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Sara Fgaier on Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember, starring Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant and Love Affair with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer: “I saw the two versions in Paris. It was incredible, because I already wrote the film [Weightless] and then I discovered them.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

Sara Fgaier’s Weightless (Sulla Terra Leggeri), a highlight of Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s 24th edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, stars Andrea Renzi, Sara Serraiocco, Emilio Scarpa, and Lise Lomi. The story by Fgaier and Sabrina Cusano, who both co-wrote the screenplay with Maurizio Buquicchio, links love and memory and in an exciting new cinematic way combines past and present, the life of the mind and that of physical remnants of what may never have been.

Lise Lomi and Emilio Scarpa star in Sara Fgaier’s Weightless

Fgaier chose a Julian Barnes quote from...

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

Museum of the Moving Image

Tom Gunning is celebrated in a weekend-long series featuring M on 35mm, Hal Hartley’s Flirt, and an avant-garde program; films by Buster Keaton and Renny Harlin play in See It Big: Stunts!

Nitehawk Cinema

A print of Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman screens early on Saturday and Sunday.

Film at Lincoln Center

Films by Charles Burnett, Ousmane Sembène, and more screen in L.A. Rebellion.

Museum of Modern Art

Films by Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, and Dorothy Arzner play in The Lady at 100.

Film Forum

A new 35mm print of 8½ begins playing, while Mort Rifkin favorite A Man and a Woman continues in a new restoration.

Bam

A retrospective of Sudanese cinema begins.

Roxy Cinema

The French Connection and City Dudes screen this Saturday; The Little Rascals plays for free on Sunday,...

Among the most legendary actresses of all time, Ingrid Bergman looms large. Bergman's career extended across decades, and she was able to work with some of the greatest filmmakers of all time, from Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Curtiz to Leo McCarey. And moreover, many of the films in her filmography are widely, and correctly, considered among the best English-language films ever made, from "The Bells of St. Mary's" and "Gaslight" to one of the most iconic American and World War II films ever, "Casablanca." Bergman, unsurprisingly, was well rewarded for her immense talent and acting craft, netting three Oscars (as well as being nominated four other times). That she wasn't even nominated for "Casablanca," a film that has a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes and walked away with the Best Picture Oscar, says something about how good she was and how not every one of her performances could get the golden statuette.

Quick LinksWhat is Bringing Up Baby About?The Leopard in Bringing Up Baby Was Mostly PracticalBringing Up Baby Was a Box Office Flop

They did things differently back in the early days of Hollywood. It all started humbly with the development of "talkies" when synchronized sound was introduced in 1927's The Jazz Singer. The train didn't stop here, however, as new groundbreaking film technologies have been discovered every single year since. From Technicolor, Eastman color, and digital cinema, all the way to 3D and even 4D. The cinema experience is becoming more visually striking and immersive by the second, and it doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. Despite these advancements making film an interesting medium to track the growth of, some can't help but be nostalgic for the olden days. Fans and filmmakers alike are concerned that these new advancements strip the filmmaking process of the love that made...

Reader, you have been lied to! Film history is littered with unfairly maligned classics, whether critics were too eager to review the making of rather than the finished product, or they suffered from underwhelming ad campaigns or general disinterest. Let’s revise our takes on some of these films from wrongheaded to the correct opinion.

When “Madhouse,” a comedy about a happily married couple besieged by out of control house guests, was released in early 1990, it met with immediate hostility from critics. How hostile were they? So hostile that “Madhouse” is currently in the select group of movies sitting uncomfortably at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, not a single positive review to its name.

The irony is that not only is “Madhouse” not bad, it’s great. And not only great, but all-time great, a comedy so flawless in its construction and so precise in its timing that it ranks alongside the best work of Howard Hawks,...

If film is, as Roger Ebert famously put it, a machine that generates empathy, then there's perhaps no other artistic medium out there so perfectly suited to communicating and eliciting sadness. By the same token, movies are maybe the best medium at laying out a persuasive case for the value of sadness as an aesthetic experience. A good cry at a movie can be cathartic, therapeutic, restorative, sobering and educational, or merely painful and gut-wrenching and still have value for its sheer depth of experience.

To compile this ranking of the 15 saddest movies ever, we've tried to go beyond the territory of efficient tear-jerking, and look instead for those films that are positively drenched in gloom, pain, misery, and despair from beginning to end — the movies that articulate sadness as an existential constant as opposed to a momentary state. Get the tissues ready, take a deep breath, and happy (or not) viewing.

In Oscars history, Barry Fitzgerald holds the record of being the only actor to ever receive two separate award nominations for the same performance and win one. The Irish actor, whose prolific career in Hollywood lasted from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, worked with the likes of movie legends John Wayne, John Ford, Cary Grant, and more. But rather than just being a part of their cinematic accomplishments, Fitzgerald succeeded in landing some important achievements of his own in the industry.

In the early stages of his career, Barry Fitzgerald was an unlikely contender to set any Oscar records. He started off as a stage actor in Ireland and didn't receive his break in Hollywood until 1936, when he appeared in John Ford's The Plough and the Stars, at the age of 48. But just eight years after his appearance in the John Ford movie, Fitzgerald was chosen by director,...

The holiday season is here, even if you wish that the Christmas season didn't truly start until after Thanksgiving. Naturally, movie studios have already begun to foist holiday movies upon the world, whether it's Hallmark-style straight-to-streaming fluff like "Hot Frosty" or the extremely big-budget action-adventure "Red One," starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans as an unlikely duo who have to team up to rescue none other than Santa Claus himself from being kidnapped and ruining the holiday altogether. But for those of us who may love films but want something a little different out of the movies that ring in the extended holiday season from Thanksgiving all the way through New Year's Day, try out these 12 movies for size. We won't get into any standard-issue "Is 'Die Hard' a Christmas movie?" debates in this list. Instead, let's just look chronologically at these 12 very different kinds of holiday movies.

What's your favorite romantic movie, the one that moves you to tears, be they of happiness or sorrow? Perhaps it's Leo McCarey's four-hankie 1939 weeper "Love Affair" starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, or maybe it's McCarey's own remake "An Affair to Remember" lead by the insanely photogenic likes of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. And then there's Nora Ephron's rom-com riff on those films, "Sleepless in Seattle" toplined by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Prefer a good ugly cry? Arthur Hiller's "Love Story" and that Francis Lai score will mug it out of you as Ryan O'Neal loses the love of his life in Ali MacGraw. In the mood for a good emotional scalding? Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" will leave you stunned and in the mood for anything but love.

For fans of the "Love Story" flavor, John Crowley's "We Live in Time" did...

The great actress Isabella Rossellini was the face of Lancôme beauty for more than a decade beginning in the early 1980s, but strangely, if you look back, rarely is she the lead in any of her iconic films.

Sometimes a shadow, sometimes on the periphery, a Rossellini character is nonetheless always knowing, from tragic lounge singer Dorothy Vallens in her then-partner David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” to ethereal beauty whisperer Lisle Von Rhuman in Robert Zemeckis’ “Death Becomes Her” and a wealthy Italian widow who dates below her station in David O. Russell’s “Joy.”

In Edward Berger’s papal potboiler “Conclave,” Rossellini has fewer lines than ever — and probably they could fit on one page — as Sister Agnes. Here is a glowering nun who has seen some shit. In the case of Berger’s English-language follow-up to Oscar-winning heavy-hitter “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Agnes is the eyes...

Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola has joined Letterboxd, the social cataloguing service where members can rate and review films and keep track of what they’ve watched. I’m a little addicted. Coppola has shared a list of twenty films that he would recommend to any cinephile or aspiring filmmaker, which you can check out below.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir) The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra) Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg) The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis) The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa) Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu) The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg) Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan) Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg) Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst) A Place in the Sun (George Stevens) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) After...

Directors remaking their own movies isn’t a common practice, but it does happen every now and then. The reason behind doing so usually boils down to the Fomo over technological advancements and equipment that weren’t available during the making of the original. In addition to that, some directors want to include plot elements and themes that were absent in the original for some reason or another. And sometimes it can be a result of a studio, which owns the rights to the original, deciding to greenlight a remake, thereby leaving the director with the option of either helming the film or watching someone else do it. Some of the most popular examples of this phenomenon are Michael Mann’s L.A. Takedown and Heat, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sam Raimi’s requel (it’s a remake and sequel) The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II,...

Though the title of the awards has changed over the decades, the two guest star in a drama series Emmys are among the most competitive handed out during the Creative Arts ceremony. Cicely Tyson earned the most nomination in this category with nine. Michael J. Fox received seven nominations earning the award in 2009 for FX’s “Rescue Me.” And who have won the most in the past five decades? Patricia Clarkson, Charles S. Dutton, Cherry Jones, Ron Cephas Jones, John Lithgow, Shirley Knight, Margo Martindale, Patrick McGoohan, Amanda Plummer and Alfre Woodward have each won twice.

This year five drama nominees appeared in FX’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith“- Michaela Cole, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, Parker Posey and John Turturro. Rounding out the nominees for Best Drama Guest Actress are Claire Foy for “The Crown,” Marcia Gay Harden for “The Morning Show” while Nestor Carbonell for “Shogun,” Tracy Letts...

by Cláudio Alves

Since last month, the Criterion Channel has hosted a curated collection of screwball comedies, spanning the subgenre's pre-Code genesis to its postwar decline. Among the many screwy delights, you'll find The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey's 1937 classic, and a Best Director Oscar winner to boot. Indeed, the movie was most beloved by the Academy, scoring five additional nominations, including for Picture, Actress, and Supporting Actor. According to contemporary publications, that last honor was a relative surprise, especially since the movie's leading man was left off the ballot altogether.

You would think a major star associated with such an awards juggernaut would have an easy time nabbing themselves a coattails nomination, but Cary Grant was out of luck in 1937. Well, when it comes to the AMPAS, he was often unfortunate, only ever getting their seal of approval in the early 40s with a couple of dips into melodrama-land.

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,...

When IndieWire recently ranked the 25 best films of Alfred Hitchcock, it was probably no surprise to anyone that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the director’s sole attempt at a light romantic comedy, didn’t make the cut. Even Hitchcock himself tended to underrate the film, as when he told interviewer François Truffaut that “since I didn’t really understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written.” From a filmmaker who regularly dismissed movies he considered uncinematic as mere “photographs of people talking,” this was the ultimate self-directed insult.

Yet even a casual reappraisal of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” newly available in an exquisite Blu-ray special edition from Warner Archive, undermines Hitchcock’s claims about his own movie. While it would be a bridge too far to declare the film a masterpiece on a par with “Psycho” or “Rear Window,...

The character of Chief Miles O'Brien first appeared in the pilot episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Encounter at Farpoint". Throughout the show's first season, Chief O'Brien would appear mostly in the Enterprise's transporter room, tasked with beaming the Enterprise crew up and down from dangerous away missions. As the show progressed, O'Brien was allowed to speak up more and more. By the show's fourth season, O'Brien would marry his sweetheart Keiko (Rosalind Chao), become possessed by an alien criminal, and reveal long-lasting Ptsd. All told, O'Brien was in 52 episodes of "Next Generation" before becoming a regular cast member of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," affording him 160 additional episodes.

O'Brien was played by reliable Irish actor Colm Meany, star of John Houston's "The Dead," "Dick Tracy," and "The Commitments" (and its sequels). He was a hard worker, and during his 12-year stint on "Star Trek," appeared in 23 feature films.

How now, what news: the Criterion Channel’s July lineup is here. Eight pop renditions of Shakespeare are on the docket: from movies you forgot were inspired by the Bard (Abel Ferrara’s China Girl) to ones you’d wish to forget altogether (Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing), with maybe my single favorite interpretation (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet) alongside Paul Mazursky, Gus Van Sant, Baz Luhrmann, Derek Jarman, and (of course) Kenneth Branagh. A neonoir collection arrives four months ahead of Noirvember: two Ellroy adaptations, two from De Palma that are not his neonoir Ellroy adaptation, two from the Coen brothers (i.e. the chance to see a DVD-stranded The Man Who Wasn’t There in HD), and––finally––a Michael Winner picture given Criterion’s seal of approval.

Columbia screwballs run between classics to lesser-seens while Nicolas Roeg and Heisei-era Godzilla face off. A Times Square collection brings The Gods of Times Square,...

World War II was still raging in May 1944. The allied invasion of Normandy — aka D-Day — was just around the corner on June 6th. Americans kept the home fires burning and escaped from the global conflict by going to the movies. Two of the biggest films of the year, Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way” and George Cukor’s “Gaslight,” recently celebrated their 80th anniversaries.

Actually, “Going My Way” had a special “Fighting Front” premiere on April 27th: 65 prints were shipped to battle fronts and shown “from Alaska to Italy, and from England to the jungles of Burma.” The sentimental comedy-drama-musical arrived in New York on May 3rd.

And it was just the uplifting film audiences needed. Bing Crosby starred as Father O’Malley, a laid-back young priest who arrives at a debt-ridden New York City church that is run by the older, set-in-his ways Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald). The elder...

The Greek provocateur seemed to be smiling throughout Oscar night. In the past he’d delivered films with titles like Dogtooth and The Lobster, and his newest, Poor Things, was now stockpiling the statuary even as Hollywood’s filmmaking elite looked on, perplexed.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ code-busting Poor Things was winning not only successive awards (four in all) Sunday but also the exuberant applause from an audience that seemed to welcome change. Even chaotic change.

Oppenheimer won the big prize on Oscar night, of course, but Oscar voters once again demonstrated their support for the product of the filmmaking underclass. The Scorsese-Spielberg-Ridley Scott fraternity looked on while dark horses like Lanthimos, or, a year earlier, the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) from Everything Everywhere All at Once, stole the action. Coda from Sian Heder was the surprise of 2022.

Does all this reflect a restive mood? “The power of Poor Things stems...

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best Adapted Screenplay Oppenheimer, from left: Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, 2023. © Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Weekly Commentary: Cord Jefferson stands on the brink of potentially making history in the adapted screenplay category with “American Fiction,” potentially becoming only the second...

“It Happened One Night,” which premiered at Radio City Music Hall on Feb. 22, 1934, helped usher in the screwball romantic comedy, changed the careers of stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin and transformed the Poverty Row Columbia Pictures into a major player. And let’s not forget, “It Happened One Night” also made Oscar history winning five major Oscars: picture, director, adapted screenplay and both actor and actress. It would be 41 years before “One Flew of the Cuckoo’s Nest” would accomplish the same feat at the Academy Awards.

Based on the short story “Night Bus,” the smart, endearing road movie focuses on spoiled rotten Ellie Andrews (Colbert) who has gone against her wealthy father’s (Walter Connelly) wishes by marrying the gold-digging King Westley (Jameson Thomas). Before their wedding night, her father whisked her away to his yacht in Florida. She manages to...

February––particularly its third week––is all about romance. Accordingly the Criterion Channel got creative with their monthly programming and, in a few weeks, will debut Interdimensional Romance, a series of films wherein “passion conquers time and space, age and memory, and even death and the afterlife.” For every title you might’ve guessed there’s a wilder companion: Alan Rudolph’s Made In Heaven, Soderbergh’s remake, and Resnais’ Love Unto Death. Mostly I’m excited to revisit Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, a likely essential viewing before Megalopolis.

February also marks Black History Month, and Criterion’s series will include work by Shirley Clarke (also subject of a standalone series), Garrett Bradley, Cheryl Dunye, and Julie Dash, while movies by Sirk, Minnelli, King Vidor, and Lang play in “Gothic Noir.” Greta Gerwig gets an “Adventures in Moviegoing” and can be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast,...

Only six actors in Oscar history have been nominated for playing the same character in different movies, with Bing Crosby and Paul Newman being the only two to win an Oscar for their performances. Cate Blanchett is the only actress on the list, receiving two Oscar nominations for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in "Elizabeth" (1998) and "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" (2007). Sylvester Stallone has the largest gap between Oscar nominations for playing the same character, receiving his first nomination for playing Rocky Balboa in "Rocky" (1976) and his second nomination for reprising the role in "Creed" (2015), nearly 40 years later.

In the Oscars' 94-year history, only six actors have ever been nominated for playing the same character on separate occasions. It’s not uncommon for different portrayals of the same character to be nominated or even win an Oscar. However, in these instances, the character is played by different actors, typically in remakes of the original movie.

Alice Walker published her acclaimed novel “The Color Purple” in 1982. It sold five million copies; Walker became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and she also received the National Book Club Award. Three years later, Steven Spielberg directed the lauded film version which made stars out of Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. It earned 11 Oscar nominations. The story revolves around a young woman who suffers abuse from her father and husband for four decades until she finds her own identity. Not exactly the stuff of a Broadway musical.

But the 2005 tuner version received strong reviews, ran 910 performances and earned ten Tony nominations, winning best actress for Lachanze. The 2015 production picked up two Tonys for best revival and actress for Cynthia Erivo. The movie musical version opened strong Christmas Day with $18 million and is a strong contender in several Oscar categories especially for Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks.

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...

Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig. Those are just three names that suggest that the upcoming Academy Awards could well be the year of the auteur — a beloved director who takes their movie through every stage of the filmmaking process from script to screen. This all-hands-in approach sees these types of filmmakers take on scriptwriting, directing, and producing roles — the “holy trinity” of filmmaking if you like.

We’ve had plenty of these types of creatives before but not all of them have resulted in Oscars success. Only nine filmmaker across Oscar history have pulled off a triple play with wins for Best Picture, Best Director, and either Best Adapted Screenplay or Best Original Screenplay:

Leo McCarey, “Going My Way” (1945) Billy Wilder, “The Apartment” (1961) Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather Part II” (1975) James L. Brooks, “Terms of Endearment” (1984) Peter Jackson, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2004) Joel Coen and Ethan Coen,...

Harrowing is a word that barely scratches the surface of the emotional abyss that is war. The uncertainty, the fear, and the profound loss cast long shadows over the human experience. At the end of it, there is often yet another difficult journey: rebuilding. It can be tumultuous. In the wake of World War II, as the world struggled to rebuild and heal, Leo McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's in 1945 not only became the highest-grossing movie of its time but also offered solace and hope to a weary audience. This film captures the essence of wartime struggle, not through the lens of battlefields and violence, but by delving deep into the hearts and minds of its characters. The film's main characters, Sister Benedict (played by Ingrid Bergman) and Father O'Malley (portrayed by Bing Crosby) are determined to achieve their shared goal of saving a school in financial crisis...

Christian Petzold’s Afire on the IFC Center marquee Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with director/screenwriter Christian Petzold on Afire starring Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert (winking at the audience like Ryan Gosling’s Ken in Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster Barbie), Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt we touch upon Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in reference to Paula Beer in the wheelchair; pronouncing Walter Benjamin and Uwe Johnson; Margarethe von Trotta’s film series Jahrestage; Devid Striesow in Yella; new Baltic Sea tourism in the old east, and the goulash in and out of the bag.

Christian Petzold on Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr: “Oh, this is a fantastic movie! It all comes back now!” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Friends Felix (Langston Uibel) and Leon (Thomas Schubert) are on their...

Screwball comedy is a subgenre of romantic comedy that saw its classic period run from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s. Directors such as Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hawks, along with stars such as Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, William Powell, and Katharine Hepburn, all helped shape the foundation of the genre.

Screwball comedies are distinguishable from stereotypical romantic comedies because screwballs typically spoof notions of love rather than emphasize romantic ideals. Common elements found in screwball comedies are rapid-fire overlapping dialogue, zany slapstick antics, mistaken identities, and a battle of the sexes narrative. Many of cinema's classic screwball comedies rank among Hollywood's funniest films.

Related: 10 Rom-Coms Critics Loved But Audiences Hated

The Awful Truth (1937)

Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth is a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a wealthy couple who decide to divorce but end up trying to sabotage each other's subsequent romantic conquests.

Christian Petzold, the director of the well-timed summer movie Afire with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I’m really sure that we don’t have summer movies. The Americans have summer movies, the French have summer movies.”

Christian Petzold’s slow-burning Afire, shot by Hans Fromm, stars Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt.

Nadja (Paula Beer) with Devid (Enno Trebs), Felix (Langston Uibel), and Leon (Thomas Schubert) in Afire

A scene in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr); Sophie Calle’s Voir La Mer and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs; Astrid Lindgren; a Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre touch; Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob and Margarethe von Trotta’s Jahrestage series; Johan Wolfgang von Goethe; a Nanni Moretti quote; meeting Paul Dano’s Wildlife cinematographer Diego García (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendor) in Tel Aviv; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak,...

(Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we look at Oscars categories from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy's winners stand the test of time.)

When we think of great Hollywood directors, we think of names like John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, and moving on up to the likes of Steven Spielberg. These are filmmakers who not only had strong artistic and creative instincts and abilities, but they also knew how to translate those skills into making films that appealed to gigantic mass audiences. They made the films that Hollywood always strives to make.

Unquestionably, another filmmaker who belongs on that list is Alfred Hitchcock, the so-dubbed "Master of Suspense." That moniker suits him perfectly, as he was able to craft some of the most tense pictures ever produced in Hollywood. He perfectly understood set-up and payoff. He knew how to ride the line between euphemism and explicitness,...

Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood, and horror movie remakes have long been a thriving part of the industry. Directors will turn their creepy, viral short films into larger studio features, like David F. Sandberg did with Lights Out, and surprise foreign genre hits will sometimes get a makeover for U.S. audiences with the original director at the helm. But you’d be hard pressed to find a modern American director who’s interested in remaking their own feature film.

Enter Clive Barker protégé Anthony Diblasi, who was certainly up for the challenge when he was approached by new genre studio Welcome Villain with the possibility of remaking his 2014 low-budget gem, Last Shift. The director believes he’s the first American director to take on such a feat since Leo McCarey remade Love Affair into An Affair to Remember in 1957.

This week, Welcome Villain releases Diblasi’s remade version of Last Shift,...

Any belief that the Oscars award the right films, directors and performances has faded over the years.

While every ceremony has a smattering of correct decisions – trophies handed to the right people for the right films – more often than not, the pervading feeling is one of pessimism caused by a deluge of undeserving recipients.

The Oscars are a far cry from what they claim to be – a celebration of the previous year’s cinematic offerings. But his does not stop people from trawling the internet the following morning in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the winners list impresses rather than disappoints.

With the 2023 ceremony taking place in March, we have highlighted 17 films that really should not have been awarded Oscars.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is one of the mustier Best Pictures winners of the century so far. While its win was a coup for DreamWorks – the film...

Any belief that the Oscars award the right films, directors and performances has faded over the years.

While every ceremony has a smattering of correct decisions – trophies handed to the right people for the right films – more often than not, the pervading feeling is one of pessimism caused by a deluge of undeserving recipients.

The Oscars are a far cry from what they claim to be – a celebration of the previous year’s cinematic offerings. But his does not stop people from trawling the internet the following morning in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the winners list impresses rather than disappoints.

With the 2023 ceremony taking place in March, we have highlighted 17 films that really should not have been awarded Oscars.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is one of the mustier Best Pictures winners of the century so far. While its win was a coup for DreamWorks – the film...

Any belief that the Oscars award the right films, directors and performances has faded over the years.

While every ceremony has a smattering of correct decisions – trophies handed to the right people for the right films – more often than not, the pervading feeling is one of pessimism caused by a deluge of undeserving recipients.

The Oscars are a far cry from what they claim to be – a celebration of the previous year’s cinematic offerings. But his does not stop people from trawling the internet the following morning in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the winners list impresses rather than disappoints.

With the 2023 ceremony taking place in March, we have highlighted 17 films that really should not have been awarded Oscars.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is one of the mustier Best Pictures winners of the century so far. While its win was a coup for DreamWorks – the film...

This year, all the Oscar-contending directors are nominated for original screenplay: the Daniels, Todd Field, Martin McDonagh, Ruben Östlund and Steven Spielberg (writing with Tony Kushner).

This is the first time it’s happened in AMPAS history.

The only year that came close was 2017, when all five helmers had written or co-written their scripts, though they didn’t all get writing noms.

So here’s Film History 101.

In Hollywood lore, Preston Sturges is often credited as the first scribe to become a hyphenate, as writer-director of the 1940 “The Great McGinty.” But as with all Hollywood “facts,” there is only an element of truth here.

In the next few years, he was joined by some heavyweights: Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) in 1941; Leo McCarey (co-writer of “Going My Way”); Billy Wilder (writing with Raymond Chandler) for “Double Indemnity” in 1944; and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Dragonwyck”), 1946.

However, a writer-director wasn’t an innovation.

Any belief that the Oscars award the right films, directors and performances has faded over the years.

While every ceremony has a smattering of correct decisions – trophies handed to the right people for the right films – more often than not, the pervading feeling is one of pessimism caused by a deluge of undeserving recipients.

The Oscars are a far cry from what they claim to be – a celebration of the previous year’s cinematic offerings. But his does not stop people from trawling the internet the following morning in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the winners list impresses rather than disappoints.

With the 2023 ceremony taking place in March, we have highlighted 17 films that really should not have been awarded Oscars.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is one of the mustier Best Pictures winners of the century so far. While its win was a coup for DreamWorks – the film...

Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out shiny gold Oscar statuettes to actors in four categories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. But believe it or not, what they don't do, anywhere in the Oscar rulebook, is clearly define what the difference is between a lead performance and a supporting performance.

In the end, they leave that decision up to the Academy voters, who can sometimes make weird calls. How the heck they thought Viola Davis was just "supporting" Denzel Washington in "Fences" is anyone's guess, for example. But the thing is, one rule the Academy does have for these categories, is that you are absolutely not allowed to be nominated for Best Lead and Best Supporting for the same performance, in the same film, in the same year.

At least, not anymore. Because someone already did get nominated for...

Fay Wray began her autobiography On the Other Hand with an open letter to her most famous co-star. In it she said, “for more than half a century, you have been the most dominant figure in my public life. To speak of me is to think of you. To speak to me is often a prelude to questions about you.” This most dominant figure was of course the mighty King Kong and the film they appeared in together is unquestionably the best remembered in Wray’s career. She went on to tell Kong, “I admire you because you made only one film—and that became famous, whereas I made seventy-five or eighty and only the one I made with you became really famous.” Despite this fact, which was true for many decades, other films in Wray’s filmography have found new life in the years since she wrote those words in 1988. Now,...

Despite being one of the most recognizable filmmakers in cinematic history, Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar during his illustrious career. With landmark films to his name like Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954), the Master of Suspense was snubbed on the grandest stage of cinematic achievement on a handful of occasions. Though almost all of his over 50 feature films are noted for their technical prowess and timelessness, Hitchcock suffered from a lack of success when it came to accolades and awards. His films have won a slew of awards on their own, but the director himself was never honored with an Oscar.

Hitchcock was nominated for the Best Director Oscar five times over his lengthy career but came up short every time. The Oscars are known for their controversy in awarding the wrong people, and other accomplished auteur directors like Robert Altman and King Vidor were also nominated and lost the prestigious award five times.

Holidays loom, but don’t fear TBS marathons of A Christmas Story. If, like me, you once enacted some good and let studio classics stream on Criterion during family Christmas, you know the trip home will be easier with December’s additions. (People at Criterion: please don’t report me for logging into multiple devices.) As family arrives, drinks are downed, and questions about what you’ve been up to are stumbled through it’ll be nice to stream their “Screwball Comedy Classics” series—25 titles meeting some deep cuts (10 via Venmo if you’ve recently watched It Happens Every Spring).

Personally I’m most excited about the 11 movies in “Snow Westerns,” going as far back as The Secret of Convict Lake, as recently as Ravenous, with the likes of Wellman, Peckinpah, and Corbucci in-between. I personally cannot stand soccer but I appreciate the World Cup giving occasion for a series...

Director/Tfh Guru Allan Arkush discusses his favorite year in film, 1975, with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Rules of the Game (1939)

Le Boucher (1970)

Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

Topaz (1969)

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Hollywood Boulevard (1976) – Jon Davison’s trailer commentary

The Innocents (1961) – Joe Dante’s trailer commentary

The Earrings of Madame De… (1953)

Rope (1948) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

The Awful Truth (1937) – Charlie Largent’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Duck Soup (1933) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Going My Way (1944)

Nashville (1975) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Dan Perri’s trailer commentary

M*A*S*H (1970)

Shampoo (1975) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Bonnie And Clyde (1967) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

The Nada Gang (1975)

Get Crazy (1983) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Night Moves (1975) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – Katt Shea’s trailer...

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Jack Ging, the familiar character actor who recurred on such series as Tales of Wells Fargo, Mannix, Riptide and The A-Team and appeared in three films opposite Clint Eastwood, has died. He was 90.

Ging died Friday of natural causes at his home in La Quinta, California, his wife, Apache Ging, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In rare starring turns, Ging played the love interest of Diane Baker’s character in a remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1960), a soldier and reluctant hero in the waning days of the Korean War in the drama Sniper’s Ridge (1961) and a clinical psychiatrist on the 1962-64 NBC medical series The Eleventh Hour.

Alongside Eastwood, Ging portrayed a marshal in Hang ‘Em High (1968), a doctor in Play Misty for Me (1971) and Morgan Allen, the mine owner (and lover of Marianna Hill’s character), in High Plains Drifter...

Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.Stars at Noon.Dear Leo and Danny,Danny, I’m glad you brought up Three Thousand Years of Longing, a film whose conceptual explorations of myth and storytelling sustained my interest for quite some time. The fundamental question it raises—and which is studied by narratologists and students of comparative religion the world over—is whether there is a finite number of narrative patterns and character archetypes, whether there is a theoretically enumerable list of story structures which we simply repeat again and again. In Three Thousand Years, the basic idea, voiced by Tilda Swinton's academic, is whether it is possible to tell a story about wish-granting that is not a cautionary tale? In its exploration of this, the film played, for a time, a bit like...

Before the academy expanded the Best Picture race in 2010, the winner of that award almost always picked up the Best Director prize as well. But since then, these two awards have aligned at only seven of the dozen ceremonies. We thought that we’d see another case of double-dipping this year with Jane Campion winning for both directing and producing “The Power of the Dog.” But now it looks like “Coda” will claim the top prize of Best Picture, with Campion consoling herself with being the third woman to win Best Director.

Why the change?

When the decision was made to increase the number of nominees for Best Picture, it was also decided to bring back the preferential ballot that had been used by the academy until the mid 1940s. The rationale was that by ranking the nominees, the winner would be the film that had the broadest level of support.

Any belief that the Oscars award the right films, directors and performances has faded over the years.

While every ceremony has a smattering of correct decisions – trophies handed to the right people for the right films – more often than not, the pervading feeling is one of pessimism caused by a deluge of undeserving recipients.

Despite the recent victories of Parasite and Nomadland, the Oscars are a far cry from what they claim to be – a celebration of the previous year’s cinematic offerings. But his does not stop people from trawling the internet the following morning in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the winners list impresses rather than disappoints.

With the 2022 ceremony arriving this weekend, we have highlighted 17 films that really should not have been awarded Oscars.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is one of the mustier Best Pictures winners of the century so far. While its win...

If there’s any film which really conjures an ‘empire state of mind,’ it’s Leo McCarey’s 1939 romantic tearjerker, Love Affair. Strangely, despite an intensely impressive and prolific filmography from McCarey, this is the title most securely saturated in the cinematic zeitgeist, as evidenced by two remakes, the first of which McCarey himself directed as 1957’s An Affair to Remember (arguably most prominent version). But it’s this original morsel, based on a short story by Mildred Cram, adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Delmer Daves (just prior to his ascension as a notable director of film noirs and groundbreaking westerns), which remains the most unfettered and potent version.…...

Those who do not know Oscar history are surprised when it repeats. It’s a different take on philosopher George Santayana’s famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Statistics are an important piece to consider when analyzing an Oscar race. Too often, from the casual awards-watchers on social media, contenders are easily dismissed because of “missing x or y” during its run. However, this new Academy membership, which has diversified immensely in the last few years, has led to various statistics falling in the wake of a new movie being crowned. Jane Campion has been the prom queen of the awards season, with her film “The Power of the Dog” leading the way in the Oscar nomination tally, and despite a recent surge from “Coda,” it remains competitive in many of its races, including best picture.

Read more: Variety’s Awards Circuit Predictions...

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Leo McCarey’s beloved 1939 romance “Love Affair” starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as star-crossed lovers who meet cute on a luxury liner. Since they are both attached to others — Dunne is actually a “kept” woman — they agree to meet six months after they land in New York at the Empire State Building. For years, “Love Affair” was near impossible to see after the rights of the Rko production had been sold to 20th Century Fox for Carey’s scene-by-scene 1957 remake “An Affair to Remember” with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.

But in 1977, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film department lead by the late great Ron Haver presented a months’ long Rko festival featuring every film from the studio that still existed including “Love Affair,” which had earned six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best...