Rob Reiner

Before going on to a brilliant Hollywood career – and four Best Director Golden Globe nominations – Rob Reiner found fame as the beloved Michael Stivic (aka Meathead) on All in the Family. That multi Globe-nominated sitcom (including five for Reiner) is now routinely held up as a seminal example of television comedy with a social conscience.

It seems Lyndon B Johnson, the once-polarizing 36th President of the United States, is having a cinema moment. Recent portrayals including Tom Wilkinson in Selma and the formidable Bryan Cranston in the Broadway production All the Way (made later into an HBO movie) are reconsidering his legacy.

Director Rob Reiner held a masterclass at the 13th Zurich Film Festival and told the audience that he held the world premiere of his latest film Shock and Awe in Switzerland because Europe 'still hangs on to the free press'. Shock and Awe follows four journalists who pursued the real “weapons of mass destruction” story behind the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the news agency Knight Ridder.

The TCM Classic Film Festival, launched in 2010, was held for the eighth year in Hollywood, April 6 to 9, 2017. Crowds of movie lovers of all ages lined up to watch their favorites films on the big screen at the Chinese, Egyptian and Arclight theaters and they gathered for social events at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.