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Cate Blanchett has received a symphony of praise from critics for her starring role in Todd Fields’ “Tar”and as a strong-willed orchestra conductor. Lydia Tar speaks her mind whether making a fool out of a conducting student at Juilliard or threatening a young girl bullying her daughter at school. But Tar’s diva-tude has nothing on the Sir Alfred de Carter (Rex Harrison) the famed conductor with an ego as big as the Ritz in writer/director/producer Preston Sturges’ hilarious dark 1948 comedy “Unfaithfully Yours.”

Sturges had had an incredible run at Paramount with his brilliant comedies: 1940’s “The Great McGinty,” for which he won the original screenplay Oscar and “Christmas in July”; 1941’s “The Lady Eve” and “Sullivan’s Travels”; 1942’s “The Palm Beach Story”; and 1944’s “The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.” But then came many clashes with Paramount executives, the 1944 critical...

I had the chance to speak to Tom Sturges, the son of director Preston Sturges, to converse about the comically inclined films of his auteur father whose works came to define American cinema and sentiments of the 1940s. For the occasion of the Criterion Collection’s re-release of the 1941 classic The Lady Eve on Blu-ray (which is also a newly restored 4K digital transfer), Sturges shared illuminating asides about how his father’s personal experiences shaped some aspects of the film (which are also detailed in his 2019 publication Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director).…...

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“Pratfalls And A Zoom Supplement”

By Raymond Benson

The brilliance of Preston Sturges’ brilliant screwball comedy aside, what is striking about the new Blu-ray edition of the filmmaker’s 1941 The Lady Eve from The Criterion Collection is the supplement that is a Zoom conversation between Tom Sturges (Preston’s son), filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, James L. Brooks, and Ron Shelton, and critics Leonard Maltin, Kenneth Turan, and Susan King. While it’s unclear if this is the first acknowledgment of the Covid-19 pandemic in the production of home video supplementary features, this reviewer found the inclusion to be revelatory. How amazing it is to see these personages in the Brady Bunch-style squares all discussing Sturges and the film, and mirroring what many of us are doing while working at home. At one point, Brooks’ internet connection fails and his image freezes. All the others...

We already got details on The Criterion Collection’s major release this July–a seven-disc Bruce Lee box set–but that’s not all of the cinematic goodness they will be serving up this summer.

They’ve now unveiled the rest of their July releases, some of which are Blu-ray upgrades, including the Abbas Kiarostami masterpiece Taste of Cherry and their first Netflix release, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.

Also in the lineup is the Preston Sturges classic screwball comedy The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda as well as Byron Haskin’s Technicolor adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Check out full details on all the releases below.

Taste of Cherry

The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives around...

In a revealing new biography, Tom Sturges looks back on the life of his writer-director father despite barely knowing him

“If ever a plot needed a twist, this one does.” That’s one of the most arch, and celebrated lines in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. It’s a great comic story that’s both about storytelling, and about comedy itself – that precious quality of laughter, which “isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan”. Recently, Tom Sturges, the writer-director’s youngest son, discovered that his own father’s life story was in need of a plot twist. The result is a new book, co-authored by Tom, called Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director.

Related: Preston Sturges: how a master of daftness conquered Hollywood...