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Stephen King has a wide taste in literature, loving novels like "Lord of the Flies" and "Watership Down" over horror literature and weird fiction, but that's not to say he doesn't pay attention to other masters of the genre. The bulk of King's novels are horror stories, and he clearly took a lot of inspiration from the pulp horror, genre magazines, and EC Comics of his childhood. Indeed, King wrote "Creepshow" in 1982, openly paying homage to the "Tales from the Crypt" and "Shock SuspenStories" issues he read as a youth in the 1950s. King wears his horror influences on his sleeve. 

As for the literature that inspired him, King recalls reading a lot as a child, and that he loved a wide variety of books. He enjoyed the fantastical stories of Ray Bradbury, the Nancy Drew mysteries of Carolyn Keene, and, yes, even horror novels like Robert Bloch's "Psycho.

Mark Molloy's "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" succeeds in large part because it is unabashedly formulaic in a way many mainstream programmers are afraid to be nowadays (though we're not all fans here at /Film). Yes, superhero movies and four-quadrant family entertainments contain obligatory elements like Easter eggs for the properties' hardcore fan base and mid- or post-credit scenes to juice excitement for the next installment, but, narratively, the brand managers (i.e. filmmakers) feel a need to overdeliver. It's no longer enough to deliver a simple, well-told story. This is how ephemeral studio/streaming tentpoles wind up with bloated runtimes and obscenely inflated budgets. When viewers look up from their phones to check in on "Red Notice," they expect to see something of significance happening.

"Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F," which mercifully clocks in a shade under two hours (with credits), has its share of fan service, but story-wise,...

Christopher Durang, one of American’s most acclaimed and accomplished playwrights whose works like Beyond Therapy, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and the Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike were as incisive as they were absurdly comic, died Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.

His agent, Patrick Herold, confirmed that Durang died as a result complications of his 2016 diagnosis with logopenic primary progressive aphasia (Ppa), a form of Alzheimer’s disease that impedes the ability to process language. He remained out of the public spotlight since his condition was made public in 2022. In February, New York’s Dramatists Guild announced that the playwright would receive its 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award on May 6, placing Durang on a prestigious roster alongside such past awardees as John Guare, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Miller.

Born Christopher Ferdinand Durang on January 2, 1949, Durang soared to...

What becomes of a prodigy who’s too sure of his talents but never brave enough to act upon them? Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter follows the life of a failed literature professor who is content with his failure and doesn’t have any hope for himself. Lousy’s obscurity is not forced on him; it’s rather something of his creation.

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens In The Movie?

Teaching a class capped at 8 students, Lousy Carter teaches The Great Gatsby, and he’s clearly not the right person for the job. His relationship with his mother is so-so, and his ex-wife occasionally keeps in touch with him. Lousy’s life isn’t anything of importance, and when he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, his awful behaviour worsens even further. You’d think one would try to right their wrongs when they have a few months left in their life,...

Ever since his high school golf teammates realized he couldn’t hit a straight tee shot, Carter (David Krumholtz) has been saddled with a nickname that doesn’t allow much room for charitable interpretations. His days of athletic mediocrity are now far behind him, but the “Lousy Carter” moniker has followed him throughout his adult life — and frankly, it’s hard to argue he doesn’t deserve it. The question of whether his high school bullies were abnormally clairvoyant or he simply lived down to their insults is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but the middle-aged iteration of Carter that we meet in Bob Byington’s latest film is an undeniably lousy man.

The literature professor has spent the bulk of his adult life coasting on the glimmer of promise that he showed as an animator when he released his first film 13 years ago. He parlayed those 15 seconds of fame into a...

In his last dramatic and interminable years, Michael Cimino spent his days in solitude rewatching old movies in the Bel-Air mansion he bought during his heyday. On the rare occasions that he ventured out, he drove a Rolls-Royce he acquired while making The Deer Hunter in 1978, his chauffeur having left long ago, as well as his success.

Even in those final moments, he did everything he could to show a winning image to Hollywood, a town that had ostracized him ever since the colossal Heaven’s Gate fiasco that had bankrupted United Artists during the early ’80s. He had a perpetually ironic, scornful smile, but he was the first to know how pointless, even miserable, that act was. The only thing he had left from his triumphant years was some money, and he would show up at the hangouts of movers and shakers like the Polo Lounge, where he often ended...

When 24-year-old Zoe Jackson scrolls her for-you-page, there are books all the way down. As a BookTok creator, Jackson spends much of her time on TikTok watching videos and recommendations surrounding the best books out there, from newly published novels to classic tomes. But while the average reader might stop scrolling when they recognize a book cover from high school English or a college course — like Catcher In The Rye, The Brothers Karamazov, or Infinite Jest, Jackson usually keeps it moving in an effort to avoid one of BookTok’s biggest icks: bro-lit.

Russell Brand was dropped by his agent Saturday following the accusations of rape and sexual assault against the actor-comedian in a new investigative report.

Among the claims against Brand include an alleged three-month relationship with a then-16-year-old girl. According to the joint The Times UK and Channel 4’s Dispatches report, Brand was “emotionally and sexually abusive” during their time together, and one point “forced his penis down her throat,” causing her to choke. She also claimed that Brand — who referred to her as “the child” — asked her to...

Four women — including one who was just 16 at the time — have accused actor-comedian Russell Brand of sexual assault and rape in a new report.

The allegations against Brand were brought forth in both an article by The Times UK as well as an episode of the Channel 4 investigative show Dispatches that is set to air Saturday night in the U.K.

The accusations span a seven-year period from 2006 to 2013, during which time Brand was married to singer Katy Perry from 2010 to 2012.

Among the most serious allegations involves a woman...

Russell Brand has been accused of “rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse” in a new report by The Sunday Times of London.

The joint investigation with The Times of London and Channel 4’s documentary team “Dispatches” published on Saturday afternoon in the U.K. “Dispatches” will air its 90-minute documentary on the allegations on Saturday evening on U.K. network Channel 4. “Five women, four of whom asked to remain anonymous, agreed to share their stories of serious sexual allegations in the program,” said a rep for the show.

According to The Sunday Times, the British comedian, who originally found fame as a host on MTV U.K. before starring in Hollywood films such as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek,” has been accused of sexual assault by four women between 2006 and 2013.

He was married to singer Katy Perry between 2010 and 2012.

The newspaper reported that one alleged victim...

This year marks 30 years since Bob Byington’s first feature, though it’s only during the last 15 of those — since SXSW midnight-movie breakout “Rso: Registered Sex Offender” — that the Austin-based director has enjoyed “indie darling” status. During that same stretch, the cultural discourse has changed a great deal, while Byington’s voice remains remarkably (if somewhat frustratingly) consistent, churning out self-deprecating feature-length sitcoms about flaccid man-babies. Those aren’t the kind of movies American festivals are looking for so much anymore, which could explain why his latest, “Lousy Carter,” wound up premiering abroad, at the Locarno Film Festival.

Locarno’s programmers typically gravitate toward austere, experimental and/or formally audacious works of cinema. “Lousy Carter” is none of these things, but neither is it lousy. That unfortunate moniker belongs to the film’s lead character, a lumpy failed animator turned tenured literature professor, who’s rendered all the more pathetic...

Despite its controversial subject matter, which involves a middle-aged man of letters obsessing over a 12-year-old "nymphet", Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 book "Lolita" is often regarded as one of the finest novels ever written. In 1998, the year that a new Adrian Lyne adaptation of "Lolita," starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain, premiered on Showtime, Modern Library named Nabokov's book the fourth-best English-language novel published by Random House in the 20th century. This was the second attempt at a film adaptation of "Lolita;" the first came in 1962 when Stanley Kubrick was in the director's chair.

Kubrick's adaptation of "Lolita" works backward from the climax of Nabokov's novel, as Humbert Humbert (James Mason) confronts and shoots his drunken counterpart, Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), in his mansion. The film magnifies Quilty's role, with Sellers even adopting a German disguise at one point, similar to how he would play multiple roles two years later in "Dr. Strangelove.

In a postscript to his 1955 novel "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov stated, quite shockingly, that it was a love story. Not between an adult man and a 12-year-old girl, as the dark plot of the novel details, but between Nabokov and the English language.

Nabokov, born in St. Petersburg in 1899, always had a strange affinity for the English language and often translated his own works from their original Russian. He also had an equally strange affinity for American culture as it looked in the 1950s, and "Lolita" was his full exploration of that. Among many other things, "Lolita" is about how post-War America -- featuring a money-raking landscape of hotels, kitsch, and secrets -- was all too willing to offer its youth as prey for a seemingly respectful European aristocracy. The book's main character, comically named Humbert Humbert, was a morally bankrupt transplant who saw himself as the king of his own story,...

Stanley Kubrick always had a strange relationship with authors. On the one hand, the director relied on their work to prompt his own artistic exploits. He would spend his entire career searching for stories worth adapting for the big screen as though they were some sort of finite resource that required immediate mining. Almost all of the auteur's films were adaptations of pre-existing works, with Kubrick using the time between projects to peruse the pages of publications such as the Virginia Kirkus Review in search of the next story to spark his interest.

On the other hand, he had some, shall we say, complicated interactions with the various authors of these stories that were so crucial to his process. Gus Hasford, who wrote the 1979 novel "The Short-Timers," on which "Full Metal Jacket" was based, was so unhappy with what he witnessed on the film's set he waged his own battle...

It's not really surprising that Stanley Kubrick never really got along with the whole American studio system of filmmaking. A notorious perfectionist, the director was at his best when retaining all creative control, and he knew it. Hence why he spent a large part of his career holed up in his Hertfordshire manor house. Childwickbury Manor has since become famous among fans of the auteur for being where he planned, wrote, and even edited some of his most famous movies, including the war epic "Full Metal Jacket."

But Kubrick actually made the move to the U.K. long before he took up residence in Childickbury in 1978. Back in 1960, he and his wife Christiane crossed the Atlantic to live just north of London while Kubrick worked on an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's now-classic novel "Lolita." The project was to be the director's triumphant escape from the rigidities of the Hollywood system,...

Stanley Kubrick pushed a lot of boundaries as a filmmaker, but perhaps most controversial was his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's famed novel, "Lolita." The story centers around a middle-aged man's affection for a teenage girl, a romance that raised eyebrows when the film was released in 1962 and it is still the subject of controversy to this day. The director had no regrets about making such a scandalous film — in fact, he wished he had pushed the envelope even further.

"Lolita" was an incredibly successful novel before it was made into a movie. However, it wasn't the book's popularity that attracted Kubrick to the project. "We bought it when it had not yet appeared on the New York Times bestseller list," the filmmaker revealed to The Guardian. "We never dreamed of the popularity that the book would achieve. We thought it would be popular, but how could one guess that...

AMC is continuing to cut back. The cable network has cancelled plans to air the second and final season of the 61st Street series. The show's final eight episodes have already been produced, so they'll likely surface elsewhere.  The fate of Invitation to a Bonfire looks less sure.

Based on the novel of the same name by Adrienne Celt, Invitation to a Bonfire was created by Rachel Caris Love, who also serves as showrunner and an executive producer. A psychological thriller, it was ordered to series last February and stars Tatiana Maslany, Freya Mavor, Pilou Asbæk, and Ngozi Anyanwu.

The series is inspired by the co-dependent marriage of famed Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, editor, and translator, Vera.

Set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey, Invitation to a Bonfire follows Zoya...

Tatiana Maslany is heading back to the AMC Networks family. The actress, who previously starred on AMC’s BBC America series “Orphan Black,” will star in and executive produce “Invitation to a Bonfire.”

Due out 2023, the series is psychological thriller based on the novel by Adrienne Celt.

It is inspired by Vladimir and Vera Nabokov’s co-dependent marriage. The real life Vladimir Nabokov wrote the controversial 1955 novel “Lolita.”

The show is set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey. It follows Zoya (Freya Mavor), a young Russian immigrant and groundskeeper, who is drawn into a lethal love triangle with the school’s newest faculty member (Pilou Asbæk) — an enigmatic novelist — and his bewitching wife (Tatiana Maslany). The cast also includes Ngozi Anyanwu.

Maslany’s character, Vera Orlov, is described as more than Leo’s wife; she is his editor and his everything.

Also Read:

Tatiana Maslany...

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Tatiana Maslany’s next TV role will be a world away from her current one.

The Emmy winner and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law star has joined AMC Networks’ drama Invitation to a Bonfire. She’ll also be an executive producer of the series, which is inspired by the codependent marriage of Lolita novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera.

The announcement was one of several AMC Networks made during its time at the Television Critics Association press tour Wednesday. The company has also named a new showrunner for its series Dark Winds and set a guest lineup for season two of IFC’s Sherman’s Showcase.

Invitation to a Bonfire is set at a girls boarding school in the 1930s. It follows Zoya (Freya Mavor), a young Russian immigrant and groundskeeper at the school, who’s drawn into a lethal love triangle with the...

Exclusive: Freya Mavor (Skins) and Pilou Asbæk are set to star in Invitation to a Bonfire, AMC’s series adaptation of the novel by Adrienne Celt. Ngozi Anyanwu (Deuce) also has been cast as a series regular in the project, which received a six-episode straight-to-series order under AMC’s “scripts-to-series” model to launch on the network and AMC+ in 2023.

Created by Rachel Caris Love, Invitation to a Bonfire is a psychological thriller set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey. Inspired by Vladimir and Vera Nabokov’s co-dependent marriage, the series follows Zoya (Mavor), a young Russian immigrant and groundskeeper, who is drawn into a lethal love triangle with the school’s newest faculty member — an enigmatic novelist, Leo (Asbæk)— and his bewitching wife.

Mavor’s Zoya Andropova is an orphaned refugee and the consummate outsider at the posh all-girls school where she works.

The first, and greatest, adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s troubling 1955 novel still possesses a strange and unnerving power

What happens when a magnet for controversy depolarizes with age? Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita still attracts plenty of analysis, admiration and disgust, in the classroom and beyond. But despite the pedigree of the beloved film-maker Stanley Kubrick, the first film adaptation of Lolita – released 60 years ago this week – is arguably more of a curio these days, forced to excise or elide some of the book’s thorniest elements for the sake of being allowed to exist at all.

The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being made near-contemporaneously with the novel was worked into the ad campaign, some of its posters adorned with a cheeky question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Good question, relatively simple answer: by ageing up the title character slightly, and relying on innuendos...

Two months after the debut of musical rom-com “Marry Me,” starring Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson and Maluma, Bobby Crosby is getting another one of his Keenspot graphic novels adapted for the big screen. Israeli producer Uri Singer has secured the film and television rights to “Dreamless,” a Keenspot graphic novel by Crosby illustrated by Sarah Ellerton.

“Dreamless,” which was first a Keenspot webcomic in 2009 before being collected into a graphic novel, has been read by more than four million people worldwide. It is a romance about a girl from America and a boy from Japan, born on the same day in 1923. Since birth, they have somehow mind-swapped in their sleep, experiencing each other’s lives instead of dreaming. Then, their relationship is tested during World War II in young adulthood. The project is currently out to talent.

“I love ‘Dreamless,’ ” Singer told Variety. “We look forward to bringing this beautiful...

Harry Styles nearly followed in the footsteps of Robert Pattinson and Anya Taylor-Joy.

In a lengthy, incredibly illuminating profile of director Robert Eggers for The New Yorker, it was revealed that Harry Styles was scheduled to be a part of Eggers’ remake of “Nosferatu,” starring Anya Taylor-Joy. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

The article says that Styles had to drop out due to scheduling concerns. He appeared briefly in Marvel Studios’ “Eternals” last year and has a role in Olivia Wilde’s upcoming “Booksmart” follow-up “Don’t Worry Darling” alongside Florence Pugh and Chris Pine. Styles is releasing a new album in May and then going on an international tour, which may have conflicted with the intended “Nosferatu” shooting dates.

According to the New Yorker profile, Eggers’ cinematographer Jarin Blaschke had already enrolled his daughter in school in Prague when Styles dropped out.

It’s unclear if the project,...

Exclusive: Uri Singer and Aimee Peyronnet are teaming to acquire two works from the estate of French author Pierre Boulle, who wrote the novels The Planet of the Apes and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which both were turned into iconic Hollywood movies.

The pair have acquired Boulle’s 1974 novel The Virtues of Hell, as well as Planet of the Men, an unproduced feature screenplay Boulle wrote after the first Planet of the Apes movie premiered in 1968 with Charlton Heston starring. The plan is to turn Virtues of Hell into a film, and adapt Planet of the Men for TV.

The Virtues of Hell centers on John Butler as he returns from war and turns to heroin to cope with his Ptsd. He is pulled into a secret drug operation and tasked with developing a technique for producing the purest heroin ever created, all while the DEA, his past psychiatrists and lovers,...

Uri Singer has obtained the rights “Invitation to a Beheading,” a surrealist and politically charged work by Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita.”

Singer has been carving out a niche for himself by developing literary classics into potential films. He recently obtained the rights to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus” and Don DeLillo’s “The Silence.” He is also producing another DeLillo adaptation “White Noise,” which is currently filming with Noah Baumbach directing Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. Singer is also producing “The King of Oil,” set at Universal, with John Krasinski’s Sunday Night, with Matt Damon attached to play the lead role based on the book “The King of Oil” by Daniel Amman, adapted by Joe Shrapnel and Anne Waterhouse.

“Invitation to a Beheading” embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by...

A lost poem written by Vladimir Nabokov about Superman — in which the Man of Steel envisions a tragic wedding night with Lois Lane and longs to be a mortal man — has been published for the first time.

Written in June 1942 and rejected by the New Yorker, “The Man of To-morrow’s Lament” was penned two years after Nabokov emigrated from Russia to the U.S., with the Lolita author focusing on the American cultural icon — he read the comics to his 8-year-old son — and jumping into one of the biggest...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died last month just 30 days shy of his 102nd birthday, lived a life of fascinating contradictions. From a Dickensian childhood — his father died before he was born, and his mother was institutionalized when he was only two years old — Ferlinghetti eventually landed with wealthy foster parents who nurtured his love of literature and art. He was a World War II naval officer who went to Normandy on D-Day and Nagasaki six weeks after the atomic blast, but was forever afterwards dedicated to anti-war writing, activism, and publishing.

From the moment she put down Walter Tevis’ book The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy knew how she would portray chess genius Beth Harmon, who blazes a trail and explodes glass ceilings during the Cold War-era 1960s as a femme champion in the testosterone-dominated game-peg playing world.

“I said to myself, ‘If we were shooting tomorrow, I know exactly what I’m doing, I know how I want to do it, I understand this woman so well’ “, said Taylor-Joy, the American-born Argentine-British actress who received not only SAG and Golden Globe nominantions for the role but also, Globe Best movie actress nom for her turn in Focus Features’ update of Jane Austen’s Emma.

“With Beth, it was instincts on a whole other level, I never had to reach for anything,” Taylor-Joy said. “They just had to yell ‘action’ and something would happen.”

On playing the ferociously ambitious, complex young woman,...

Scott Frank, the writer and co-creator of Netflix’s acclaimed “The Queen’s Gambit,” is setting his sights on an original sci-fi limited series for FX.

Frank is set to adapt Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 debut novel “The Sparrow,” which followed a group of Jesuit priests and scientists who make contact with an alien species in the near future. Their mission ends in disaster and the lone human survivor returns to Earth to face the Vatican as a scandal ensues. Casting details and a premiere date are under wraps.

“The Sparrow” will be directed by Johan Renck. Renck will executive produce alongside Frank, who will write all of the episodes of the limited series. Mark Johnson (“Better Call Saul”) will also serve as an executive producer. “The Sparrow” will be produced by FX Productions.

Frank’s upcoming series does not mark Hollywood’s first attempt to adapt “The Sparrow.” Brad Pitt...

Natalie Portman is opening up about the heartbreaking way that she was affected by acting roles from her earlier years. The actress was a guest on the Armchair Expert podcast on Monday, Dec. 7, where she told host Dax Shepard that playing sexualized characters at the start of her career had an insidious impact on her.  Portman, who began acting at age 12, discussed her role in the 1996 film Beautiful Girls, in which her 13-year-old character Marty develops a relationship with a man played by Timothy Hutton. She told Shepard that it was clear to her that she was being portrayed as a "Lolita figure," referring to Vladimir Nabokov's classic 1955 novel about a girl who engages in a sexual...

Nobody could have predicted that “The Queen’s Gambit” would become the global phenomenon that it has, and that includes co-creator Scott Frank and lead actor Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the Netflix limited series. Academy Award-nominated writer/director Frank, who co-created the series with Allan Scott, is now hoping that lighting in a bottle will carry over to his next project. According to an interview with The Ringer’s The Watch podcast (via JoBlo.com), Frank is currently developing an adaptation of “Lolita” author Vladimir Nabokov’s 1932 novel “Laughter in the Dark,” with Anya Taylor-Joy to star.

Frank called the project “a valentine to movies, I’m going to do it as a film noir and a movie within a movie. And it’s a really nasty, wonderful, thriller.” The book centers on Albert Albinus, a middle-aged art critic who takes a special interest in Margot Peters,...

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon biopic has long been considered the greatest film the director never made, but now cinephiles can add “Doctor Zhivago” to that list thanks to a recently discovered letter from six decades ago in which Kubrick wrote to “Zhivago” author Boris Pasternak asking for rights to the epic novel. The discovery was made by British film historian James Fenwick (via The Guardian) during his research for two upcoming books, “Stanley Kubrick Produces” and “Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films.”

According to Fenwick’s research, Kubrick and producer James B. Harris were interested in acquiring the rights to “Doctor Zhivago” as early as December 1958. The two men were in discussions with Kirk Douglas’ production company Bryna Productions to mount the “Zhivago” adaptation as a Hollywood production, years before David Lean started work on his famous adaptation in the U.K. The plan was for...

Scientists have confirmed that there’s water on the Moon. Here’s what that could mean for future lunar expeditions.

“Scientists have gathered some of the most compelling evidence yet for the existence of water on the moon – and it may be relatively accessible. The discovery has implications for future missions to the moon and deeper space exploration.”

Read more at The Guardian.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credits author Vladimir Nabokov for changing the way she communicates.

“The road to becoming a Supreme Court justice is paved with legal briefs, opinions, journal articles, and other written works. In short, you’d likely never get there without a strong writing voice and a knack for clear communication. Ruth Bader Ginsburg learned these skills from one of the best: Vladimir Nabokov.”

Read more at Mental Floss.

One of the most stereotypical features of witches is their pointy hats,...

There’s never a bad time to be reminded of and introduced to great cinematic works and their authors and filmmakers, but 2020 is turning out to be a particularly necessary time for cultural enrichment and artistic nourishment. At home.

So the timing couldn’t be better for Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s new tome, “Cinema ’62,” an examination and celebration of 1962, which they boldly proclaim was “The Greatest Year at the Movies.”

For those cineastes who might challenge that proclamation, and substitute, say, 1939, 1999 or my particular favorite, 1969, for that vaunted honor, the book thankfully opens with an astute and succinct preface by Oscar-winning writer-

director Bill Condon.

“I’ve found that a cineaste’s ‘greatest year’ more often than not lines up with the early years of his or her adolescence,” observes Condon, expressing a theory I’d always assumed was mine alone. So with the question of subjectivity and...

Though it was heavily rumored beforehand, the final reveal that Zendaya’s character Michelle Jones was a revamped version of Mary Jane Watson was one of the coolest moments in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Once you know the twist though, there are a few hidden references to the fact that Mj will go on to be integral to Peter Parker’s life, and one fan has just pointed us in the direction of a pretty neat one.

Reddit user u/MrBubbles9039 shared a screenshot on the Marvel Studios subreddit taken from the scene where Mj is staring up at the Washington Monument, during the section of the film where the Midtown Academic Triathlon team have travelled to D.C. The character is wearing a shirt with a picture of famed poet and writer Sylvia Plath on it. The Redittor notes that Plath once wrote a poem called “The Spider.”

On the one hand,...

Actor who played Lolita in the controversial film based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name

A much celebrated movie poster shows Sue Lyon peering over a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses while sucking a red lollipop under the legend “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” The answer lay in the casting of 14-year-old Lyon in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the controversial Vladimir Nabokov novel, in which Lolita is 12 years old.

Although Kubrick later complained about having to stick to the Hollywood Production Code, he said of Lyon, who has died aged 73, “she’s a one-in-a-million find”, and Nabokov thought her “the perfect nymphet”, a noun he coined in his 1955 novel. Her performance in Lolita (1962), her first feature, won the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. Few film actors can claim such a prestigious start to their careers.

Continue reading.

Actor who starred in the controversial 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s novel as a 14-year-old never matched its impact in her subsequent career

Sue Lyon, who at age 14 played the title character in the 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, has died at age 73.

Longtime friend Phil Syracopoulos told The New York Times she died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He gave no cause of death.

Actress Sue Lyon, best known for her role in Stanley Kubrick‘s adaptation of Lolita, has died, The New York Times reported. She was 73.

Lyon died on Thursday in Los Angeles, according to the newspaper. A longtime friend of the actress told the Times that she had been experiencing declining health for a while.

Lyon’s film and television career spanned 1959 to 1980, with her breakout role being the titular character in 1962’s Lolita. Based on the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the story follows a middle-aged professor who becomes sexually obsessed with Dolores Haze, a 12-year-old girl, whom he nicknames “Lolita.

Sue Lyon, the actress who played the title role in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1962 film Lolita, has died at the age of 73.

Lyon’s friend Phil Syracopoulos confirmed the actress’ death to the New York Times, noting that she died in Los Angeles Thursday following a period of declining health. No cause of death was provided.

The Iowa-born Lyon, then 14 with only a handful of small television roles to her credit, was cast over the 800 young actresses who reportedly auditioned for the role of Dolores Haze in the adaptation of...

Actress Sue Lyon passed away in Los Angeles on Dec. 26. She was 73. According to Lyon’s longtime friend Phil Syracopoulous, cited by the New York Times, the actress’ health had been declining for some time.

Lyon was best known for her first major role. She was picked out of 800 young actresses who had auditioned to play the title character in the controversial 1962 film Lolita when she was just 14 years old.

In Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel, about a middle-aged college professor who becomes infatuated with a teen nymphet, Lyon starred opposite James Mason. Her performance earned Lyon the Golden Globe in the most promising newcomer-female in 1963.

Lyion’s followup to Lolita was a co-starring role opposite Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr in the John Huston-directed 1964 feature The Night Of the Iguana. She went on to appear in two dozen movies and TV show,...

Sue Lyon, who was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” at the age of 14, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 73.

Lyon’s longtime friend Phil Syracopoulos told the New York Times she had been experiencing poor health for some time.

Lyon’s acting career lasted from 1959 to 1980, with her most significant role as the title character in the 1962 Kubrick film based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a middle-aged man who becomes sexually obsessed with a young girl. Lyon earned the part over 800 girls that auditioned; Nabokov described her as “the perfect nymphet.”

While Nabokov’s 1955 novel was seen as scandalous, the film was less so due in part to the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code.

Lyon was born in Davenport, Iowa. Her mother moved the family to Dallas before relocating them to Los Angeles, where Lyon was able to pursue acting. She landed the role of Laurie in...

Sue Lyon, the actress who at age 14 starred as the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of “Lolita,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 73.

Lyon had been in failing health for some time, her friend Phil Syracopoulos told The New York Times.

Born Suellyn Lyon in 1946 in Iowa, Lyon’s family moved to Los Angeles when she was a small child. As a teenager, she began acting in small television roles, including an appearance on “The Loretta Young Show” that brought her to Kubrick’s attention. She was subsequently cast in “Lolita” at 14 in part because the filmmakers aged the character up from 12, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Upon release, Lyon was catapulted to stardom, and she won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer — Female for her performance, which had her acting alongside James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers, some of the era’s biggest stars.

Stanley Kubrick would’ve celebrated his 91st birthday on July 26, 2019. The notoriously meticulous filmmaker only completed 13 features before his death in 1999, but several of those titles remain groundbreaking classics, spanning a variety of genres and themes. So in honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at all 13 of those films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1928 in New York City, Kubrick got his start as a photographer for Look magazine before directing short documentaries. His first features, “Fear and Desire” (1953) and “Killer’s Kiss” (1955), were produced out of his own pocket on shoestring budgets. It was with the noir thriller “The Killing” (1956) and the antiwar drama “Paths of Glory” (1957) that his talent fully blossomed, and before long he was helming the epic “Spartacus” (1960) and an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov‘s controversial novel “Lolita” (1962), both of which brought him Golden Globe nominations for Best Director.

He hit the...

Stanley Kubrick would’ve celebrated his 91st birthday on July 26, 2019. The notoriously meticulous filmmaker only completed 13 features before his death in 1999, but several of those titles remain groundbreaking classics, spanning a variety of genres and themes. So in honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at all 13 of those films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1928 in New York City, Kubrick got his start as a photographer for Look magazine before directing short documentaries. His first features, “Fear and Desire” (1953) and “Killer’s Kiss” (1955), were produced out of his own pocket on shoestring budgets. It was with the noir thriller “The Killing” (1956) and the antiwar drama “Paths of Glory” (1957) that his talent fully blossomed, and before long he was helming the epic “Spartacus” (1960) and an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov‘s controversial novel “Lolita” (1962), both of which brought him Golden Globe nominations for Best Director.

SEEKirk Douglas movies:...

SauvageNew Directors/New Films (Nd/Nf) returns to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art for its 48th edition, and once again proves that for New Yorkers it’s the key festival to discover an exciting new crop of young filmmakers, most of them presenting debut or second features. The program includes some movies previously covered on Notebook: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Ms Slavic 7, Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists, and Mark Jenkin’s Bait (Berlin Film Festival premieres), Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto (Locarno Festival), Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Manta Ray (Venice), Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load (Directors' Fortnight), and Eva Torbisch’s All Is Good (Locarno). While diverse, overall, this year’s slate is thoughtful and yet agile, with films that invite both risk and ambiguity.Not since Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) has there been a film in which the main character drifts into willful dissolution with as...

Psyche 59

Blu ray – All Region

Powerhouse

1964 / 1:85:1 / 94 Min. / Street Date – February 25, 2019

Starring Patricia Neal, Samantha Eggar, Curd Jürgens

Cinematography by Walter Lassally

Directed by Alexander Singer

The story of a troubled marriage and a tenacious home wrecker, Psyche 59 is a Brigitte Bardot movie without Bardot – despite its overheated narrative Alexander Singer’s psychosexual potboiler is stuck at room temperature.

Patricia Neal plays Alison Crawford, the unlucky sibling to Samantha Eggar’s hot to trot sister Robin and Curd Jürgens is Eric, the reluctant Romeo in the little flirt’s crosshairs. Jürgens knew the pitfalls of a wandering eye having tangled with Bardot herself in 1956’s And God Created Woman – judging by his reaction to Eggar he hasn’t learned his lesson.

Alison suffers from hysterical blindness and has suppressed the traumatic event that triggered it – her sister’s return unlocks a Pandora’s Box of bad memories but...

Ahead of the World premiere of the darkly erotic Automata at Arrow Video FrightFest Glasgow 2019, director Lawrie Brewster tells us about his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, the growth of Hex Studios and his fascination with creepy dolls.

Automata has earned its place in Kickstarter history as the UK’s most funded narrative film ever. Why do you think that happened?

The reason this happened is because there is a disconnect between a swathe of the audience, in our case a genre audience, and commercial distributors. Because commercial distributors and broadcasters for that matter, are so adept and so accustomed to selling a type of predictable product, that a form of repetition occurs whereby films that might not fit the mould, are simply not sold, and hence not usually produced. With Automata, and with all of our films at Hex Studios, we utilise that underserved niche, to produce unique genre films, which...

Shortly after the publication of his short story “The Vane Sisters” – in which a plot twist is revealed through a hidden acrostic message in the final paragraph – Vladimir Nabokov quipped that the narrative trick he employed was something that “can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction.” Perhaps we’ll need to call for a similar moratorium, albeit for entirely different reasons, on the type of twist that powers Steven Knight’s soggy, island-bound noir “Serenity.” Distinguished only by its starry cast and cinematographer Jess Hall’s beautiful lensing of some idyllic Mauritius locations, “Serenity” sees a usually reliable screenwriter-turned-director take a bold swing and miss the mark completely, so intent on pulling the rug out from under you that he never notices you weren’t even standing on it.

Though its trailer telegraphs a deeper mystery at play, the film’s ostensible plot couldn’t be simpler,...

“Burning Secret,” the long lost Stanley Kubrick script that was discovered over the summer, is being auctioned off later this month at Bonhams New York, Deadline reports. The original manuscript is expected to sell in the $20,000 region, so now the question remains whether or not anyone in the film industry will jump at the chance to buy the script and turn it into a feature film.

As reported earlier this year, “Burning Secret” is an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella of the same name. Kubrick co-wrote the script with Calder Willingham in 1956, shortly before making “Paths of Glory.” The script was discovered by Bangor University film professor Nathan Abrams, and while many would assume studios would jump at the chance to make the film (Netflix just released Orson Welles’ long-delayed “The Other Side of the Wind”), the film’s subject matter is controversial.

Abrams has described “Burning Secret” as “the inverse of ‘Lolita,...

Long-lost Stanley Kubrick script Burning Secret is up for auction at Bonhams New York on 20 November. The original manuscript is expected to fetch in the region of $20,000.

The script, which has been certified by Kubrick experts, is said to be virtually complete, begging the question, would a film or TV company take it on today? We’ve just had a semi-complete Orson Welles movie pieced together, after all.

Entitled Burning Secret, the script is an adaptation of the 1913 novella by the acclaimed and often-adapted Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. In Kubrick’s adaptation of the story, a suave insurance salesman befriends a 10-year-old boy at a spa resort so he is able seduce the child’s married mother. In Zweig’s original, the story is set in Austria but Kubrick’s script transfers the story to America of the 1950s with American characters.

The visionary filmmaker wrote it in 1956 with American...