News

Though the summer movie season got off to a stronger start than last year, June is a bit lacking for promising tentpoles. Yet looking deeper, there’s plenty to seek out, from the best title to premiere at Sundance earlier this year to the anticipated return of a zombie franchise to formally thrilling documentaries to a shark thriller with bite.

10. F1 (Joseph Kosinski; June 27)

After his little-seen Top Gun: Maverick follow-up Spiderhead, Joseph Kosinski returns to large-scale entertainment with F1. While there’s something a little more dull about the proposition of branded entertainment with a sports league (as opposed to his previous outing of brashly unfiltered U.S. military propaganda), here’s hoping the $300 million budget was enough for Kosinski to properly deliver high-octane thrills.

9. Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz; June 27)

While Emma Mackey is gearing up for a major year with Julia Ducournau’s Alpha and James L. Brook...

Rod Steiger is primarily remembered for his tough guys in such films as "Al Capone," "The Big Knife" and his Oscar-winning performance in "In the Heat of the Night." But his performances include such diverse characters as a meek Holocaust survivor in "The Pawnbroker" and a fey embalmer in the satire "The Loved One."

In addition to his performance in "In the Heat of the Night," for which Steiger also won a Golden Globe as well, he was Oscar-nominated for "The Pawnbroker" and for his iconic performance as the brother of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in the back seat of that car in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront."

So let's raise a glass to the late great man and honor him by counting down his 12 greatest screen performances, ranked from worst to best.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen has secured Javier Bardem to star in his upcoming feature El Ser Querida, which will start shooting in January 2025.

Vicky Luengo, whose credits include Riot Police and The Room Next Door, will co-star in the film about the relationship between an acclaimed film director and his daughter, a struggling actress. They share a difficult past that neither wants to discuss. Until they shoot a film together after years of estrangement.

El Ser Querido is being produced by Spain’s Caballo Films and France’s Le Pacte, with backing from Movistar Plus+. A Contracorriente Films will release the film...

The Final Girl trope has been around since the slasher films of the 1970s, with the official term being coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It has been used to describe the sole surviving female character at the end of a horror movie. The names Laurie Strode (Halloween), Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street), and Sidney Prescott (Scream) are all iconic to the horror genre and are just some of the many women who have either escaped from or defeated the movie's main villain. This begs the question, "what about the Final Boys?"

Although not as prevalent as Final Girl characters in horror movies, the genre has its fair share of Final Boys who have survived their own terrifying tormentors. Characters like Chris in Get Out and Casey from The Faculty were able to avoid dying at...

Robert Morse, the impish actor and singer who found early fame and success as the Tony Award-winning star of Broadway’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and enjoyed a late-career second act as an eccentric elder statesman of advertising in AMC’s Mad Men, died yesterday. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by son Charlie to Los Angeles’ ABC affiliate Wednesday night, and was announced on Twitter this morning by Larry Karaszewski, a writer, producer and VP on the board of governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“My good pal Bobby Morse has passed away at age 90,” Karaszewski wrote. “A huge talent and a beautiful spirit. Sending love to his son Charlie & daughter Allyn. Had so much fun hanging with Bobby over the years – filming People v Oj & hosting so many screenings.”

Additional information on...

Robert Morse, who translated Broadway stardom into a film career in the 1960s, then re-emerged decades later as one of the stars of “Mad Men,” has died. He was 90.

Writer-producer Larry Karaszewski, who serves as a VP on the board of governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tweeted news of Morse’s death on Thursday.

“My good pal Bobby Morse has passed away at age 90,” he wrote. “A huge talent and a beautiful spirit. Sending love to his son Charlie & daughter Allyn. Had so much fun hanging with Bobby over the years – filming People v Oj & hosting so many screenings.”

Morse was Emmy nominated five times for playing the sage Bertram Cooper, the senior partner at the advertising firm that was the focus of AMC’s prestigious series “Mad Men,” from 2007 to 2015. In 2010, he shared the SAG Award that “Mad Men” won for outstanding performance by...

The writer/director returns to talk about his favorite Blaxploitation movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Man Bites Dog (1992)

Trick Baby (1972)

The Exorcist (1973) – Oren Pelli’s trailer commentary

The Untouchables (1987)

Predator (1987)

Purple Rain (1984) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

The Loved One (1965) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Live And Let Die (1973)

Enter The Dragon (1973) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s trailer commentary

The Green Hornet (1974)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary

The Last Dragon (1985) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Dead Presidents (1995)

Hell Up In Harlem (1973) – Larry Cohen’s trailer commentary

Black Caesar (1973) – Larry Cohen’s trailer commentary

Shaft (1971) – Bill Duke’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)

Coffy (1973) – Jack Hill’s trailer commentary

Midnight Cowboy (1969) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Taxi Driver (1976) – Rod Lurie’s trailer commentary

Boxcar Bertha (1972) – Julie Corman...

Brilliant filmmaking from Japan: Yasuzô Masumura’s film all but screams in protest, that unfettered consumer capitalism is cannibalism, plain and simple. In the radical director’s scathing, savage satire, Tokyo’s desperate advertising ‘Mad Men’ create a fresh new star celebrity to promote their product, only for the warfare of cutthroat competition to shatter careers, fortunes and basic human values. Masumura’s cinematic onslaught is at least ten years ahead of its time, in design, direction, writing and music — the movie outpaces American comedies about Succeeding in Business, recognizing that the tyranny of commercial media trashes the quality of life itself. Arrow’s informed and insightful Blu-ray extras ask the important question: how can one movie get this complex subject so completely right?

Giants and Toys

Blu-ray

Arrow Video

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 95 min. / Kyojin to gangu, The Build-Up / Street Date May 11, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Hitomi Nozoe, Yunosuke Ito, Kinzo Shin,...

This mid-‘sixties black comedy from the mischievous George Axelrod defines and dissects ‘crazy California culture’ just as West Coasters were being slandered as godless weird-oh hedonists. It’s partly a sarcastic put-down, citing anecdotal extremes like drive-in churches (how 2020 can you get?), perverse youth encounter groups and mindless beach party movies. But Axelrod’s paints indelible images of maladjusted women of three age groups: Tuesday Weld, Lola Albright and Ruth Gordon. Where Roddy McDowall fits in is anybody’s guess — he’s meant to glue the satire together and instead turns it into a big Question Mark.

Lord Love a Duck

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1966 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date September 22, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Roddy McDowall, Tuesday Weld, Lola Albright, Martin West, Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, Sarah Marshall, Lynn Carey, Donald Murphy, Max Showalter, Joseph Mell, Dan Frazer, Martine Bartlett, Jo Collins, Judith Loomis, Gay Gordon,...

Horror films aren’t only about vampires and goblins — Czech director Juraj Herz’s mind-chilling study of a Fascist opportunist communicates truths about aberrant psychology and Fascists, that audiences would never read in print. A bourgeois burner of cadavers leverages his Reich-useful trade into his own little warped empire of evil. Karl Kopfringl’s modus operandi hardly needs to change, to conform to Nazi standards — the elitist hypocrite already has both his family and employees passively accepting his sick ideas about cremation as the solution to all human ills. Cinematically brilliant, this late picture from the Czech New Wave is one of the best movies ever about conformists, collaborators, and assorted other ghouls.

The Cremator

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1023

1969 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 100 min. / Spalovač mrtvol / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 21, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Rudolf Hrusínský, Vlasta Chramostová, Jana Stehnová, Miloš Vognič, Zora Božinavá.

Cinematography: Stanislav Milota

Film Editor:...

A happy birthday greeting as we remember Rod Steiger, the screen actor who would have been 94 on April 14, 2019. Although he is primarily remembered for his tough guys in such films as “Al Capone,” “The Big Knife” and his Oscar-winning performance in “In the Heat of the Night,” Steiger’s performances include such diverse characters as a meek Holocaust survivor in “The Pawnbroker” and a fey embalmer in the satire “The Loved One.”

SEEOscar Best Actor Gallery: Every Winner in Academy Award History

In addition to his performance in “In the Heat of the Night,” for which Steiger also won a Golden Globe as well, he was Oscar-nominated for “The Pawnbroker” and for his iconic performance as the brother of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in the back seat of that car in Elia Kazan‘s “On the Waterfront.”

SEEMarlon Brando movies: 20 greatest films ranked worst to best

So let’s raise...

While October is officially just days away now, we have another batch of excellent genre home media releases in the meantime to help get us ready for the best month of the year. Scream Factory has put together an incredible box set for the [Rec] series that fans will definitely want to add to their personal collections, and for those who have made the upgrade, John Carpenter’s original Halloween makes its debut in 4K this week.

Arrow Video has put together a Special Edition release for The Baby, and for those of you who may have missed it earlier this year, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich heads to multiple formats on Tuesday. Both The Swarm (1978) and The Cyclops (1957) head to HD for the first time ever courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, and there’s a bevy of cult classics headed to both Blu-ray and DVD from the likes...

“Maybe you think too much. When it comes to Baby, I do all the thinking.”

The Baby (1973) will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video September 25th

Still traumatized by the loss of her husband, well-meaning social worker Ann Gentry throws herself into her latest assignment: the case of Baby , a 21-year-old man with the mind of an infant who crawls, cries and has yet to make it out of nappies. But Baby s family the tyrannical Mama Wadsworth and her two demented daughters aren’t the only ones with a warped conception of familial relations, and the full horror only begins when Ann sets her sights on liberating the drooling man-child… and in so doing unleashes the wrath of the Wadsworth women.

45 years after its original release, this film remains one of the most bizarre horror movies ever committed to celluloid. Directed by Ted Post and co-starring Marianna Hill,...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Actor Tab Hunter has died at age 86 after sudden complications from a blood clot lead to a fatal heart attack. Hunter's blonde hair and hunky build made him a natural for the kind of beefcake leading men that characterized 1950s Hollywood. He was put under contract at Warner Brothers and became the studio's top grossing star during the years 1955-1959. Among Hunter's biggest hits of the era was the WWII film Battle Cry and the screen adaptation of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees. Hunter's popularity briefly extended to singing and his recording of "Young Love" was a smash hit, displacing Elvis Presley at the top of the charts. However, changing attitudes among fickle movie-goers in the 1960s swerved away from the traditional studio concept of a leading man. Hunter continued to work but in less-than-stellar productions. He did, however, have memorable cameos in big studio productions such...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) is playing July 16 - August 15, 2017 in the United States as part of the series John Schlesinger's First Masterpieces.Billy Fisher, a cheerful twenty-something lad from Yorkshire, is going to have a great future. For now, he only has a small office position in his dull small city, but Billy has already landed a job in London writing for a popular TV comedian. He is also working on a novel that soon enough will bring him fame and fortune. He is also engaged to a girl. Actually, two girls. And he doesn’t really want to marry any of them. Also, the TV star doesn’t really know that Billy exists. And he hasn’t started on the novel. Billy just has a vivid imagination and speaks before he thinks—some people prefer to call it compulsive lying.

(See previous post: “Gay Pride Movie Series Comes to a Close: From Heterosexual Angst to Indonesian Coup.”) Ken Russell's Valentino (1977) is notable for starring ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as silent era icon Rudolph Valentino, whose sexual orientation, despite countless gay rumors, seems to have been, according to the available evidence, heterosexual. (Valentino's supposed affair with fellow “Latin Lover” Ramon Novarro has no basis in reality.) The female cast is also impressive: Veteran Leslie Caron (Lili, Gigi) as stage and screen star Alla Nazimova, ex-The Mamas & the Papas singer Michelle Phillips as Valentino wife and Nazimova protégée Natacha Rambova, Felicity Kendal as screenwriter/producer June Mathis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), and Carol Kane – lately of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame. Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) is notable as one of the greatest musicals ever made. As a 1930s Cabaret presenter – and the Spirit of Germany – Joel Grey was the year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner. Liza Minnelli...

Turner Classic Movies' 2017 Gay Pride film series comes to a close this evening and tomorrow morning, Thursday–Friday, June 29–30, with the presentation of seven movies, hosted by TV interviewer Dave Karger and author William J. Mann, whose books include Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines and Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969. Among tonight's movies' Lgbt connections: Edward Albee, Tony Richardson, Evelyn Waugh, Tab Hunter, John Gielgud, Roddy McDowall, Linda Hunt, Harvey Fierstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Christopher Isherwood, Joel Grey, and Tommy Kirk. Update: Coincidentally, TCM's final 2017 Gay Pride celebration turned out to be held the evening before a couple of international events – and one non-event – demonstrated that despite noticeable progress in the last three decades, gay rights, even in the so-called “West,” still have a long way to go. In Texas, the state's – all-Republican – Supreme Court decided that married gays should be treated as separate and unequal. In...

The Loved One

Blu-ray

Warner Archives

1965 / B&W / 1:85 / / 122 min. / Street Date May 9, 2017

Starring: Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters, Anjanette Comer.

Cinematography: Haskell Wexler

Film Editor: Hal Ashby, Brian Smedley-Aston

Written by Terry Southern, Christopher Isherwood

Produced by Martin Ransohoff (uncredited), John Calley, Haskell Wexler

Directed by Tony Richardson

Funeral Director: Before you go, I was just wondering… would you be interested in some extras for the loved one?

Next Of Kin: What kind of extras?

Funeral Director: Well, how about a casket?

Mike Nichols and Elaine May – The $65 Dollar Funeral

That routine, a classic example of what was known in the early 60’s as “sick humor”, was nevertheless ubiquitous across mainstream variety shows like Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar. It also popularized the notion of a new boutique industry, the vanity funeral. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, decidedly less mainstream, documented the beginning of that phenomenon over a decade earlier with The Loved One,...

Broadway’s delightful — but wickedly accurate — satire of big business was brought to movie screens almost intact, with the story, the stars, the styles and dances kept as they were in the long-running show that won a Pulitzer Prize. This is the place to see Robert Morse and Michele Lee at their best — it’s one of the best, and least appreciated movie musicals of the 1960s.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1967 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date March 14, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Robert Morse, Michele Lee, Rudy Vallee, Anthony Teague, Maureen Arthur, Sammy Smith, Robert Q. Lewis, Carol Worthington, Kathryn Reynolds, Ruth Kobart, George Fennemann, Tucker Smith, David Swift.

Cinematography: Burnett Guffey

Film Editor: Allan Jacobs, Ralph E. Winters

Original Music: Nelson Riddle

Art Direction: Robert Boyle

Visual Gags: Virgil Partch

From the play written by Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows,...

Tony Sokol Aug 4, 2019

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard took the tinsel out of Tinseltown, the gild off the golden boy, and the cover off a forgotten murder.

Movie audiences in the naïve early days of film sometimes didn’t know that somebody had to sit down and write a movie. They thought the actors made it up as they went along. Sunset Boulevard, the 1950 film noir classic directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, did a lot to change that and other myths of old Hollywood--like the real-life murder at the heart of the story.

Sunset Boulevard told an old familiar story. William Holden’s Joe Gillis helps a timid soul named Norma Desmond cross a crowded street on Paramount's back lot. She turns out to be a multimillionaire silent screen icon played by the legendary Gloria Swanson and she leaves him all her money, which she’s already spent,...

While the holidays unfolded, we lost two of the greatest photographers to ever work in cinema, and it's only when you look back at the filmography they leave behind and the legacy they passed on to all the cameramen who worked under them and then went on to shoot films of their own that you understand the magnitude of what we've lost. There was a point in my own film education when I stopped going from actor to actor or from director to director in the way I was watching movies and spent a summer going from cinematographer to cinematographer, and doing that proved to be an education in the tricky definition of what we call "authorial voice" in film. I think it is only in collaboration that magic happens, and one of the people who has to be absolutely killing it for that to work is the cinematographer. The...

This week’s Blu-ray and DVD releases are an eclectic bunch, to say the least. Not only is Steve Miner’s criminally overlooked horror/comedy creature feature Lake Placid swimming its way onto Blu-ray, but Severin Films is also releasing a trio of controversial cult classics- Bloody Moon, The Baby and Bloody Birthday-all in high definition for the first time ever.

The Time Machine is also getting a Blu-ray release this week, along with Gareth Evans’ stunning action masterpiece The Raid 2 and a handful of indie horror films, including the wickedly entertaining horror musical Stage Fright starring Minnie Driver and Meat Loaf. Overall, it’s a good week to be a genre fan with oddball tastes because there’s a whole lot of wonderfully weird stuff arriving this Tuesday.

Spotlight Titles:

The Baby (Severin Films, Blu-ray)

An A-list director. A jaw-dropping storyline. And depraved depictions of suburban violence,...

Conscious-free kids who kill, a man living like a baby, and a killer stalking Spanish schoolgirls: Severin Films is plucking these three stories from the old-school horror shelf and bringing them to Blu-ray this summer, and we have the release details for you now.

Set for a July 8th home media release, the Blu-ray releases of 1981′s Bloody Birthday, 1973′s The Baby, and 1981′s Bloody Moon should excite fans of these grindhouse films and bring new viewers in, as well. Here are the release details from Severin Films:

Bloody Birthday Blu-ray:

“Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the ’80s that may also be the most disturbing ‘killer kids’ movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings and beyond.

It's always an exciting thing when horror flicks hit Blu-ray for the very first time, and Severin Films has three such debuts in store for us on July 8, inviting us to a Bloody Birthday, allowing us to hold The Baby, and encouraging us to howl at the Bloody Moon.

Read on for complete release details for all three!

Bloody Birthday Synopsis

Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the 80s that may also be the most disturbing "killer kids" movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings, and beyond. Can the town's grown-ups stop these pint-sized serial killers before their blood-soaked birthday bash? K.C. Martel (E.T., "Growing Pains"), Joe Penny ("Jake and The Fat Man"), Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja...

By Tom Lisanti

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Gail Gerber passed away on March 2, 2014 due to complications from lung cancer. Gerber was born on October 4, 1937 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and began studying ballet at age seven. Extremely talented, at fifteen she became the youngest member of Les Grandes Ballets Canadiennes in Montreal. Quitting the ballet troupe in the late 1950s and abandoning a husband who was a jazz musician, she moved to Toronto to work as an actress. She appeared on stage and in many live CBC television dramas. As part of the act of legendary vaudeville entertainers Smith and Dale (who were the basis for The Sunshine Boys), she appeared on The Wayne and Schuster Show and The Ed Sullivan Show. Moving to Hollywood in 1963, the talented blonde with a flair for comedy quickly snagged the lead role in the play Under the Yum Yum Tree...

Sure, Sunday tends to be overcrowded with high-end TV (like "Downton Abbey," returning to PBS this week), but what to watch the rest of the time? Every Monday, we bring you five noteworthy highlights from the other six days of the week. "In Memoriam" Monday, December 30th at 8pm on TCM Turner Classic Movies' year-end "In Memoriam" tribute is a salute to those who passed who weren't already honored during the year. The night begins with the 1941 Deanna Durbin musical "It Started with Eve" at 8pm, followed by Annette Funicello's 1964 "Bikini Beach" at 9:45pm. Eileen Brennan stars in Neil Simon's 1978 "The Cheap Detective" at 11:30pm, while Jonathan Winters plays a pair of brothers in 1965 black comedy "The Loved One" at 1:15am. Karen Black received an Oscar nomination for her performance in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces" at 3:30am, while Julie Harris is terrific in 1955's...

Top 10 Andrew Blair 13 Sep 2013 - 06:48

Andrew counts down Doctor Who's top 10 Dalek stories, from Invasion Earth to The Power of the Daleks...

A cosmos without the Daleks scarcely bears thinking about.

Without the mutated remnants of the seemingly indestructible planet Skaro, we don't know if Doctor Who would have survived. If Terry Nation had dreamt up the Voord to menace Barbara in the series fifth episode, Den of Geek may well be paying tribute to Doctor Who as an obscure cult concern, cherished by a few but forgotten by many. Instead, we do things like this.

This list is not limited to the television series, because Doctor Who isn't limited to the television series. And hey, why not use our Comments Section to add your own list or express disbelief that I've not included Evil of the Daleks in mine?

10. Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.

There's something eternally...

Los Angeles – Jonathan Winters, one of the most influential comedians of the past two generations, has died of natural causes on April 11th at his home in Montecito, California. His characteristic schizophrenic comic style inspired modern funnymen like Robin Williams, George Carlin and Jim Carrey. He was 87 years old.

The career of Jonathan Winters spanned from 1948 to the present, during which his freaky, energetic expression of humor had its own unique form. A fixture on such legendary television shows such as “The Tonight Show” (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson), “The Dean Martin Show” and “Hollywood Squares,” Winters would often appear as his alter ego Maude Frickert, a sharp tongued old lady character. It wasn’t just an act, as during his early career he spent time in mental institutions, and was diagnosed with manic depression.

Jonathan Winters as Lennie Pike in ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad...

Beloved film and TV actor Jonathan Winters passed away last night at the age of 87, at his home in Montecito, California. The comedian passed from natural causes while surrounded by friends and family members.

Born in 1925 in Dayton, Ohio, Jonathan Winters' career was launched after he won a talent contest, which lead to a local TV series in the early 1950s. He became a fixture on the stand up comedy circuit and on The Tonight Show, where he was a favorite of hosts Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. He also made many appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He launched his own series The Jonathan Winters Show in 1967.

He has appeared in several films such as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Loved One, and also starred as the son of Robin Williams and Pam Dawber on the TV series...

Jonathan Winters, comedian and television and film actor, best remembered for his roles in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and as the voice of Papa Smurf in The Smurfs, has died. He was 87. Winters’ show biz career began after he won a talent show in his native Dayton, Ohio. He went on to appear in dozens of television shows throughout his decades-long career, winning a supporting actor Emmy in 1991 for Davis Rules. His other TV credits include The Jonathan Winters Show, The Twilight Zone, Hee Haw, Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In and Mork And Mindy. He was a veteran of the late night talk show circuit guesting frequently on The Jack Paar Show and later The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. His late night appearances continued into the ’90s with Jay Leno and David Letterman. His other film credits include Viva Max, The Loved One, Oh Dad Poor Dad,...

Deborah Kerr in the classic ghost story The Innocents, screenplay by Truman Capote.

The Anthology Film Archives in New York is holding a unique film festival throughout the month of September honoring screenwriters who were best known for their work as novelists. Here are the details:

On this calendar we are highlighting the screenwriting work of writers best known as novelists – including pulp novelists like Richard Matheson, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard, cult figures such as Don Carpenter and John Fante, and such highly respected authors as Truman Capote and Joan Didion. Paying homage to the long tradition of novelists trying their hand at writing for the movies, we will present a selection of films based not on these writers’ novels, but on their original screenplays (which are sometimes adaptations of other novelists’ work).

From The Pen Of is programmed in close collaboration with author/musician Alan Licht.

Very special thanks to Alan Licht,...

Andrew Davis Returns To Stony Island

By Alex Simon

Director Andrew Davis made his name with hard-hitting action blockbusters like The Fugitive, Under Siege and The Guardian, but like most filmmakers, his first effort was a small film with a modest budget and a lot of heart. Davis’ directing debut Stony Island was shot in 1977, helmed by the then 30 year-old who had made a name for himself as a cinematographer, and conceived as a love letter to the South Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. Based loosely on the story of Davis’ younger brother Richie (starring as a fictionalized version of himself), who grew up as one of the few white kids in a largely African-American neighborhood, Stony Island follows a group of young musicians who try to form an R&B group in their racially-mixed neighborhood. Featuring the film debuts of now-notable names such as Dennis Franz, Susanna Hoffs,...

Los Angeles: It’s this Saturday!

Larry Karaszewski is a busy man, but that hasn’t stopped him from presenting great screenings of great films. As part of that ongoing series of impossibly cool American Cinematheque screenings, Larry Karaszewski will host Tony Richardson’s hilarious, morbid comedy The Loved One at the Egyptian Theater on Saturday, February 4.

So sayeth The Cinematheque:

Marketed as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone!” this achingly funny, pitch-black comedy could only have been released in the anything-goes era of the 1960s. Judged unfilmable for more than a decade (Luis Buñuel was trying to set it up for years), writer Evelyn Waugh’s spot-on satire of Southern California – specifically the funeral business – finally was brought to the screen in the mid-’60s by director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) with a screenplay by Terry Southern (Candy, Easy Rider) and Christopher Isherwood (!). Robert Morse, a British...

A few weeks ago, I attended a taping of BBC Radio 4’s program Open Book. The topic was a debate to choose Britain’s funniest book, and the five books under discussion were: • 1066 And All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman (championed by John Sessions) • The Virgin Soldiers, by Leslie Thomas (championed by Tony Parsons) • The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh (championed by A.L. Kennedy) • The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged thirteen and three quarters, by Sue Townsend (championed by Jo Brand) • Swing Hammer Swing, by Jeff Torrington (championed by Christopher Brookmyre) The winner was chosen by the studio audience -- we voted through several elimination rounds -- which made for an interesting experience for me, since I haven’t read any of the books. (Though now I plan to read all of them.) I cast my votes based entirely upon the presentations by the writers, comedians,...

Hollywood film producer and veteran studio executive

The Hollywood studio executive and producer John Calley, who has died aged 81, once characterised running a film studio as "a guy lying in a bed in a rented apartment in Century City at four in the morning in a foetal position trying to decide whether or not to say yes to a $175m budget for Spider-Man. In the end, it comes down to one guy who has to use his gut."

When Calley was production chief at Warner Bros in the 1970s, it was his gut instinct that led him to green-light such hit movies as A Clockwork Orange, The Towering Inferno, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, Dirty Harry, All the President's Men, Blazing Saddles, Superman and Chariots of Fire. However, in 1980, when he was about to sign a new seven-year contract worth $21m, he decided to give it all up. "I wasn't enjoying it,...

John Calley, the low-key, much beloved producer and studio head, died earlier this week at age 81. Calley was a true American success story. He worked his way up from the NBC mail room and ultimately held leader ship positions at Warner Brothers, United Artists and Sony. Additionally, he produced an eclectic slate of important motion pictures including The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Castle Keep, Ice Station Zebra, Topkapi, The Americanization Of Emily, and Catch-22. Calley played a pivotal role in green lighting the return of the James Bond franchise after a six-year absence with the smash hit GoldenEye in 1995. Click here for more...

John Calley, the veteran Hollywood movie and TV producer whose long career as a studio mogul helped engineer the comebacks of Warner Bros, United Artists, and most recently Sony Pictures Entertainment, has died after a long illness. Soft-spoken and friendly, the polar opposite of the stereotypical image of a Hollywood mogul as a tyrant, Calley was awarded filmdom’s highest honors when he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the inaugural Governors Awards ceremony on November 11, 2009. Unable to attend in person due to illness, he recorded remarks that were projected on a giant video screen, characterizing the life of a film studio executive as, ”You’re very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don’t experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you’re lucky.” In fact, Calley was very lucky and very competent:...

Muscled lean, smooth, tanned, blonde, blue-eyed, and incredibly handsome, Tab Hunter was the post war Golden Boy, the Brad Pitt of the 50′s. The american actor, singer, former teen idol and author landed a role in the film Island of Desire opposite Linda Darnell. With a fabricated name and extreme good looks, Tab Hunter was never taken seriously as an actor, but his co-starring role as young Marine Danny in 1955′s World War II drama Battle Cry cemented his position as one of Hollywood’s top young romantic leads. An instant success, Tab went on to star in over 50 major motion pictures, including The Pleasure of His Company, That Kind of Woman, Gunman’s Walk, They Came to Cordura, Ride the Wild Surf, The Loved One, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and the Academy Award-nominated Damn Yankees. Hunter was a number-one box office attraction who dominated the...

Colin Firth is mesmerising as a bereaved gay man with a death wish in fashion designer Tom Ford's superb debut

Christopher Isherwood was one of the great prose writers of the 20th century, a man of complexity, honesty and wit, and the fashion designer Tom Ford, making his carefully stylised directorial debut, has done an altogether admirable job of bringing to the screen what many regard as his best novel.

Born in 1904, Isherwood grew up with the cinema, was fascinated by the relationship between literature and the new medium, and his most famous line occurs his most celebrated book, ­Goodbye to Berlin: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Over the years he worked frequently on movies (his masterly novella, Prater Violet, was based on his experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend), and when he and Wh Auden left Britain just...

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Cinema Retro columnist Tom Lisanti has paired with actress Gail Gerber to write her fascinating autobiography that details her experiences in Hollywood as a young starlet in the 1960s as well as her career as a writer and Terry Southern's longtime companion. The book, Trippin' With Terry Southern, is due out in June. Here is an excerpt:

Hollywood, summer of 1964. I had been living in California for almost a year now and still felt like a fish out of water. Growing up in Canada where I studied ballet from the time I was a small child, Los Angeles was mystifying to me with its palm trees, bright sunlight forever contrasting with the deep shade, and its superficial inhabitants. But I readily admit I was sort of a snob myself and didn’t know...

I guess he'll die another way, to paraphrase Madonna's lousy theme song for the 20th Bond movie. Bond's survival of baroque death traps has been mocked on screen all the way back to 1965, when the noted character actor Robert Easton had the following line as a fruity-accented Bond type in The Loved One: "I think it could be dicey if he decides to use the giant squid." There was a giant octopus in the novel of Dr. No, though no villain ever actually employed sharks with laser helmets as in the Austin Powers films. However, there had been a planned robot shark in the kinda-non canonical Bond adventure Never Say Never Again. Our hero has dealt with seven especially exotic murder weapons over the years:

1. Death by giant yo-yo: Octopussy (1983) Resting after an exhausting shag with Maud Adams, Commander Bond (Roger Moore) is awakened by the sudden arrival in...