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Norman Spencer, the British producer, production manager and screenwriter who worked alongside famed director David Lean on films including Blithe Spirit, Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, has died. He was 110.

Spencer died Aug. 16 in Wimbledon three days after his birthday, the European Supercentenarian Organisation announced.

Apart from Lean, Spencer produced Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn; Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), the car chase movie that starred Barry Newman; and Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), starring Denzel Washington.

Spencer was Lean’s unit manager on the ghost comedy Blithe Spirit (1945), based on the Noël Coward play, and served as his production manager on his adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948).

He produced Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1949) and the Hepburn-starring, Venice-set Summertime (1955); worked on a rewrite of the script for...

Wes Anderson was expected to attend the Cannes Film Festival this month to world premiere his new movie, “The French Dispatch.” The director last attended Cannes for the world premiere of “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opened the 2012 edition of the festival and remains Anderson’s first and only trip to the Croisette. Anderson took part in The New York Times’ Cannes survey to share a memory about the world’s most prestigious film festival, and in doing so he also dropped an update about how he’s been spending his quarantine.

“I have a 4-year-old daughter so, like so many others in our situation, I am now a part-time amateur schoolteacher,” Anderson said. “Much of what I am reading has to do with ancient Egypt, dinosaurs, insects and the Amazon rainforest. But also: Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, Elmore Leonard and a book about plagues.”

Anderson also dropped an 11-film quarantine watch list.

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“A British Right Stuff”

By Raymond Benson

There exists a period in the career of the great David Lean in which several of his pictures are today more or less forgotten, especially in the U.S. After the one-two double punch of Brief Encounter and Great Expectations in the mid-40s, Lean directed several pictures that were less than stellar in terms of popularity and critical acclaim before he hit a spectacular stride with Hobson’s Choice, Summertime, and The Bridge on the River Kwai in the mid-50s.

Nestled neatly in this middle period is The Sound Barrier (titled Breaking the Sound Barrier in the U.S.), released in 1952. Despite doing very decent box office on both sides of the Atlantic, the film isn’t one that comes to mind when considering Lean’s genius.

It's the story of how the sound barrier...

“You are always so close to the line of chaos.”

Source: Focus Features

Phantom Thread

Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis has revealed what he enjoys most about working with his Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson.

Day-Lewis has previously spoken about a challenging and charged atmosphere on the set of Phantom Thread and how he and Thomas Anderson became “overwhelmed by a sense of sadness” during the shoot.

On Saturday, however, speaking alongside the director and his co-star Vicky Krieps after a private screening in London, the actor revealed what he likes most about working with the Us director:

“There’s nothing mad you can do that he won’t encourage you to be madder. I love that. You are always so close to the line of chaos, which you have to be for it to be alive. There’s so much misunderstanding about preparation. You prepare for a long...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)

Blurring the line between documentary and fiction like few films before it, Michal Marczak‘s All These Sleepless Nights is a music-filled ode to the ever-shifting bliss and angst of youth set mostly in the wee hours of the day in Warsaw, Poland. Marczak himself, who also plays cinematographer, is wary to delineate the line between narrative and nonfiction, and part of the...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This August will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Tuesday, August 1

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: These Boots and Mystery Train

Music is at the heart of this program, which pairs a zany music video by Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki with a tune-filled career highlight from American independent-film pioneer Jim Jarmusch. In the 1993 These Boots, Kaurismäki’s band of pompadoured “Finnish Elvis” rockers, the Leningrad Cowboys, cover a Nancy Sinatra classic in their signature deadpan style. It’s the perfect prelude to Jarmusch’s 1989 Mystery Train, a homage to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the musical legacy of Memphis, featuring appearances by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Joe Strummer.

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Robert Mitchum ca. late 1940s. Robert Mitchum movies 'The Yakuza,' 'Ryan's Daughter' on TCM Today, Aug. 12, '15, Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” series is highlighting the career of Robert Mitchum. Two of the films being shown this evening are The Yakuza and Ryan's Daughter. The former is one of the disappointingly few TCM premieres this month. (See TCM's Robert Mitchum movie schedule further below.) Despite his film noir background, Robert Mitchum was a somewhat unusual choice to star in The Yakuza (1975), a crime thriller set in the Japanese underworld. Ryan's Daughter or no, Mitchum hadn't been a box office draw in quite some time; in the mid-'70s, one would have expected a Warner Bros. release directed by Sydney Pollack – who had recently handled the likes of Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and Robert Redford – to star someone like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman.

If René Clément's short collaboration with Jacques Tati in 1936 has its later development in the surprising (and political) slapstick of Che gioia vivere (1962), his technical assistance to Jean Cocteau on Beauty and the Beast pays off more rapidly with Le château de verre (The Glass Castle, 1950), starring Cocteau's beautiful beast, Jean Marais, and ice queen monstré sacré Michelle Morgan. This one came highly recommended by Shadowplayer David Wingrove, who saw in its opening sequence a foreshadowing of Last Year at Marienbad's glacial surrealism—frozen figures, somnambulent dancers, palatial surroundings. In fact, the Clément film comes with le jazz hot, and the frozen figures aren't frozen, but there is certainly an air of decadent mystery, with Jean Servais as the chess-playing husband a passable progenitor of the Resnais movie's sepulchral M.But there's more! We begin with a disembodied voice (another Marienbad trope) and open in a fabulous grotto,...

Alec Guinness movies: Pre-’Star Wars’ Guinness runs the gamut from Dickens’ Fagin to Japanese businessman romancing Rosalind Russell Alec Guinness is Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” star on Saturday, August 3, 2013. The bad news: No Alec Guinness TCM premieres or lesser-known Guinness movies, e.g., A Run for Your Money, Last Holiday, Malta Story, The Prisoner, Star Wars (kidding). The good news: Alec Guinness movies are always welcome, even when the movies themselves are unworthy of his talents — and there were quite a few of those — or when Guinness forces his characters to fit his persona (instead of the other way around), so that we’re watching Alec Guinness play Alec Guinness playing some role or other, instead of, for instance, a Japanese businessman who happens to be both Star Trek‘s George Takei’s father and Rosalind Russell’s platonic paramour. (TCM schedule: Alec Guiness movies.) (Photo: Alec Guinness ca.

The penultimate episode of "American Horror Story: Asylum" had a tough act to follow: last week's terrific "Spilt Milk" delivered a superior visual style and sense of momentum that had the feeling of everything clicking into place for the finale.

"Continuum" didn't really hit that level, but it did set the table for next week's finale to the entire "Asylum" arc. Here's what went down in the episode's four different chapters:

Kit and Grace (and Alma)

The action in "Continuum" picks up in 1967 with Kit, Grace and Alma all living together with their two kids. It's not exactly domestic bliss though, as we know from the pre-credits teaser featuring Kit in his underwear, splattered in blood and holding an axe.

The segment didn't do much to advance the mysterious alien storyline (here's hoping for some real answers in the finale, and not just loose ends), but established a power struggle...

You may not know the incredible tale of bravery that is Marina Nemat's, but you will as Intandem Films is turning her memoir Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman's Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison into a sure-to-be-compelling drama. Nemat was just a young girl when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution changed the face of her Iranian homeland. At 16, she was like any other teen girl with interests in boys and parties. But when studying the Koran and political propaganda overtook a focus on math and history in her school, Nemat spoke out, and ultimately caused a student walk out. Her rebellion was taken very seriously by Iranian officials. She was arrested and thrown in the infamous Tehran prison called Evin. Here she was tortured and sentenced to death for her perceived crimes against the state. An unlikely chance at salvation came at the hands of a guard named Ali, who...

Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Lawrence of Arabia Turner Classic Movies' "Race and Hollywood: Arab Images on Film" continues this evening with four movies about European powers and their difficult relationship with "the Arab races": Lawrence of Arabia, Lion of the Desert, The Four Feathers, and Young Winston. In David Lean's sprawling Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole is a much taller version of T. E. Lawrence, the Englishman who fought alongside Arabs at the time of World War I. Lawrence of Arabia won a total of seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director; it's also considered by many one of the greatest movies ever made. Personally, I find Lawrence of Arabia great-looking but much too long: 227 minutes. Also, at times I couldn't quite figure out what Lean's and screenwriter Robert Bolt's political take was; I'm not sure if their vision is just too muddled and wishy-washy, or...

Producer, director and cinematographer of many well-loved British film classics, including Oliver Twist, Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The producer, director, writer and cinematographer Ronald Neame, who has died aged 99, played an important role in British cinema for more than half a century. The critic Matthew Sweet once called him "a living embodiment of cinema, a sort of one-man world heritage site". Neame was assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie; he was the cinematographer on In Which We Serve (1942), Noël Coward's moving tribute to the Royal Navy during the second world war; he co-produced and co-wrote David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946); and he directed Alec Guinness in two of his best roles, in The Horse's Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960). As if this wasn't enough, Neame also conquered Hollywoo d with one of the first and most successful disaster movies,...