MaXXXine” is struggling to make it in mainstream Hollywood in 1985, they send her a newspaper clipping with the headline: “The Texas Porn Star Massacre,” a direct reference to Tobe Hooper’s immortal “Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”

And that’s just the beginning of the metatextual delights that make “MaXXXine” so special. We thought that we’d talk about five of the movies that fundamentally inspired “MaXXXine.”

Since we’ll be talking about plot specifics, consider this your mild spoiler warning before we get into it.

“Psycho” (1960) Universal Pictures...

When Nicole Holofcener was coming up in the ’90s, she was celebrated as that rare thing: a female writer-director. Today, she’s no longer a rarity, and she’s still delivering sharp, funny observational comedies about flawed middle-class New York women. But somehow, the breadth and potential of her talent remains elusive.

Hollywood gives her scripts to write and rewrite and polish (for the big bucks). She wrote, with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, “The Last Duel” for Ridley Scott, crafting the Jodie Comer character, and the Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh roles in Marvel’s “Black Widow.” She made more on that three-week assignment than three of her movies combined, she said at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which tributed her this year, playing three of her films for an audience unfamiliar with her work. She’s currently writing for Gillian Anderson and Greta Lee in Disney’s latest iteration of “Tron.

Screenwriter Robert Towne, noted for his Oscar-winning screenplay for the crime thriller “Chinatown’ has died:

Towne started writing screenplays for TV series, before hooking up with low-budget film director Roger Corman on “The Tomb of Ligeia”.

Part of the ‘New Hollywood’ wave of filmmaking, Towne wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay…

…for director Roman Polanski's “Chinatown” (1974) starring Jack Nicholson.

For director Hal Ashby, he wrote screenplays for “The Last Detail” (1973), also starring Nicholson…

…and “Shampoo” (1975), starring Warren Beatty.

Noted as a script doctor, Towne collaborated on numerous features including “Days of Thunder (1990), “The Firm” (1993) and Brian de Palma’s “Mission: Impossible” (1996).

Click the images to enlarge…...

A great ending can be the hardest thing for a writer. For Robert Towne — who died Monday, having written and reshaped some of the most important films of the 1970s — finding the best way to wrap up a film was a career-long challenge. In the script that earned him an Oscar, the downbeat “Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown” finale was famously Roman Polanski’s idea.

And yet, there’s undeniable poetry in Towne’s passing: The Oscar winner died 50 years (and two weeks) after “Chinatown” opened, basking in the fresh round of appreciation that the half-century anniversary brought. Towne was a natural raconteur whose stories were every bit as rich as his screenplays — as evidenced by an in-depth Variety interview that ran last month — and whose best writing often went uncredited.

For those who weren’t around to have witnessed Towne’s transformative impact on American cinema in the 1970s,...

Robert Towne, the screenwriter and director whose Oscar-winning work in the 1974 film Chinatown enshrined him in Hollywood history, has died at the age of 89.

Towne died at his home on Monday, his publicist Carri McClure confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

During his celebrated career, Towne wrote the Hal Ashby films The Last Detail in 1973 and 1975’s Shampoo, receiving Academy Award nominations for both. He also wrote and directed 1988 crime drama Tequila Sunrise — starring Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer — which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.

Early in his career,...

While last month saw typically dramatic actor/writer/director Viggo Mortensen share his TCM picks in honor of the release of his western romance film “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” the beloved channel has recruited a filmmaker with a more comedic voice to spearhead its July slate. Having produced for film and television since the early ’90s, Judd Apatow made his directorial debut in 2005 with the critical and cultural smash hit, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” He’s helped build the careers of Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Kristen Wiig, and many others, while also honoring the careers of those who’ve passed with HBO documentaries “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” and “George Carlin’s American Dream.”

Apatow’s first picks for the month harken back to his youth, with George Lucas’ coming-of-age hang-out flick “American Grafitti” (1973) airing on July 4 at 3:45am Et and Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Judith Rossner...

Anthea Sylbert, the two-time Oscar-nominated costume designer who worked on Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Carnal Knowledge, Shampoo and Julia before becoming a studio executive and producer, has died. She was 84.

Sylbert died Tuesday in Skiathos, Greece, director Sakis Lalas told The Hollywood Reporter. Lalas just finished a documentary about Sylbert titled, My Life in 3 Acts.

Sylbert partnered with two-time Oscar-winning production Richard Sylbert on eight films and with his twin brother, Paul Sylbert — her first husband and another Oscar-winning production designer — on another three.

“Paul is the more bitter, more angry of the two,” she told Peter Biskind in 1993. “Someone once put it this way: Dick is more of a diplomat. He will put the ice pick somewhere in your back, you’re not quite sure, and you sort of feel tickled; Paul, while facing you, sticks it in your gut. I always used to think that if you put them together,...

Bruce Dern is a two-time Oscar nominee who shows no signs of slowing down, having most recently appeared in Quentin Tarantino‘s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” (2019). Let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1936, Dern made his film debut with an uncredited appearance in Elia Kazan‘s “Wild River” (1960). He popped up in a number of supporting roles throughout the decade, making a name for himself in exploitation films produced by low-budget king Roger Corman.

Dern hit his stride in the 1970s, when a number of offbeat-looking performers suddenly became leading men. He earned his first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for Hal Ashby‘s Vietnam War drama “Coming Home” (1978), playing a Ptsd-afflicted marine whose wife (Jane Fonda) falls in love with a paralyzed vet (Jon Voight) while he’s deployed.

Dern spent most of his career as a colorful supporting player,...

Jan Haag, who a half-century ago founded the landmark Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute, has died. She was 90.

The remarkable Haag, who also was an actress, painter, poet, novelist, playwright, writer of travel stories and creator of needlepoint canvases, some of which required hundreds of hours to complete, died Monday in Shoreline, Washington, according to the AFI and the Mb Abram agency.

Haag had directed dozens of educational films for the John Tracy Clinic and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare when she became the first woman accepted into the Academy Intern Program at the AFI in 1970, three years after it was founded by George Stevens Jr.

She was assigned to Paramount’s Harold and Maude (1971), directed by Hal Ashby, then joined the AFI staff in 1971, and among her duties was to administer the nonprofit’s film grant program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Few creative talents have the breadth of a career equal to Lee Grant. The 98-year-old director, actor, and writer has a storied body of work, debuting on screen in 1951 in William Wyler’s Detective Story, for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and Cannes Best Actress win, while also receiving a Supporting Actress Oscar for Shampoo. Grant, who has also appeared in Mulholland Drive, Valley of the Dolls, and In the Heat of the Night, has also set a few records: she’s the oldest living film director, while 1980’s Tell Me a Riddle was the first major American film to be entirely written, produced and directed by women, and she’s the only Academy Award-winning actor to also direct an Academy Award-winning documentary with 1986’s Down and Out in America.

Among the most revelatory repertory cinema I saw last year, the much-deserved 4K restorations of Grant...

The red carpet will soon roll out for the 77th Festival de Cannes. The international film festival, playing out May 14-25, has a distinct American voice this year. “Barbie” filmmaker Greta Gerwig is the first U.S. female director name jury president. Many veteran American helmers are heading to the French Rivera resort town. George Lucas, who turns 80 on May 14, will receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Francis Ford Coppola’s much-anticipated “Megalopolis” is screening in competition, as is Paul Schrader’s “Oh Canada.” Kevin Costner’s new Western “Horizon, An American Saga” will premiere out of competition and Oliver Stone’s “Lula” is part of the special screening showcase.

Fifty years ago, Coppola was the toast of the 27th Cannes Film Festival. His brilliant psychological thriller “The Conversation” starring Gene Hackman won the Palme D’Or and well as a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. The film would earn three Oscar nominations: picture,...

Stars: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan, Michael Provost, Tate Donovan | Written by David Hemingson | Directed by Alexander Payne

Having not released a film since 2017’s Downsizing, director Alexander Payne follows up what is considered the weakest film of his career with an absolutely wonderful work. At the Barton boarding school, bad-tempered professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is forced to remain on campus during the Christmas break to look after a handful of students with nowhere to go – collectively known as The Holdovers. Across the break, he forms a bond with student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

From the opening moments where the studio logos and ratings title card appear in retro styles, Payne recreates the feel of a ‘70s feature throughout his latest work. The combination of aesthetic and story brings to mind a Hal Ashby film,...

“An Officer and a Gentleman” star Louis Gossett Jr.’s cause of death was Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (Copd), per Friday’s report from the coroner.

The report, which was first obtained by TMZ, lists Copd as his main cause of death, with heart failure and atrial fibrillation as contributing conditions. The actor, who made Hollywood history as the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar, died on March 29 in Santa Monica, Calif.

Gossett Jr. got his start on the stage with roles in plays in the 1950s and ’60s before breaking big with his Emmy-winning role as Fiddler in the 1977 miniseries “Roots.”

In 2022, on the 45th anniversary of the landmark miniseries, Gossett Jr. told TheWrap he never expected that “Roots” would be made.

“The story about [slavery] was we knew it, we heard it from our parents and our aunts and uncles and stuff, but we knew it...

If Criterion24/7 hasn’t completely colonized your attention every time you open the Channel––this is to say: if you’re stronger than me––their May lineup may be of interest. First and foremost I’m happy to see a Michael Roemer triple-feature: his superlative Nothing But a Man, arriving in a Criterion Edition, and the recently rediscovered The Plot Against Harry and Vengeance is Mine, three distinct features that suggest a long-lost voice of American movies. Meanwhile, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Antiwar Trilogy four by Sara Driver, and a wide collection from Ayoka Chenzira fill out the auteurist sets.

Series-wise, a highlight of 1999 goes beyond the well-established canon with films like Trick and Bye Bye Africa, while of course including Sofia Coppola, Michael Mann, Scorsese, and Claire Denis. Films starring Shirley Maclaine, a study of 1960s paranoia, and Columbia’s “golden era” (read: 1950-1961) are curated; meanwhile, The Breaking Ice,...

When none of us are generous enough to just buy an album (or join his notoriously unwieldy streaming service) there’s been a surge of reinterest as Neil Young makes his dizzyingly dense catalog freshly available on Spotify. Likely coinciding with his greatest exposure in years is the uncovering, by Creep director Patrick Brice, of Hal Ashby’s 1984 concert film Solo Trans, which spans some of Young’s earliest recorded music to then-new masterpiece Trans––my pick for his greatest work, which devoted fans have characterized with words such as “untenable” and “insane”––and controversial rockabilly period, which indeed sounds like a joke from Walk Hard.

Among these performances are skits in the tone of Young’s more-than-a-little-amazing feature film Human Highway, albeit (like most things) not as good as Human Highway. More devoted Ashby auteurists will surely find things to identify as distinctly his; it’s easier to admire...

Louis Gossett Jr., the celebrated An Officer and a Gentleman actor who became the first Black man to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, has died at the age of 87.

“It is with our heartfelt regret to confirm our beloved father passed away this morning,” the actor’s family said in a statement Friday (via CNN). “We would like to thank everyone for their condolences at this time. Please respect the family’s privacy during this difficult time.” No cause of death was provided.

Over an onscreen career that spanned seven decades,...

We are sad to report that legendary African-American actor Louis Gossett Jr. passed away on March 28, 2024 in Santa Monica, CA. He was 87 years old at the time of death, and was on his way to celebrate his 88th birthday in May this year. No official cause of death has been given, but Gosset has had health issues in the recent decade, being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 and being hospitalized for Covid-19 during the pandemic. The news was confirmed by Gossett’s first cousin Neal L. Gossett.

A true acting legend, Louis Gossett Jr. was born in New York on May 27, 1936. His mother was a nurse, and his father was a porter. Although he was proficient in sports as well, after his stage debut at the age of 17, his teacher encouraged him to pursue an acting career. Although he obtained a sports scholarship at the NYU and was offered to play basketball,...

Louis Gossett Jr., the tough guy with a sensitive side who won an Oscar for his portrayal of a steely sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy for his performance as a compassionate slave in the landmark miniseries Roots, has died. He was 87.

Gossett’s nephew told the Associated Press that the actor died Thursday night in Santa Monica. The cause of death is unknown, but Gossett announced in 2010 that he had prostate cancer.

With his sleek, bald pate and athlete’s physique, Gossett was intimidating in a wide array of no-nonsense roles, most notably in Taylor Hackford’s Officer and a Gentleman (1982), where as Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley he rides Richard Gere’s character mercilessly (but for his own good) at an officer candidate school and gets into a memorable martial arts fight.

He was the second Black man to win an acting Oscar, following Sidney Poitier in 1964.

For the role,...

Before he even had a dozen movies on his directing resume, Elia Kazan had seen nine different actors to Oscar victories. Nearly seven decades later, he remains one of only two filmmakers associated with that many or more winning performances (along with William Wyler) and one of four responsible for at least one victor in each of the four acting categories. Check out our complete photo gallery of Oscar-winning turns in Kazan films, which also includes a rundown of the unsuccessful nominees directed by him.

Between 1945 and 1976, Kazan directed 19 narrative feature films, 13 of which earned a collective total of 59 Oscar nominations and 21 wins. Prior to his death in 2003, he was personally recognized seven times across three categories, winning Best Director for “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1948) and “On the Waterfront” (1955). He also received an honorary award in 1999 “in appreciation of a long, distinguished and unparalleled career.”

The performances included in this gallery are listed in chronological order,...

Before he even had a dozen movies on his directing resume, Elia Kazan had seen nine different actors to Oscar victories. Nearly seven decades later, he remains one of only two filmmakers associated with that many or more winning performances (along with William Wyler) and one of four responsible for at least one victor in each of the four acting categories. Check out our complete photo gallery of Oscar-winning turns in Kazan films, which also includes a rundown of the unsuccessful nominees directed by him.

Between 1945 and 1976, Kazan directed 19 narrative feature films, 13 of which earned a collective total of 59 Oscar nominations and 21 wins. Prior to his death in 2003, he was personally recognized seven times across three categories, winning Best Director for “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1948) and “On the Waterfront” (1955). He also received an honorary award in 1999 “in appreciation of a long, distinguished and unparalleled career.”

The performances included in this gallery are listed in chronological order,...

American Dreamer deserves better than it has gotten. Shot three years ago during the pandemic this delirously black comedy premiered at Tribeca 2022 and got lost in the crowd. The filmmakers including first time feature director Paul Dektor and screenwriter/producer Theodore Melfi decided to then hold it back and recut and tighten it eliminating 10 minutes of the original running time. In early 2023 it turned up at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, still largely ignored, and then its distribution hunt was further delayed by the Hollywood strikes. Finally Vertical has wisely picked it up and it will be opening in theatres and VOD Friday.

I saw the Tribeca cut and I have seen the final cut. Both worked for me but it was great to experience it a second time in an actual theatre with a very appreciative audience. Comedies work best that way and this one...

Since the beginning of the Academy Awards in the late 1920s, Hollywood filmmakers have been making socially conscious films. Many of the best of those have scored the film town’s top honor — Oscar best picture.

This year, that winner could be “Oppenheimer,” a film that boldly and starkly dramatizes the creation of man’s most dangerous invention: atomic weapons.

It could be “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film that brought a lost and dreadful piece of American history into the sunlight of the Cannes Film Festival and ultimately the spotlights of awards season.

It could be either “Barbie” or “Poor Things,” two of the wildest, most colorful and inventive investigations of feminist and/or post-feminist womanhood to ever hit the big screen.

It could be “American Fiction,” a wry and witty look at Black American middle-class identity and family relations under preposterous, dispiriting cultural pressures.

But will the...

Stars: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan, Michael Provost, Tate Donovan | Written by David Hemingson | Directed by Alexander Payne

Having not released a film since 2017’s Downsizing, director Alexander Payne follows up what is considered the weakest film of his career with an absolutely wonderful work. At the Barton boarding school, bad-tempered professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is forced to remain on campus during the Christmas break to look after a handful of students with nowhere to go – collectively known as The Holdovers. Across the break, he forms a bond with student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

From the opening moments where the studio logos and ratings title card appear in retro styles, Payne recreates the feel of a ‘70s feature throughout his latest work. The combination of aesthetic and story brings to mind a Hal Ashby film,...

As Hollywood neared the midpoint of the 1980s, the industry had abandoned the risk-taking ethos of the 1970s and unabashedly embraced formula filmmaking. Stars still mattered, but the pitch was king. Studio executives keen on becoming their generation's Jack Warner, Daryl Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer were through humoring unpredictable auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby. They wanted can't-miss high-concept projects powered by high-wattage stars that could play for months on end in theaters because, despite the skyrocketing value of home video and pay cable channels, theatrical was still king.

"Beverly Hills Cop" traversed a rocky path from inception to production, but producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer doggedly developed and re-developed the project until they paired a 23-year-old comedy superstar with a once-hot director who'd two years prior gotten himself fired off "WarGames." The particulars of the fish-out-of-water plot shifted many times over the years (it was nearly...

Comedies often depend on precision, with jokes popping off like synchronized gunfire, though in Between the Temples, Nathan Silver stretches moments out to revel in texture and give his actors room to breathe. The film, written by Silver and C. Mason Wells, is a marvel of lived-in shagginess, of clashing, cacophonous tones that reveal characters’ inner furies. Between the Temples is funny and even suspenseful in its unpredictability, as you never quite know when and where the punchlines will land. The film revels in the volatile human comedy of which John Cassavetes, an obsessive miner of neurotic minutiae, might approve.

Take a scene in which a grieving widower, Ben (Jason Schwartzman), goes to lunch with his childhood music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane). Silver captures them eating in close-up, as they talk about their wonderful burgers, for much longer than most filmmakers would dare. The scene’s punchline—that Ben, the cantor at his local synagogue,...

Plot: A cantor (Jason Schwartzman), grieving his wife’s loss a year earlier, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly bat mitzvah student (Carol Kane).

Review: Between the Temples is a rather quirky, offbeat comedy. The latest from indie director Nathan Silver, it marks his most accessible, mainstream work to date, although the romantic pairing at the movie’s heart is rather unusual. Indeed, the film has heavy shades of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, although the romantic pairing of Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane (28-year age difference) isn’t as eye-brow-raising as it was in that film.

Granted, the romantic aspect of the movie is underplayed for the most part, with their romance ultimately being a chaste one. The two leads play two lost souls who find each other at a difficult time in their lives. Schwartzman’s Ben is a cantor who’s been unable to...

Oscar-nominated film director and producer Norman Jewison, who steered the 1967 racial drama “In the Heat of the Night” to a best picture Oscar and also helmed such popular films as “Moonstruck,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” as well as film musicals “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” died Saturday at his Los Angeles residence. He was 97.

His film career began with fluffy Doris Day comedies like “The Thrill of It All.” But Jewison’s social conscience began to surface with “In the Heat of the Night” and, later, the labor union drama “F.I.S.T.” and other films focusing on racial tensions such as “A Soldier’s Story” and “The Landlord” (the latter of which he only produced), though he never abandoned comedies and romances.

Jewison had his share of box office hits and was usually attuned to the audience pulse, but did...

Norman Jewison is dead at the age of 97. For over four decades he sustained a career of films that became major box office hits as well as others that presented current social issues in a Hollywood context (with some combining the two). He died peacefully at his home on Saturday January 20.

“In the Heat of the Night,” which beat “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” for the Best Picture Oscar for 1967, is the most obvious example of Jewison’s talent for turning tough subjects into hit movies. It grossed (adjusted to current prices) over $200 million, with it already having become a major success before it won five Oscars. Ironically, the racially-charged story about a Northern Black detective (Sidney Poitier) investigating a murder and confronting a racist Southern police chief wons its Oscars in a ceremony delayed by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Norman Frederick Jewison was born on July 21, 1926 in Toronto,...

Norman Jewison, who directed Best Picture Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night and nominees Fiddler on the Roof, A Soldier’s Story, Moonstruck and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, also producing the latter four, died peacefully Saturday, January 20. He was 97.

Jewison’s film career spanned more than four decades and seven Oscar nominations — three for Best Director and the four for Best Picture. His films received a total of 46 nominations and 12 Academy Awards. In 1999, Jewison was honored with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards. He also collected three Emmy Awards for his work in television.

A smattering of his other wide-ranging work includes The Hurricane, Agnes of God, Rollerball (1975) and Jesus Christ Superstar, all of which he also produced. As a producer, Jewison had an eye for talent, as well.

In a grimy, awkward world that painfully resembles our own, Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t coping very well. His wife passed away and he’s living back at home with his two overbearing mothers in upstate New York, isolated from the energy of the city. He’s a cantor at the local temple, but he can’t sing anymore. While he keeps kosher and remains devout, Ben struggles to feel the same connection to his faith that he once had. Ben isn’t really connecting to anything these days, not even his own body. He’s schlubby, unshaven with blemishes on his face, plodding through life in a depressed daze. It’s like he’s completely given up. In one early scene, he lays out in the middle of the road beckoning for a truck to run him over.

Then he has a chance encounter with his childhood music teacher,...

There’s a very young, very online contingent of Generation Z that propagates repeated cycles of so-called “age gap discourse”: heated, often condemnatory debate over the rights or wrongs of people dating, or merely socializing, outside their immediate age group. The discussion often takes quaintly prudish forms, permitting no adult age at which such differences cease to matter, but if it circulates most heatedly among the young, it’s been handed down to them via age-old social rules and biases — ones to which Nathan Silver’s delightful “Between the Temples” gives a cheerfully flippant middle finger. Collapsing divides between old age, middle age and adolescence into a universally relatable paean to doing whatever the hell feels right for you in your own weird situation, this scruffy shoestring indie won’t be seen by the internet’s most hawkish age-gap monitors, though it has much to gently teach them.

Premiering in the U.

Alexander Payne's story of a cantankerous teacher holed up for Christmas with a wayward teen and the school cook is expertly told with gentle, grownup comedy

The year’s best Christmas movie arrives in the UK a bit late for Christmas: it is a genial, gentle, redemptive dramedy from Alexander Payne which hits the happy/sad sweet spot with Payne’s sure aim. It is taken from TV writer David Hemingson’s impeccably crafted screenplay, a masterclass in incremental, indirect character revelations and plot transitions. The Holdovers is set in 1970, consciously (or maybe self-consciously) crafted to look like a film which its characters could have gone to see at the time, with the funny, rueful dialogue and melancholy sense of place that you might find in something by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, and a madeleine soundtrack from Cat Stevens, Labi Siffre and more.

But of course it also...

When Nathan Silver’s mother was in her mid-60s, she decided to have a bat mitzvah. As the indie filmmaker started telling people that his mother was embarking on a rite of passage usually reserved for teenagers, a friend urged him to turn her story into a movie. Now, “Between the Temples,” a screwball comedy inspired by mom’s coming-of-age ceremony, will premiere at Sundance, with Carol Kane and Jason Schwartzman playing an elderly bat mitzvah student and a depressed cantor who forge an unlikely bond.

“It’s one from the heart,” says Silver. “It’s a story that touches on many aspects of my life.”

It also gives Kane and Schwartzman, who so often steal scenes in supporting roles, a chance to shine as leads. Signing on required a leap of faith for Kane because Silver’s scripts, which he calls “scriptments” and likens to novellas, aren’t traditional.

Steve Carell in director Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features

Augie Steenbeck: I still don’t understand the play.

Schubert Green: Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. – Asteroid City’

2023 was a year full of stories with highs and lows. The year brought about ChatGPT, more news about Uap’s aka UFO’s, Technologists warned of “doomsday” style scenarios in which AI grows an ability to think on its own and attempts to destroy humanity, Baldur’s Gate 3 was crowned the Best Video Game of the Year, England saw the coronation of new king, Fran Drescher led SAG-AFTRA through the actors’ strike and it paid off with the 2023 TV/Theatrical billion-dollar deal, while the Writers Guild’s strike ended in October when they ratified a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) https://www.

J.J. Abrams touts Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde and Shampoo for must-see viewing as part of the January 2024 Turner Classic Movies lineup in his own TCM Picks video that dropped on Tuesday.

“They could not be more different,” Abrams says of Arthur Penn’s 1967 crime spree drama Bonnie and Clyde, which also starred Faye Dunaway, and Hal Ashby’s Oscar-winning dramedy Shampoo. Bonnie and Clyde “portrayed violence in a way that had not typically been seen in American cinema and really ushered in a new age of bold graphic storytelling in a way that you really hadn’t seen before,” Abrams says in the video.

Having made a name for himself in Hollywood with television and popular series like Felicity, Alias and Lost, you can see the grounds for Abrams’ eventual success making action tentpole movies, given his love for classic Hollywood pics.

Shampoo becomes a time capsule movie for Abrams,...

As 2023 comes to a close, we here at JoBlo.com would like to take a moment to pay tribute to some of the people who sadly passed away this year. Our deepest respect goes out to everyone in the industry we have lost, and our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of those who died in 2023. These talented individuals will always be remembered for their impact on the world of film and television.

In Memory Of…

Earl Boen

Earl Boen died at the age of 81 on January 5th. The actor was best known as Dr. Peter Silberman in The Terminator, a role he reprised in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, making him the only other actor aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear in the first three movies.

Boen always wanted to inject a little more humour into his performance, but director James Cameron kept telling him no…...

“Discomfort and joy,” what a tremendously fitting tagline for “The Holdovers,” the new Alexander Payne film that takes place over the holidays. We haven’t updated our Best Christmas Movies of All Time list in a while—it was created years ago—but Payne’s “The Holdovers” would be a fitting addition to it. Set in the 1970s and highly influenced by filmmaker Hal Ashby, “The Holdovers” is an entertaining but also melancholy wintry tale about a trio of an unlikely collection of people who are trapped together during the holidays (read our review).

Continue reading ‘The Holdovers’: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph & Dominic Sessa Discuss Their Acclaimed Throwback Drama [Exclusive] at The Playlist.

In The Holdovers, a professor, a student and a grief-stricken cook are stranded together at a New England boarding school over the holidays. The story takes place in the early 1970s, an era whose films are beloved by both Holdovers director Alexander Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld. However, they took opposing philosophical perspectives in imbuing their movie with the spirit of that epoch. Though he looked at the work of Hal Ashby for inspiration – particularly The Landlord and The Last Detail – rather than attempt to replicate it, Payne’s approach found him imaging what kind of film he himself […]

The post “If I Had Been Working in the 1970s [But With Today’s Technology], I Would Have Used Digital, I Would Have Used LED Technology”: The Holdovers Cinematographer Eigil Bryld first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In The Holdovers, a professor, a student and a grief-stricken cook are stranded together at a New England boarding school over the holidays. The story takes place in the early 1970s, an era whose films are beloved by both Holdovers director Alexander Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld. However, they took opposing philosophical perspectives in imbuing their movie with the spirit of that epoch. Though he looked at the work of Hal Ashby for inspiration – particularly The Landlord and The Last Detail – rather than attempt to replicate it, Payne’s approach found him imaging what kind of film he himself […]

The post “If I Had Been Working in the 1970s [But With Today’s Technology], I Would Have Used Digital, I Would Have Used LED Technology”: The Holdovers Cinematographer Eigil Bryld first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.