films

The best way to build momentum is to make a splash at Cannes and then to impress around the festival circuit enough to win an Oscar nomination. Joachim Trier’s film The Worst Person in the World did this as its lead, Renate Reinsve, won the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress Award, and it’s currently celebrating nominations for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay at the 94th Academy Awards.

100 years of heroes - and villains! - are put on display in Hollywood at the "Icons of Darkness" exhibit. Curator Rich Correll showed HFPA-reporter Raffi Boghosian his collection.

Whether you celebrate Valentine's Day or not, whether you are or were in love - or, maybe, hoping it will knock on your door, - there are some gems with one thing in common: they celebrate and explore this complicated and very human feeling - love - with precision, knowledge, and passion. (And there are many more - go ahead, create your own Love Festival!) .

The start of talkies in 1929 in Hollywood jumpstarted Lionel Barrymore’s brief career as a director as studios required an experienced hand with spoken dialogue and Barrymore had had great success on stage before he became a movie actor.  Ten Cents a Dance was the last movie he directed, and he was offered the job after being nominated for a directing Oscar for Madame X in 1930.

On October 21, 1916, the La Crosse Tribune carried a full-page advertisement for the next day’s release of Thomas Ince’s epic silent movie Civilization. Under a black and white picture of a listing ship going down in a storm as a lifeboat full of people foundered nearby, the breathless headline proclaimed: Thos.

The Burning Bed, What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Sleeping with the Enemy, Dolores Claiborne, Not Without My Daughter, Bastard Out of Carolina.  And the upcoming Let Him Go starring Diane Lane and Kevin Costner.

Federico Fellini is quoted as saying that “from a sentimental point of view” he was “most attached” to his film La Strada. He told writer Edward Murray in Ten Film Classics: A Re-Viewing: “I feel that it is my most representative film, the one that is the most autobiographical; for both personal and sentimental reasons because it is the film that I had the greatest trouble in realizing and that gave me the most difficulty when it came time to find a producer.

In a spectacular career spanning over four decades, Gregory Peck cultivated the screen image of the liberal, benevolent patriarch, greatly assisted by his famously deep, well-modulated voice. In Elia Kazan's 1947 drama, Gentleman's Agreement, he played a conscientious journalist fighting anti-Semitism.

There is an apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway telling Howard Hawks his opinion of Hollywood money. “Walk to the Nevada side of the California state line and have them throw the money to you.

When Martin Scorsese was nine-years-old, his father took him to see Jean Renoir’s film The River. He said later that it would turn out to be one of the formative film experiences of his life.