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Eddie Murphy has confirmed he will play Inspector Clouseau in the next Pink Panther movie.The Shrek star was first reported to be in talks to take on the iconic character back in 2023, and he has now revealed it's among his upcoming roles.He told Al Roker on Today: “I’m getting ready to do a [biopic of] George Clinton, [his music collective] Parliament-Funkadelic. I’m getting ready to do George Clinton.“I’ve already started Shrek 5. And I’m going to be — I’m Inspector Clouseau in the next Pink Panther.”When asked if Clouseau will still be French, Murphy quipped: “Maybe. Well, he has to be French, but he could also be Haitian. I will tell you, he’s Black. He’s Black, for sure.”Sources previously told The Hollywood Reporter that the movie is to be a live-action/ CG hybrid.The original comedy film, The Pink Panther, was released in the...

Ornella Muti’s legacy is getting even more iconic thanks to Oscar-winning auteur Sean Baker. The “Anora” director, who recently won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Picture, is ushering in the summer of Muti with the release of four newly-restored films. Titled the “Ornella Muti 1970s Collection,” the Blu-ray and DVD set will feature extensive new bonus features and new artwork by Gilles Vranckx for the North American market, as well as Baker interviewing Muti onscreen. The special featurette with Baker has him interviewing Muti on her career, 1970s cinema, and the collection itself.

“I’m beyond thrilled to sit down with the legendary Ornella Muti — an icon whose work has inspired me for years,” Baker told IndieWire. “Her presence on screen is electric, and I can’t wait to explore the stories behind her incredible career.”

The Blu-ray set was first announced by Muti’s daughter Naike Rivelli in...

“Emma & Capucine, Volume 1”, a 104-page coming-of-age manga by Jerome Hamon and Lena Sayaphoum, immediately draws readers into the intense world of professional ballet. The narrative compellingly highlights the profound dedication, rigorous discipline, and significant personal sacrifices demanded by a life devoted to dance.

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What truly sets this manga apart is its willingness to explore beyond the glamorous performances, delving into the often-unseen and arduous realities of this demanding art form. At its core are two sisters, Emma and Capucine, both navigating this challenging path but responding to its pressures in their own distinct ways.

A central theme revolves around Emma’s struggle with the strict rules of classical ballet. This conflict underscores the tension between the yearning for individual artistic expression and the often-inflexible demand for uniformity and adherence to tradition. We witness her grappling not only with the intense physical...

Tokyopop moves further into Spring and lines up a slate of fresh new manga and light novel releases to delight a wide range of readers.

The new titles begin with a trio of April debuts under the LoveLove imprint that include We’Re Not Cut Out To Be Lovers, the one-shot The Little Bird Sleeps By The Sea, and the series launch of Fated Not To Meet.

May debuts feature the acclaimed manga series, Merry Witches’ Life¸ a full color coming-of-age bande dessinée from France, Emma & Capucine, and the “Danmei” (Chinese language Boys’ Love) novel, The Wizard: When Words Kill.

The latest round of new releases also sees June debuts of two additional titles under the LoveLove imprint – the full-color royal romance of The Unwanted Bride Loves The Crown Prince With All Her Heart and Sanctify: Lost Paradise, a spinoff bonus volume of the sexy, supernatural boys love series, Sanctify.

For a long time, Westerns were indisputably the most popular and widely enjoyed genre of movies that were being made. Throughout the 40s and 50s, the genre rose to immense prominence and birthed some classic Hollywood stars who managed to make their entire careers through this style of filmmaking - from Clint Eastwood to John Wayne, countless actors followed this same path. However, not every Western was an instant classic at this time. There were still many films that didnt quite live up to expectations, or perhaps simply havent aged perfectly, that cant quite be labeled as perfect.

Related 10 Best Westerns That Are Over 3 Hours Long

The Western genre lends itself to epic narratives, with great films over three hours long like Dances with Wolves making a case for longer Westerns.

Many of the best Westerns ever made are those that manage to blend the inherent scope and scale of the genre with more grounded,...

Charles Bronson, star of action movies, westerns, and war films during the late 20th century, was synonymous with "tough" on and off-screen. Bronson's television and film appearances included numerous spaghetti Westerns, including Red Sun. Released in 1972, Red Sun was directed by Terrence Young and starred Ursula Andress (also in Dr. No), Alain Delon, and Toshir Mifune alongside Bronson. It was based on a true story from the American frontier.

When the Japanese ambassador is robbed en route to meet with the US president, bandit Link Stuart (played by Bronson) is double-crossed by his gang. Link ultimately teams up with samurai bodyguard Kuroda (Mifune) to retrieve the ceremonial sword the rest of the gang has made off with. Considered one of the earliest examples of Asian martial arts movies uniting with Western cowboy adventures, Red Sun offers action, drama, and a bit of levity. It is an underrated movie that showcases...

The star of La Dolce Vita and A Man and a Woman, who has died aged 92, had a unique screen presence that was at once alluring and forbidding

The superbly aquiline beauty and patrician style of Anouk Aimée made her a 60s movie icon in France, Italy and everywhere else with a presence at once alluring and forbidding. She had something of the young Joan Crawford, or Marlene Dietrich, or her contemporary, the French model and actress Capucine. Aimée radiated an enigmatic sexual aura flavoured with melancholy, sophistication and worldly reserve. Hers was not a face that could simper or pout: it was the entranced men around her who were more likely to be doing that. Hirokazu Kore-eda once wrote an amusing line that all the great French movie actresses have surnames that begin with the same letter as their first names: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Brigitte Bardot … and of...

The cast of Ransom Canyon just got bigger!

Netflix just revealed three more additions, joining previously announced stars Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly.

Sweet Tooth‘s James Brolin, La Brea‘s Eoin Macken and A Million Little Things‘ Lizzy Greene were just announced as series regulars on Thursday (January 18).

Get the scoop on the show and their characters inside…

Ransom Canyon is described as a “romance-fueled family drama and contemporary western saga that charts the intersecting lives of three ranching families, all set against the rugged expanse of Texas Hill Country.”

The new drama series will consist of 10, 60-minute episodes.

Find out more about the three new characters below…

James Brolin cast as Cap – Cap Fuller is an ex army captain, and the brash, bullheaded owner of Fuller Ranch. After losing his only son in Afghanistan, Cap buried his grief in work and the occasional drink, his once renowned...

Jumping in at volume four, you might want a Synopsis for Latecomers .

Or, perhaps, you might want to know what happened in earlier Back to Basics books. This is a humorous, more-or-less autobiographical comics series originally published in France in the early Aughts, soon after the events depicted. Cartoonist Manu Larcenet moved from Paris to a small rural town – Ravenelles is either the name of the town, or the house he lives in, or something like that – along with his partner Mariette, and these are stories of his adventures there, almost entirely in the traditional “rural people are stoic, laconic, and good at everything, while urbanites are neurotic and mostly useless” mode. There’s also an element of “I am a total goofball who is barely useful at anything, and my partner is a wonderful angel in everything,” which is also deeply traditional.

The credits are unclear, and the story...

The "Pink Panther" film series reached its peak silliness in the 1970s and was all the better for it. Come "The Pink Panther Strikes Again," Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers had dropped the usual business of framing Inspector Clouseau's bumbling antics with a wider crime caper and just focused on him and his arch-nemesis, former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom). Dreyfus, having had it up to here after years of Clouseau's ineptitude, builds a vanishing ray and threatens the world with annihilation if the clueless detective isn't assassinated.

You can see the jokes coming from a mile away, but it hardly matters when you have a comic talent like Sellers delivering the gags. This is the period when all the elements of Clouseau that literally had me rolling on the floor laughing as a kid were cranked up to epic proportions; his penchant for zany disguises; the apartment-trashing fights...

It’s a Cold War thriller in the steamy tropics! The Reds are making their move in Malaya and four vibrant people are caught in the crosshairs: rich rubber planter William Holden, revolutionary strategist Tetsuro Tanba, peaceful teacher and activist Capucine, and adventurous Governor’s daughter Susannah York. Director Lewis Gilbert keeps a rickety script on its feet drama-wise and superb cinematography (Freddie Young) and impressive music (Riz Ortolani) do the rest. The show ended up being most noted for a nude swimming scene scooped in the pages of Playboy.

The 7th Dawn

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1964 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date January 4, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: William Holden, Susannah York, Capucine, Tetsuro Tanba, Michael Goodliffe, Allan Cuthbertson, Sydney Tafler, Maurice Denham.

Cinematography: Frederick Young

Production Designer: John Stoll

Art Director: Herbert Smith

Film Editor: John Shirley

Original Music: Riz Ortolani

Associate Producer: John Dark

Written for the...

Anyone who’s been following these pages has come across the works of Les Films de la Mouche, a French collective of talented filmmakers sure to make a splash with a notable debut feature in the not too distant future. Until that day comes, they keep turning out wonderful shorts. The most recent one, Nuage, is directed by Joséphine Darcy Hopkins and follows Capucine, her sick mother and Eugénie as they hit the road to try and escape a radioactive cloud that is heading straight for their little town. A fantastical road trip that confronts the fearful specter of death, Nuage is a drama about the difficulty of letting go while accepting the bittersweet peace it can bring. With a perfect sense of pacing, strong performances...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

'The Pink Panther' with Peter Sellers: Blake Edwards' 1963 comedy hit and its many sequels revolve around one of the most iconic film characters of the 20th century: clueless, thick-accented Inspector Clouseau – in some quarters surely deemed politically incorrect, or 'insensitive,' despite the lack of brown face make-up à la Sellers' clueless Indian guest in Edwards' 'The Party.' 'The Pink Panther' movies [1] There were a total of eight big-screen Pink Panther movies co-written and directed by Blake Edwards, most of them starring Peter Sellers – even after his death in 1980. Edwards was also one of the producers of every (direct) Pink Panther sequel, from A Shot in the Dark to Curse of the Pink Panther. Despite its iconic lead character, the last three movies in the Pink Panther franchise were box office bombs. Two of these, The Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther, were co-written by Edwards' son,...

The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.

Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...

The late career of Joseph L. Mankiewicz—who is getting a sidebar retrospective, The Essential Iconoclast, at the New York Film Festival—is fascinating. While many of his contemporaries floundered as the rules of filmmaking changed, formally and in every other aspect, he found ways, for a while at least, to carry on telling the kind of stories he liked, with the kind of people he liked, in the way he liked. Sleuth (1972) could probably have been made earlier—the amorality and venality of the characters might well have passed the censor, since vice can be said to be punished. The filmmaking is a little less sure-footed than we expect from Mankiewicz, though: he should have been the perfect director for a two-hander full of arch talk in elegant surroundings, but his attempts to keep the visuals lively sometimes seem forced.

There Was a Crooked Man (1970), is more problematic, illustrating...

Jane Fonda: From ‘Vietnam Traitor’ to AFI Award and Screen Legend status (photo: Jason Bateman and Jane Fonda in ‘This Is Where I Leave You’) (See previous post: “Jane Fonda Movies: Anti-Establishment Heroine.”) Turner Classic Movies will also be showing the 2014 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony honoring Jane Fonda, the former “Vietnam Traitor” and Barbarella-style sex kitten who has become a living American screen legend (and healthy-living guru). Believe it or not, Fonda, who still looks disarmingly great, will be turning 77 years old next December 21; she’s actually older than her father Henry Fonda was while playing Katharine Hepburn’s ailing husband in Mark Rydell’s On Golden Pond. (Henry Fonda died at age 77 in August 1982.) Jane Fonda movies in 2014 and 2015 Following a 15-year absence (mostly during the time she was married to media mogul Ted Turner), Jane Fonda resumed her film acting career in 2005, playing Jennifer Lopez...

A chameleon by nature, Peter Sellers had been turning in inspired comic performances since the early fifties – but it took the role of the habitually hapless Inspector Clouseau (originally intended for Peter Ustinov) in this first of seven The Pink Panther comedies to catapult him to superstar status. Though director Blake Edwards’ screenplay placed the bumbling detective at the center of a comic ensemble that included David Niven (who signed on expecting his role to be the lead), Capucine and Robert Wagner, Sellers would have free reign over the film’s even funnier sequel, A Shot in the Dark. Henry Mancini contributed the ultra-lounge score along with the memorable theme song. A lamentable animated cartoon series helped kill off theatrical cartoons.

The post The Pink Panther appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

The Warner Archive Collection is really starting to put out some great DVDs that feature titles you aren’t going to find anywhere else, and the latest to be made available is Search. A massively fun show from the early 70s, Search starred Hugh O’Brian, Doug McClure, and Tony Franciosa, and was (although I’m testing my memory) a show that pulled great tech ideas into the espionage drama realm, at a point when some of the ideas were practically sci-fi.

The complete series is available now, and it’s a lost classic that deserves a look. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get a taste of it to know if you’re interested in buying, but for those who remember the series, this is a real treat.

Catch the full info below, and don’t let this one escape your notice.

Look no further: You can now find Search...

Oscar-nominated ‘Imitation of Life’ actress Juanita Moore has died Juanita Moore, Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee for the 1959 blockbuster Imitation of Life, died on New Year’s Day 2014 at her home in Los Angeles. According to various online sources, Juanita Moore (born on October 19, 1922) was 91; her step-grandson, actor Kirk Kahn, said she was 99. (Photo: Juanita Moore in the late ’50s. See also: Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner photos at the 50th anniversary screening of Imitation of Life at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) Juanita Moore movies The Los Angeles-born Juanita Moore began her show business career as a chorus girl at New York City’s Cotton Club. According to the IMDb, Moore was an extra/bit player in a trio of films of the ’40s, including Vincente Minnelli’s all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (1942) and Elia Kazan’s socially conscious melodrama Pinky (1949), in which Jeanne Crain plays a (very,...

When an actor gets pigeon-holed as an action star, it becomes very difficult to shake that title. You are deemed bankable more for your screen presence, physical attributes and ability to run from explosions, rather than your thespian skills.

Most action stars are not known for their acting chops. That is why it always baffles the mind when these movie tough guys decide in starring in a flat out comedy instead of their usual mind-numbing brand of cops ‘n robbers thrills.

Comedy takes a certain set of skills, and sometimes even the most brilliant of comic actors have had difficulty tackling this genre. But why do action stars, known for spending most of their previous screen credits running around with guns and spouting witty one liners, think that doing comedy would be a good idea? Here are 10 movies which show why action movie stars should not attempt comedy.

10. John Wayne...

The 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival has unveiled another spectacular lineup of special guests and events for this year’s four-day gathering in Hollywood. Among the newly announced participants for this year’s festival are five-time Emmy® winner Dick Van Dyke, Oscar® winner Shirley Jones, two-time Golden Globe® winner Angie Dickinson, six-time Golden Globe nominee Robert Wagner, seven-time Oscar nominee Norman Jewison, longtime producer A.C. Lyles and three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker. In addition, the festival will feature a special three-film tribute to director/choreographer Stanley Donen, who will be on-hand for the celebration.

As part of its overall Style and the Movies theme, the festival has added several films featuring the work of pioneering costume designer Travis Banton. Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will introduce the six-movie slate, with actress and former Essentials co-host Rose McGowan joining her for one of the screenings.

Other festival additions include a screening...

"A very happy birthday to Liszt Ferenc, who was born two hundred years ago today," blogs Alex Ross, introducing a brief but — coming from the author of The Rest Is Noise — essential roundup.

Like many (many!) commentators today, Phil Harrell makes the case for Franz Liszt as the world's first rock star, here for NPR: "In the mid-19th century, Liszt was tearing up the polite salons and concert halls of Europe with his virtuoso performances. Women would literally attack him: tear bits of his clothing, fight over broken piano strings and locks of his shoulder-length hair. Europe had never seen anything like it. It was a phenomenon the great German poet Heinrich Heine dubbed 'Lisztomania.' … Liszt deliberately placed the piano in profile to the audience so they could see his face. He'd whip his head around while he played, his long hair flying, beads of sweat shooting into the crowd.

DVD Playhouse—March 2011

By

Allen Gardner

127 Hours (20th Century Fox) Harrowing true story of Aron Ralston (James Franco, in another fine turn), an extreme outdoorsman who finds himself trapped in a remote Utah canyon, his arm pinned between two boulders, with no help nearby, no communication to the outside world, and dim prospects for survival, to say the least. Director Danny Boyle manages to prove again that he’s one of the finest filmmakers working today by making a subject that is seemingly uncinematic a true example of pure cinema. Inventive, breathtaking, funny, and horrifying, often all at once. Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara make a memorable, brief appearance as hikers who connect with Ralston during his journey. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Boyle, producer Christian Colson, co-writer Simon Beaufoy; Deleted scenes; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS-hd 5.1 surround.

Amarcord (Criterion) Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning, autobiographical classic might...