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Anne Baxter was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age who is recognized for her leading roles in classic films, including All About Eve, The Blue Gardenia, and The Ten Commandments. Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana, and started appearing on stage as early as the age of five, making her Broadway debut when she was ten. After her success on the stage, Baxter set her sights on Hollywood, where she made her feature film debut in the 1940 film 20 Mule Team.

Sixty-four years late and right on time, Alice Childress’ wise and stirring backstage comedy-drama Trouble in Mind is making its long-in-coming Broadway debut tonight, and to describe the play as prescient would be an understatement. Uncanny rings truer.

With a star turn by Lachanze that takes a strong place in a theatrical season already formidable in its roster of performances, Trouble in Mind takes a behind-the-curtain look at the racism, coded prejudice, self-flattery, sexism and built-in bigotry that Broadway has always professed to eschew.

Childress, who died in 1994, knew better, and her insights fuel Trouble in Mind. First staged to acclaim Off Broadway in 1955, the play, about a Black actress in a big Broadway play who must choose between truth and security, was optioned by producers to open on Broadway in 1957 – if only Childress would write a more upbeat and forgiving ending. She chose truth.

Set in a theater during rehearsals for the play-within-the-play,...

This July, TetroVideo will be releasing the splatter erotic Japanese film Mai-chan’s Daily Life: The Movie (2014) by Sado Satō, the anthology extreme film Vore Gore (2021) and the punk horror film Rot, directed by Marcus Koch in 1999, which is the first title of Tetro Underground, a line dedicated to all the underground films produced until 1999, with tons of titles never officially released before. The film comes on DVD + Amaray + vintage looking slipcase.

The three titles will be available for pre-order on July.

Mai-chan’s Daily Life: The Movie

Written and directed by Sado Satō, Mai-chan’s Daily Life: The Movie is a splatter/erotic film based on the popular manga by Uziga Waita who supervised the film. Mai-chan’s Daily Life: The Movieartwork is by the italian comic artist Claudio Montalbano. Mai-chan’s Daily Life: The Movie is a diabolical splatter and gore comedy that takes fetish violence to shocking new extremes.

As part of a new series, one of our writers finally catches up with the cinematic classic they’ve somehow missed. Today, Stuart Jeffries watches Fritz Lang’s pioneering sci-fi epic

It’s Freddie Mercury’s fault. When he and his lavishly coiffed backing band released Radio Gaga in 1984, the video used footage from the 1927 German expressionist film, Metropolis. Superimposed over Fritz Lang’s visionary cityscape were the foursome in a flying car. Later in the video, they performed a gig before the film’s downtrodden masses. Not many cinematic classics could survive such brutal repurposing. For me, Lang’s film got tainted by association with Queen’s song – one that, ironically enough, became part of the very radio blah it ostensibly indicted.

I’ve always loved the films noirs the German emigré made in Hollywood after the war: The Blue Gardenia, While the City Sleeps, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Aaron Sagers Aug 5, 2019

Cocktail masters pair exotic drinks with their favorite Tiki movies. Here's what to watch while you drink.

For some, summer is a time of sweet rum drinks with tiny umbrellas and exotic-sounding names. For Tiki culture enthusiasts though, the luau is year-round and liquid aloha fills glasses in a precise combination of quality booze, fresh juices, ingredients almost entirely reserved for these cocktails, and even ice specifications.

But Tiki is more than a cocktail culture populated by Zombies, Mai Tais, Painkillers, Singapore Slings, Fog Cutters, Scorpion Bowls, Blue Hawaiians, and the like—an extended family of colorful drinks fathered in 1930s California by the likes of Donn Beach and Trader Vic.

Tiki culture is an aesthetic, a state of mind, and a way of life inspired by factual (and at times culturally appropriated) visions of Polynesia and larger Oceania, as well as the Caribbean. Summed up thusly...

Wow! Fritz Lang's second western is a marvel -- a combo of matinee innocence and that old Germanic edict that character equals fate. It has a master's sense of color and design. Robert Young is an odd fit but Randolph Scott is nothing less than terrific. You'd think Lang was born on the Pecos. Western Union Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1941 / Color /1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / Street Date November 8, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Randolph Scott, Robert Young, Virginia Gilmore, Dean Jagger, John Carradine, Chill Wills, Slim Summerville, Barton MacLane, Victor Kilian, George Chandler, Chief John Big Tree, Iron Eyes Cody, Jay Silverheels. Cinematography Edward Cronjager, Allen M. Davey Original Music David Buttolph Written by Robert Carson from the novel by Zane Grey Produced by Harry Joe Brown (associate) Directed by Fritz Lang

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Darryl Zanuck of 20th Fox treated most writers well, was good for John Ford...

By John M. Whalen

All struggling young reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) wants is a break. He needs money so he can move out of his crummy room in a three story boarding house, get his own place, and marry his girl, Jane (Margaret Tallichet). His break arrives when he becomes the star witness to the murder of Nick, the owner of Nick’s Coffee Pot, a neighborhood eatery right across the street from where he lives. The newspaper he works for gives him a raise and assigns him to cover the murder trial. At first he and Jane are elated about Mike’s turn of fortune, and they began planning their future. But soon Jane wonders if the young man Mike is going to testify against, a young cab driver named Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr.), is really the killer. “He’s so young,” she says. Her attitude begins to...

From the New York Film Festival, Doug Dibbern and Daniel Kasman continue our series of festival dialogues. David Fincher's Gone Girl had its world premiere as the opening night film of the festival.

Daniel Kasman: I'm glad to be discussing this film, which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday, with you Doug. Several friends and acquaintances of mine in the film world are either unduly fascinated by director David Fincher (along with Steven Soderbergh, brothers in cinema, I'd say) while an equal part seemingly has no interest in him whatsoever. I don't believe we've ever talked about him before, so I'd be curious to know what you thought of his work, and especially his work over the last decade or so, after Fight Club.

To get to Gone Girl, which revolves around the case of a missing bottle-blonde housewife in Missouri, Amy (Rosamund Pike), and how suspicion—that of the audience,...