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For decades, trailblazing journalist E. Jean Carroll had been among the most influential voices in media, penning a dedicated advice column for Elle Magazine until 2019, after countless accolades to her name as a TV host, “SNL” writer, bestselling author and pioneering woman editor at Esquire, Playboy and Outside magazines. Since 2019, after coming forward with her sexual assault and defamation allegations against President Trump, Carroll added not one but two more triumphs to her resume: winning two separate legal battles against the current president through a civil court jury that found him liable for both sexually assaulting Carroll and defaming her. She was first awarded $5 million in 2023 and then, upon re-suing Trump, $83 million in 2024.

With the sharply structured documentary “Ask E. Jean,” director Ivy Meeropol accomplishes the near-impossible, telling the story of Carroll in a manner as consistently enthralling and unapologetic as its subject. How can one possibly fit the multiple...

Griffin Dunne on watching movies with his mom: “We would see A Place in the Sun. And I'd say, Mom, you look like Elizabeth Taylor …” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with Griffin Dunne on his memoir The Friday Afternoon Club we talk about the Kennedy “switch on the switch” and the “lie based on a lie,” his elementary school friends with famous parents and attempts at reconnecting with the past, watching the Million Dollar Movie program with his mother, his uncle John Gregory Dunne’s influence, more on Suddenly, Last Summer, and Gavin de Becker (author of The Gift Of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence).

Griffin Dunne with Anne-Katrin Titze on his uncle John Gregory Dunne: “I always made him laugh from a very early age”

Griffin Dunne and I met during this year’s Tribeca Festival at their launch party and Jane Rosenthal.

It’s telling that so many incisive, vital documentaries on journalism and media have been produced in the past half-dozen years. The Fourth Estate is under attack on many fronts, from the deleterious effects of social media to conspiracy-theory-mongers on the left and right. Understanding the changes in the media landscape and our information diets has never been more important for understanding the changes in our world. Here are 15 documentaries on journalism that help us do just that.

Medium Cool (1969)

This landmark film, directed and co-produced by cinematographer Haskell Wexler, is a unique hybrid of narrative and documentary footage from the chaos that enveloped the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Medium Cool” turns the lens on a TV-news camera operator, played by Robert Forster, who along with other characters winds in and out of Irl riot footage. Just as the 1968 DNC has cast a long shadow on American politics, so...

Warning: This article includes Spoilers for the finale of The Handmaid's Tale!

Elisabeth Moss, who plays June Osborne in The Handmaid’s Tale, explained why she thinks the show’s final scene is “honestly perfection.” Based on the book by Margaret Atwood, this show has been one of the most prolific adaptations within the dystopian genre because of its powerful message and terrifying warning. After eight years, the TV show has come to an end, offering closure to the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Actress Elisabeth Moss joined the TV show in 2017, pouring her heart and soul into the project. Now that it has ended, Moss has shared with Vanity Fairthat she sees the final scene as “perfection.” She said this:

"The series’ ending scene is honestly perfection. And I would never have settled for anything less than perfection when it came to this ending. We return back to the beginning,...

Cautious optimism. This had been the mood, earlier this year, of many of New York City’s top brokers as they navigated the challenges of low inventory and high interest rates. Then came the stock market convulsions and recessionary fears triggered in April by President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. “Even with financial uncertainties — political instability, layoffs and global tensions — New York’s real estate market remains resilient,” said Steven Cohen of Douglas Elliman, speaking before the market convulsions. “Moving to its own rhythm and continuing to attract discerning buyers and investors — quite a bit of opportunity in the market right now.”

The volatility Cohen alludes to has since dramatically increased, as has the likelihood of a slowdown in the luxury real estate market. Yet the source of New York brokers’ optimism remains unchanged: a belief that the Big Apple will always find a way to thrive in the long term,...

If any single thing distinguishes directors from auteurs, the capacity to put oneself into the film might be a strong dividing line. Few living directors have defined themselves so strongly as David Cronenberg, and while this sets expectations that can very well engender confused responses, it’s all the more opportunity to surprise––such as a sold-out New York Film Festival crowd being hushed into stunned silence when they realized his new film, The Shrouds, was less of the Videodrome or Scanners variety than an unsparing film about grief and loss, albeit a study spring-loaded with doppelgängers, vaguely futuristic tech, and dense conspiracy plotting.

When all is said and done, The Shrouds might very well emerge one of Cronenberg’s best films. I sat down with him some 12 hours after its U.S. premiere, the film still swimming in my mind, attempting (then failing) to ask questions that weren’t laced with admiration and observation.

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network: post-apocalyptic scenarios, B-movie worlds, iconic cultural figures and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

The Rest of Us

Revived from the dead like an injection of cordyceps, Film Stories’ own Maria Lattila becomes the new host of The Last of Us podcast The Rest of Us, here catching us up with guest Craig McKenzie in readiness for coverage of the brand new Season 2…

The Tardis Crew

Talking of second season’s, Doctor Who thunders the Tardis back to life for another run, as Baz and Ben Greenland discuss 2×01 ‘The Robot Revolution’…

Podcast-616

Daredevil: Born Again edges closer to its season finale and here to analyse proceedings are host Ashley Thomas and guest Ian Buckley talking 1×07 ‘Art for Art’s Sake’…

Writers on Film

Joan Didion was a cultural icon and literary giant, making her fine fettle for a discussion...

In 2020, film critic Alissa Wilkinson started working on a book project about Joan Didion. She wanted to explore the iconic essayist, reporter, novelist and playwright through an angle that hadn’t been considered much before — Didion’s connection to the film industry. That became the book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.”

Wilkinson, who has been a critic at The New York Times since 2023 and wrote for Vox before that, was not interested in delving into Didion’s “persona or her celebrity, as much as what ties all her work together.”

“I came up with this notion of writing about her through the lens of Hollywood, both because she worked in Hollywood and wrote movies that have been produced and that we still watch today, but also because she wrote about Hollywood,” Wilkinson told Variety in a recent phone interview.

“We Tell Ourselves Stories,” which was published Tuesday,...

My wife — as usual — understood the situation before I did. The night before, Monday, Jan. 6, we’d both been awoken by the wind. Hundred-year-old pine branches snapping off like matchsticks. Iron lawn furniture tumbling across the yard. Our dog, shaking, tried to crawl under our pillows. “This is not good,” my wife said.

We’d moved to Altadena a few weeks earlier. Our dream house, right at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains — three years of permits and renovations in the making. We had a view of Eaton Canyon...

A documentary on the centennial of publication The New Yorker, from executive producer Judd Apatow, will premiere on Netflix this year, the streamer announced on Friday.

Directed by Marshall Curry, who also produces alongside Xan Parker, the doc follows the editors, writers and creatives behind the scenes of one of the last print magazines of our time, offering unprecedented access to its inner workings, its contributors, and its archives.

In addition to Apatow, executive producers include Josh Church, Helen Estabrook, Sarah Amos and Michael Bonfiglio. Marshall Curry Productions and Apatow Productions are the production companies.

In a statement shared with Deadline, Curry said, “I’ve been a reader of the magazine for most of my life, and it’s been thrilling to get to peek behind the curtain and witness the precision, thought, and almost fanatical obsession that goes into crafting their stories, cartoons, and covers.”

Said The New Yorker Editor David Remnick,...

Joan Didion’s oft-quoted dictum about how we tell ourselves stories in order to live presupposes that you can and will use the tools to tell yourself that very story. But what happens when language fails you? What happens when its breakages risk keeping you from even vocalizing what it is that could help you live? Writer-director Anna Baumgarten’s “Disfluency” tackles those questions by telling the story of a young woman struggling to find herself anew. Well-meaning and clearly trying to offer up a twist on what’s unfortunately a well-worn tale about the aftermath of sexual abuse, “Disfluency” is nevertheless bogged down by its desire to wrap that narrative within the linguistics jargon its title alludes to.

Disfluency, as the film’s very first scene informs us, is a break or irregularity in speech. “Speech is not perfect because we are not perfect,” a professor lecturing an unseen class informs.

For those of us who grew up on the Westside, an apocalypse was always on our minds. We couldn’t help it. We lived in the shadow of Mike Davis and Joan Didion, who loomed in the air like a pair of sour, secular saints. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Didion wrote, and we believed it, not without reason. The city has burned, after all, at various historical flash points — the Watts Riots, the 1992 Uprising, the sundry Malibu fires over the years — and the image has reinscribed itself upon us over and over, as in Ed Ruscha’s legendary 1968 painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. It’s almost like this city expected to burn, or as if — before it actually happened — we wanted it to, as if L.A.’s uncanny, impossible beauty also deserved to be punished.

Click here to read...

Eve Babitz, the “dowager groupie” who wrote Slow Days, Fast Company and was known for her relationships with the likes of The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison and Steve Martin, and Joan Didion, the author of Play It As It Lays and The White Album, who wrote Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born, are unquestionably two of Los Angeles’ most-revered writers.

A new book – Didion & Babitz written by Lili Anolik – highlights the relationship between the pair, helped by the author unearthing scores of previously unseen letters.

The book, which published today by Simon & Schuster’s Scribner, also explores their contrasting relationship with Hollywood (the town) and Hollywood (the industry).

Didion wrote a slew of screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, including the aforementioned A Star Is Born, 1971’s The Panic In Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino, 1981’s True Confessions, which starred Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall,...

The 2010 Boston Teran novel, The Creed of Violence was supposed to get a big screen adaptation starring Daniel Craig, but since the 2019 announcement, there's been no news about the project. While development hell is simply a facet of Hollywood, it doesn't make it any easier when a highly anticipated movie gets mired in the La Brea adjacent tar pits near Hollywood. The Creed of Violence is an action novel, set in Mexico in 1910, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. On the Mexican-American border, an assassin, Rawbone, is on a mission.

There was immediate interest in an adaptation of the book, and in 2011, it was announced that Todd Field was attached to write and direct (via Empire). Since then, the adaptation has gone through numerous revisions. Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale were both attached at one point, and the film nearly began production in 2013. In 2019, James Bond star Daniel Craig was cast as Rawbone,...

The Family Chantel star Pedro Jimeno gets a bad rap sometimes, but I personally believe that he isn't a complete write-off as a human being - and I'm going to tell you why. To be honest, I have written negative articles about Pedro, but I've also tried to consider his side of things. I have really tried. So, quite often, I was conflicted.

For example, I could clearly recognize that Pedro messed with Chantel Everett's head before he left her. What I wasn't quite certain about was whether he'd always planned to leave her. Because I had these questions, my work would toggle between positive and negative. I would paint him as a villain, and believe what I was writing - however, sometimes, doubts crept in. Occasionally, I would feel bad about things I wrote even though they were probably true, or, at least, partially true.

Was Pedro Really Rotten To The Core?...

Netflix's Olivia Rodrigo: Guts World Tour was shot over the course of two sold-out tour dates in Los Angeles, California's Intuit Dome, and it, of course, came with some incredible costume changes throughout. Guts is Rodrigo's Grammy-nominated sophomore album, which explores themes of heartbreak, new love, and the crushing weight of young adulthood's new responsibilities. Rodrigo's style grew up with her on the tour in support of this album, which discusses more mature themes, as she continues to uplift women in music through her women and non-binary dancers and band.

Her debut album Sour saw the singer donning plaid skirts and a y2k-infused pop-punk look, soon after Rodrigo left High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. The Guts era is drenched in glittery rock n' roll glamor, marrying the singer's rock aspirations with her pop star status. From sparkling two piece sets to fishnet tights and Doc Marten's boots,...

“Martha,” R.J. Cutler’s film about the life and career of Martha Stewart (it drops today on Netflix), is a splendid documentary. It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely. It traces how she started off as a model, then became a New York stockbroker, then moved with her publishing-magnate husband to Westport, Conn., where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose fixing up, by Martha (she hand-painted the entire farmhouse while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful rustic “perfection.” It shows us how she launched a prestige catering business and then, with the 1982 book “Entertaining,” launched herself as the doyenne of a new upscale lifestyle culture that would be — in a word — vicarious.

The movie shows us that Stewart had a vision, and that her...

Emmy-winning actor Nathan Lane was able to channel his performance as legendary crime reporter Dominic Dunne in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story by going through the writer’s famous son, actor Griffin Dunne.

Lane’s performance is winning praise for his harnessing of the pain and loss Dunne held onto for decades after the double blow the writer experienced in the early 1980s of a tragedy and an injustice; as the series shows, the perceived miscarriage of justice informs Dunne’s perspective on crimes he covers for Vanity Fair and leads to his speculations about the nature of the Menendez boys’ relationship, which are peppered throughout the limited series. But it wasn’t only through researching his crime and trial reporting that Lane got into the mindset of the late legend.

“What helped was talking to Griffin Dunne, his son, a lovely actor and a wonderful...

Perhaps Britney Spears should be conducting a Britney Bootcamp à la Madonna. Earlier this month, Universal announced an adaptation of Spears' memoir The Woman In Me, to be directed by John M. Chu. No doubt the news sent a lot of Hollywood stars running straight to their agents. Not only is it a juicy role,...

Our latest review of new and recent books about (or connected to) cinema includes an extraordinary look at transness in film; memoirs from Griffin Dunne, Jon Chu, and Susan Seidelman; and several new books on music, highlighted by the latest from the great Steven Hyden. Plus, we run down some noteworthy novels worth checking out before the summer’s end. Let’s hold on to the season a bit longer, shall we?

Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater)

The world of cinema has been in dire need of a book like Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. It is no exaggeration to say that this study of transness in film––from the silent era to more recent works like Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca and Jane Schoenbrum’s We’re All...

The Last of Us Season 1 was a major hit, with the HBO series gaining universal acclaim. However, episode 7 received mixed reviews despite following the source material.

The Last of Us is based on the popular video game of the same name and it follows Joel and Ellie in a post-apocalyptical world. While the series is a mostly faithful adaptation of the video game, episode 7, which is based on the Dlc The Last of Us: Left Behind, has received both negative and positive reviews. The episode's director, Liza Johnson, addressed the backlash she received when speaking to ScreenRant.

Related The Last of Us Season 2 Set Photos Unveil New Look at Ellie & Dina

The latest set photos for The Last of Us Season 2 offer a new look at Bella Ramseys Ellie and Isabela Merceds Dina as filming continues in Canada.

Episode 7 gives a throwback to Ellie's life before her journey with Joel...

The Last of Us episode 7 faced backlash despite its faithfulness to the game's Dlc source material. The episode, featuring LGBTQ+ representation, received both negative and positive feedback. Director Liza Johnson opens up about her experience with the backlash, recalling how she generally avoids reading reviews, while also inviting viewers to "get good enough at the game" to reach the point in which episode 7's story was told.

The Last of Us director opens up about the backlash surrounding episode 7. The series, which is based on the hit game of the same name, was created for television by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin and stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Episode 7 was based on a Dlc titled Left Behind, which provided a deep look into Ellies (Ramsey) life before she met Joel (Pascal), including the traumatic moment when she got bit. The episode also included an LGBTQ+ relationship, a relationship already established in the Dlc,...

One word is on the lips of every broker in NYC, and they’ve all got an opinion.

“The elections always bring uncertainty into the equation,” says Douglas Elliman star Fredrik Eklund. Agrees fellow Elliman broker Steven Cohen, “The real estate market is averse to volatility and historically slows down as we approach the elections.

“I think activity will remain low until at least later this year, after the election,” concurs Nobel Black, also of Elliman. But says Compass’ Matt Breitenbach, “The Hamptons real estate market will be fine despite macroeconomic pressure and presidential elections.”

But no matter what’s in the crystal ball for the remainder of 2024, one thing is clear: New York’s power sellers again made their marks over the past year. Despite high interest rates, inflation and competition with South Florida, Manhattan continued to see jaw-dropping sales at buildings the Central Park Tower, where Elliman’s...

Griffin Dunne’s family has done so many larger-than-life, unbelievable things that when the actor-director-producer started to write his memoir “The Friday Afternoon Club: A Memoir of Family,” he realized it wasn’t enough to start the story with his complex writer father Dominick Dunne.

In fact, it was impossible to understand the forces that shaped the Dunnes, including his uncle John Gregory Dunne and sister Dominique Dunne — without understanding his father’s abusive upbringing in an Irish Catholic family, his mother’s Mexican heritage and all great love stories, clandestine affairs, celebrity encounters and tragedies that seem to surround them, buffeted with lots of pitch-black mordant humor.

The heart of the new memoir is the 1982 murder of Griffin Dunne’s younger sister, “Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne. It’s the first time he’s really grappled with telling the story of that pivotal event in his family’s history. The...

On a brisk April afternoon in the East Village, Griffin Dunne steps through a portal to his past. He has hustled up the stairs of an East Village tenement too old for elevators despite its gentrified gleam. The hallways are narrow but clean and the doors look modern, new — until we arrive at the apartment we’re seeking. Layers of chipped paint speak of the passage of decades. The threshold is uneven — an entry to an era of slanting wooden floors, fire escape patios and bathrooms the size of closets. Inside, hats of fantastic shapes and sizes dot the blue walls, and everywhere there are books and flyers about Blondie, the Pyramid Club, Candy Darling, David Wojnarowicz, etc. Here is the habitat of a performance artist, impeccably preserved for decades and in fact still very much in use.

Because he’s trying to help his daughter, the actor Hannah Dunne,...

Jessica Lange plays the type of women you best keep your guard up around. Step carefully, or she could hurt you with a turn of phrase so gutting because it locates all your insecurities. But that’s also because these women are broken, too, and played with the rare cocktail of vulnerability, resolve, and brio that the two-time Oscar winner is known for on stage and screen.

In Paula Vogel’s (“How I Learned to Drive”) “Mother Play,” a “play in five evictions” now on Broadway as part of Second Stage Theater, Lange is Phyllis, a hardheaded, chain-smoking, martini-swilling matriarch and — oh, when hasn’t Lange played a hardheaded, chain-smoking, martini-swilling matriarch, or at least a complicated woman with a gamut of dependency and emotional issues? Stage roles in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” or “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” put...

Jerry Schatzberg's The Panic In Needle Park is a 1971 drama film co-written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by James Mills. What the film is arguably most remembered for is being Al Pacino's first starring role as Bobby, a small-time hustler and addict. The film is a gritty and harrowing tale of love and addiction in New York City, following the relationship of Bobby and his addict-to-be lover Helen (Kitty Winn), who falls deep into the NYC heroin scene, tarnishing their relationship and leading to a series of heart-breaking betrayals. Pacino's charismatic portrayal of Bobby is endearing and inviting, a beautiful trainwreck of a character whose spell is so effectively cast upon Helen. His cock-sure attitude and enigmatic personality are tragically undercut by the savagery of his addiction, which spreads like a disease into Helen, subsuming her morality in a heart-breaking corruption arc.

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.

Maggie Rogers has unveiled her third studio album, Don’t Forget Me.

First announced this past February, Don’t Forget Me features 10 new songs, including the previously-released singles “Don’t Forget Me” and March’s “So Sick of Dreaming.” Now, the album has arrived in its entirety, capturing the spontaneous inspiration the musicians were tapped into when it was recorded.

Get Maggie Rogers Tickets Here

As Rogers explained in a statement released around the album’s announcement, “I wanted to make an album that sounded like a Sunday afternoon,” Rogers said in a note accompanying today’s announcement. “Worn in denim. A drive in your favorite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room. An old corvette. Vintage, but not overly Americana. I wanted to make an album to belt at full volume alone in your car,...

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.NEWSThe Delinquents.The start of the Academy Awards ceremony was delayed by hundreds of protestors obstructing the red carpet to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of plagiarism charges by an Iranian court after allegations were leveled by a former student, who accused him of stealing the idea for A Hero (2021) from her documentary on the same subject, produced in his 2014 filmmaking workshop.Meanwhile, Alexander Payne has been accused of plagiarizing The Holdovers (2023) “line-by-line” from a screenplay by Simon Stephenson he appears to have read on spec.Thailand is planning to reform its national film industry as part of a “soft power” program, which may include increased production funding, more rebates for foreign productions, and a reduction of state censorship domestically.

When her son was just two months old, Roja Pakari fell ill. After several medical tests, she was eventually diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer. Extended stays in hospital for treatment meant she slowly became a stranger to her little boy, who thought the hospital was her home.

Co-directed with fellow Danish filmmaker Emilie Adelina Monies, “The Son and the Moon” is Pakari’s love letter to her son, which she will be premiering at Cph:dox, one of Europe’s leading documentary film festivals, on March 18. Variety is debuting the poster below.

Mixing her own footage with archives of her native Iran shot with a camcorder, the film chronicles the six years since the birth of her son and the diagnosis of her illness: how she survived coma, her desire – in her own words – “not only to survive but to live” despite cancer, and how she reclaimed her place as...

Maggie Rogers has announced her third album, Don’t Forget Me, which will be released on April 12th via Capitol Records. The title track, which doubles as the lead single, is out today alongside a music video filmed in Super 8. Check it out below.

Rogers wrote Don’t Forget Me over the course of five days in late 2022, early 2023. Her sole collaborator on the project was Ian Fitchuk, who co-wrote eight of the album’s 10 songs and also played the majority of the instruments and served as its co-producer alongside Rogers.

“I wanted to make an album that sounded like a Sunday afternoon,” Rogers said in a note accompanying today’s announcement. “Worn in denim. A drive in your favorite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room. An old corvette. Vintage,...

The Killer.How do you make a good movie in this country and be jumped on?Once, in 1967, in the opener for her Bonnie and Clyde review, Pauline Kael asked the opposite question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” Now, times have changed. Nothing provokes us to jump and say, “Hold the torches! That’s the key! The way forward.”An automatic film like David Fincher’s new thriller, The Killer, comes and goes with the velocity of a Twitter news cycle: about six fervent days of talk. (The seventh and beyond? Fits and bursts of takes amid miles of silence.) Whether you think it’s good or bad, The Killer has not lingered in the popular consciousness. And I can’t imagine it lingering. It might have passed me by with the similarly fleeting presence of recent moving-image works like Richard Linklater...

James Sanders in Celluloid Skyline: New York And The Movies quotes Deborah Kerr with Cary Grant in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember: “It’s the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York.”

In the first instalment with architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders, we discuss his timeless and profound book, Celluloid Skyline: New York And The Movies, in which he explores how deeply one informs the other. From Joan Didion’s wisdom to Cedric Gibbons’s dream sets in the sky, we touch on George Stevens’s Swing Time (starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and Robert Z Leonard’s Susan Lenox (with Greta Garbo and Clark Gable); East River running with Jill Clayburgh and Michael Murphy in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.

James Sanders with Anne-Katrin Titze: “One of the aspects of a mythic city is that it can go anywhere ”

The mansion...

Exclusive: Matthew Wilder has been set to write and direct an untitled film that chronicles the life and work of author Joan Didion.

The plan is to paint a dreamlike day in the life of Didion and California in the late 1960s, when the brilliant young journalist is hurtled from encounters with jailed Manson girls to protesting Black Panthers, and from Nancy Reagan pausing in a photo op to Vietnam War POWs — climaxing with an epilogue in a near-future California where an AI Joan encounters a dystopia beyond her wildest anxiety dreams.

The film, produced under David Michaels’ Enfant Terrible Cinema, will shoot in Los Angeles in the first or second quarter of 2024. Financing is being discussed with potential partners this week at AFM.

A National Book Award winner and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, Didion’s account of grief and loss in 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking...

Despite being a bestseller, Donna Tartt's novel "The Secret History" has faced numerous failed attempts at adaptation to film due to various reasons. Hollywood legends Alan J. Pakula and Joan Didion were initially involved in the first attempt at adaptation but faced obstacles and eventually, the project was shelved. Gwyneth and Jake Paltrow and author Bret Easton Ellis also tried to bring "The Secret History" to the screen, but unfortunate events and difficulties in finding a network for the adaptation prevented its realization.

Though Donna Tartt's novel is a bestseller, The Secret History has yet to be adapted to the screen after a handful of failed attempts to bring her book to life. Initially released in 1992, The Secret History is Tartt's first novel and follows students at a prestigious school who are encouraged by an eccentric professor to live outside the bounds of common morality--eventually murdering a classmate. The...

This is day 99 of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Actors in New York City nearing day 100 on strike said a polite no thank you Friday to an offer from top stars to fund their health care by lifting the cap on SAG-AFTRA dues — to the tune of more than $150 million over three years — and to rework residual payments to benefit rank-and-file union members.

“It seems like not a good idea,” actor Kathleen Chalfant told Deadline during Friday’s rainy picket outside Netflix offices near Manhattan’s Union Square, in response to a proposal Thursday by A-listers to let their dues rise and, relatedly, to reverse the normal order of residual payouts so that actors at the bottom of the call sheet are paid first.

Union leaders have praised George Clooney and others for “their creativity and earnest desire to help solve the impasse.” But in a letter to members they also said...

Like its two recent multi-disc predecessors, Joni Mitchell Archives — Volume 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) collects live and studio vault tapes from a particular era in Mitchell’s career. This one gets off to a seemingly unbeatable start. Much of its first quarter is devoted to an entire live show from Carnegie Hall in 1971, months after Mitchell’s landmark album Blue had been released. Sounding at the top of her game, vocally and instrumentally, Mitchell opens with a swooping, vivacious “This Flight Tonight.” Accompanying herself on guitar, piano and dulcimer,...

On Monday, 2nd October 2023, at 7:30 Pm on BBC Two, Season 21 Episode 6 of “Mastermind” will air. In this episode, four contenders will participate, answering questions on their chosen specialist subjects and general knowledge.

The questions in this episode will be posed by Clive Myrie, and they will cover a range of topics. The specialist subjects include the musician Richard Thompson, the popular show “Ted Lasso,” the life and works of Joan Didion, and the remarkable figure of Gandhi.

“Mastermind” is a quiz show where contestants display their knowledge and expertise across a wide array of subjects. It’s a platform for individuals to showcase their intellect and test their memory and understanding.

Tune in to see how these four contenders fare as they respond to questions about their chosen topics and tackle general knowledge queries. It’s an opportunity to witness the pursuit of knowledge and the thrill of competition on “Mastermind.

Of all the stories and sides of Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper decided to leave out of “Maestro,” the most infamous is surely the “Radical Chic” episode. In 1970, a New York magazine cover story, written by Tom Wolfe and entitled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” spent 20,000 words describing, in delectable you-are-there detail, a party thrown by Lenny and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers. Several of the Panthers were there, mingling with the swells of aristocratic liberal New York, and Wolfe captured the contradictions of that evening in a tone of such scathing perception that it was as if he’d defined the concept of bourgeois political correctness, disemboweled it, and danced on its grave, all in the same moment.

In “Radical Wolfe,” a lively, impeccably chiseled portrait of Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018 (this is the first documentary...

Olivia Rodrigo recently revealed how she’s gotten into ’80s new wave bands like Depeche Mode and The Cure, and now, she’s named a more current favorite in Rage Against the Machine.

In a new cover story with Rolling Stone, Rodrigo opened up about some of the influences for her excellent sophomore album, Guts. While speaking about the opening track, “All-American Bitch,” she credited two bands as inspiration: Babes in Toyland and Rage Against the Machine.

Rodrigo remembered sleeping with a turntable next to her bed at the age of 14 and being awoken by her mom putting on Babes in Toyland’s sophomore album, Fontanelle, which she would listen to while getting dressed. “Rock in that feminine way, that’s just the coolest thing in the world to me,” she said about the Kat Bjelland-led band.

In addition to the punk energy of Babes in Toyland, Rodrigo tapped...

Olivia Rodrigo knocked it out of the park on her first try, with her instant classic of a debut, Sour. So expectations have been sky-high for her next move. But the suspense is over: Her excellent new Guts is another instant classic, with her most ambitious, intimate, and messy songs yet. Olivia’s pop-punk bangers are full of killer lines (“I wanna meet your mom, just to tell her her son sucks”), but she pushes deeper in powerful ballads like “Logical.” All over Guts, she’s so witty, so pissed off,...

The 2023 writers strike has focused attention on recent developments like artificial intelligence and the transition to streaming.

But for film writers, the key issue in the strike has been a constant battle for more than a generation: How do you get paid for a script once it’s finished?

Screenwriters have long been asked to do free revisions before turning in a “first draft” to the studio, which triggers payment. Typically they agree, even though the Writers Guild of America contract sets out minimum rates for revisions and polishes.

“I have boxes of scripts in my garage that are just draft after draft after draft,” said Emily Fox, a WGA strike captain who was walking the picket lines last week. “And it was all ‘first draft.’ But it was like First Draft A, First Draft B. But if they’re like, ‘You’re not ready to hand it in,’ then...

Clockwise from left: Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry (Apple TV+), Gaga: Five Foot Two (Netflix), Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (HBO), Pamela, A Love Story (Netflix), Cobain: Montage Of Heck (HBO)Graphic: AVClub

Celebrity documentaries run the gamut. There are hagiographies, which all but deify their subjects.

One of the most notorious porn movies in history provides the backdrop for this week’s Minx, which hints at the success that might await the little magazine that could. But is everyone on board with that plan?

It sure seems so in the beginning, at least, as we open at an event’s red carpet like the one in the season premiere. This time, though, it’s not a dream: A swanky Doug and Tina are getting out of a fancy car outside a theater showing Deep Throat. Bottom Dollar Productions is hosting a screening of the controversial adult film,...

Before indie sleaze, there was porno chic. And if Apple TV+’s recent “City on Fire” brought back to life the fashions and music of the early oughts’ indie sleaze heyday, then Starz’s “Minx” absolutely owns porno chic, down to the last unbuttoned button.

Set during the ‘70s as indefatigable feminist Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) reluctantly teams up with porn publisher Doug Renetti to transform her The Matriarchy Awakens magazine pitch into Minx, a porn magazine for women filled with both feminist theory and schwanzes, the show initially premiered on HBO Max before moving to Starz as a result of the streamer’s content purge. Never mind the new home, though, Ellen Rapaport’s silly, sexy, and serious comedy remains as solidly built as before even as the characters experience radical growth in its sophomore season.

Much of it is spurred by the arrival in the season premiere of Elizabeth Perkins’ caftan and turban-clad Constance,...

During a star-studded promotional screening of “Deep Throat,” Joan Didion shares a prescient observation. She doesn’t want to — at least, not in that moment. All she wants is to enjoy the lavish party put on to promote Minx magazine. Check that: All she really wants is to be left in peace to use the restroom, but Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor-in-chief of Minx, can’t contain her giddy inquiries long enough for the acclaimed journalist to relieve her bladder. Joyce wants Joan to write for the magazine; something about “Deep Throat” and what it reflects about the shifting ‘70s culture, if not society at large. Joan isn’t all that interested, and instead encourages Joyce to pen the piece herself — but not before offering her reluctant, rushed assessment of the landmark porno being screened in the adjacent auditorium. “I don’t think it was their intent,” Joan says,...

What was it W. B. Yeats wrote, that line Joan Didion lifted and twisted in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about West Coast chaos in 1967? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

That’s how it felt on Thursday, a few minutes before lunch with some seasoned film executive-friends at the Academy Museum (Salad Niçoise again). Ping, a news alert said the actors’ strike was on. Just up the street, SAG-AFTRA was already under media siege. July 13, 2023: It was a hot one in Hollywood, and about to get hotter. As Didion said of the Sixties cultural crisis, “The center was not holding.”

Actors weren’t acting. Writers weren’t writing. Top film reviewers weren’t deigning to review Sound of Freedom, a right wing-connected child-trafficking thriller that slipped past Insidious: The Red Door to lead the box-office for a couple of days, until Tom Cruise took over with Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One.

Inspired by the vestiges of a bygone industrial age in places like Flint and Ypsilanti, as well as the enduring grandeur of Tahquamenon Falls, Sufjan Stevens’s Michigan was, to borrow from William Butler Yeats by way of Joan Didion, something of a “slouch towards Bethlehem.” Set against the backdrop of a nation grappling with the effect of globalization, the slow creep of post-modern isolationism, and the trauma of 9/11, the album serves as both a freeze-frame of an era and a signpost of a new direction for indie music in 2003.

Michigan was the first entry in Stevens’s 50 States Project, with a proposed album about each state in the United States. The ambitious series was ultimately revealed to be, at least in part, a joke, with only one other album—2005’s Illinois—ever completed.

Michigan isn’t just Stevens’s home state, but a microcosm of the broader challenges faced...

I swear, this review is not a defense of Che Diaz.

I won’t apologize for their crimes against stand-up comedy, their pursuit of gold in the Identity Olympics, or the way they make their paramour Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) walk on egg shells whenever they’re breathing the same air. Sara Ramirez’s Che is smarmy and self-absorbed. They’re ostensibly a comic by profession, but have no clue how to produce or wield humor. (“The only thing I’m worried about is that spice all over your lips,” they clunkily purr to a fretting Miranda. “Because I’m not trying to have curry-lingus later.”) Che is what haters’ dreams are made of. And if Twitter memes are to be taken as fact, they are the complete opposite of a fan favorite: They’re a fan bête noire.

Which is precisely why I love the existence of Che Diaz. On...