Thompson on Hollywood

Berlinale Announces Retrospective Lineup, Includes Restorations of 'On the Waterfront,' 'Tokyo Story,' 'Dial M for Murder'

Festivals

The Berlin International Film Festival (February 7-17) has announced the titles in its expanded retrospective lineup, Berlinale Classics. The five films on the slate are all restorations, and include Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront," Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and Alfred Hitchcock's 3-D "Dial M for Murder." Full list below.

By Beth Hanna
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January 31, 2013 12:17 PM
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Christopher Nolan's Top Ten Films for Criterion: Lang, Welles, Malick Make the Cut [Video]

Video

Director Christopher Nolan has selected his Top Ten films for Criterion. His choices are varied, and the themes unsurprising: morality, mortality, life-or-death decisions, larger-than-life situations, and characters pushed to their total limits. The films he selected -- from Erich von Stroheim in 1924 and Orson Welles in 1955 to Terrence Malick in 1998 -- share ambition. Watch the trailers and clips from Nolan's selections below. The full list is here, published in the Criterion newsletter.

By Maggie Lange
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January 30, 2013 6:57 PM
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Trailers from Hell: Joe Dante on Orson Welles' Thriller Noir 'The Stranger'

Video

Orson Welles Week! begins at Trailers from Hell with director and TFH creator Joe Dante introducing thriller noir "The Stranger," starring Welles as a Nazi posing as a New England professor, and Edward G. Robinson as the shrewd War Crimes Commission investigator tailing him.

By Trailers From Hell
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January 14, 2013 12:22 PM
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Love 'Amour'? Check Out These Classics Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva

Features

Octogenarian French acting legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva give stunning, energetic performances as a married couple facing the bitter end in Michael Haneke's critically lauded, multi-awarded "Amour." Below, a look at some of the classic films that put Trintignant and Riva on the map.

By Beth Hanna
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January 3, 2013 12:50 PM
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Watch: Andrei Tarkovsky Tells Filmmakers that Art 'Requires Sacrificing of Yourself'

Video

Watch the great director Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris," "Stalker," "Nostalghia," "The Mirror") give advice to young filmmakers in this clip below from his 1983 documentary "Voyage in Time."

By Sophia Savage
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January 3, 2013 12:50 PM
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MOD (Manufactured on Demand) Moves into Blu-Rays

Features

Hollywood is always looking for new ways and new places to sell its movies. In 1982, Barry Diller, one of the smartest men ever to run a Hollywood studio, told me that the decisions he and the other studio heads were then making about new technologies – basic cable, pay-cable, satellite television. Pay-Per-View, videocassettes and videodiscs – “will dictate the makeup of this industry 20 years from now.”

By Aljean Harmetz
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January 3, 2013 6:26 AM
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Watch: Roman Polanski's Striking 1957 Short Film 'Murder'

Video

Check out Roman Polanski's student short film "Murder," made in 1957. Silent, black-and-white and only a minute in duration, the film shows what the title promises with queasy bluntness...

By Beth Hanna
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January 2, 2013 3:46 PM
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Go Into The Story with Noir Classic 'Double Indemnity,' From Script to Screen [Video]

Video

Go Into the Story, the screenwriting blog of the Blacklist, features a fascinating script-to-screen installment today on Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir classic "Double Indemnity." The blog looks at a key scene from the film, comparing the screenplay pages to the filmed finished product.

By Beth Hanna
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January 2, 2013 2:32 PM
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Book Review: David Thomson's 'The Big Screen'

Reviews

In the epilogue to “The Big Screen,” his one-volume history of the movies, David Thomson warns the reader: “You should be ready for the loss of theaters and video stores….Be prepared for the word ‘movie’ being replaced by ‘bits’ or ‘bites’ or ‘viddies’ (a term Anthony Burgess used in 'A Clockwork Orange' in 1962).”

By Aljean Harmetz
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December 31, 2012 1:55 PM
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Films that Should Never Be Remade - From 'The Goonies' and 'Die Hard' to 'Deer Hunter' and 'Shawshank'

Features

You'd think the great auteurs would be safe from remakes -- it's hard to imagine someone taking on a Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick or David Lynch film, for example. But that hasn't stopped Hollywood from remaking everything from "The Haunting" to "Psycho." Studio heads figure the lazy new generation doesn't know the classics. And marketers want to cash in on easy-sell branded titles and fan followings -- it's the way it works. But more often than not, when less-than-great movies get remade into even less great "reboots" like 2012's "Total Recall," they flop with audiences anyway. And when the great ones get remade, like Federico Fellini's "8½," even canny movie stars like Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard can't save them.