Industry

John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley will forever be known as the film that beat Citizen Kane at the 14th Academy Awards on February 26, 1942. Perhaps it was the relentless campaign against Kane by William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire, but the film considered the greatest of all time only came away with one win that night – Original Screenplay for Welles and Herman Mankiewicz.

It wasn’t all that long ago in the history of Hollywood that the LGBTQ community represented in front of the camera had to adhere to the strict Hays Code, which remained in place for three decades (1934 to 1968). It was a self-imposed industry guideline set up to prevent any explicit depictions of homosexuality in film.

For more than 30 years, HFPA grantee Women Make Movies has produced and financed films by female directors that tackle the difficult subject of reproductive rights. Watching some of these through the lens of what happened on June 24, when the US Supreme Court overturned the almost 50-year-old Roe vs.

An official selection of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, where it recently made its world premiere, the new documentary Endangered serves up an engrossing and, in many ways, rather dispiriting look at deliberate and coordinated attacks on the fourth estate, and their relationship to the erosion of public faith and trust which has fed a wave of social disorientation. Co-directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, and executive produced by Ronan Farrow, the film unfolds over the course of one year, and takes as its subjects four journalists living and working in ostensibly democratic countries as they face an array of assaults both on their livelihood in general and, in many instances, via very personal targeting.

Every summer, National Sunglasses Day spotlights the importance of wearing tinted eyewear to shield our eyes from the UV rays. People have been protecting their eyes from the glare of the sun since prehistoric times when generations of people living in the snow-bound Arctic Circle used pieces of flattened walrus, ivory or caribou antler fitted to their eyes to protect them from burning snow and ice reflections.

Aiming to follow in his father’s swashbuckling footsteps, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. bought the rights to the 1926 book “His Majesty, the King: A Romantic Love Chase of the Seventeenth Century” by Cosmo Hamilton in 1941.

The adage “write what you know” is such an old saw that many aspiring authors, songwriters, and other artists almost seem to instinctively recoil from it. Filmmakers, especially these days, seem enchanted instead by digital technology that, in both the fiction and nonfiction realms, allows for inexpensive indulgences of far-flung horizons.

On June 24, 2022, the radical majority on the Supreme Court brought about the end of Roe v. Wade in a ruling that the rightwing has been planning for decades.