Classic

Ghosts of all kinds were very much in the minds of Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray when they came to see us back in June 1984. “Beyond American cinema, even Bergman loves the use of ghosts and devils visiting the Earth and that kind of thing”, Dan Aykroyd told us.

When we interviewed Tom Hanks for the first time, in September of 1986, he was mere two and a half years away from his first Golden Globe. Hanks was finally making strides in his career as a feature film actor, after a false start in 1980 in the horror flic He Knows You’re Alone (his character was supposed to die at the hands of the psycho killer, but director Armand Mastroianni found him so engaging that he decided to ax the death scene in the editing suite).

“To tell the entire story would be like 50,000 words”, Sylvester Stallone told us on November 15, 1976. “But a brief summary would be that my career had come to a sputtering standstill.

Keanu Reeves has been making some interesting choices lately - voicing a namesake cat in Key & Peele’s feline-in-the-hood movie, joining the exodus of A-list movie stars to TV with the series Rain. Or playing against type in The Neon Demon, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish, nightmarish meditation on fame, beauty and sex that split the Cannes Film Festival in two.

This week’s opening of Matthew McConaughey’s new movie, director Gary Ross’ Civil War drama Free State of Jones, is the perfect occasion to recall our first encounter with our future Golden Globe winner. It was exactly 20 years ago, in July of 1996, and McConaughey’s breakthrough movie, director Joel Schumacher’s legal drama A Time to Kill, was weeks away from its premiere.

Fans of the 2010 Australian movie Animal Kingdom are probably excited and curious to see how that terse crime drama will translate into a TV show – starting June 14 the series will launch on TNT, transposed from Down Under to a Southern California beach town. Here’s a piece of good news: the pivotal role of implacable matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody, which earned Jackie Weaver a Golden Globe nomination, has been taken over by another Golden Globe nominee, the talented Ellen Barkin.

As film-lovers mark the anniversary of one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, the HFPA’s Phil Berk reflects on Orson Welles’ masterpieceIn the seventy-five years since Citizen Kane was first shown, no film in history has been discussed and debated more than Orson Welles's masterpiece. For most film scholars, the only mystery of Citizen Kane is not Rosebud, but whether or not Welles actually wrote it.

The longest-running film noir festival in Los Angeles returns to the Egyptian Theatre, anchored by movies that were restored with funds provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.  The Film Noir Foundation's Noir City festival  returned to Hollywood for its 17th annual edition and both the opening and the closing of the festival featured HFPA-funded restorations.

“When I look back (on my career) the early days come to mind. Many times someone from the press had said to me or they’ve written “he was discovered by David Selznick”.

With two biopics of jazz icons hitting the screens – Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, exploring Miles Davis’ life and music, and Robert Budreau’s Born To Be Blue, a re-imagining of critical moments in Chet Baker’s tumultuous career, with Ethan Hawke as the jazz legend- this seemed like an appropriate time to look back at how movies expressed this all-American music style. Check the gallery to see what filmmakers and stars  - Golden Globe nominees and winners, most of them -told us about jazzin’ up the screen.