News

Although it failed to captivate critics and audiences alike amid its initial release, Mixed Nuts has all the makings of a holiday classic.

Marking the movie’s 30th anniversary, co-writer Delia Ephron reflected on its cult status to Deadline as she remembered her and late sister Nora Ephron’s little-known 1994 Christmas film, “a great fun comedy that we wrote together” after the success of Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

“I do not believe it got good reviews,” she recently recalled. “I’m not someone who ever reads reviews, good or bad, so that’s not something I know what they said or anything, but I certainly know that it wasn’t initially a hit.”

Delia Ephron added, “But that is the weird thing with movies. They’re not, and then suddenly, they get this cult following of people who absolutely love them. And then I look at them again and I think,...

The redoubtable Anémone in one of her last roles in Rosalie Blum by Julien Rappeneau Photo: Unifrance One of France’s best-loved actresses, simply known as Anémone (real name Anne Bourguignon), has died at the age of 68.

Anémone started in her career with Philippe Garrel in the Sixties Photo: Unifrance She took her solo name from the film Anémone by Phlippe Garrel in which she played the title role of a young girl from a Parisian bourgeois family. The film was made for TV in 1968 but the producer rejected it as being “too pessmistic” and it remained unseen until the Société Nationale des Arts organised some public cinema screenings. It has not been shown since 2003 amid a legal wrangle.

It set the actress off on a decades long career in both theatre and cinema, beginning on the boards with the Splendid comedy troupe who made a cult cinema hit as...

Welcome to Holiday Favorites, a series in which Slackerwood contributors and our friends talk about the movies we watch during the holiday season, holiday-related or otherwise.

The sadly forgotten Christmas comedy Mixed Nuts (1994) has been a holiday viewing tradition for me since its release 20 years ago. Co-written and directed by Nora Ephron from the earlier French film Le père Noël est une ordure (1982), Mixed Nuts bears almost no resemblance to the director's more famous romantic comedies. The holiday farce deals with the staff of a Los Angeles suicide hotline (Steve Martin, Madeline Kahn, Rita Wilson) who must contend with a bickering pair of expectant parents (Anthony Lapaglia, Juliette Lewis), a melancholy cross-dresser (Liev Schrieber), a quirky ukulele player (Adam Sandler) and other assorted characters as they face eviction as well as a serial killer known as The Seaside Strangler on Christmas Eve.

So much of Mixed Nuts is the exact...

Fake Fruit Factory from Guergana Tzatchkov on Vimeo.

"Every year, Librarian of Congress James H Billington personally selects which films will be added to the National Film Registry, working from a list of suggestions from the library’s National Film Preservation Board and the general public," reports Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. This year's list of 25 films slated for preservation:

Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961) Bambi (Walt Disney, 1942) The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) A Computer Animated Hand (Pixar, 1972) Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963) The Cry of the Children (George Nichols, 1912) A Cure for Pokeritis (Laurence Trimble, 1912) El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992) Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968) Fake Fruit Factory (Chick Strand, 1986) Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Growing Up Female (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971) Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975) I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977) The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler,...