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Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black film star to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Carmen Jones (1954). Her mother created a song-and-dance act for Dorothy and her sister Vivian, “The Wonder Children,” which toured Baptist churches throughout the South, during which they rarely attended school.

A home-grown German film saved the box office this last weekend. Wunderschön, a dramedy, sailed into the top spot.

Florenz Ziegfeld turned her down for a role in his Follies because he said she was too short, had fat legs, crooked teeth, and a wandering eye. She wasn’t the most good-looking or talented hopeful to want a career in the movies.

Wolfgang Petersen, the German director whose film credits include Das Boot, a 1982 Golden Globe nominee for Best Picture -- Non-English Language (formerly Foreign Language), died in his house in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on Friday, August 12, 2022.  He was 81.

In 1972, Diana Ross, then better known to the public as the topliner of the Supremes, burst on the movie scene with a stunning performance in Lady Sings the Blues, a biopic of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. For that splashy feature debut, Ross earned two Golden Globe nominations, for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama and for Most Promising Newcomer-Female, winning the latter.

When a filmmaker talks about the human soul as a “disease,” you know you are dealing with complexity. Maria Ignatenko’s second feature, Achrome, which premiered at IFFR’s Tiger Competition, feels as mysterious and deep as its title suggests.

It took Jackass to finally topple Spider-Man. Jackass Forever, which was made for $10 million, easily beat Roland Emmerich’s $140 million action/adventure/sci-fi, Moonfall, and the $200 million-budgeted Spider-Man: No Way Home to become the weekend’s domestic champ.

Kenneth Branagh won his first Golden Globe in 2022, after five nominations, for the screenplay of Belfast, the autobiographical film he also directed. The Irish actor/writer/director adapted into movies several plays by William Shakespeare throughout his career.

While many of the biggest horror films of the past century were made in America, the horror film genre was not actually born in the United States. French director Georges Melies' 1896 short The House of the Devil is often credited as the first ‘horror’ movie.

“Stories about us, that are written and directed by us, are, of course, going to hold a deeper meaning. And by us, I mean ethnic filmmakers,” said Dionysio Basco about The Fabulous Filipino Brothers, a film which he and his siblings – Dante, Derek, and Darion – and their parents, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins made and acted in.