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Four years after launching United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin distributed his first film through the company. It was a dream project that defied expectations. After making over 50 comic shorts, all of which he starred in, Chaplin not only released a straight romantic drama with A Woman of Paris, but—as he only appeared in it in a brief cameo, and under heavy makeup—it was easy to miss him on screen.

This 1923 film delighted critics, and its narrative and visual sophistication and the highly natural performance style of the actors made it a watershed release during Hollywood’s silent era, influencing countless directors, most notably Ernst Lubitsch. But it was a commercial failure, as audiences only wanted more of the Little Tramp. Still, while neither that iconic character nor anyone like him appears in it, A Woman of Paris is distinctly Chaplinesque,...

One of our favorite times of the month is when the Criterion Collection drops their releases for the months ahead and the batch its announced for March certainly doesn’t disappoint. Ranging from dark rom-coms to monster movies, Criterion is adding some proper deep cuts, as well as 4K restorations of two films that are already part of the collection.

The first film given the Criterion treatment is Alan Rudolph’s “Choose Me,” starring Keith Carradine and Lesley Ann Warren. Set in Los Angeles during the 1980s, the film follows a number of lovers violently weaving in and out of each other’s live, mostly crossing paths at a dive bar. A protégé of Robert Altman, Rudolph’s films, such as “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” and “Breakfast of Champions,” often carry a balance of absurdity and bite. Next up is the 1989 addition to the Godzilla cannon, “Godzilla vs. Biollante” from Kazuki Omori.

Quick Links Chaplin Is One of The Most Underrated Biopics Ever Made Charlie Chaplin Was One of Robert Downey Jr.'s Most Demanding Performances Who Won The Best Actor Oscar Against Robert Downey Jr. in 1993?

This year, Robert Downey Jr. received his first-ever Oscar win for his supporting role as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. With the remarkable performance that he gave, it was certainly well-earned, but having been nominated twice previously, it was an achievement that was long overdue. Even though he's now perhaps most well-known for his decade-spanning turn as Tony Stark/Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he's had quite a remarkable career outside that one character that has proven him to have a wider range than some may give him credit for. One of these films that displayed said range and his ability to completely vanish into a role was the first film...

The lesser-known of Charlie Chaplin’s canon might still place among the finest films ever made, and his greatest scholars and acolytes will tell you A Woman of Paris has always deserved such label. It began the run of feature-length masterpieces that was The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator but remains semi-obscure––an oddity perhaps partly explained by Chaplin’s own classification as “the first serious drama written and directed by myself,” and one soon be amended by Janus Films’ U.S. release of a 4K restoration.

Ahead of its December 22 premiere at Film Forum, there’s a new trailer and poster. The former suggests a strong, faithful rendering from Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Timothy Brock, who has newly conducted Chaplin’s original score; the latter so strongly evokes a 1923 theatrical release that I assumed it was the original one-sheet with new titles attached.

Charlie Chaplin was one of the most influential figures in the early days of cinema, and his feature films represented some of the best that Old Hollywood had to offer. From his onscreen debut in 1914 to his eventual passing in 1977, Chaplin often pushed the boundaries of what was possible in film production, and his work always had an abundance of heart to go along with the laughs. Although he was most remembered for his Tramp character, Chaplin wasn't limited only to silent films and his body of work grew along with the film technology of the time.

Starting with his first feature film, The Kid in 1921, it was obvious that Chaplin was on the cutting edge of film production and every one of his early works often involved visual innovation as well as his signature humor. Charlie Chaplin used VFX long before CGI, and his works were usually only bound...

Last week Warner Bros. announced that it was shelving the upcoming HBOMax release Batgirl along with an almost finished sequel to their animated film Scoob. All of this, while announcing massive layoffs in various departments across the board and the cancelation of various projects in early development. Kevin Smith even mentioned that a DC Project he had been working on was shut down on the latest episode of Hollywood Babble-On alongside co-host Ralph Garman.

The surprising part of this is the shelving of almost finished projects. The Batgirl film has already cost them 90 Million and was done enough to do some test screenings. Weirdly this is not the first time completed movies have been put up on the shelf, never to see the light of day. We’ve rounded up ten shelved movies from well-known creators or star well know actors.

Conversations With Vincent – dir. Tim Burton

I don’t...

When Charlie Chaplin passed away on Christmas Day in 1977, aged 88, he left the screenplay for a last unfinished film titled “The Freak,” a passion project about a young woman with wings named Serapha who is exploited in all kinds of ways.

Italy’s Cineteca di Bologna archives, which have long been in charge of the preservation and restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s oeuvre, has just published a book that for the first time unearths the final version of Chaplin’s complete “The Freak” script. The book also comprises previously unseen materials, such as preparatory notes, drawings, photos and stills from filmed rehearsals of the film that Bologna archives chief Gianluca Farinelli calls Chaplin’s “artistic testament.”

Born to a couple of British missionaries, Serapha winds up in Patagonia, where she becomes an angel-like figure at a pilgrimage site for invalids seeking to be cured; she is then kidnapped and brought...

The reunion of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray for the new A24/Apple release “On the Rocks” comes 17 years after their first collaboration on the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation.” Such repeated pairings between directors and actors have been mainstay a in Hollywood since the earliest days of cinema. In the silent era, there were multiple films from D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance.

One of the great partnerships during the Golden Age of Hollywood was John Ford and John Wayne. Ford had actually befriended Wayne when the young man was doing odd jobs as well as extra work-including in few of the director’s films-at Fox Studios in the late 1920s. Wayne made his official film debut starring in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 epic western “The Big Trail.”

The film wasn’t a hit and Wayne found himself spending the decade doing “B” westerns including 1938’s...

1 March 1925: This is a remarkable film, an historic film, a film to see and consider

Mr. Charles Spenser Chaplin has been enjoying a holiday from his boots and his hat. It has been a holiday in the true sense, which implies, not idleness, but the doing of a thing long desired in the desired way. His new film A Woman of Paris is the fruit of many years’ consideration, the logical development of that other holiday The Kid, and the fulfilment of his dream.

Like all good comedians, pushing aside a delirious desire to play Hamlet, Chaplin has sought a medium of tragic expression, cast here and everywhere, for an outlet for his serious emotions. His later comedies are shot with the Hamlet quality. But he is bounded by the little hat, and the boots and the cane, and a servant to the public in whose mind these things stand for laughter.

Adolphe Menjou movies today (This article is currently being revised.) Despite countless stories to the contrary, numerous silent film performers managed to survive the coming of sound. Adolphe Menjou, however, is a special case in that he not only remained a leading man in the early sound era, but smoothly made the transition to top supporting player in mid-decade, a position he would continue to hold for the quarter of a century. Menjou is Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Day today, Aug. 3, as part of TCM's "Summer Under the Stars" 2015 series. Right now, TCM is showing William A. Wellman's A Star Is Born, the "original" version of the story about a small-town girl (Janet Gaynor) who becomes a Hollywood star, while her husband (Fredric March) boozes his way into oblivion. In typical Hollywood originality (not that things are any different elsewhere), this 1937 version of the story – produced by...

Limelight

Written and directed by Charles Chaplin

USA, 1952

Rightly dubbed a “supreme auteur” by David Robinson, who provides a video essay on the newly released Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Limelight, Charlie Chaplin wore many hats in making this 1952 film. Aside from writing, directing, and starring in the picture, he was the producer, he arranged the score, and he choreographed the dance sequences, in addition to other supervisory duties behind the scenes. Part of the preparation for the film even included Chaplin penning a novel on which the movie was based, called Footlights, which was then adapted with great ease by the author. Set in 1914 London (about the time Chaplin had left England for America), Limelight is a basically familiar showbiz story, with one performer’s career on the wane as another’s is ripe for revival, but there is far more to this late Chaplin classic. For the great comedian,...

A 9-film series of not-quite-classics (on 35mm), "Auteurs Gone Wild" runs at Anthology Film Archives from March 20-30, 2014; what follows are the director's cut of the program notes (with production stills of the auteurs themselves, mid-wild)—

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If the Hollywood auteurs were the ghosts in the studio machine, what would they look like exorcised? Rather than author, the word "auteur" might have referred to a kind of rhetorician working within genre codes that, once decoded, would only reveal his own commentary on them. But what would happen if this auteur cleared his throat, managed a sip of water, and tried speaking in his own tongue? Typically, the critics who had authored the auteur as a placeholder and retroactive justification for their own generic interpretations would have to snub such attempts to break out of genre molds to go strange, personal places. For the irony is that these works, kind of laboratory...

It is 100 years since Charlie Chaplin's Tramp character was first seen and at Bristol's Slapstick festival the corks popped

A centenary is more than excuse enough for a party, even if the birthday boy is a work of fiction – a beggar, even, with ill-fitting shoes, a violent streak and bow legs. This is the year of the Tramp. Twenty-fourteen marks 100 years since Charlie Chaplin first appeared on a movie screen as an eccentric fellow with a toothbrush moustache and a derby hat, walking with splayed feet and carrying a cane. Due to the global reach of Chaplin's fame, there will be events to mark the anniversary around the world all year, but this weekend, the corks were popped in Bristol. The city's Slapstick festival, itself celebrating a decade on the job, kicked up its heels with a sumptuous gala screening of Chaplin's late silent masterpiece City Lights,...

This 1929 article by Paul Gilson, something of a forgotten classic in France, was published in the third issue of Jean George Auriol’s Du Cinéma (which would become the better known La Revue du Cinéma with the next issue) to coincide with the French release of Harry Langdon’s underappreciated masterpiece Three’s a Crowd. The magazine, close to various avant-garde circles, featured everything from screenplays to reportages to reviews, testifies to the effervescent, and relatively little known, film culture in Paris at the time. For those familiar with the bland, descriptive write-ups of most movie reviews of the era, this piece comes off as an exhilarating exercise in a deliriously subjective, free-form style of poetic film writing that is more inspired by the film than about it — an approach that, to this day, remains largely unexplored.

“Bombay, December 5th — The Bombay Chronicle brings to our attention an extraordinary botanical phenomenon.

You want action? Movie-movie action? Then forget The Avengers, which opens in the Us on May 4. The following day, head instead to the Niles Essanay Film Museum in the northern Californian town of Fremont, where they’ll be screening two action-packed flicks: Laughing at Danger and "The Tragic Plunge," episode 7 of the serial The Perils of Pauline. Haven’t heard of either one? Well, Laughing at Danger was an independent production released in 1924. It stars Richard Talmadge (no relation to sisters Constance Talmadge and Norma Talmadge), who, according to some sources, was quite popular in the Soviet Union, of all places. As for the serial The Perils of Pauline, it was a humongous success in 1914, turning Pearl White (photo) into a major screen star. Actually, more than that. White became a near-legendary movie icon, one whose adventures have been copied, remade, and rebooted ever since. In fact, I wouldn’t...

Penelope Ann Miller is co-starring in what has to be one of the most intriguing films of the year: "The Artist," a black-and-white silent film. That's right -- a silent film, just like those from the 1920s.

Miller stars alongside Jean Dujardin, who plays a movie star who is afraid that the arrival of "talkies" will cause his career to fade into obscurity. Berenice Bejo also stars as a dancer looking for her big break.

"It's a love letter to cinema," Miller says of the buzzed-about film. "It takes it back to its purest, most beautiful form."

Did you think this was a goof when you were offered the role?

Yeah, I was pretty shocked that someone was so daring to make this kind of film. But I was excited about the project. I did the movie "Chaplin" years ago and I did a little bit of silent acting because I played Edna Purviance,...

In December of last year I reviewed the initial ten books in the excellent Masters of Cinema collection from Cahiers Du Cinema, published in the UK by Phaidon Press and I’ve been sent two of the next batch to be released. Here Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles are under the spotlight, the other new books focus on Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

Jérôme Larcher takes us through Chaplin’s extraordinary life, pausing at key points to survey the cinematic and social landscape. His major works have their turn under the spotlight, with Chaplin’s iconic characters deconstructed with The Tramp in particular commented on by Andre Bazin and Chaplin himself.

As Chaplin was at the forefront of cinema through its early development it is the story behind the scenes, battles with outlandish figures from old Hollywood and the discovery of a muse in Edna Purviance there is...

This weekend is a special one in Los Angeles, because on Sunday night the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is holding its annual Silent Film Gala at UCLA’s glorious Royce Hall. Chaplin, Edna Purviance, and friend in A Dog’s Life. This year’s offering is a Charlie Chaplin double-bill: Shoulder Arms and A Dog’s Life, with silent-film score specialist Timothy Brock conducting. The curtain-raiser will be Walt Disney’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Cartoon Trolley Troubles, with a score by Alex Rannie. For ticket information, click Here. I look forward to the Laco’s annual program not only because it’s wonderful to see great…...

  A Woman of Paris (1923) Direction & Screenplay: Charles Chaplin Cast: Edna Purviance, Adolphe Menjou, Carl Miller, Lydia Knott Edna Purviance (left), A Woman of Paris I must admit that I'm not a fan of Charles Chaplin's comedies. Heresies aside, I did very much enjoy Chaplin's dramatic A Woman of Paris, an attempt to turn his frequent leading lady Edna Purviance into a star. Despite rumors to the contrary, A Woman of Paris was a box-office success; even so, Purviance's career never took off. That is unfortunate, as she gives a moving, subtle performance in this nonjudgmental tale of lost love and single motherhood. Purviance is with Carl Miller in the photo on the right. Things are obviously not going very well for the couple, but the actress is surely suffering in style.

Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Lon Chaney, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Pearl White, Evelyn Brent, Edna Purviance, Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, Harold Lloyd,Adolphe Menjou, Percy Marmont and Our Gang – might there be more stars on the Niles screen in October then in the night skies above? Perhaps that depends on the fog.For October, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has put together a star studded schedule of films. Here’s the line-up for the month.“Saturday Night at the Movies,” with Bruce Loeb at the piano Saturday October 2at 7:30 pm (Suggested...