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It’s a wild story of a British “Robin Hood” stealing from the government in 1961 to hopefully (and earnestly) compensate taxpayers who better deserved the funds set aside to stop a hostile takeover of ownership of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) had already gone on record (and served jailtime) for his efforts to end the BBC license fee being charged poor pensioners who simply wanted a television to connect with the fast-growing world outside their doors. With no one listening and constant talk about England having today’s equivalent of £3 million to stop a private collector from purchasing said painting, Bunton decides to cause a ruckus nobody can ignore: stealing and ransoming it for that same price. This time for charity.

The ordeal fascinated the nation because of how absurd the whole thing looked. Everyone assumed it was a professional thief who...

BAFTA nominees Lindsay Duncan and Simon Callow join Joe Stephenson’s upcoming “Doctor Jekyll,” starring Eddie Izzard.

Also added to the cast are Jonathan Hyde Tony Jayawardena (“The Crown”) and Robyn Cara.

In the film, a modern interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,” Izzard plays Dr. Nina Jekyll, a recluse who finds friendship with her newly hired help, Rob, played by emerging actor Scott Chambers (“Chicken”) and they must work together to prevent Hyde from destroying her life. The screenplay is by first time writer Dan Kelly-Mulhern.

Joe Stephenson, director of Edinburgh and Busan selected film “Chicken” and feature documentary “McKellen: Playing the Part,” directs.

The film is produced by London based B Good Picture Company in association with Fluidity Films (“Journey’s End”). Stephenson produces with Guy de Beaujeu (“The Laureate”) with Liam Coutts (“The Good Drug”) associate producing. Christian Angermayer...

"To us teenagers, she was a babe!" Madman Films has released an official trailer for the documentary film Elizabeth, a biopic profile of the iconic Queen of England. This film is made by the acclaimed filmmaker Roger Michell, known for his many features over the years including Notting Hill, Changing Lanes, Venus, Morning Glory, Hyde Park on Hudson, Le Week-end, My Cousin Rachel. His latest is this - a documentary on the life of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-lived, longest reigning British monarch and longest serving female head of state in history. Why now? Who knows! "With extraordinary access to rare footage from the Royal Archives, Elizabeth is a cinematic celebration of an icon that reveals a unique glimpse of the woman behind the legend." It sounds like it won't be critical because it's more of a look at this woman and her life, not so much a commentary about...

If the improbably named Kempton Bunton hadn’t really lived, Ealing Studios would probably have written him into existence. A 60-year-old working-class Newcastle gent with a cheeky sense of humor and a cheerily rabble-rousing spirit, who just happened to be implicated in a headline-making London art heist, he was born to be the hero of a jaunty, crowd-pleasing British comedy caper. 44 years after his death, that has materialized in “The Duke,” and while the Ealing team might have made a more raucous farce out of it, Roger Michell’s film is a perfectly nimble, kind-hearted bit of teatime entertainment — ideally tailored to Jim Broadbent in one of his most appealing big-screen roles.

The pairing of Broadbent with Helen Mirren, warmly weary if a bit under-tested as Bunton’s salt-of-the-earth wife Dorothy, will make “The Duke” a major attraction to ill-served mature audiences when distributor Pathé opens the film in the U.

It’s official: Selena Quintanilla is this year’s top Halloween costume.

And Kim Kardashian West became the latest celebrity to transform into the late Queen of Tejano music following in the footsteps of Demi Lovato and America Ferrera this spooky season.

“My fave Selena!” the Keeping Up with the Kardashians reality star, 37, captioned a series of three videos on Twitter Tuesday.

My fave Selena!!!! pic.twitter.com/DVKSSRxnxy

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) November 1, 2017

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Kardashian West paid tribute by donning a purple jumpsuit similar to the one Quintanilla wore at her final concert before...

This beautiful pair of illustrated posters for two late 50s Maigret adaptations by Jean Delannoy is the work of Nathan Gelgud, an artist who by now should be well known to cinephiles in New York and Los Angeles. Nathan is the creator of the auteur tote bag, an essential cinephilic fashion accessory for the 2010s, more on which later. Full disclosure: I was involved in the art direction on these posters at Kino Lorber, whose repertory division is re-releasing Maigret Sets a Trap (originally released in the Us as Inspector Maigret and later re-released as Woman Bait) at Metrograph today and will be releasing both films on Blu-ray in December. I’d been aware of Nathan’s work for a while, but it was his comic-book style resumé poster for Metrograph’s Alain Tanner retrospective this summer that convinced me he’d be perfect for Maigret. And, as luck would have it,...

Anne Wiazemsky, the actress best known as the star of “Au Hasard Balthazar” and for her appearances in French New Wave movies, has died at 70 after a battle with breast cancer. Her brother confirmed the news with the Afp. Wiazemsky was the second wife of Jean-Luc Godard and appeared in his 1967 dramas “La chinoise” and “Week End.”

The actress got her breakthrough in 1966 when Robert Bresson cast her in the lead role of Marie in “Au Hasard Balthazar.” The film memorably chronicled the relationship between the character, a shy farm girl, and her beloved donkey as they grow old and drift apart. Wiazemsky was only 18 year old when she appeared in the movie but became an instant favorite of Bresson. Her acting career continued until the late 1980s and she starred in films directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Teorema,” “Pigsty”) and Philippe Garrel (“L’enfant secret”).

Most recently, Wiazemsky had...

French actor best known for mainstream films who earned her place in the New Wave pantheon with her performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend

Mireille Darc, who has died aged 79, was a French film star known for her zestful appearances in a string of popular sex comedies and cops and robbers movies. Mainly in the 1960s, she played a variety of good-natured call girls and gangsters’ molls, while not being averse to disrobing when the plot required it, and sometimes when it did not.

One of her most famous roles was in The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire, 1972), an espionage farce in which she displayed a black backless dress to the astonishment of unwilling spy Pierre Richard. The dress, designed by Guy Laroche, is now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

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Mireille Darc as Corinne Durand in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend with Jean Yanne (Roland Durand). Photo: Unifrance The French actress and model Mireille Darc who was one of the beautiful people of the Sixties and Seventies and a constant companion over many years of Gallic superstar Alain Delon, has died last night (August 27) in Paris, her family have announced.

Mireille Darc: 'When I saw myself a blonde, I realised that it was me' Photo: Unifrance Darc, who was 79 and who chose her surname as a reference to Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), was born in Toulon on May 15, 1938 as Mireille Aigroz. She began her career as a model and television presenter before turning to cinema.

Early on, she landed roles in various films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1968), and at the opposite end of the spectrum Ken Annakin’s comedy romp Monte Carlo Or Bust! (1969) with Tony Curtis,...

In what’s been a fairly wretched summer box-office season, Oscar-winners Casey Affleck, Brie Larson, and Matthew McConaughey had some of the worst of it with “A Ghost Story,” “The Glass Castle,” and “The Dark Tower.” Casting didn’t drive those failures, but possessing Hollywood’s most-coveted award offered little or no bottom-line benefit.

Read More:The Most Surprising Movies of the 2017 Summer Movie Season

Beyond creating certain mention in the first sentence of an obituary, the long-term impact of an Oscar is never clear. In the 15 years since Halle Berry won an Oscar for “Monster’s Ball,” her roles have ranged from decorative to derivative — a trend that continued with this late-summer’s release of the low-budget, don’t-mess-with-Mama thriller “Kidnap.”

Still, is it too much to expect a short-term uptick in interest and box office? The summer of 2017 suggests that may be the case.

Brie Larson

Best Actress, 2016

Oscar-winning film: “Room,...

Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film — past, present, and future.

“Everything, Everything” director Stella Meghie, who made her debut with the Canadian production “Jean of the Joneses,” isn’t just being modest when she says she didn’t expect to direct a studio film. The numbers tell us as much: Most female filmmakers struggle to get a second film off the ground, and the number of black female filmmakers in the studio system is vanishingly small.

In fact, Meghie is just one of 16 female filmmakers to have a studio-backed film hitting theaters in 2017 (that includes studio speciality divisions). However, it’s not Meghie who got lucky; it’s MGM and Warner Bros., since she might be the only person who could have made this movie.

“That was the reason why I did the film,” said its star, Amandla Stenberg, who was 13 when she broke out as...

Andrew McCarthy is best known for starring in movies like Pretty In Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, and Weekend At Bernie’s. But a few years ago he realized that travel had had a profound effect on his life and inundated an editor friend with clips until he got an assignment. Now McCarthy is an award-winning travel writer who has recently released his first Ya novel, Just Fly Away. On his book tour, he stopped by The A.V. Club to talk with assistant editor Gwen Ihnat about his current career, which includes not only his writing but also directing for TV series like Orange Is The New Black and The Blacklist.

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out.

Two Very Different Movies Look to Divide Up the Weekend Box Office Business

With Disney’s Beauty and the Beast continuing to dominate at the box office with $90 million this past weekend, and Saban’s Power Rangers (Lionsgate) also doing exceedingly well with $40 million in second place, you wouldn’t think anyone would try to release a movie that might get overshadowed by those two blockbusters.

That said, what’s interesting about this weekend is the fact there are two very different movies that are competing very heavily for second place with DreamWorks Animation’s latest animated family film, The Boss Baby (20th Century Fox), taking on the live action English remake of Ghost In The Shell (Paramount), starring Scarlett Johansson. In most cases,...

Director Michel Hazanavicius has unveiled the first teaser for his upcoming romance drama “Redoubtable.” In his latest project, the filmmaker behind the Oscar darling “The Artist” takes on the life of legendary French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who has created iconic masterpieces such as “Breathless” and “A Woman Is a Woman.” Godard is portrayed by Louis Garrel (“The Dreamers,” “Love Songs,” “The Beautiful Person”).

Read More: Louis Garrel Channels Jean-Luc Godard In First Pics From Michel Hazanavicius’ Romance ‘Redoubtable’

Based on the autobiography “Un An Après” by Anne Wiazemsky, the biopic centers around the romance that flourished between her and Godard when they were making the 1967 film “La Chinoise.” They married shortly after and collaborated on “Week End” and “Sympathy for the Devil” before divorcing in 1979.

Read More: Academy Award-Winner Michel Hazanavicius’s 5 Tips for Filmmakers

Wiazemsky is played by “Nymphomaniac” actress Stacy Martin. The film also stars Hazanavicius’ wife Bérénice Bejo,...

Fox Searchlight Pictures has released the first trailer and poster for their upcoming thriller My Cousin Rachel, which stars Rachel Weisz as the title character and Sam Claflin as Philip Ashley. This film will mark the third time that the timeless original novel by Daphne Du Maurier will be adapted, with the first big-screen adaptation debuting in 1952, starring Olivia de Havilland as Rachel Ashley and Richard Burton as Philip Ashley. The novel was then adapted into a 1983 mini-series starring Geraldine Chaplin and Christopher Guard as Rachel and Philip.

My Cousin Rachel is a dark romance that tells the story of a young Englishman who plots revenge against his mysterious, beautiful cousin, believing that she murdered his guardian. But his feelings become complicated as he finds himself falling under the beguiling spell of her charms. The original novel was first published in 1951, and also spawned a few other types of adaptations.

Saturday Night Live took on President Donald Trump once again over the weekend, showing what it would like if an alien invasion went down under his leadership. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go well.

Alec Baldwin reprised his impression of the commander-in-chief, who is tasked with the unenviable duty of motivating the last remaining cadre of soldiers following a devastating attack on the United States by extra-terrestrial villains.

Watch: 'SNL' Brutally Mocks President Donald Trump's First Press Conference and Latest Sex Scandal

Unfortunately for the troops, Baldwin's Trump isn't able to do much more than hit inane talking points while avoiding the real issues facing America -- like the fact that California has been vaporized.

"Everyone in California is dead," Kenan Thompson's army commander tells the president.

Trump only has one concern, however. "Even Arnold?" he asks, referring to his Celebrity Apprentice rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

More: Alec Baldwin's 13 Funniest 'Saturday Night Live' Moments...

The 2017 iHeartRadio Music Awards were held on Sunday at The Forum in Inglewood, California, featuring performances by superstars Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry and more.

Check out all the big winners below!

Pics: 2017 iHeartRadio Music Awards Red Carpet Arrivals

Song of the Year:

"Can't Stop The Feeling" - Justin Timberlake *Winner*

"Cheap Thrills" - Sia featuring Sean Paul

"Closer" - The Chainsmokers featuring Halsey

"One Dance" - Drake featuring Wizkid and Kyla

"Stressed Out" - twenty one pilots

Best New Artist presented by the all-new 2017 Subaru Impreza®:

The Chainsmokers *Winner*

Chance The Rapper

Bryson Tiller

Kelsea Ballerini

The Strumbellas

Joss Favela

Cnco

Female Artist of the Year:

Adele *Winner*

Ariana Grande

Rihanna

Selena Gomez

Sia

Male Artist of the Year:

Drake

Justin Bieber *Winner*

Luke Bryan

Shawn Mendes

The Weeknd

Best Duo/Group of the Year:

Coldplay

Dnce

Florida Georgia Line

The Chainsmokers

twenty one pilots *Winner*

Alternative Rock Song of the Year:

"Bored to Death...

Weekend Preview:The final, R-rated, impale-happy, Hugh Jackman-cussing Wolverine film, Logan hits 4,071 theaters this weekend and Fox's guidance is $60 million. The studio is pulling its punches (or adamantium claws) though as that means they think it's heading for $14.7K per screen average. In a weekend where its competition is the well-reviewed holdover Get Out, the Groundhog Day Ya film, Before I Fall, and Lionsgate/Summit's faith-based film, The Shack, Logan's prospects seem better than that.Since moving out of the X-Men Academy to make it on his own Wolverine has had solid commercial, if not always critical, success. The first outing, 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine may have made $85 million its opening weekend (in 4,099 theaters for a psa of $20.8K) but it had a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 6.7 on IMDb, a B+ on CinemaScore and nearly knee-capped the Deadpool character for all time. It ended up with $173 million domestic, $193 million...

The “Bob’s Burgers Music Album” is coming your way May 12, and it’s loaded up with more goodies than a Poutine on the Ritz Burger.

This is not the time to be modern and go the digital route for your music. Hell, even buying the CDs isn’t old-school enough. Instead, if you buy the the “Bob’s Burgers Music Album” deluxe limited-edition gift box, that comes with three LPs (in “condiment-colored” vinyl?!), a Bob’s Buskers seven-inch white vinyl LP, a hardbound lyric book (for those times you need to know more than just “Butts, Butts, Butts”), a sheet music collection, three original posters and a lot more. What is “more” you ask? Take a look at the unboxing video below featuring Teddy’s hairy arms and mumbly narration to see everything:

Of course, the two-cd album is still chockfull of “Bob’s Burgers” audio goodness, which amounts to 107 songs.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's La gai savoir (1969) is showing from January 18 - February 17, 2017 in many countries around the world as part of the retrospective For Ever Godard.Le gai savoir (Joy of Learning, 1969) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard which, unlike classics such as Breathless (1960) or Contempt (1963) is hardly a household name. Godard’s Weekend (1967) gives us an inkling of what is to come in its postscript production credit: What translates to mean “End of story” and then “End of cinema” flashes in blue lettering on a black backdrop; a moment later, we see that this word game has been created using a statement of the film’s visa control number. Of course, Godard had already been engaging in this kind of word play for years in his credits and intertitles. Although these statements could also be taken as being typical,...

A version of this article originally appeared on EW.com.

La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s musical romance (and EW’s favorite movie of 2016) is packing theaters in major cities across the country. Its earning power has been mighty impressive, guaranteeing that the film will be open for box office business at least until the Oscars in February, where the film leads all hopefuls with a record-tying 14 nominations.

Chazelle’s movie features a number of song and dance sequences that are both steeped in homage for old musicals and wondrously modern. In one scene, which drew inspiration from classic Hollywood...

The iHeartRadio Music Awards is right around the corner — and the nominees (plus the show’s first performer) have been revealed.

The news for the highly-anticipated event was announced Wednesday morning, and by the looks of it, it’s sure to be a star-studded evening.

Bruno Mars, who was nominated for both Song of the Year and Best Collaboration last year, is set to take the stage in March as one of the show’s performers.

Meanwhile, Drake leads the nominees with 12 nominations, including Male Artist of the Year. The Chainsmokers are right behind the singer with 11 nominations, including the inaugural category,...

The iHeartRadio Music Awards nominations are here!

The nominees for the fourth annual iHeartRadio Music Awards were announced on Thursday, dominated by hip-hop artists like Drake, who earned 12 nominations, including Male Artist of the year, and new group The Chainsmokers, who nabbed 11 nods, including the inaugural Best New Pop Artist category.

Related: iHeartRadio Music Awards Winners List 2016

Of course, our girls Beyonce and Adele also earned several nominations each, while the award show's new category, Best Music Video, is sure to be a face-off between many famous faces, including Zayn Malik, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande, Rihanna and Calvin Harris.

As for the night's entertainment, Bruno Mars is the first performer to be announced by the show.

See the nominees below:

Song of the Year

"Can't Stop The Feeling" - Justin Timberlake

"Cheap Thrills" - Sia featuring Sean Paul

"Closer" - The Chainsmokers featuring Halsey

"One Dance" - Drake featuring Wizkid and Kyla

"Stressed Out" - twenty one pilots...

This past weekend, Lionsgate released the horror film “Blair Witch,” a direct sequel to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 smash hit “The Blair Witch Project,” to mixed reviews and an underwhelming box office performance. The film grossed $9.6 million on opening weekend, which was below expectations and the lowest for the series, even lower than the widely-panned first sequel “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.”

Read More: Review: ‘The Woods’ Delivers The ‘Blair Witch’ Sequel We Wanted 15 Years Ago

In response to the film’s tepid critical and commercial response, the “Blair Witch” director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett took to Twitter to lament their film’s reception and gently mock the weekend’s box office winner “Sully,” Clint Eastwood’s film about Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and the Miracle on the Hudson. Wingard first tweeted that, “Ya win some. Ya lose some,” before commenting to Barrett that they...

Legendary French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard has created a legacy with masterpieces like “Breathless” and “A Women Is a Women.” Now, the helmer is becoming the subject of “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius’ romance drama “Redoubtable.” The project was announced back in May, and now the filmmaker has released a handful of new images from the project.

The film is based on Anne Wiazemsky’s autobiography, “Un An Après,” which chronicles the actress’ blossoming romance with Godard during the making of the 1967 film “La Chinoise.” The duo, who married shortly after, also collaborated on “Week End” and “Sympathy for the Devil” before divorcing in 1979. In the first pictures, “The Dreamers” actor Louis Garrel channels the iconic helmer, while “Nymphomaniac” actress Stacy Martin portrays Wiazemsky.

Read More: That Movie About Jean-Luc Godard’s Second Marriage is Misguided

Hazanavicius states in his Facebook post that he has always admired Godard’s...

One of the many touchpoints mentioned in the course of “De Palma,” the new film from Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is Jean-Luc Godard‘s “Weekend,” but if they’d gone for the embellishment of a subtitle in the name of their interview-based doc, it could very well have been “Brian De Palma: Breathless.” Because it is both literally […]

The post ‘De Palma’ Is An Exhilarating Blast Of Cinephile Cocaine From Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow [Review] appeared first on The Playlist.

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.News Jan Němec, the Czech director of Diamonds of the Night (1964), has died. Keyframe has an overview of his work. Above: the Czech poster for Němec's 1966 film, A Report on the Party and the Guests, via Adrian Curry's blog Movie Poster of the Day.Speculation around the 2016 Cannes Film Festival selection is raging, but Variety is pretty sure it will include several new American films, including new movies directed by Sean Penn, Woody Allen and Jeff Nichols.The Criterion Collection has announced its next lineup of releases, which includes Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria, and Michelangelo Antonionio's Le amiche.New issues of Cinema Scope and Senses of Cinema are out. Yes,...

"Though Michael Mann has directed only 11 theatrical feature films in 35 years, he has left his mark on a wide range of movie types, including period drama (The Last of the Mohicans), sports biography (Ali), corporate thriller (The Insider) and the ever-popular Nazi paranormal horror flick (The Keep)," writes Daniel M. Gold for the New York Times. The BAMcinématek series Heat & Vice: The Films of Michael Mann runs from tomorrow through February 16. More goings on: Antonio Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well has been restored, Matt Zoller Seitz presents Mad Men Weekend in San Francisco, and the Jean-Luc Godard season rolls on in London. » - David Hudson...

"Though Michael Mann has directed only 11 theatrical feature films in 35 years, he has left his mark on a wide range of movie types, including period drama (The Last of the Mohicans), sports biography (Ali), corporate thriller (The Insider) and the ever-popular Nazi paranormal horror flick (The Keep)," writes Daniel M. Gold for the New York Times. The BAMcinématek series Heat & Vice: The Films of Michael Mann runs from tomorrow through February 16. More goings on: Antonio Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well has been restored, Matt Zoller Seitz presents Mad Men Weekend in San Francisco, and the Jean-Luc Godard season rolls on in London. » - David Hudson...

Fortunes are reviving for The Revenant. After a stint in second, it bypassed the competition to hold the top spot of the weekend with an estimated $16 million. While it is a rough victory (this weekend is the slowest weekend of 2016 so far), Oscar buzz and word of mouth are giving the film some much-needed revenue here and abroad. In second this week, Star Wars: The Force Awakens needs no help as it continues to slaughter box office records; with an estimated $14.3 million, it still has a chance, though slimming, of pushing Titanic out of the highest grossing film worldwide, though Avatar still appears out of reach (yet it has handily defeated both films in domestic earnings). Meanwhile, in third place, Ride Along 2 took in an estimated $13 million, and looks on track to at least break even on its $40 million costs, though it took a massive hit in revenue since its first week.

Above: Italian poster for Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967).Flaming car aside, the poster above, with its emphasis on a torrid embrace that seems right off the cover of a Harlequin romance, doesn’t really scream Jean-Luc Godard. When I came across two Italian posters for Weekend the other day (the other, seen at the end of this piece, more sexploitation than romance but equally inappropriate to the film) I started to look at other Italian posters for Godard’s films and I found them all strikingly different from their French counterparts.While the Nouvelle vague in France coincided with a new wave in poster design, based mostly around photomontage, Italian distributors either resisted moving away from the kind of overtly emotional, painterly style of poster illustration that had been their stock in trade, or deliberately subverted the iconoclastic new films coming out of France with images that were more comfortingly familiar or sensationally commercial.

A new restoration of Lino Brocka’s Insiang (1976) begins its weeklong run at MoMA today. More goings on: A Mathieu Amalric retrospective and screenings of Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd and Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder in New York, Adam Curtis Weekend in Berlin, an Alejandro Jodorowsky retrospective in Bordeaux and, in São Paulo, a Jean-Luc Godard retrospective aims to screen the entire filmography, 125 works in all, including features, shorts, commercials and trailers. Through November 30. » - David Hudson...

A new restoration of Lino Brocka’s Insiang (1976) begins its weeklong run at MoMA today. More goings on: A Mathieu Amalric retrospective and screenings of Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd and Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder in New York, Adam Curtis Weekend in Berlin, an Alejandro Jodorowsky retrospective in Bordeaux and, in São Paulo, a Jean-Luc Godard retrospective aims to screen the entire filmography, 125 works in all, including features, shorts, commercials and trailers. Through November 30. » - David Hudson...

In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, would make him an icon of French cinema, inaugurating a career that has consistently expanded society’s definitions and expectations of cinema. That film alone would have reason enough to consider him an important filmmaker, but Godard went on to direct fourteen more features through 1967, culminating with his attack on bourgeois culture, Weekend.

Following this extraordinary run of films, Godard found himself at a moment of great change. His romantic and artistic partnership with Anna Karina had ended, to be replaced with a new (but short-lived) marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who would serve as a bridge to the current youth culture. Godard’s politics had also changed considerably since the 1950s. His conservatism, a relic of his parents’s politics, had been replaced with an interest in Maoism and an increasing distaste for anything evoking America. (Classic Hollywood cinema initially got a pass,...

One of the many touchpoints mentioned in the course of "De Palma," the new film from Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend," but if they'd gone for the embellishment of a subtitle in the name of their interview-based doc, it could very well have been "Brian De Palma: Breathless." Because it is both literally and metaphorically so, a whistle-stop guided tour of De Palma's filmography in which the legendary director talks non-stop, with one anecdote jump-cut against the next so fast that often the breaths in between sentences are snipped out. The effect is almost disconcertingly rapid-fire at first, and initially it suggests Baumbach and Paltrow are going for something avant-garde. Then you think maybe it's an attempt to mimic the giddy headrush pleasures of De Palma's own high-octane style. And then, maybe four minutes in, you realize it's actually just because he has...

Despite competition from three new movies in wide release this weekend, Marvel's Ant-Man held on to the top spot at the box office with $24.7 million. The studio's final Phase Two adventure dropped 56.7% from last weekend's $58 million tally, currently standing at $106 million domestically and $120.4 million internationally for a worldwide total of $226.4 million, from a $130 million budget. The superhero movie pulled in a respectable $6,403 per-screen average this weekend from 3,868 theaters, and its 56.7% drop is actually better than The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: The First Avenger, both of which dropped more than 60% in their second weekends in theaters.

Ant-Man just barely beat out its top competitor this weekend, Sony Pictures' video game comedy Pixels, which debuted in second place with an estimated $24 million. Pixels scored a $6,446 per-screen average from 3,723 theaters, opening far lower than many projections, some of which had it earning over $40 million this weekend. The film, which stars Adam Sandler,...

Film Movement continues with its Classic series and delivers their next title in a continuing line-up of new Blu-ray presentations, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, a seminal French comedy of the period from director Yves Robert. A stylized paean to the comedic tradition of Jerry Lewis, this is straight-faced screwball comedy not quite as daring or inventive as the title’s sterling reputation promises (it did win the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival). Notable, especially considering the significant talent in front of and behind the camera, it’s a comedy classic of uncomplicated froth, though its ability to amuse now seems dwarfed by expectation.

Traveling violinist Francois (Pierre Richard) is misidentified as a superspy by France’s national intelligence. As a host of people desperately attempt to interpret Francois’ strange actions, everyone becomes more and more assured of his significant skills. Meanwhile, Francois is embroiled...

Jean-Luc Godard in his youthful days. Jean-Luc Godard solution for the Greek debt crisis: 'Therefore' copyright payments A few years ago, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, while plugging his Film Socialisme, chipped in with a surefire solution for the seemingly endless – and bottomless – Greek debt crisis. In July 2011, Godard told The Guardian's Fiachra Gibbons: The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore ...' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore ...' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it. If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans.

Home, the newest feature from animation studio Dreamworks, won the top spot in its opening weekend, beating out competitors with a $54 million opening. The total marks Dreamworks’ first box office top finish since Mr. Peabody and Sherman achieved the feat a year ago, and the studio’s first opening weekend victory since 2013’s The Croods. The PG-rated Home was joined at the top by fellow new opener and R-rated Get Hard, as the Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart comedy took in $34.6 million in its opening weekend, good for a second place finish.

Among the rest of the films, the other big entry was the indie horror film It Follows. Distributors’ plans to forego a VOD opening this weekend in favour of taking the film to a wide theatrical release instead paid off, as the movie made $4 million in its expansion, finishing in fifth place on the chart with a $4 million total.

The top movie this weekend was of course Insurgent, part two of The Divergent Series earned an estimated $54 million. Divergent debuted with $54.6 million on this same weekend one year ago. What this means is that we are not done with Ya movies yet; if they continue to make bank, you can count on more and more being thrown our way, for better or worse.

The other new release this weekend was the Sean Penn starring The Gunman from Taken director Pierre Morel, earned an estimated $5 million from 2,816 locations. The film also has terrible reviews (14% on Rotten Tomatoes) and believe it or not, Penn isn’t he most likable of actors.

There was another Christian-themed movie that made its way into theaters this weekend. If you were a fan of Son of God, Heaven is for Real and God’s Not Dead, then you may have checked out Do You Believe?...

Editor's Note: RogerEbert.com is proud to reprint Roger Ebert's 1978 entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica publication "The Great Ideas Today," part of "The Great Books of the Western World." Reprinted with permission from The Great Ideas Today ©1978 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

It's a measure of how completely the Internet has transformed communication that I need to explain, for the benefit of some younger readers, what encyclopedias were: bound editions summing up all available knowledge, delivered to one's home in handsome bound editions. The "Great Books" series zeroed in on books about history, poetry, natural science, math and other fields of study; the "Great Ideas" series was meant to tie all the ideas together, and that was the mission given to Roger when he undertook this piece about film.

Given the venue he was writing for, it's probably wisest to look at Roger's long, wide-ranging piece as a snapshot of the...

If you’re in the enviable position of checking out Jean-Luc Godard’s body of work for the first time, his sci-fi opus “Alphaville” will stand out as a bit of a curiosity. The film is a lean, bizarro riff on familiar noir tropes and is infused with a punk-y dystopian edge, as well as Godard’s love of the perverse and the postmodern. It’s miles away from both the amoral romanticism of his early work (“Breathless,” “A Woman is a Woman”) as well as his more socially minded mid-career pictures which occasionally resemble incendiary political slideshows with included voiceover (“Weekend,” with its infamous ten-minute tracking shot, comes to mind, as does “Made in U.S.A.”). Remakes of Godard’s work are a dicey proposition: his signature style is so maddeningly distinct that a reimagining sounds unnecessary (not many people even remember the Richard Gere-starring remake of “Breathless,” except for Quentin Tarantino,...

En route to Palm Springs yesterday afternoon, I saw the news that the National Society of Film Critics had gone against the flow, where most would have expected a "Boyhood" win, and named Jean-Luc Godard's "Goodbye to Language" the year's best film. What I wasn't fully aware of until this morning was the wave of displeasure it apparently spurred. First, some thoughts on the organization's history. They often settle on something perfectly reasonable if not inspired, and sometimes that falls outside the sphere of major Best Picture contenders. "Inside Llewyn Davis," "Amour," "Melancholia," "Waltz with Bashir," "Pan's Labyrinth," "American Splendor," "Mulholland Drive," "Yi Yi: A One and a Two" — that's just a brief, selective history. And I'm forever in love with their "Out of Sight" choice in 1998. Only five films have won all three major critics group awards (Nsfc, Lafca and Nyfcc): "The Social Network," "The Hurt Locker,...

15. The Immigrant -

If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of narrative bravado or anything approaching experimentalism. The moralistic script feels like a relic from a bygone studio era.

But to assess the film’s merit based on its stubborn refusal to buck conventions is to deny one’s self the virtues of one of the year’s great films. Marion Cotillard gives an unforgettable performance as Ewa, the titular heroine whose desire to save her sister enables her to overcome the harsh realities of life in New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Joaquin Phoenix portrays the snarling antagonist who helps her survive,...

15. The Immigrant -

If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of narrative bravado or anything approaching experimentalism. The moralistic script feels like a relic from a bygone studio era.

But to assess the film’s merit based on its stubborn refusal to buck conventions is to deny one’s self the virtues of one of the year’s great films. Marion Cotillard gives an unforgettable performance as Ewa, the titular heroine whose desire to save her sister enables her to overcome the harsh realities of life in New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Joaquin Phoenix portrays the snarling antagonist who helps her survive,...

Katniss continued to kick butt at the domestic box office - though it wasn't as if she had much competition. "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1" finished at No. 1 for the third time in a row with an estimated $21.6 million over a typically weak post-Thanksgiving frame, falling 62 percent from last weekend - a drop similar to "Catching Fire's" 65 percent slide during the same period last year. The film has now taken in $257.7 million, making it the fourth-highest grossing movie of 2014 so far. It will rise to No. 2 this week, however, as both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" ($259.7 million) and "The Lego Movie" ($257.76 million) are only a hairsbreadth away from being toppled by the Ya sequel. It's also within striking distance of current No. 1 "Guardians of the Galaxy," which finished with $332 million during its run. Coming in a distant second was Dreamworks Animation's "Penguins of Madagascar," which tumbled 56 percent...

5th Update, Monday 6:05 Pm Pt: Actuals have poured in from the studios with the weekend’s big bird Mockingjay — Part I whistling a fine $154.3 million. Worldwide, the third installment of Ya rebel Katniss Everdeen stands at $276.2M. The other major global player, Interstellar, came up slightly higher after Sunday was officially tallied with $71.1M vs a projected $70M. There were no major fluctuations on the rest of the films in the marketplace apart from the usual adjustments. Next week, we’ll see Penguins Of Madagascar expand beyond the Middle Kingdom as well as the Horrible Bosses 2 crew conspiring in several major markets. Also of note, Paddington will steam into the UK on the heels of strong reviews and a little bit of controversy to add heft to this fuzzy bear of a family film (see below the original posts for more).

Numbers have been updated below on the...

+“Sometimes the class struggle is also the struggle of one image against another image, of one sound against another sound. In a film, this struggle is against images and sounds.”

- British Sounds

There was something in the air when Jean-Luc Godard took up the political banner of the late 1960s and shifted his filmmaking focus in terms of storytelling style and stories told, and in a general sense of formal reevaluation and reinvention. Always considered something of the enfant terrible of the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard was keen from the start to experiment with the conventional norms of cinematic aesthetics, from the jarring jump cuts of Breathless (1960), to the self-conscious playfulness of A Woman is a Woman (1961), to the genre deviations of Band of Outsiders (1964) and Made in USA (1966). But Godard was still, at a most basic level, operating along a fairly conventional plane of fictional cinema, one with...

This season of “Saturday Night Live” has been surprisingly devoid of nostalgia, something I didn’t think would happen in this, the show’s fortieth season. But with former cast member Bill Hader returning tonight, look for that to change. And honestly? That’s fine. I have no problem with the show occasionally celebrating its own history, especially since much of the current cast was there during Hader’s tenure. Look for many of Hader’s classic characters to make a comeback tonight. Will there be a Stefon appearance? One could argue (and I would argue) that the Stefon sendoff was so perfect that any future appearance of the character would dilute that moment. But since Stefon did make another appearance during Seth Meyers’ farewell, anything’s possible. Something that’s not possible but definite: I’ll be liveblogging everything that happens tonight. Also definite: Many of you will rend...

Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language)

Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

France, 2014

When I finally got around to seeing Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, the thing I kept saying to people was, “Isn’t it funny that this film needs to be seen in 3D and yet itself does not justify 3D’s place within cinema?” I still hold my “it’s fine” opinion on that film, denying its status as an Avatar-esque game changer, and I thought I’d have to keep searching for that. Luckily, I found it right off the bat at the New York Film Festival: Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language redefines not only 3D in film, but quite possibly film itself.

Admittedly, I am not a huge fan of Godard (despite his masterwork Vivre sa Vie being in my top ten favorites of all time). His rhetorical style, abrasive and uncompromising, has always alienated me.