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Gaining a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes is either an impressive achievement or a sign that your movie hasn't been all that widely reviewed. The same goes for those films that bear the dreaded 0% rating, of which the great John Travolta currently has a full seven.

This is all by virtue of the way Rt works. The website aggregates reviews, deeming each individual appraisal either positive or negative. Even mixed reviews get crammed into this binary, allowing Rotten Tomatoes to produce a percentage score based on how many reviews are "Fresh" and how many are "Rotten." If a film is solid enough to garner a handful of decent reviews, that means it will likely get a 100% rating on the site because A) there aren't many reviews to include in the rating and B) the handful of reviews that do exist are all decent enough to be rated "Fresh" by Rt's moderators.

If there’s any film which really conjures an ‘empire state of mind,’ it’s Leo McCarey’s 1939 romantic tearjerker, Love Affair. Strangely, despite an intensely impressive and prolific filmography from McCarey, this is the title most securely saturated in the cinematic zeitgeist, as evidenced by two remakes, the first of which McCarey himself directed as 1957’s An Affair to Remember (arguably most prominent version). But it’s this original morsel, based on a short story by Mildred Cram, adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Delmer Daves (just prior to his ascension as a notable director of film noirs and groundbreaking westerns), which remains the most unfettered and potent version.…...

Possibly the best-known rom-com to come out of the Golden Age of Hollywood, "The Philadelphia Story" brought screen icons Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Cary Grant together for a film that revitalized Hepburn's career after a string of box-office duds. It also snagged a half-dozen Oscar nods, including one for Best Picture. It ultimately won two Academy Awards: one for Stewart's performance, and one for Donald Ogden Stewart's script, adapted from Philip Barry's play. It's also a movie that maintains its charm 80 years on, but can still make modern viewers uncomfortable -- as my roommates and I learned upon deciding to stream it one night amidst the 2020...

The post The Philadelphia Story Scene You Probably Didn't Know Was Improvised appeared first on /Film.

“This picture is perfect, end of review.” That may not be 100 true, but Leo McCarey’s unabashed leap into romantic Nirvana really hasn’t been bettered, although his color & ‘scope remake is very good. Never was smart adult dialogue this winning — Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer’s cinematic courtship is a highlight of the Big Studio years. And Maria Ouspenskaya’s performance will send you out to pamper the nearest grandmother. The restoration for this one is a revelation, as the show has looked terrible for sixty years- plus. Serge Bromberg and Farran Smith Nehme make the extras especially valuable.

Love Affair

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1114

1939 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 15, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman, Astrid Allwyn, Maurice Moscovitch, Ferike Boros, Scotty Beckett, Bess Flowers, Harold Miller, Dell Henderson, Frank McGlynn, Sr., Joan Leslie.

Cinematography: Rudolph Maté

Art Director: Van Nest Polglase,...

“Books are more important than pajamas.”

Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in Without Love (1945) is currently available on Blu-ray From Warner Archive. Ordering info can be found Here

Every rental is rented, every sublet is let in crowded Washington, D.C. So Jamie Rowan does her part for the wartime lodging crunch by sharing her home with military inventor Pat Jamieson. There are a few conditions, natch. First, for appearances, they must get married. Second, there’s plenty of room for each other…but no room for love. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn team for the third time in Without Love, played for laughs and, above all, with love. Donald Ogden Stewart adapts Philip Barry’s play. And Keenan Wynn’s bibulous bon vivant, Lucille Ball’s wisecracking girl Friday and Gloria Grahame’s flower girl add to the movie’s urbane wit and warmth.

The post Spencer Tracy and...

This classy late-’30s Park Avenue romp gives us Katharine Heburn and Cary Grant at their best; Grant is especially good in a particularly demanding comedy role. The original play is warmed up a bit with comedy touches, and some pointed political barbs slip in there as well. The marvelous acting ensemble gives terrific material to favorites like Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton.

Holiday

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1009

1938 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 95 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 7, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Doris Nolan, Lew Ayres, Edward Everett Horton, Henry Kolker, Binnie Barnes, Jean Dixon, Henry Daniell, Ann Doran.

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Film Editor: Al Clark, Otto Meyer

Original Music: Sidney Cutner

Written by Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman from the play by Philip Barry

Produced by Everett Riskin

Directed by George Cukor

Holiday was written by Philip Barry, the playwright who tailored The Philadelphia Story for Katharine Hepburn.

This article marks Part 3 of the Gold Derby series reflecting on films that contended for the Big Five Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted). With “A Star Is Born” this year on the cusp of joining this exclusive group of Oscar favorites, join us as we look back at the 43 extraordinary pictures that earned Academy Awards nominations in each of the Big Five categories, including the following 11 films that scored a pair of prizes among the top races.

At the 4th Academy Awards ceremony, “Cimarron” (1931) made Oscar history as the first motion picture to ever score nominations in the Big Five categories. On the big night, the western took home the top prize in Best Picture, as well as the Oscar in Best Adapted Screenplay (Howard Estabrook). Not as successful were the picture’s director, Wesley Ruggles, topped by Norman Taurog (“Skippy”), and the leads,...

This article marks Part 2 of the Gold Derby series reflecting on films that contended for the Big Five Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted). With “A Star Is Born” this year on the cusp of joining this exclusive group of Oscar favorites, join us as we look back at the 43 extraordinary pictures that earned Academy Awards nominations in each of the Big Five categories, including the following 11 films that scored a single prize among the top races.

More than eight decades prior to Bradley Cooper’s take on the timeless tale, the first “A Star Is Born” (1937), headlined by Fredric March and Janet Gaynor, became the third motion picture, following “Cimarron” (1931) and “It Happened One Night” (1934), to earn nominations in the Big Five Oscar categories.

At the 10th Academy Awards ceremony, however, neither March nor Gaynor emerged triumphant, losing in their...

November over at The Criterion Collection may look a smidge slim, offering up just four new titles, but each new addition to the collection is a seminal selection well-deserving of the Criterion treatment. Of most interest, however, is Donna Deitch’s feature debut “Desert Hearts,” a seminal lesbian drama that’s been going through something of a resurgence as of late, thanks to last year’s 30th anniversary and a continued adoration for its forward-thinking subject matter.

As we recently explored, in the early ’80s, Deitch was a film school grad with only docs under her belt, eager to make a different kind of feature about lesbians in love, and “without the help of Kickstarter or industry backing, she launched an unorthodox grassroots campaign that eventually gained the support of Gloria Steinem, Lily Tomlin, and Stockard Channing. The result was a hit at Sundance in 1986 that went on to become...

Merle Oberon movies: Mysterious star of British and American cinema. Merle Oberon on TCM: Donning men's clothes in 'A Song to Remember,' fighting hiccups in 'That Uncertain Feeling' Merle Oberon is Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month of March 2016. The good news: the exquisite (and mysterious) Oberon, whose ancestry has been a matter of conjecture for decades, makes any movie worth a look. The bad news: TCM isn't offering any Oberon premieres despite the fact that a number of the actress' films – e.g., Temptation, Night in Paradise, Pardon My French, Interval – can be tough to find. This evening, March 18, TCM will be showing six Merle Oberon movies released during the first half of the 1940s. Never a top box office draw in the United States, Oberon was an important international star all the same, having worked with many of the top actors and filmmakers of the studio era.

Cary Grant movies: 'An Affair to Remember' does justice to its title (photo: Cary Grant ca. late 1940s) Cary Grant excelled at playing Cary Grant. This evening, fans of the charming, sophisticated, debonair actor -- not to be confused with the Bristol-born Archibald Leach -- can rejoice, as no less than eight Cary Grant movies are being shown on Turner Classic Movies, including a handful of his most successful and best-remembered star vehicles from the late '30s to the late '50s. (See also: "Cary Grant Classic Movies" and "Cary Grant and Randolph Scott: Gay Lovers?") The evening begins with what may well be Cary Grant's best-known film, An Affair to Remember. This 1957 romantic comedy-melodrama is unusual in that it's an even more successful remake of a previous critical and box-office hit -- the Academy Award-nominated 1939 release Love Affair -- and that it was directed...

Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...

Thanks to "Sleepless in Seattle," everyone knows "An Affair to Remember" is the ultimate romantic tearjerker. Not only do Nora Ephron's female characters describe it as their favorite chick flick, but the ending atop the Empire State Building evokes the abortive reunion that Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr never get to enjoy. Many modern viewers also know that "Affair to Remember" (which opened in theaters 55 years ago, on July 11, 1957) was filmmaker Leo McCarey's remake of his own 1939 hit "Love Affair," with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as the lovers kept apart by fate and their own wounded pride. Still, there's a lot about "An Affair to Remember" that even its biggest fans may not know, including its uncanny echoes of Grant's own shipboard romance with his third wife, or how a not-yet-famous young visitor witnessed the veteran leading man's acting breakthrough, or Grant's off-camera therapeutic uses of hypnosis and LSD.

Chicago – Fox has released two of the most beloved films in their extensive back catalog of movies waiting for their HD debut and just in time for Valentine’s Day. Forget traditional flowers or chocolates and pick up the lovingly-packaged, beautifully-transferred, and bonus-packed releases of “All About Eve” and “An Affair to Remember.”

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

If I were to pick one of these two movies, it’s “All About Eve” in a walk. The winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, “All About Eve” is a classic, featuring one of my favorite actress performances of all time in Bette Davis’ master class on how to steal not just a scene but an entire damn movie. “An Affair to Remember” features two wonderful actors at the peak of their charm — Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr — and its their talent and amazing chemistry from minute one that make the movie work as well as it does.

Scintillating romantic comedy is the holy grail that everyone in Hollywood dreams of capturing. Producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner have achieved some success reinvigorating classic formulas in their English comedies including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill.

But in crossing the pond for their latest effort, Definitely, Maybe, they run into some problems. Writer-director Adam Brooks ("Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason") doesn't have the knack for the genre demonstrated by the masters. Opening on Valentine's Day, the film hopes to tap the date crowd, but it falls somewhere between a mass audience crowd-pleaser and a literate class act. Business will be middling but not spectacular.

Yet the film is far from a complete washout, and this is chiefly a tribute to its immensely attractive and appealing cast. Ryan Reynolds proves to have the stuff of a true leading man. He plays disgruntled ad man Will Hayes, who receives divorce papers in the movie's opening scene. He goes to pick up his daughter Maya ("Little Miss Sunshine's" Abigail Breslin) at school, where she has just attended her first sex education class and has a million questions for her befuddled dad.

Maya's discovery of sex prompts her to ask Will how he met and fell and love with her mother. Instead of giving her a straightforward answer, Will recounts his romantic involvement with three women: college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), flaky co-worker April (Isla Fisher) and aspiring journalist Summer (Rachel Weisz). He frames his history as something of a mystery that Maya will have to solve: Which of the three women became his wife, and which of the three is his true soulmate?

The answer to the first question is not immediately apparent, but the answer to the second is clear because Fisher has top billing and the most screen time. It's also clear because Fisher and Reynolds have the kind of sizzling chemistry that defines all the memorable movie couples. This film is a great showcase for both of them.

Will is an unusual romantic hero in that he spends most of the movie being dumped instead of conquering women. Considering that Reynolds has the looks to be a superstar, it's a shrewd decision for him to play against that and come across as awkward and even dorky in his pursuit of women. His lack of confidence in his sexual prowess makes him even more endearing.

Fisher, best known for her role in Wedding Crashers, is absolutely irresistible. She, too, seems frazzled and rumpled rather than glamorous. April is the kind of no-nonsense, down-to-earth woman who always has been the mainstay of romantic comedy. Fisher actually seems to be channeling Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert.

Weisz and Banks are ravishing enough to make the contest among the three women viable, though Banks' role is underdeveloped, and even Weisz could use some meatier scenes. (A bland montage that shows Summer and Will falling in love doesn't do the trick.)

Kevin Kline has a sharp cameo as the drunk writer who is Summer's mentor and lover. But a lot of the other supporting players don't really have enough to do. Even Breslin is reduced to little more than a sounding-board until the very last scenes, when she finally gets to play a more active role in Will's search for fulfillment.

The film begins in 1992, when Will goes to work for Bill Clinton's campaign for president, and an entertaining subplot concerns Will's disillusionment with Clinton during the course of the '90s. But the evocation of the era is fairly lackluster. Cinematographer Florian Ballhaus does capture the allure of Manhattan, though the editing by Peter Teschner lets the picture drag on too long.

The bigger problem is that the romantic banter between Will and his three paramours strains for sparkling wit and only occasionally achieves it. In addition, the script cries out for the kind of clever plotting that distinguished such movies as It Happened One Night and "Adam's Rib." Is it impossible for today's writers to match the urbanity of Samson Raphaelson or Donald Ogden Stewart or Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin?

Such performers as Reynolds and Fisher might rank with Gable and Lombard or Tracy and Hepburn, but we'll never know until they get the crack scripts that helped to turn an earlier generation of actors into legends.

DEFINITELY, MAYBE

Universal

Working Title, StudioCanal

Credits:

Screenwriter-director: Adam Brooks

Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner

Executive producers: Liza Chasin, Bobby Cohen

Co-executive producer: Kerry Orent

Director of photography: Florian Ballhaus

Production designer: Stephanie Carroll

Music: Clint Mansell

Costume designer: Gary Jones

Editor: Peter Teschner

Cast:

Will Hayes: Ryan Reynolds

April: Isla Fisher

Maya Hayes: Abigail Breslin

Russell McCormack: Derek Luke

Emily: Elizabeth Banks

Summer Hartley: Rachel Weisz

Hampton Roth: Kevin Kline

Gareth: Adam Ferrara

Arthur Robredo: Nestor Serrano

Running time -- 110 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13...