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January 2025 could mark a bleak month for very specific reasons, but in that month one can watch a nicely curated collection of David Bowie’s best performances. Nearly a decade since he passed, the iconic actor (who had some other trades) is celebrated with The Man Who Fell to Earth, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Linguini Incident, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Basquiat. (Note: watch The Missing Pieces under Fire Walk with Me‘s Criterion edition for about three times as much Phillip Jeffries.) It’s a retrospective-heavy month: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Crowe, Ethan Hawke, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Paolo Sorrentino, and Sean Baker are given spotlights; the first and last bring with them To Die For and Take Out‘s Criterion Editions, joining Still Walking, Hunger, and A Face in the Crowd.

“Surveillance Cinema” brings Thx 1138, Body Double, Minority Report, and others, while “Love in Disguise” offers films by Lubitsch,...

Welcome to our weekly rundown of the best new music — featuring big new singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, the theme is power-packed remixes and collabs as major stars join forces. Charli Xcx and Lorde work out their miscommunication and serve up a banger about girlhood, Ariana Grande gets together with R&b queens Brandy and Monica, and Taylor Swift lends haunting harmonies to a standout Gracie Abrams track. Plus, new music from Karol G, Peso Pluma and Quavo, Ice Spice, and more.

Charli Xcx feat.

Rouben Mamoulian is one of the best directors of Golden Age Hollywood, but his efforts often go underseen and underappreciated. One only has to watch his films to admire, and love, his skill as a director. Love Me Tonight (1932) sweeps and swoons with romantic energy; Queen Christina (1933) is a moody biopic that plays with shadows and sexuality; Becky Sharp (1935) is one of the first Technicolor features and is an array of delectable pastels to backdrop to colourful cohorts. And, of course, Mamoulian’s finest work – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931) an imaginative horror that looks deep into the monster lurking in man’s soul.

Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941) is also undeniably exquisite art. Played on the gorgeous, yet volatile nitrate as part of BFI’s Film on Film Festival, there has never been a Mamoulian presentation quite like it in recent years.

Starring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth, Blood and Sand revolves around Juan,...

It is my experience that one gets a far richer, stranger cinema education in pursuing the careers of actors, that group defined first by (assuming luck shines upon them) two or three era-defining films and then so much that dictates their industry—pet projects, contractual obligations, called-in favors alimony payments, auteur one-offs, and on and on. Few embody that deluge of circumstance better than Michelle Yeoh and Isabelle Huppert, both of whom are receiving spotlights in March. The former’s is a who’s-who of Hong Kong talent, new favorites (The Heroic Trio), items we can at least say are of interest (Trio‘s not-great sequel Executioners), etc.

Huppert’s series runs longer, and notwithstanding certain standards that have long sat on the channel it adds some heavy hitters: Hong’s In Another Country, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness, Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come. And, of course,...

With it being seven years since his last live-action film, 2014’s The Grand Budapast Hotel, Wes Anderson is hard at work. Following a Cannes premiere, The French Dispatch finally arrives in limited theaters on October 22 followed by a wide release the following week, and he’s already shooting his next film (recently revealed to have the title Asteroid City) outside of Madrid with Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Rupert Friend, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, Tony Revolori, and Matt Dillon.

As is the case with all of his work, Wes Anderson synthesizes cinema history in his own specific language and for The French Dispatch he has provided a list of influences. As revealed in a promotional book sent to The Flim Stage and styled after the film’s magazine, 32 films are listed that “provided inspiration to the filmmakers,...

The soft glamor of Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? radiates with the persistence of a sparkling disco ball in a foggy club. It’s melancholic luxury, like heavy drops of mascara-stained tears. It is also, undeniably, the British pop star’s best album yet: a sumptuous tribute to both peak- and post-disco as well as the black, brown and LGBTQ people the genre resonated with most deeply.

On Pleasure, the best songs sound like the final breath of euphoria before the harsh glow of the bar’s fluorescent...

Don Williams, who died in September 2017, would have turned 80 this Memorial Day. In a remarkable country music career that began in the early Seventies and lasted until his retirement in 2016, Williams was known not only for his warm, resonant voice and his gentle, unassuming nature, but also as one of the world’s most important and popular ambassadors of country music. What is less well-known about the “Gentle Giant,” as he was affectionately nicknamed, are details of Williams’ military career.

From 1957 to 1959, Williams served at a remote base with the Army Security Agency,...

Allen Jenkins. Illustration by Tony Millionaire.We had a lurid fantasy life. And it was not pre-Code, it was prehistoric. Synchronized sound technology created Neanderthal Cinema, an aesthetic slouching and slack-jawed, a case of temporarily thwarted evolution. In a brief era with no accepted form and before industrial standardization, experimentation raged, and some of sound cinema's experiments were dumb, inept, or too far ahead of their time to have a prayer of working. So the exceptional and the clunking are both responses to a general ignorance about what will work. Take the split screen of sleeping sweethearts in Love Me Tonight (1932), with dream voice-overs singing on top: All we see is snoring people. Or the endless tracking shot in Cape Forlorn (1931) in which director E.A. Dupont hopes we'll be transfixed by the gradually transforming acoustics. Tod Browning is asleep in his chair for a reel of Dracula (1931) while the...

Commentary Commentary“There’s no number in this movie that we didn’t try cutting at some point.”

La La Land may not have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but it’s still a delightfully mesmerizing experience with one of last year’s best endings. It hits Blu-ray/DVD next week, and along with an 80 minute making-of documentary the disc features a commentary with the film’s award-winning writer/director and composer.

Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

La La Land (2016)

Commentators: Damien Chazelle (writer/director), Justin Hurwitz (composer)

1. Chazelle wanted his Cinemascope opening to replicate the widening aspect ratio he recalled seeing in Frank Tashlin’s 1956 film, The Girl Can’t Help It.

https://medium.com/media/9380e26eac8c1822373ef72457dcfef7/href

2. The opening scene is modeled in some ways on 1932’s Love Me Tonight which “begins with a cacophony of street noises, Paris...

Jacques Demy’s international breakthrough musical gives us Catherine Deneuve and wall-to-wall Michel Legrand pop-jazz — it’s a different animal than La La Land but they’re being compared anyway. The story of a romance without a happily-ever-after is doggedly naturalistic, despite visuals as bright and buoyant as an old MGM show.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 716

1964 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Les parapluies de Cherbourg / Street Date April 11, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey, Jean Champion.

Cinematography: Jean Rabier

Production design:Bernard Evein

Film Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Original Music: Michel Legrand

Produced by Mag Bodard

Written and Directed by Jacques Demy

What with all the hubbub about last year’s Oscar favorite La La Land, I wonder if Hollywood will be trotting out more retro-nostalgia, ‘let’s put on a show’ musical fantasy fare.

We hate to tell you this, but that big closet cleanout you just did is going to go to waste, because you’re about to restock your freshly-emptied shelves with tons of designer items. Bergdorf Goodman is offering 40 percent off of their contemporary designer collections and we’re basically stopping everything to shop it. Clothing, accessories, jewelry and shoes from designers such as Gucci, Jason Wu, Jonathan Simkhai, and Valentino (just to name a few) are all marked way down. The sale is happening online and in stores, so make sure to check it out before all of the best deals are gone!

A version of this article originally appeared on EW.com.

La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s musical romance (and EW’s favorite movie of 2016) is packing theaters in major cities across the country. Its earning power has been mighty impressive, guaranteeing that the film will be open for box office business at least until the Oscars in February, where the film leads all hopefuls with a record-tying 14 nominations.

Chazelle’s movie features a number of song and dance sequences that are both steeped in homage for old musicals and wondrously modern. In one scene, which drew inspiration from classic Hollywood...

Jimmy Fallon‘s cold open at Sunday night’s Golden Globes is chasing all the lights that shine.

The host of this year’s 74th annual Golden Globes ceremony will parody the opening scene from hit musical La La Land, which led all features with seven total nominations including best musical or comedy motion picture.

Fallon released a 10-second teaser of the cold open to his official Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon YouTube account on Sunday evening.

Directed by Damien Chazelle, La La Land opens with a show-stopping number in the middle of a Los Angeles freeway set to the...

It's sweet, all right, not to mention sentimental and corny -- As Adeline Schmidt, Irene Dunne leaves her father's beer garden to sing in New York, where she falls prey to a predatory playboy. Set in nostalgic 1898, this Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical features several unfamiliar but marvelous songs. Dunne shows the film world the voice that brought her fame on Broadway -- "Why Was I Born?", "Lonely Feet" -- supported by Donald Woods, Louis Calhern and Dorothy Dare. Warners' new restoration makes this a must see for Irene Dunne fans. Sweet Adeline DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1934 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date October 20, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 18.95 Starring Irene Dunne, Donald Woods, Louis Calhern, Hugh Herbert, Ned Sparks, Wini Shaw, Joseph Cawthorn, Dorothy Dare, Noah Beery, William V. Mong. Cinematography Sol Polito Film Editor Ralph Dawson Art Director Robert Haas Ensembles Director Bobby Connolly...

“A peach must be eaten, a drum must be beaten, and a woman needs something like that!”

Love Me Tonight plays at The Hi-Pointe Theater ( 1005 McCausland Ave., St. Louis, Mo 63117) Saturday, July 11th at 10:30am as part of their Classic Film Series

I’ve never seen the 1932 Paramount production Love Me Tonight, a classic mix of comedy, romance, song and satire with a first-rate cast, but I will this weekend. The story takes place in France around the time the film was made. It’s an early musical that employs an unusual script device in places – rhyming dialog exchanges that often lead into song (think the early ‘Musical Novelty’ Stooges short The Woman Haters). Love Me Tonight is apparently a satire of French royalty and high society households. Its characters are either the idle rich leading empty, hedonistic lives, or their compliant, consenting household staff. Maurice Courtelin, a Parisian...

"Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe is "a gleefully ludicrous, all-gold-everything rap musical whose many virtues do not include nuance," writes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the Av Club. Notebook editor Daniel Kasman finds "its long takes, glimmering colors, and relentlessly unflagging energy connects lines from Love Me Tonight through Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Streets of Fire, Takashi Miike's own recent brawling high school musical For Love's Sake and the Step Up movies." Jake Cole at the House Next Door: "Sono has branched out into more placid, issue-oriented filmmaking in the wake of Fukushima, but taken with last year's Why Don't You Play in Hell?, this is a return to the freewheeling, uninhibited stylist." We've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...

"Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe is "a gleefully ludicrous, all-gold-everything rap musical whose many virtues do not include nuance," writes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the Av Club. Notebook editor Daniel Kasman finds "its long takes, glimmering colors, and relentlessly unflagging energy connects lines from Love Me Tonight through Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Streets of Fire, Takashi Miike's own recent brawling high school musical For Love's Sake and the Step Up movies." Jake Cole at the House Next Door: "Sono has branched out into more placid, issue-oriented filmmaking in the wake of Fukushima, but taken with last year's Why Don't You Play in Hell?, this is a return to the freewheeling, uninhibited stylist." We've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...

Over Your Dead Body

Dear Fern,

Familiar faces. Indeed, it is so very good to see yours, one year later. The steadfastness of friends through this world and in this industry is for me always a surprise, and always touching, especially in light of the mutability of life and cinema.

Familiar faces...Ventura's: that's another story. Seeing this man, this actor, this figure in Horse Money was like happily visiting an aging relative only to discover that across the span of missed time you can see the creeping effects of dementia. (“Blood drips on the floor but you don’t see the razor,” a widow in the film mourning, angrily remarks.) Standing tall as ever and poised with attempted self-control, nonetheless you see Ventura's long fingers tremble, in the darkness a nosferatu wandering a prison-hospital of memories and sins, psychic and bodily pain. The expressionist shroud in which he wanders confounds time,...

Welcome, beloved guests. The time has come to check-in to The Grand Budapest Hotel. Upon arrival, be sure to take in the beautiful world surrounding you, as created by director and co-writer Wes Anderson, as well as the wonderful hotel aesthetic, brought to you by production designer Adam Stockhausen. This week, Wamg and a few members of the press sat down (in a roundtable discussion) with Anderson and Stockhausen to talk about Anderson’s all new caper The Grand Budapest Hotel. Check it out below!

The Grand Budapest Hotel recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars; and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting; a raging battle for an enormous family fortune; a desperate chase on motorcycles, trains, sleds, and skis; and the sweetest...

Tom Hooper's gamble of filming Les Misérables with on-set singing has resulted in a work of unusual power and colour

Asked who was France's greatest poet, André Gide responded with the famously rueful answer: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" Cameron Mackintosh, the impresario who brought Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel's Les Misérables to London and transformed it into a worldwide phenomenon after its mild Parisian success and disastrous British first-night reception, would give a rather more positive response. I was in that first-night audience on 30 September 1985, and shared the general opinion that it was an indifferent show, shallow and somewhat forced in tone. I emerged with only one song planted in my head, Master of the House, sung by Alun Armstrong as Thénardier, the outrageously opportunist innkeeper, a number that struck me as rather like You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two from Oliver!

I wasn't writing about the...

A bi-weekly look at issues in contemporary film culture and technology.

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In spite of its prestige pic credentials, Tom Hooper's Les Misérables is almost endearingly eccentric. Almost. Shot from odd angles with distortive wide-angle lenses which often give the impression that space is warping and shifting around the characters, the film strikes an awkward balance between showy glitz and intentional roughness. Most importantly, there's the film's central gimmick: instead of lipsyncing, the leads performed most of their singing live on the set.

As gimmicks go, it's an interesting one; whether talking or singing, voices coming from moving or seated or costumed bodies sound nothing like voices recorded in a studio. The sound of "live" voices—flat notes and all—singing along to an off-screen orchestra mirrors the film's glamorous / scuzzy visual aesthetic.

It's a risky idea, and a lot of the time it doesn't quite gel. Russell Crowe, for instance,...

The cast list for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel just keeps getting … well, grander. /Film confirms that Anderson has cast Saoirse Ronan, the young star of Hanna and Atonement, as the star of his latest ensemble work.

Although there’s no indication yet about who Ronan will play, she joins a remarkable ensemble, including Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Angela Lansbury and Bill Murray. She’s also definitely in a starring role, not a cameo.

Ronan has quite a list of films lined up, including a starring role in Mary Queen of Scots. Working with a director of Anderson’s caliber can only advance her career.

The cast for Anderson’s latest effort has been in flux, with the greatest disappointment – for me at least – coming when Johnny Depp’s name was dropped from the cast list. A lot of the casting news have been mostly concerning cameos from big name stars,...

I didn't want to kick off the first batch of 2013 Oscar predictions with Best Picture. I felt it would dominate the conversation moving forward for the rest of the week and wanted to make sure we built toward Picture instead. However, I didn't want to go straight to acting either, figuring that would diminish a focus on the films themselves to start off the week (not to mention I'm seeing Won't Back Down tonight and I'd rather wait and see that before commenting on the actress races). That said, what better way to begin the Oscar conversation than with Best Director? Looking at the field of directors we can not only discuss their work, but also the picture and the performances they were able to get out of their actors, which will hopefully set us up for a busy week of early dissection and continued anticipation for films seen, unseen...

Chicago – Director Jack C. Newell ended up meeting one of his great collaborators while taking classes at Columbia College Chicago. His future filmmaking partner turned out to not be a fellow peer, but his teacher, Ron Falzone. Together, they made the acclaimed short, “Typing,” about two Hollywood screenwriters whose brainstorming session draws inspiration from the clacking of typewriter keys in the next room.

Newell and Falzone’s first feature effort is “Close Quarters,” an endearing and insightful collection of parallel vignettes set in a Chicago coffee shop. Baristas Abby (Erica Unger) and Barry (Seth Unger) flirt with the possibility of long-term romance while observing the dysfunctional relationships of their customers. Two friends, Patrick (Tj Jagodowski) and Olivia (Kate Duffy), chat upstairs while their respective partners, Dina (Holly Laurent) and Cary (Dave Pasquesi), make love in the downstairs bathroom. An estranged couple (Susan Messing and Jim Carlson) argue over Skype while...

Myrna Loy biography: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood Many believe that Myrna Loy is the best American actress never to have been nominated for an Academy Award. Despite having played leads and supporting roles in more than 100 movies (in addition to a few dozen bit parts during the silent era), Loy was invariably bypassed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But that's the Oscar and the Academy's loss. For starters, Loy was a delightful light comedienne in movies such as W.S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man and Jack Conway's Libeled Lady. One of the greatest — and most beautifully politically incorrect — dialogue exchanges in movies can be heard in Rouben Mamoulian's 1932 musical Love Me Tonight: Jeanette MacDonald: "Don't you think of anything but men, dear?" Myrna Loy: "Oh yes, schoolboys." Loy could be a remarkable dramatic actress as well, as can...

Every year since 2000, the Jeonju International Film Festival has commissioned three short works for its Jeonju Digital Project and, about a month ago now, the festival announced it'd selected Raya Martin, Vimukthi Jayasundara and Ying Liang for this year's edition (you may remember the three directors' video messages). The 2011 films are still making the rounds, and in fact, when they screen tomorrow at Exit Art, two of them — Claire Denis's To the Devil and José Luis Guerín's Memories of a Morning, both 45 minutes — will be seeing their NYC premieres. The third is Jean-Marie Straub's An Heir (22 mins, image above). If you're planning on being there, you'll want to read Robert Koehler's dispatch from Locarno last summer, touching briefly on the Denis and Guerín films but really digging into the Straub.

Reading. "With the main focus on African and Asian cinema and documentary film, Camera Lucida no 7 also...

This week we have a welcome rerelease of Meet Me in St Louis, which opened in America 67 years ago this month. It was the first truly great movie from the Freed unit, the MGM department specialising in musicals and headed since 1940 by Arthur Freed, who wrote some of the best songs of the 1920s and 30s and produced several of the finest films of the 20th century.

Freed acquired Sally Benson's series of New Yorker stories about the delightful middle-class Smith family proudly living in 1903 St Louis and looking forward to the following year's World's Fair but not to a proposed move to New York. He assembled the writers, composers, designers and cast, including the virtually unknown Vincente Minnelli, and told studio boss Louis B Mayer: "I want to make this into the most delightful piece of Americana ever." He achieved his aim with a movie that defines perfection,...

Lover's rock influenced the Police and Sade, and gave women a voice in reggae – so why was it sidelined in its native Britain?

In 1979, Janet Kay's piercing falsetto was one of the defining sounds of the summer. Silly Games, her bittersweet ode to a faltering relationship, enjoyed heavy radio play, thanks in part to a subtle arrangement by songwriter/producer Dennis Bovell, a distinctive drum pattern from Aswad's Angus Gaye and distribution on a Warners subsidiary. The song reached No 2, the highest chart placing for a black, British woman at that point. It also signalled a coming of age for lover's rock, the softened, British reggae sub-genre that focused on romance, but, as noted in Menelik Shabazz's documentary The Story of Lover's Rock, involved so much more than setting teenaged heartbreak to a reggae beat.

Though a primarily underground phenomenon, lover's rock influenced pop acts such as the Police,...

Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Code series, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...

In contemporary cinema many camera pans look like postcards, but ones without the simplicity or light-hearted use of clichés of the past. (No European ever hated an American film for those old expository shots of their cities.) Those opening postcards once led us to, say, Gary Cooper. And therefore we knew it was cinema. Today, the postcard pan tries to lead us to the illusion that we actually are somewhere, and not in a film. But a panning shot by itself is not a pretense, it is just what it is: a look over rooftops, at streets seen from above, hills and roads, all passing by—a Google view of the world. The pan is no longer the amazed discovery of what cinema could embrace (the 1900s) nor the deep breath of the Straubian traveller. It is now an illusion of legibility or a misplaced conception of opacity, a shot...

Ella Raines, Franchot Tone in Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (top); Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier in Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (middle); Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn in Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (bottom) Pre-1948 Paramount talkies are owned by Universal (or whichever conglomerate owns Universal; I've lost track of them by now — Comcast? NBC? General Electric?). For the most part, Universal couldn't care less about the movies in their archives. Relatively few have been released on DVD and most of them are hardly ever shown on cable. Well, Turner Classic Movies has leased the Universal library — whether all of it or only some titles, I don't know. That's why the early Mae West movie This Is the Night (1932) was shown a couple of weeks ago, and that's why we now have Lucky Jordan (1942), the film that helped turn Alan Ladd into a star. I've never seen this...

Joe Dante presenting "The Movie Orgy" in L.A., a rare stateside appearance of Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda for a retrospective in New York and the Fantastic Fest in Austin are just a few of the events that serve as the perfect antidote for the endless stream of summertime sequels and toy-based franchises.

More Fall Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]

[Anywhere But a Movie Theater]

[Breakout Performances]

92Y Tribeca

While the 92Y Tribeca is taking a well-deserved break in August, the cinema space comes roaring back in September, beginning with hosting the Fifth Annual NYC Shorts Festival (Sept. 10-13), followed by a late night "Labyrinth" sing-along complete with trivia and a costume contest (Sept. 25-26), and a Michael Winterbottom double bill of "Code 46" and "24 Hour Party People" (Sept. 30)...In October, the 92Y Tribeca will premiere "Zombie Girl: The Movie" (Oct. 2), the doc about 12-year-old filmmaker Emily Hagins and her quest to make a zombie movie, followed by hosting the Iron...