Actualités

Above: 1963 German re-release poster by Heinz Edelmann for Kind Hearts and Coronets.If you are near Berlin during the next four months there is a movie poster exhibition that you must not miss. It opens today at the Kulturforum and it is called Grosses Kino: Filmplakate aller Zeiten, which translates as The Big Screen: Film Posters of All Time.Grosses Kino has been curated by Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (the Art Library at the Berlin State Museum) in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek. The Kunstbibliothek has an extraordinary collection of over 5,000 film posters, 300 of which—dating from 1905 to 2023—have been selected for the exhibition. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 26 “film industry experts” from the fields of acting, directing, cinema management, film studies, art, and graphic design selected to choose one...

Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86.

Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, said her publicist, Gene Schwam.

It was her uncredited turn opposite Astaire in "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946 that won her a seven-year contract with MGM. Her moves with Astaire in Vincent Minnelli's "Band Wagon" were often described as "heavenly."

One of the greatest female dancers in the heyday of the Hollywood musical, she starred in such big-screen extravaganzas as "Brigadoon" (1954) and as a young Vicki Carr in "The Silencers" (1966). While she strutted her considerable stuff on the screen, her singing was invariably dubbed.

Though she didn't often spend much time on the screen, her scenes made dramatic impact. Outfitted in the most splendid costumes, she wowed...