News

With the US presidential election looming, Tonight examines the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris’s last-minute entry into the race has boosted Democratic hopes of retaining the White House, but can she secure enough support to defeat Trump? Robert Moore travels to the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia to […]

Tonight: Trump v Harris: The Battle for America...

At this year’s Tony Awards “Suffs” managed to win prizes for Best Musical Book and Best Score, both of which went to Shaina Taub. Historically, winning those two accolades in particular would bode well for a show’s chances at Best Musical. Yet in a shocking turn of events, the top award went to “The Outsiders.” But this is not the first time something like this has happened.

SEETony Awards: Every winner (and nominee) in all 26 competitive categories

In 1978 “On the Twentieth Century” won Tonys for Best Score and Best Book (Comden and Green). It also won Best Actor in a Musical (John Cullum), Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Kevin Kline), and Best Scenic Design (Robin Wagner). Yet Best Musical that year went to Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr.‘s revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” A tribute to the music of Fats Waller, it also won Tonys for Best...

Ed Mintz, the founder of the motion picture industry’s tried-and-true audience polling service CinemaScore, died February 6. He was 83.

Known for its mathematical “Coca-Cola” algorithm developed by Mintz, CinemaScore has been prized by studios and exhibitors since its inception in the early 1980s as a domestic box office barometer for movies when it comes to its opening-night audience grades. Pre-pandemic, an A+ CinemaScore meant a movie could leg out to a 4.8x multiple off its U.S./Canada box office opening; a B+ meant a 3.2x multiple to final domestic gross; C+ and D+ 2.4x; and an F 2.2x.

CinemaScore continues to be operated by Mintz’s two sons, Harold and Ricky Mintz.

Mintz, a math wizard since his teenage years when he penned a book about square roots, The Mintz Method, sparked to the idea for CinemaScore in his late 30s in 1978. Mintz and his wife, along with another couple,...

There’s no shortage of brilliant detectives in novels, film and television, but one of the greatest — or at least the one with the fanciest facial hair — is Hercule Poirot. The Belgian investigator, created by Agatha Christie, has appeared 33 novels, more than 50 short stories, and has been played by a variety of iconic actors.

But for whatever reason, Poirot has only sporadically appeared on the big screen, with many of his earliest movie appearances being lost to time, while some of his other noteworthy adventures were rewritten as vehicles for Christie’s other beloved creation, Miss Marple.

Here we take a look at the various theatrically-released adventures of Hercule Poirot, from the 1930s to today, and see which of his mysteries were truly worth solving.

Photo credit: Columbia

Honorable Mention: “Murder By Death” (1976)

Neil Simon’s wacky spoof of the supersleuth genre, directed by Robert Moore, features an all-star cast...

'And Then There Were None' movie with Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, June Duprez, Louis Hayward and Roland Young. 'And Then There Were None' movie remake to be directed by Oscar nominee Morten Tyldum One of the best-known Agatha Christie novels, And Then There Were None will be getting another big-screen transfer. 20th Century Fox has acquired the movie rights to the literary suspense thriller first published in the U.K. (as Ten Little Niggers) in 1939. Morten Tyldum, this year's Best Director Academy Award nominee for The Imitation Game, is reportedly set to direct. The source for this story is Deadline.com, which adds that Tyldum himself “helped hone the pitch” for the acquisition while Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, The Thing 2011) will handle the screenplay adaptation. And Then There Were None is supposed to have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, thus holding the...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

Peter Falk Peter Falk, the two-time Oscar nominee best known for playing television police detective Columbo, died Thursday, June 23, at his Beverly Hills home. Falk, who had been suffering from dementia (apparently a consequence of Alzheimer's disease), was 83. Falk's two Oscar nods, both in the Best Supporting Actor category, came back-to-back in the early '60s: as a cold-blooded hitman in Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg's 1960 crime drama Murder, Inc., and as a typical Damon Runyon underworld character — named Joy Boy — in Frank Capra's dismal 1961 remake of his own Lady for a Day, Pocketful of Miracles. Among Falk's other notable film roles are those in two John Cassavetes movies: the very, very, very long 1970 drama Husbands, co-starring Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes himself, and the director' biggest box-office hit, the 1974 release A Woman Under the Influence, co-starring Gena Rowlands as the mentally unbalanced title character. In the film, which many consider Cassavetes' best work,...

Reviewed by Amy R. Handler

(March 2011)

Directed by: Crayton Robey

More than four decades after it premiered on stage and in movie theaters, people are still talking about “The Boys in the Band.” So what’s it all mean, and where do we go from there?

When the then down-and-out playwright Mart Crowley composed a script from the mansion where he was house-sitting, he had no idea he would change the course of history. The script was “The Boys in the Band,” and the play opened on April 14, 1968, at Theater Four — off-off-Broadway in New York City. Under the direction of Robert Moore (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), “The Boys” ran for 1,001 performances and stunned audiences from virtually every strata of society. Two years later, director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”) recreated the production for film with the original cast — and the movie was every bit as provocative as the live performances preceding it.

Reviewed by Amy R. Handler

(March 2011)

Directed by: Crayton Robey

More than four decades after it premiered on stage and in movie theaters, people are still talking about “The Boys in the Band.” So what’s it all mean, and where do we go from there?

When the then down-and-out playwright Mart Crowley composed a script from the mansion where he was house-sitting, he had no idea he would change the course of history. The script was “The Boys in the Band,” and the play opened on April 14, 1968, at Theater Four — off-off-Broadway in New York City. Under the direction of Robert Moore (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), “The Boys” ran for 1,001 performances and stunned audiences from virtually every strata of society. Two years later, director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”) recreated the production for film with the original cast — and the movie was every bit as provocative as the live performances preceding it.

The ladies of "Mad Men" stole the attention at the red carpet event for the fourth season premiere. The ever curvy Christina Hendricks preferred to go all black with lace details while Elisabeth Moss stunned onlookers with her green one-shoulder. Noticeably skipping the event was January Jones who plays lead character Betty Draper in the series.

Jon Hamm meanwhile brought along his long-term girlfriend Jennifer Westfeldt to the affair. He detached himself from her for a while to take a picture with the series' creator Matthew Weiner. Children were also present since Weiner decided to take his whole family to the event and Kiernan Shipka aka Sally Draper also walked down the carpet.

The other cast spotted there were Jarred Harris, Robert Moore, Rich Sommer, Christopher Stanley and Vincent Kartheiser among others. Fellow AMC stars Betsy Brandt and Aaron Paul who star on "Breaking Bad" came as guests.

"Mad Men...

Our Inception contest is now over. The winners' names are Robert Moore, Linda Santiago and John Taylor. You have all been notified via email and need to respond within 72 hours in order to claim your prizes. Thanks to everyone who entered. If you read my review, you already know what I think about Inception (and if you haven't, I kept it spoiler-free so check it out). It's nothing short of a masterpiece and worth every bit of hype leading up to it. We wanted to be able to share...

I’ve been slacking on taping TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland, but that’s about to change: Tim Conway will play a suitor who goes toe-to-toe with Max (Carl Reiner) to win the heart of Elka (Betty White) in the July 28 episode “It’s Not That Complicated.” (Pause as we miss Harvey Korman.)

The guest stars continue to line up for this show: The Aug. 4 episode will feature Ugly Betty’s Justin, Mark Indelicato, as Zack, “a drama nerd and fan of Victoria Chase (Wendie Malick) who invites his hero to give some notes on his school’s production of Romeo & Juliet.

Yesterday the London 2012 Olympics, owners of what may be the most widely panned logo in history, revealed yet another frightening piece of their fragmented branding puzzle: Olympic mascots Mandeville and Wenlock. As the legend goes, the cycloptic blobs were created from the last two drops of British steel used for the London 2012 Olympic Stadium (they built that thing with steel drops?). "That's why we're so shiny," they say on their Web site," reflecting the people, places and things we meet along the way as we travel around the U.K."

No one should get too upset about this: Olympic mascots have rarely predicted the success of the actual games. In fact, the best mascots have emblemized the most disastrous games. Here are our official findings.

The very first Olympic mascot was created for the 1972 Munich games. Design legend Otl Aicher's cherished identity for the games used variations on Olympic colors...

Star Trek beamed into second place for highest weekend opening of the year, topping out at $76.5 million, less than 10 million behind Wolverine’s debut last week. The Jj Abrams reboot of this popular Sci-Fi series has benefited from strong critical reception, highlighted by a 96% worldwide approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, and by what seems to be a strong word-of-mouth increase from Friday to Saturday - which is normally a good sign that the film will continue to post decent numbers and not suffer from a sharp drop-off as most fan-boy driven films tend to. The film also performed well overseas, which had never been the case with the previous Star Trek films, grossing around $35.5 million.

Despite a very youthful advertising platform, and the fact that the film finds itself telling the story of the Star Trek crew from it’s first younger inception, the film still failed to...