films

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.

When Cecil B. deMille released his silent movie The Cheat in 1915, his villain was a Japanese ivory merchant called Hishuru Tori played by Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa.

A Face in the Crowd was the film Steven Spielberg selected to present at the film restoration event for the HFPA’s 75th-anniversary celebrations at the Egyptian Theater in 2017. At our special screening, he called Elia Kazan’s film “way ahead of its time” in depicting our obsession with celebrity and power “with the nightmare scenario of an Arkansas drifter who turns folk hero who turns demagogue.

In 2017, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association asked Christopher Nolan to choose a film that the HFPA helped restore for a screening to celebrate our 75th anniversary.   His choice was The Red Shoes.

* An occasional series on films restored with the support of the HFPA. Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Paths of Glory, which was declared 'culturally, historically and aesthetically significant' by the Library of Congress in 1992, was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Reading books is a waste of time. Anyone who believes that can make a strong argument.

David Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016, an evening no one attending the 73rd Golden Globes will likely forget. That night, after the ceremony, revelers crowded the dance floors of the after-parties, when one DJ after the next started playing Bowie songs while fans shed tears for their fallen idol.

Gone with the Wind, The Exorcist, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, those film classics were all adapted from novels.  And during the 1940s almost all the successful movies were based on books, some, schmaltzy best sellers, but others were the work of America’s foremost writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association with the American Cinematheque will present the Golden Globe Foreign-Language Nominee Series at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica from December 29 to January 4. The series is an opportunity for the public to see all five extraordinary films nominated for in the Foreign Language category for the 77th Golden Globes.

On a bright sunny Hollywood morning in July hundreds of film enthusiasts began lining up in the courtyard of the Egyptian Theatre for the first Foreign Language Film Series, a marathon day of foreign films organized by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in cooperation with the American Cinematheque. Audience members were affiliated with grant recipient organizations ranging from community associations to film schools, which were invited to attend the screenings together with HFPA members.