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With the Academy Awards just around the corner, it’s time to talk about the “who didn’ts” — the actors who never won an Oscas, let alone received a nomination-as well as classic films that never saw Oscar gold. And there are plenty of who didn’t filmmakers. Countless legendary directors didn’t win Oscars or even earn nominations.

Martin Scorsese, who is one of the most influential, acclaimed directors of the past 50 years has only won for directing 2006’s Best Picture winner “The Departed.” Though his 1976 masterpiece “Taxi Driver” was nominated for Best Picture, he didn’t earn an Oscar nomination for Best Director. He first got his first directing nomination for his 1980 masterwork “Raging Bull,” but lost to Robert Redford for “Ordinary People.”

Scorsese has received a lot of Oscar love. As far as producing, writing and directing, he’s received 14 nominations. And this year, he’s nominated...

Criterion resurrects Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed film Cluny Brown (1946), a post-war comedy about pre-wwii class divisions in 1938 England. Headlined by Jennifer Jones, fresh off her divorce from actor Robert Walker and whose career was now completely in the hands of lover and eventual second husband, studio titan David O. Selznick, it’s an odd standout in her filmography of serious, dramatic turns. Having already acquired a Best Actress Academy Award, Jones is the titular protagonist, playing the prototype of a character whose overarching traits would eventually come to be known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.…...

When you think of Quentin Tarantino, classic films like “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “Django Unchained” certainly come to mind. But what about the critically reviled “Saturday Night Live” sketch adaptation “It’s Pat”? Or the Michael Bay Alcatraz action movie “The Rock”? Tarantino’s fingerprints have been all over the movies ever since his breakout debut in 1992, and some of his projects are way more bizarre than others.

Read More:Quentin Tarantino Wants Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence For New Movie, And They Shouldn’t Resist

The director is currently getting together his ninth feature, which will be his penultimate effort behind the camera if his retirement talks are to be believed. Sources say Tarantino is putting together a drama involving the Manson family murders and that he’s eyeing Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence to star. As the filmmakers looks to the future for his next project, we...

"The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth–that, and no more; with sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses–the delicacy, too–belonging to that time."—"The Professor's House," Willa CatherHis last words, in a hospital four months later, are said to have been 'Mind your own business!' addressed to an enquirer after the state of his bowels. Friends got to the studio just before the wreckers' ball. Pictures, a profusion, piles of them, littered the floor: of 'a world that will never be seen except in pictures'"—"The Pound Era," Hugh Kenner***Heart Of FIREOften when I go to a movie, usually one made before 1960, I think about the opening scene of The Red Shoes, of Marius Goring and his...

Read More: Watch: Dysfunctional Relationships Explode in Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston Comedy 'She's Funny That Way' After spending his first 25 years in New York, Peter Bogdanovich moved to Los Angeles, where he was based when  he directed "The Last Picture Show," "Paper Moon" and other '70's Americana classics. But Bogdanovich has always been a true New Yorker at heart. He returns to that city as a setting in his latest screwball comedy, "She's Funny That Way," starring Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots and Jennifer Aniston (and featuring cameos by Graydon Carter, among others). The film was originally titled "Squirrels to the Nuts" after a line from the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch romance, "Cluny Brown," which should provide a good taste of what the finished product plays like for those familiar with Lubitsch's fast-talking comedies. Bogdanovich joined Indiewire over the phone from Los Angeles about his new movie and the key contributions of.

For the first time since 2001, we have a new Peter Bogdanovich film arriving this year. She’s Funny That Way (formerly titled Squirrels to the Nuts, a reference to Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown) stars Owen Wilson as Arnold, a theater director who gets involved with an escort and aspiring actress (Imogen Poots) whose therapist (Jennifer Aniston) […]

The post ‘She’s Funny That Way’ Trailer: Peter Bogdanovich Returns With Owen Wilson appeared first on /Film.

Venice — Your enjoyment of dodgy comedy "She's Funny That Way" will depend hugely on your personal tolerance for coincidence as plot mechanic. How many coincidences need to occur before the characters might as well start saying "a wizard did it" by way of explaining the wherefores of the plot? What's your personal tipping point? Perhaps your answer will depend on genre. Even in sci-fi or fantasy, "a wizard did it" is still a pretty poor explanation unless the wizard has a satisfying motive. In a more realistic genre, the greater the number of coincidences, the greater the strain on audience credulity. The genre of farce, though broadly realistic (there are usually no wizards), is of course often borderline fantastical in terms of the believability of people's behavior and the frequency with which coincidence craps all over the characters' hopes and dreams. "She's Funny That Way" leans heavily on this creaky...

Thirty-two years after They All Laughed opened the Venice Film Fesitval, Peter Bogdanovich is back on the Lido with screwball comedy She’s Funny That Way. He spoke to the press this afternoon about the star-studded project coming together and noted that today, the kinds of smaller films he likes can only be made independently. “I don’t want to bite the hand that doesn’t feed me,” he said to much laughter, “but unfortunately, Hollywood has gone in the wrong direction.”

The out of competition She’s Funny That Way itself got a lot of laughs when it screened this morning. It stars Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Kathryn Hahn, Imogen Poots, Rhys Ifans, and Will Forte — along with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon star Tatum O’Neal, as well as a longer turn by a very famous director. The...

At first exposure, we are likely to wonder what it is about Jacques Becker’s films that make them feel distinctive.Antoine et Antoinette, his fourth completed feature, expresses his sensibility as fully as any of his films; yet Becker is clearly playing by a great many of the rules of entertainment cinema. His visual ideas are not radical: he relies on conventional patterns of decoupage, often uses gentle camera moves when introducing locations, favors a moderate expressionism of lighting that enhances the pictorial qualities of his sets. His manipulation of narrative is likewise familiar: the complicated plot is handled deftly and light-heartedly to convey the basically comic nature of the enterprise; there is a stock villain, the lecherous businessman Roland (Noël Roquevert), whose offenses are accompanied by comical music cues that limit his threat; the story line is designed in broad movements of joy and despondency, with events within...

 

It's my birthday today, which means naturally I'm looking at movie listings for tonight and tomorrow. Should I finally see Argo, convince my husband to watch Cloud Atlas with me or give Wreck-It Ralph a chance? After reading Chale's Austin Polish Film Festival previews (parts one and two), I'm tempted to spend the weekend at The Marchesa. Otherwise, tonight's an unusually poor night for special screenings unless I want to go to a Dumb and Dumber quote-along, and considering I walked out of that movie when I saw it in a theater I'll pass. Besides, my husband keeps promising he's taking me to a fancy dinner at McDonald's.

On Saturday and Sunday, Alamo Ritz brings back its 70mm series with Cleopatra, that gorgeous flop with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. And while I'm not a big cocktail girl, I do dearly love A Fish Called Wanda, which Alamo is...

There are so many reasons to love October in Austin. The weather can be lovely, you can bring out long sleeves and perhaps even jackets, there are film festivals galore, and at the end you get Halloween. For me, every year I look forward to the Austin Film Society's Essential Cinema series in October. If you've read Slackerwood for awhile you know this article has nothing to do with our relationship with Afs ... I really do get giddy about the series every year around this time. This year, with a title like "Late I Have Loved Thee: Latter Lubitsch," you know I'm bouncing around the room.

Why? Because Afs brings out a bunch of glorious classic Hollywood movies that I've been longing to see, or see again, or see in a theater since my only experience with them has been on a worn-out VHS tape. The selections often include great...

The Loves of Pharaoh

Written by Norbert Falk and Hanns Kräly

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Germany, 1922

Ernst Lubitsch is best known for his work in Hollywood, operating as a master of comedies until his death in 1947. He left behind a legacy of films that includes the much beloved likes of The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, Cluny Brown, Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait, and Trouble in Paradise. Prior to making the transition to American filmmaking, Lubitsch operated in his native Germany. He enjoyed a great deal of international success, though some of this was for large-scale productions and dramas that would not be a prominent feature of his Hollywood career. One of these films was The Loves of Pharaoh, or Das Weib des Pharao, a historical epic rivaling Metropolis in terms of ambitious German silent cinema, and Lubitsch’s last film made in the country. Incomplete...

Inspired by the recent Sound on Sight radio show on Preston Sturges, I have decided to supplement the work of one of the great comic directors by providing a list of under seen and generally under appreciated comedies from Preston Sturges’ era. Whereas most connoisseurs will be familiar with his work, as well as films like The Philadelphia Story, To Be or Not To Be, The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, this short list will be for those searching to look deeper into the great world of classic Hollywood comedy.

Nothing Sacred (William A. Wellman)

Nothing Sacred is an early example of three-strip Technicolor that pairs arguably two of the greatest actors of the 1930s in a dark comedy about the cruel nature of the newspaper business. Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) mistakenly believes she has radiation poisoning and is within days of her death, and newspaper man Wallace Cook...

Someone to Remember (1943) is a Robert Siodmak film so obscure even Deborah Lazaroff Alpi, author of the near-definitive R.S. overview Robert Siodmak, A Biography, apparently hadn't seen it.

Shot during Siodmak's early B-movie days, before he got his Universal contract and started to make a name for himself, it was produced by Republic and seems more in keeping with their occasional arthouse experiments like Macbeth and Moonrise than with the westerns they otherwise specialized in. Someone in charge must have just liked the story. (Original author Ben Ames Williams also penned the source novel of Leave Her to Heaven, but this one is no noir.) Certainly Siodmak didn't have the artistic reputation in America of Welles or Borzage (or Ford, who made several of his more artisitically rarified ventures at Republic). Siodmak had gone from prominence in Germany and then France, to undistinguished B-movies in America, and only gradually...

Hollywood star who won an Oscar for her role as a saintly peasant girl in the 1943 film The Song of Bernardette

On the day of her 25th birthday, 2 March 1944, a fresh-faced, hitherto unknown performer stepped on to the stage of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, in Los Angeles, to receive her best actress Oscar for her performance in the title role of The Song of Bernadette. It was officially the debut of Jennifer Jones, who has died aged 90. She had appeared four years earlier under her real name of Phyllis Isley, but only in a Dick Tracy serial and a B-western. (Actually, she had been born Phylis, but had added an "l".)

Ingrid Bergman, nominated for her performance in For Whom the Bell Tolls, said of The Song of Bernadette: "I cried all the way through, because Jennifer was so moving and because I realised I had lost the award." Jones,...