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Scorsese's Letterboxd list reveals his love for cinema, featuring companion movies from a wide range of genres and time periods. The list demonstrates Scorsese's role as a scholar of film, with many obscure choices that show his depth of knowledge. The cinematic elements in Scorsese's latest epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, reflect his passion for classic works and his ability to reimagine them.

Martin Scorsese details which films are the ideal double-features for his movies in his Letterboxd list. The auteur filmmaker directed his first feature movie, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967. Since then, Scorsese created more copious iconic epics and features, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street, and most recently, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently in theaters.

Taking to Letterboxd, Scorsese reveals an annotated list of the best companion movies to his work. The list included titles across nearly a century of cinema,...

Gravitas Ventures has promoted Danielle Gasher to vice president, acquisitions and international sales, and Bill Guentzler to vice president, acquisitions.

Gasher will now head Gravitas’ new international sales efforts division that will launch at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, continuing to play an integral role as a part of the acquisitions team. Guentzler will take on the role of securing titles for the company’s slate of over 200 films a year. Together, Gravitas and Guentzler will identify films for the Gravitas Premiere label that launched “Mack & Rita,” starring Diane Keaton, in 2022.

Prior to their promotion, Gasher and Guentzler were both senior directors of acquisition for Gravitas Ventures where they worked on acquiring Gravitas titles including Alex Heller’s “The Year Between” with J. Smith-Cameron and Steve Buscemi, “All the World Is Sleeping” with “Scream VI’s” Melissa Barrera, “Ocean Boy” with Luke Hemsworth and the comedic drama “Gringa...

Northern Ireland Screen has backed seven feature documentaries in the last year.

Northern Ireland’s documentary scene is thriving as the third annual Docs Ireland festival opens in Beflast today, Wednesday, August 25. Features from Northern Irish filmmakers Teresa Lavina and Brendan Byrne are being showcased in a programme that also includes two features in the Irish language.

The festival was created in 2019 as part of the existing Belfast Film Festival. It aims to turn the spotlight on the storytelling output of Irish and international non-fiction filmmakers, as well as leading international documentary filmmakers and also includes industry events and a marketplace.

The first feature-length concert film with live sound, Jazz on a Summer’s Day paved the way for movies like Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Photographing the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, director Bert Stern and his crew captured performances by Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and Louis Armstrong, among many others. A historic achievement, added to the National Film Registry in 1999, it was the first opportunity for some viewers to see these stars on stage, in color. To celebrate the film’s 60th anniversary, the non-profit IndieCollect and the National Film Preservation Foundation financed a new, 4K restoration that enhanced the soundtrack as well as the color camerawork. The restoration played to sold-out screenings at last year’s New York Film Festival, and is now streaming available via Kino Lorber’s Virtual Cinema platform Kino Marquee. With the film now available for a wider audience, the makings of capturing this momentous event provide...

"We are at the jazz festival, and let me tell you it is really wonderful." Kino Lorber has revealed an official trailer for a 4K restoration re-release of a classic concert doc called Jazz on a Summer's Day. Legendary photographer Bert Stern's groundbreaking concert documentary shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival featuring performances by Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson and more. The 1959 classic is considered one of the most extraordinary and possibly the first concert film ever made. The film was named to the National Film Registry in 1999, and its restoration was funded by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress in time to celebrate the film's 60th Anniversary. This looks like an awesome film to see in 4K in a cinema with full-on sound! An exceptional round of jazz music from some of the finest musicians...

It’s a summer without live music, among many other things, but one can live cathartically through classic concert films. One of the most acclaimed of its kind has received a new 4K restoration by IndieCollect and after a world premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival, it will now be arriving to theaters, virtual cinemas, and drive-ins courtesy of Kino Lorber Repertory.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day captures a classic series of performances that occurred at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and features Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, as well as a midnight performance of The Lord’s Prayer by Mahalia Jackson.

Directed by Bert Stern, the film was named to the National Film Registry in 1999, and its restoration was funded by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress in time to celebrate the film’s 60th Anniversary.

Emerging as an annual cinephile tradition, The Criterion Collection has once again kicked off the New Year with an illustrated clue hinting at what fans of the boutique label can expect over the next 12 months. And if these hints pan out, it's going to be another strong slate of releases in 2014. Now a caveat: everything below is nothing more than educated guesses, but between the usually well-informed people at The Criterion Cast and Criterion Forum, they probably aren't far off base. So what is Criterion teasing? Well, the clues seem to be pointing toward: Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter"; Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (previously issued by Criterion on laserdisc); Howard Hawks' classic "Red River"; the landmark documentary "Jazz On A Summer's Day" (recently re-issued in a theatrical run); Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" and more. Anyway, an annotated graphic and possible titles below (via...

Highly individual American drummer, bandleader and jazz visionary who toured with Lena Horne in the 1950s

A hundred years into its evolution, jazz incorporates ethnic and European classical instruments, drum machines and DJs spinning decks. A half-century or so ago, hardware habits were more cut and dried. A jazz big band had trumpets, trombones, saxes and a rhythm section. A small band had a rhythm section, a sax and trumpet, with maybe a guitar or a vibraphone. One that featured a (very quiet) guitarist, a flute or clarinet, a cellist, and a drummer who preferred mallets to sticks seemed like a strange beast in the jazz forest.

But the groups of the American drummer Chico Hamilton, who has died aged 92, did feature such instrumentation and, contrary to the jazz orthodoxies of the 1950s, they were for a time runaway successes. Hamilton led West Coast bands in that decade that came...

                                                

The upcoming week is absolutely packed with incredible archival screenings to tell you about, and there are a couple of new releases that are worth making time for as well. First up, let's focus on the Austin Film Society, who are continuing their Johnnie To series with 35mm screenings of 1999's Running Out Of Time this weekend. In advance of the upcoming local opening of Computer Chess, Afs is also hosting Andrew Bujalski on Sunday afternoon for a Q&A at a rare 35mm screening of Funny Ha-Ha. Essential Cinema presents the outrageous pre-code Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Cable in 35mm on Tuesday night while director Matt Wolf is stopping by on Wednesday for a Doc Nights premiere of his new film Teenage. 

The Paramount Summer Classic Film Series has a some tremendously well-programmed 35mm double features on deck this week including Spirit Of The Beehive and Pan's Labyrinth on Sunday,...

If you lived in New York City or anywhere else along the East Coast in the 1950s, the place to go to fix your "jazz jones" was the funereal old-money resort town of Newport, Rhode Island. Started in 1954 by socialites Elaine and Louis Lorillard, the Newport Jazz Festival had grown by 1958 into a four-day event attracting 60,000 music lovers ready to snap their fingers and bob their heads to the sounds of America's top jazz artists. Fortunately, that same summer Bert Stern and a small filmmaking crew captured the essence of those performances on 35mm color film accompanied by impeccable sound recordings.

In the 1950s, Bert Stern was best known as the photographer who combined art with advertising, as seen in the recent Austin FIlm Society Doc Nights presentation: Bert Stern: Original Mad Man. The gifted artist also created TV commercials, took fashion photos for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and...

Photographer and film-maker who took some of the last shots of Marilyn Monroe

In the summer of 1962 Bert Stern, who has died aged 83, took more than 2,500 photographs of Marilyn Monroe over three sessions held in a Los Angeles hotel. The images captured Monroe in a sometimes pensive but mostly playful mood as she posed nude, variously covered by bedsheets, a chinchilla coat, a stripy Vera Neumann scarf and a pair of chiffon roses. Despite their air of carefree humour, the portraits are inescapably wistful because – along with George Barris's subsequent pictures of Monroe at Santa Monica beach – they are among the last photographs taken of the star. She was found dead at her home several weeks later.

The shoot was for Vogue, which had Stern on a contract that required him to fill 100 fashion pages a year and afforded him an additional 10 pages for personal projects. Stern proposed Monroe as a subject,...

New York — Bert Stern, a commercial photographer best known for his images of Marilyn Monroe in what became known as "The Last Sitting," has died in New York City. He was 83.

Stern died Wednesday at his Manhattan home, said Shannah Laumeister, 43, a filmmaker who said the two were secretly married in 2009. She said the reason for keeping it secret was private.

Stern shot thousands of pictures of Monroe at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles in 1962 for Vogue magazine just weeks before her drug overdose death. They included nude and semi-nude images.

"He was an enormously innovative photographer, both as a commercial photographer and a photographer of celebrities and fashion models. And one of the great people in his field," said Bruce Barnes, director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., which this summer is presenting Stern's only documentary film, "Jazz on a Summer's Day," made in...

One of the great jazz pianists and bandleaders, he wrote Lullaby of Birdland

The pianist George Shearing, who has died aged 91 of heart failure, was the first postwar British jazz musician to move permanently to the Us and build a solid career there, effectively clearing the way for a host of other players to follow the same path. This was in 1947, at a time when Shearing and his countrymen, prevented by a Musicians' Union embargo from hearing the best American musicians in person, tended to regard these stars as supermen, wearing out their recordings, yet never imagining that it might be possible to perform alongside them in New York. However, Shearing put such negative thoughts aside and took the decision to emigrate.

His success was speedy and spectacular. By 1949, he had hit on the formula that brought him worldwide fame and colossal record sales, forming his quintet, later a sextet,...

Filed under: Documentaries, Movie News, Cinematical

Have an iPad already? If not, here is more incentive to you movie lovers: SnagFilms has just introduced a free app for the device, allowing you to stream 50 of the most popular documentary titles available through the site. And unlike Netflix Watch Instantly, which also works on the iPad, these films don't cost you anything. Some highly recommended titles offered free through the app: 'The Times of Harvey Milk,' 'Jazz on a Summer's Day,' 'Super Size Me,' 'The Future of Food' and 'Dig!'

Also coming soon is the opportunity for Comcast cable subscribers to stream movies and TV shows on their iPads (and other Apple as well as Android devices) via the Xfinity TV app, which currently appears to solely function as a guide and remote control. According to a press release, this new "play...

Filed under: Documentaries, Movie News, Cinematical

Have an iPad already? If not, here is more incentive to you movie lovers: SnagFilms has just introduced a free app for the device, allowing you to stream 50 of the most popular documentary titles available through the site. And unlike Netflix Watch Instantly, which also works on the iPad, these films don't cost you anything. Some highly recommended titles offered free through the app: 'The Times of Harvey Milk,' 'Jazz on a Summer's Day,' 'Super Size Me,' 'The Future of Food' and 'Dig!'

Also coming soon is the opportunity for Comcast cable subscribers to stream movies and TV shows on their iPads (and other Apple as well as Android devices) via the Xfinity TV app, which currently appears to solely function as a guide and remote control. According to a press release, this new "play...

What are your plans for the weekend? Here in the U.S., most folks are enjoying a long holiday weekend, filled with food, friends, and fireworks -- and maybe a free concert and a movie or two. On a personal note, with local temperatures soaring above 100 degrees for the past week or so, I'm staying inside and out of the weather as much as I can. And so I was pleased to find Jazz on a Summer's Day is available for free online viewing, courtesy of our friends at SnagFilms.

Directed by Aram Avakian and Bert Stern, the film documents the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the America's Cup sailing tournament, two events which go together like a cool drink on a hot day. Performers at the festival include Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O'Day (pictured), Dinah Washington, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson. My knowledge of jazz is extremely limited,...