Industry

The Light & Noir exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center traces the history of some of Hollywood’s most prolific immigrants and the contributions they made to American cinema. "Chased from my country,now I have to see if there's some shop or bar that I can find where I can sell the products of my mind" So wrote playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, who was chased from Germany by the rising Nazi regime.

Sooner or later someone had to dislodge American Sniper from first place, and unlikely as it may seem, the film to accomplish this feat was The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, the second feature (the first one came out in 2004) based on the Nickelodeon animated television series. On its first weekend of domestic release, Spongebob ended up collecting $58 million, an amount considerably higher than what Paramount had anticipated.

Sultry actress Lizabeth Scott (1922-2015), who just died in Hollywood of heart failure, was the star of a classic film noir that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association helped the Film Noir Foundation restore in 2013. Scott was born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pa.

The Marrakech International Film Festival was founded by the king of Morocco, Mohamed IV, and his brother prince Moulay Rashid, 13 years ago, and is run in cooperation with a French organization, which gives it a distinctive European feel and a French flavor. The festival began under a cloud, in December 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 attack, but it grew in scope and importance ever since.

Super Bowl weekend is traditionally a difficult one for the box office. And with a record 114.

There was no shortage of honors at the 2015 Sundance awards ceremony that closed the Park City festival with the distribution of 27 prizes in a lively affair presided over by comedienne Tig Notaro. Not that awards are really the point of the indie festival, but then again it doesn’t hurt to recognize the most noteworthy films and authors – and it was a pretty good excuse for one last mountain party.

How much activity can you pack into less than two days? Just ask Jason Isaacs, a man of boundless energy. The British actor flew in from London for the premiere of Stockholm, Pennsylvania on Friday and left early Sunday morning for Croatia where he is shooting the TV series Dig.

It was an early Sunday morning for Ryan Reynolds and the members of the HFPA to sit down in the tent of one of the many festival sponsors and talk about his new film Mississippi Grind. The Canadian actor flew in from Westchester, New York, where he left wife Blake Lively and baby daughter Violet for a short trip to promote the film here.

The title of Liz Garbus’ fine documentary on Nina Simone is taken from an article on the singer written by Maya Angelou but is a question that many might ask about the life and career one of modern American music’s brightest and most enigmatic stars.  Born the sixth child of a North Carolina preacher in 1931, Nina Simone studied from an early age to become “the first black female classically trained concert pianist” and subsequently rose to fame as one of the most original and incisive interpreters of the jazz, blues and soul canon.