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Sophia Loren is generating red-hot Oscar buzz for her performance in Netflix’s Italian-language drama “The Life Ahead.” The screen legend has earned some of the best reviews of her seven-decade career for her heartbreaking performance as a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who takes care of children of streetwalkers.

Loren made Oscar history 59 years ago when she became the first performer to receive an Academy Award for a foreign-language film. She took home Best Actress for Vittorio DeSica’s harrowing World War II drama “Two Women,” which was also in Italian. Loren, who also starred with Charlton Heston that year in the lavish epic “El Cid,” had very strong competition when the Oscar nominations were announced in the winter of 1962.

Natalie Wood, who had received a Supporting Actress nomination as a teenager for 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause,” gave an extraordinary performance as a sensitive teenager living in Kansas...

It is staggering to think that Sophia Loren has been making movies for 70 years, initially appearing uncredited in such films as 1950’s “Tototarzan” and “Quo Vadis” before becoming a full-fledged star in mentor Vittorio De Sica’s 1954 comedy anthology “The Gold of Naples.” And she became the first performer to win an Oscar for a foreign language film for De Sica’s harrowing World War II drama “Two Women,” which opened in the U.S. in 1961. She received two more Oscar nominations for Italian productions: DeSica’s “Marriage Italian Style” and Ettore Scala’s 1977 “A Special Day.”

After a decade’s hiatus from features, Loren has made a triumphant return to film in her son Edoardo Ponti’s poignant “The Life Ahead,” currently streaming on Netflix. The 86-year-old actress has received some of the strongest reviews of her career and loud Oscar buzz for her performance as an aged prostitute...

Actor puts myth to bed in Radio Times interview in which she also reveals her one regret

It was one of the greatest cinematic love stories of the 20th century, but Sophia Loren has now revealed that Cary Grant never proposed to her on set.

The 86-year-old Italian actor has previously detailed the torrid love affair she had with Grant while filming the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion. Also starring Frank Sinatra, it was the first American film she had worked on.

The Barefoot Contessa

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1954 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 130 min. / Street Date December 13, 2016 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Marius Goring, Rossano Brazzi, Valentina Cortese, Elizabeth Sellars, Warren Stevens, Enzo Staiola, Mari Aldon, Bessie Love.

Cinematography: Jack Cardiff

Original Music: Mario Nascimbene

Written, Produced and Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

As a teenager, many of my first and strongest movie impressions came not from the movies, but from certain critics. I memorized Robin Wood’s analysis before getting a look at Hitchcock’s Psycho. Raymond Durgnat introduced me to Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, and I first learned to appreciate a number of great movies including The Barefoot Contessa from Richard Corliss, a terrific critic who championed writers over director-auteurs.

The Barefoot Contessa is a classically structured story, in that it could work as a novel; it’s told from several points of view.

Killer Greek scenery in CinemaScope graces Jean Negulesco's relaxed thriller about art theft in the Aegean. But viewers are more likely to remember Sophia Loren's sexy wet diving costume that insured that her American debut didn't go unnoticed. Boy on a Dolphin Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1957 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 111 min. / Street Date October 25, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Alan Ladd, Clifton Webb, Sophia Loren, Alexis Minotis, Jorge Mistral, Laurence Naismith, Piero Giagnoni, Gertrude Flynn, Marni Nixon (voice), Scilla Gabel (Loren underwater). Cinematography Milton R. Krasner Film Editor William Mace Original Music Hugo Friedhofer Written by Ivan Moffat, Dwight Taylor from the novel by David Divine Produced by Samuel G. Engel Directed by Jean Negulesco

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Back when working on extras for The Guns of Navarone we saw documentation showing that Columbia Pictures had to jump through a lot of hoops with the Greek Royal Family...

Fans that lament Orson Welles' many career frustrations will flip over this Spanish-filmed masterpiece. Not well distributed when new and Mia for decades, its serious audio problems have now mostly been cleared up. It's great -- right up there with Kane and Touch of Evil, and it features what is probably Welles' best acting. Chimes at Midnight Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 830 1966 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 116 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Falstaff, Campanadas a medianoche / Street Date August 30, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud, Norman Rodway, Marina Vlady, Walter Chiari, Michael Aldridge, Tony Beckley, Alan Webb, José Nieto, Fernando Rey, Beatrice Welles, Ralph Richardson. Cinematography Edmond Richard Film Editor Fritz Mueller Original Music Angelo Francesco Lavagnino Produced by Alessandro Tasca Directed by Orson Welles

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

It's even better than I remembered. Sometime during film school I went with UCLA friends Clark...

Surround three international stars with several thousand extras in Franco's Spain and you've got yourself an instant historical adventure epic. Unfunny Cary Grant has a Big Gun, Spanish peasant guerilla (!) Frank Sinatra looks totally lost, and Sophia Loren conquers Hollywood by making with the sultry eyes and body moves. The Pride and the Passion Blu-ray Olive Films 1957 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 125 132 min. / Street Date August 16, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.95 Starring Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, Theodore Bikel, John Wengraf, Jay Novello Cinematography Franz Planer Production Designer Rudolph Sternad Art Direction Fernando Carrere, Gil Parrondo Film Editors Ellsworth Hoagland, Frederic Knudtson Original Music George Antheil Written by Edna Anhalt & Edward Anhalt from the novel The Gun by C.S. Forester Produced and Directed by Stanley Kramer

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Successful producer Stanley Kramer graduated to directing in 1955; two years later he was helming this giant, rather ill-conceived big-star epic in Spain.

Theodore Bikel. Theodore Bikel dead at 91: Oscar-nominated actor and folk singer best known for stage musicals 'The Sound of Music,' 'Fiddler on the Roof' Folk singer, social and union activist, and stage, film, and television actor Theodore Bikel, best remembered for starring in the Broadway musical The Sound of Music and, throughout the U.S., in Fiddler on the Roof, died Monday morning (July 20, '15) of "natural causes" at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Austrian-born Bikel – as Theodore Meir Bikel on May 2, 1924, in Vienna, to Yiddish-speaking Eastern European parents – was 91. Fled Hitler Thanks to his well-connected Zionist father, six months after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 ("they were greeted with jubilation by the local populace," he would recall in 2012), the 14-year-old Bikel and his family fled to Palestine, at the time a British protectorate. While there, the teenager began acting on stage,...

Cary Grant films on TCM: Gender-bending 'I Was a Male War Bride' (photo: Cary Grant not gay at all in 'I Was a Male War Bride') More Cary Grant films will be shown tonight, as Turner Classic Movies continues with its Star of the Month presentations. On TCM right now is the World War II action-drama Destination Tokyo (1943), in which Grant finds himself aboard a U.S. submarine, alongside John Garfield, Dane Clark, Robert Hutton, and Tom Tully, among others. The directorial debut of screenwriter Delmer Daves (The Petrified Forest, Love Affair) -- who, in the following decade, would direct a series of classy Westerns, e.g., 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree -- Destination Tokyo is pure flag-waving propaganda, plodding its way through the dangerous waters of Hollywood war-movie stereotypes and speechifying banalities. The film's key point of interest, in fact, is Grant himself -- not because he's any good,...

Actress’s letters reveal the Hollywood star’s passionate pursuit of her while filming in Spain

When the young Sophia Loren dances a sultry flamenco in the role of Juana in the 1957 film The Pride and the Passion, the onlooking crowd of peasants appear spellbound, not least among them Cary Grant, who plays the English hero. Now the public are to learn what the film star was really thinking as he watched Loren stamp her feet and swirl her skirt.

The Italian screen goddess, who turned 80 last month, was drawn into a torrid love affair with Grant during the making of the film in Spain and her memoirs, to be published in a few weeks, will reveal the intimate details of the matinee idol’s determined pursuit of her on set, despite the fact he was 30 years older than her and married to his third wife.

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Thanks to "Sleepless in Seattle," everyone knows "An Affair to Remember" is the ultimate romantic tearjerker. Not only do Nora Ephron's female characters describe it as their favorite chick flick, but the ending atop the Empire State Building evokes the abortive reunion that Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr never get to enjoy. Many modern viewers also know that "Affair to Remember" (which opened in theaters 55 years ago, on July 11, 1957) was filmmaker Leo McCarey's remake of his own 1939 hit "Love Affair," with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as the lovers kept apart by fate and their own wounded pride. Still, there's a lot about "An Affair to Remember" that even its biggest fans may not know, including its uncanny echoes of Grant's own shipboard romance with his third wife, or how a not-yet-famous young visitor witnessed the veteran leading man's acting breakthrough, or Grant's off-camera therapeutic uses of hypnosis and LSD.

DVD Playhouse – May 2012

By Allen Gardner

Shame (20th Century Fox) Director Steve McQueen’s harrowing portrait of a Manhattan sex addict (Michael Fassbender, in the year’s most riveting performance) whose psyche goes into overload when his equally-troubled sister (Carey Mulligan) visits unexpectedly. Exquisitely-made on every level, save for the screenplay, which makes its point after about thirty minutes. While it tries hard to be a modern-day Last Tango in Paris, this fatal flaw makes it fall somewhat short. The much- ballyhooed sex scenes and frontal nudity are the least-interesting things about the film, incidentally, which is still a must-see for discriminating adults who seek out challenging material. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS-hd 5.1 surround.

Being John Malkovich (Criterion) Spike Jonze’s madcap film of Charlie Kaufman’s script, regarding a socially-disenfranchised puppeteer (John Cusack) who finds a portal into the mind of actor...

There's very little we can say about the indomitable Ol' Blue Eyes that hasn't already been said, but suffice it to say, Frank Sinatra is one of the most successful entertainers of all time, effortlessly transitioning back and forth between his music and acting careers.

On April 3rd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment releases the rather impressive "The Frank Sinatra Film Collection" on DVD.

Films include Stanley Kramer's "The Pride and the Passion" co-starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, "Kings Go Forth" with Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, Frank Capra's "A Hole in the Head," "Can-Can," featuring Shirley MacLaine, John Frankenheimer's classic "The Manchurian Candidate," "Von Ryan’s Express," "Cast a Giant Shadow" starring Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner and John Wayne among others, "Tony Rome" (featuring a score by Lee Hazlewood), its sequel, "Lady in Cement" co-starring Raquel Welch, and "The Detective."

The 10-title collection spans 11 years...

Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi in Oscar nominee (but not DGA nominee) David Lean's Summertime DGA Awards vs. Academy Awards 1948-1952: Odd Men Out George Cukor, John Huston, Vincente Minnelli 1953 DGA (12) Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, Above and Beyond Walter Lang, Call Me Madam Daniel Mann, Come Back, Little Sheba Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Julius Caesar Henry Koster, The Robe Jean Negulesco, Titanic George Sidney, Young Bess DGA/AMPAS George Stevens, Shane Charles Walters, Lili Billy Wilder, Stalag 17 William Wyler, Roman Holiday Fred Zinnemann, From Here to Eternity   1954 DGA (16) Edward Dmytryk, The Caine Mutiny Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder Robert Wise, Executive Suite Anthony Mann, The Glenn Miller Story Samuel Fuller, Hell and High Water Henry King, King of Khyber Rifles Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, Knock on Wood Don Siegel, Riot in Cell Block 11 Stanley Donen, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers George Cukor, A Star Is Born Jean Negulesco,...

Sophia Loren, along with Myrna Loy, an Honorary Oscar recipient at the 1991 Oscar ceremony Sophia Loren will be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 4, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. The Sophia Loren Academy tribute will feature film clips and reminiscences from friends and colleagues, concluding with an onstage chat with the 1961 Best Actress Oscar winner. Among Loren's international leading men were Marcello Mastroianni (in a number of films), Cary Grant (The Pride and the Passion, Houseboat, 1958), Frank Sinatra (The Pride and the Passion), Alan Ladd (Boy on a Dolphin, 1958), Clark Gable (It Started in Naples, 1960), Charlton Heston (El Cid, 1961), Gregory Peck (Arabesque, 1966), Marlon Brando (A Countess from Hong Kong, 1967, directed by Charles Chaplin), Omar Sharif (More Than a Miracle, 1968), Peter O'Toole (Man of La Mancha, 1972), and Richard Burton [...]...