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Kate Middleton has put her St. Andrews University art history degree to good use. She has curated her art exhibit at V&a East Storehouse in London.

Kate Personally Worked With The Museum’s Curator Team To Select Items For the Exhibit

The Princess of Wales, who is a patron of V&a, personally worked with the museum’s curatorial team to choose eight significant works from their collection to display.

The aim was to show how these historic objects can impact fashion, design, film, art, and creativity today.

The items selected by Kate include a whimsical costume from the 1960s Royal Ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty, designed by Oliver Messel.

She also chose a vibrant watercolor of a forest glade by beloved British children’s author, Beatrix Potter. Kate also picked out a childhood photograph album that belonged to Beatrix’s father, Rupert Potter.

Interestingly, Beatrix Potter is reportedly...

The Queen of Spades

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1949/ 1.33:1 / 95 min.

Starring Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans

Directed by Throld Dickinson

One of the pleasures of discovering 1949’s The Queen of Spades is also discovering its director, Thorold Dickinson. Born and educated in Bristol, he abandoned Oxford for London to concentrate on the fine art of film editing and soon found himself behind the camera.

Dickinson made waves with 1940’s Gaslight but Queen was something of a critical flashpoint for the diligent director – called in as a last minute replacement, the project would cement his reputation as an artist whose portentous visual style said as much about his characters as any screenplay. Not coincidentally, those qualities were shared by the film’s associate producer, Jack Clayton.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 short story, the film is set in a snowbound St. Petersburg enclave in 1803, a gothic inversion of one of Ernst Lubitsch‘s fairy tale villages.

More than 100 pieces will go on display at Oliver Messel’s home in show charting their twin careers and friendship

The shimmering coronet made for Vivien Leigh when she played Titania almost 80 years ago is to go on public display in a new exhibition, along with drawings, photographs, letters, costumes and other treasures collected by the actor.

The gossamer-light creation by her favourite theatre designer, Oliver Messel, shivers slightly when anyone steps near the display case – to the terror of curator Keith Lodwick.

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Episode 33 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn is like the Goddess from the Machine.

I want to write about Katharine Hepburn, but the movie keeps getting in the way! Reading last night’s contributions to Hit Me With Your Best Shot, I was struck by how many bloggers described Suddenly, Last Summer as “camp,” “wildly expressive,” or “absolutely batshit gonzo crazy.” This is a film that will not be ignored. It’s garish and shocking. The psycho-babble hasn’t aged well--as Nathaniel points out, such things rarely do. The themes of cannibalism, sexual deviance, and monstrous madness creep like kudzu vines hanging in Violet Venable’s garden, blocking the light and threatening to squeeze the resistance out of unwary viewers who venture into the film unwarned.

This unsettling excess had been, up to that point, unusual for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz--best known for character dramas--but can be easily traced to his collaborators.

Second and final part of our analysis of neo-noir classic The Grifters (1990, directed by Stephen Frears). Since the film’s costume designer Richard Hornung died in 1995, we asked his assistant costume designer on the project, Mark Bridges, for his own recollections (Part 1 Here).

We pick up the story as Lily (Angelica Huston) is confronted by her gangster employer Bobo (Pat Hingle). In fact we had a peek at Lily’s next outfit when she admits her son Roy (John Cusack) to hospital during the first act. It is a clean white scoop neck shift dress accessorised with tortoiseshell sunglasses and, seemingly without explanation, later a brown belt. White is an empty colour and on Lily it also implies loneliness and vulnerability, the latter of which she exudes during her conformation with Bobo. Proving that a dress is never just a dress on film, Mark Bridges explains the origins of this...

Innovative costume designer for stage and screen, she won an Oscar and three Tonys

Theoni V Aldredge, who has died aged 88, could and did do anything with clothes, on Broadway stage or film; outfit Joe Papp's earliest Romeo and Juliet for $120 or promise embarrassed guys cast as showgirls in La Cage Aux Folles that they would never have to shave their chests or legs. More than 1,000 performers wore Aldredge clothes nightly on Broadway in 1984, in five different productions, and she raided each show impromptu, "policing", she called it, "to make sure the kids are all Ok". Broadway dimmed its lights on Tuesday to mark her death.

She was born Theoni Vachliotis, the daughter of the Greek army surgeon-general in Salonika, but emigrated to the Us, wanting to be "where there hadn't been a war". She had begun her lifelong doll collection, and maintenance of its wardrobe, as a child.

Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984) was almost forgotten at the time of his death, but in his heyday as a director, and subsequently as a pioneer of film studies, was one of the most important figures in British cinema. The High Command (1936), was acclaimed by Graham Greene; The Next of Kin (1942) is one of the most important films of the Second World War; Lindsay Anderson's Making a Film is a diary of the production of Dickinson's political thriller The Secret People (1952). The Queen of Spades (1949), a stylish, polished melodrama based on the Pushkin novella, is his most accomplished film, and it's good to have it back on the big screen. Anton Walbrook is outstanding as the impoverished, embittered engineer officer in the tsarist army, set apart by his poverty from his aristocratic fellow officers and attempting to get rich by obtaining the demonic gambling secrets of an ancient countess (Edith Evans...