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Carl Laemmle Jr. Photos show a sharp dresser, toothy and baby-faced, the overall effect marred somewhat by the fact that he was five-foot-three. A notorious hypochondriac, he downed potions and remedies of all sorts and fretted about drafts. He got his job—chief of production at Universal Studios—at the age of 21. His father owned the studio, and Hollywood’s opinion of whether this baby boss could have qualified for the job on his own merits was expressed in one derisive nickname, which he carried to the grave: “Junior....

A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong, 2021) Running just shy of three hours, A New Old Play opens in the 1920s and traces over half a century of Chinese history through the fortunes of Qiu Fu (Yi Sicheng), the lead clown-actor of a Sichuan opera troupe. Accordingly, the film—Qiu Jiongjiong’s first fiction feature—is one of enormous ruptures, stepping through such epochal markers as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, with its characters bearing witness to many bombastic declarations of the new....

One of the crucial changes Welles makes in adapting Whit Masterson’s novel to his own uses is shifting the action from San Diego to the Mexican border.1 But Touch of Evil’s “Mexico” is not the place liberal critics think it is. Such critics should have been warned by Janet Leigh’s mistake: she pleads with her husband to “get me out of here” (this is not the “real Mexico,” Vargas tries to tell her), and thinks she’ll be safe in an American motel....

Anthony Quinn La Strada, 1954 (boxing) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Airplane!, 1980 (basketball) Jack Palance Shane, 1953 (boxing) Mickey Rourke The Wrestler, 2008 (boxing) Anthony Quinn Lawrence of Arabia, 1962 (boxing) Jim Brown Fingers, 1978 (football) Jack Palance The Big Knife, 1955 (boxing) Woody Strode The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 (football) Fred Williamson Black Caesar, 1973 (football) Patrice Donnelly Personal Best, 1982 (running) Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan the Ape, 1932 (diving)...

Check back for updates to this page as more information becomes available. Haifaa Al-Mansour, The Perfect Candidate Roy Andersson, About Endlessness Olivier Assayas, Wasp Network Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story Atom Egoyan, Guest of Honour James Gray, Ad Astra Tiago Guedes, A Herdade Robert Guediguian, Gloria Mundi Ciro Guerra, Waiting for the Barbarians Hirokazu Kore-eda (Opening Night), The Truth Pablo Larraín, Ema Lou Ye, Saturday Fiction Pietro Marcello, Martin Eden...

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) (dir. Suneil Sanzgiri, 2024) A thin strip of black wall separates the two channels that make up Suneil Sanzgiri’s Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?). Ocean waves crash into the edge of one frame and ripple out into the other, pooling together a pair of histories of rebellion in India and in Angola, both former sites of Portuguese colonialism. Across a little over half an hour, the film relates the tales of an activist who fought the imperialists in Goa, an Indian province that was a Portuguese colony until 1961, and Sita Valles, an Angolan revolutionary of Indian origin, who fought with the Communist Party against the corruption of the newly independent Angolan state, and was executed by Agostinho Neto in 1977....

North American film festivals too often lack the programming acumen to present a must-see selection of films and a variety of others that audiences may not see elsewhere on the continent—the sort of access that is especially important, given the geographical distance from the major independent cinemas of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. This is precisely the kind of problem that the Vancouver International Film Festival, through its Dragons & Tigers section, has avoided....

Finding Vivian Maier John Maloof accidentally discovered Maier’s haunting, often riveting body of work in 2007 when he attended an auction in search of photo negatives for an archival project. He hauled home the contents of the boxes he bought and found thousands of feet of undeveloped film among the clothes, costume jewelry, and paper detritus. Chance has made him Maier’s executor. Finding Vivian Maier, an inexpertly made documentary co-directed by Maloof and Charlie Siskel, details the photographer’s personal life and creative output....

The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson, 2021) Peter Jackson’s epic Beatles doc Get Back, like all good durational art, tries one’s patience before ultimately coaxing the viewer into its internal rhythm: in this case, the herky-jerk works and days of the Fab Four as they struggle to overcome egos and exhaustion and create art. It’s both shocking and moving (though it shouldn’t be) to see these pop-culture demi-gods revealed to be just like any other group of sweaty young men in tight quarters....

I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec, 2019) The 69th Berlinale was one of transition. At the close of this year’s edition, the festival’s director, Dieter Kosslick, officially retired following 19 years as head of one of the world’s biggest and most heavily scrutinized film events. His previously announced successor, Carlo Chatrian, formerly of Switzerland’s Locarno Festival, could be seen around the festival in a non-official capacity, and his presence alone seemed to have people preemptively looking forward....

Sieranevada, Cristi Puiu, Romania Hermia and Helena, Matías Piñeiro, USA/Argentina Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello, France/Belgium/Germany The Dreamed Path, Angela Schanelec, Germany Yourself and Yours, Hong Sangsoo, South Korea Kékszakállú, Gastón Solnicki, Argentina By the Time It Gets Dark, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thailand/Netherlands/France/Qatar Scarred Hearts, Radu Jude, Romania/Germany The Woman Who Left, Lav Diaz, Philippines Austerlitz, Sergei Loznitsa, Germany Tempestad, Tatiana Huezo, Mexico The Rehearsal, Alison Maclean, New Zealand Safari, Ulrich Seidl, Austria/Denmark...

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, 2022) Every day at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, as I made my way to the decked-out Palais, I walked past a ginormous installation celebrating Top Gun: Maverick, an official selection of the Out of Competition section. And every day, I thought of the irony of its presence at a festival that, in 1939, was founded as an anti-fascist alternative to the Mussolini-backed Venice Film Festival....

Dumont sat for an interview soon after Slack Bay premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Though much of your prior work has featured darkly humorous elements, these last two films have been much more explicitly comedic. How are you conceptualizing these films differently from before? If, as you say, it was dark then and there is light now, the light only comes from the darkness. The comedy is only the other side of the drama....