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Jane Morgan, the elegant American singer who dazzled audiences in Paris nightclubs, on just about every TV variety show of her era and at the Oscars and had a hit record with the lovely standard “Fascination,” has died. She was 101.

Morgan was in hospice care and died Monday in her sleep of natural causes in Naples, Florida, her family announced.

A classy performer known for her silky smooth phrasing, Morgan moved from New York to France in the late 1940s to build her career before returning the U.S. and becoming a very popular singer through the mid-1960s.

She recorded about 40 albums around the world and sang in five languages, making her a true international star.

Morgan appeared dozens of times on The Ed Sullivan Show and was a welcomed recurring guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall and The Hollywood Palace and...

Four Emmys. Three Oscars. Two Grammys. One-half of a legendary songwriting team who made an enduring impact on the soundtrack of Hollywood.

Alan Bergman — whose collaboration with wife Marilyn resulted in dozens of indelible songs performed from everyone from Frank Sinatra to Barbra Streisand to Michael Jackson, and soundtracked everything from In the Heat of the Night to Severance — died Thursday at the age of 99. (Marilyn died in 2002.)

The Bergmans formed a formidable lyric-writing duo, teaming with several of the greatest composers of the 20th century, including Quincy Jones, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, and Marvin Hamlisch.

They received the Trustees Award from the Grammys in 2013 and were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980; the couple also received the organization’s highest honor, the Johnny Mercer Award, in 1997.

Here are 10 must-hear classics from their award-worthy songbook.

“Nice ‘n’ Easy” (1960)

Cowritten with Lew Spence, the swinging lead single...

Alan Bergman, the award-winning songwriter who helped craft Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” and Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind,” had died at the age of 99. The lyricist racked up a myriad of accolades for music he created in a songwriting duo with his wife Marilyn Bergman, who died in 2022 at the age of 93.

Bergman’s representative Ken Sunshine confirmed Bergman’s death, noting that he experienced respiratory issues in recent months, “but continued to write songs till the very end.”

Throughout his career, Bergman’s...

BroadwayWorld is saddened to report that lyricist Alan Bergman, who worked with his late wife Marilyn on numerous hit songs for the screen, passed away on Thursday at his Los Angeles home at the age of 99. He is survived by their daughter, Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter. Marilyn passed away in 2022 at 93 years old. In their 50+ year career together as songwriters, Alan and Marilyn Bergman collaborated frequently with many artists, including Dave Grusin, John Williams, Quincy Jones, James Newton Howard, Michel Legrand, Johnny Mandel, Cy Coleman, Henry Mancini and Marvin Hamlisch. Among many other accolades, the pair won three Academy Awards, three Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and one Cable Ace...

Alan Bergman, the three-time Oscar-winning lyricist who teamed with his late wife, Marilyn Bergman, to form one of the most celebrated writing duos in the history of movie music, has died. He was 99.

Bergman, whose work includes such classics as “The Windmills of Your Mind” — wonderfully employed for the second-season finale of Severance — “Nice ’n’ Easy,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and “The Way We Were,” died Thursday night of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, his daughter, producer Julie Bergman Sender, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Marilyn Bergman died in January 2022 of respiratory failure at age 93.

The husband-and-wife lyricists worked particular magic with songstress Barbra Streisand and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand.

They won Academy Awards for the best original songs “The Way We Were” (shared with Hamlisch) from the 1973 Streisand film of that name and “Windmills of Your Mind” (shared with Legrand) from The Thomas Crown Affair...

Alan Bergman, the lyricist whose collaborations with his wife Marilyn were behind the Oscar-winning songs “The Way We Were,” and “The Windmills of Your Mind” as well as such beloved TV theme songs for such series as Good Times, Maude and Alice, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.

His death was announced by a family spokesman, Ken Sunshine. (Marilyn Bergman died in 2022.)

According to Sunshine, Bergman suffered from respiratory issues in recent months, but continued to write songs till the very end. His daughter Julie Bergman was present at the time of his death.

For most of the three decades starting in 1970, the husband-and-wife team scored 16 Oscar nominations. A partial list of their notable songs includes:

“I Knew I Loved You” (music by Ennio Morricone) recorded by Céline Dion for the Morricone tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone (2007) “The Windmills of Your Mind...

Alan Bergman, the Oscar-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning songwriter whose lyric-writing partnership with his wife Marilyn lasted more than six decades and produced such hits as “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were” and “In the Heat of the Night,” has died. He was 99.

Bergman died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles, per the New York Times.

Marilyn Bergman, who died in January 2022, was the first woman president and chairman of the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), a leading performing-rights society for music-makers. Alan soldiered on even after her death, continuing to put words to music.

The Bergmans, who penned hundreds of songs, mostly for movies and TV, bridged the traditional Great American Songbook era of Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin with the more modern pop sensibility of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

Their poetic touch, combined with...

“Let me ask you something,” composer Lalo Schifrin told me a few years ago during a long conversation that, sadly, would be our last. “When you write your articles, do you require a piano? I imagine you don’t, because you already have all the words that you need in your mind, which you then elaborate with your knowledge of grammar and syntax, right? It’s exactly the same for me. I don’t need a musical instrument in order to compose a piece. The notes are in my head.”

I had the privilege of interviewing Schifrin, who died Thursday at 93, multiple times during the past three decades. The most memorable meeting with the Emmy-nominated (Mission: Impossible theme) and Oscar-nominated composer (Sting II, The Amityville Horror) was a leisurely lunch at one of his favorite Beverly Hills restaurants when I was still in my early 20s and just getting started in journalism.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Spine #716, is now available on 4K in the Criterion Collection.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of those legendary films that every self-respecting cinephile knows about. They’ve either seen it and sing its praises or have it on their watchlist and secretly live in shame for not watching it yet. I was in the latter category, having the musical on my watchlist for decades without pulling the trigger. Perhaps I was unknowingly waiting for this moment to watch it in the beautifully restored 4K addition to the Criterion Collection’s catalog. While I regret waiting until I was in my late thirties to see the movie, it was worth the wait.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg plot

Geneviève is the young daughter of an umbrella shop owner who falls head-over-heels in love with Guy, a local mechanic. When Guy is drafted and shipped off to war,...

Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg retains its direct appeal to the eyes, ears, and tear ducts after more than 60 years, with an emotionalism that’s shameless but never crass. A melodrama about first love set in the French port city of the title, it stood as a bold reinvention of the movie musical in 1964, just as the genre was beginning a nosedive in its Hollywood birthplace.

It became an international hit celebrated for Michel Legrand’s sung-through score, a primary-color palette that gave its settings the aura of a fairy tale, and Demy’s success in getting audiences to blubber at the pathos of thwarted romance, decorously adding elements like teen pregnancy and prostitution that were unseen in the Hollywood musical. If the aesthetics of characters bursting into song was starting to meet with resistance as the Beatles prepared to storm the globe, Demy consciously upped the ante...

France’s César Awards mark their 50th ceremony at the Olympia Theatre in Paris this evening with swashbuckler The Count of Monte Cristo, star-crossed romance Beating Hearts and Mexico-set, Spanish language musical Oscar hopeful Emilia Pérez leading the nominations.

Other multi-nominated titles include asylum seeker drama Souleymane’s Story, thriller Misericordia and The Marching Band, a feel-good movie set in a declining manufacturing town in northern France.

Voted on by the just under 5,000 members of the Academy of Cinema Arts and Techniques, or César Academy, France’s equivalent of the Oscars or Baftas celebrate French productions released in the country between January 1 to December 31 of a given year.

“We’re particularly happy this year because there’s a rich variety in the nominations. There’s everything from popular mainstream cinema to more difficult, demanding films, which have found success in festivals, which is also a reflection of the DNA and diversity of French cinema,...

Brothers and collaborators John David and Malcolm Washington didn’t come to play in the Criterion Closet. As writer/director and star of “The Piano Lesson” Malcolm put it at the start of their visit, “We’re here to do some shopping.” And shop they did, filling their tote bags with some of cinema’s greatest delights, starting with the hefty 10-film series from Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski, “Dekalog,” Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror,” and the Hughes Brothers’ “Menace II Society.”

“Actually, I learned a lot from Allen Hughes,” John David said of the “Menace II Society” co-director. “The influence and the importance of sound and music and how it can really change the mood or the scene in a way that I never stopped to think about it before.”

He also praised the work of John Cassavetes, particularly “Faces” and “Opening Night,” calling the naturalism on display “very inspiring.” Calling...

It has been a banner year for Martin Delemazure, the managing director of Paris-based composer agency Grande Ourse.

He had seven films at the Cannes Film Festival in May featuring music by composers on the agency’s books, topped by Jury Prize-winner Emilia Pérez, which also won Best Cannes Soundtrack for Grande Ourse talent Camille, who takes a co-music credit with life and work partner Clément Ducol.

The other titles spanned Palme d’Or contender Wild Diamond, for which the soundtrack was composed by Audrey Ismaël, who also wrote the music for Un Certain Regard title The Kingdom.

Grande Ourse also represents David Sztanke, who wrote the music for a second film in the sidebar, Dog on Trial. Elsewhere in the Official Selection, client Matteo Locasciulli wrote the soundtrack for bio-doc Jacques Demy, the Pink and the Black in Cannes Classics.

In the parallel Cannes Critics’ Week section, Rebeka Warrior...

A heavy influence on major recent Hollywood musicals such as La La Land, Barbie, and even, perhaps most blatantly, Joker: Folie à Deux, Jacques Demy’s musical masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has been restored in 4K for its 60th anniversary. Starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo with music by Michel Legrand, the restoration will now roll out at NYC’s Film Forum starting on December 6 and at LA’s Laemmle Royal a week later, followed by a larger release.

Here’s the synopsis: “An angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through...

"My love, oh my love." ☂ Janus Films has unveiled the official 4K re-release trailer for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is getting a US theatrical release starting in early December. Jacques Demy's all-timer musical classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg in French) celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, initially opening in France back in 1964. Written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo star as two young lovers in the French city of Cherbourg, separated by circumstance. This new 4K restoration also re-premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival earlier this year with a glamorous event and celebration. This is one of the most beautiful films ever made, so vivid and colorful and emotional and evocative. The film was also restored and re-released in 2013, and is already available as a Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection. Even if this isn't...

European group Mediawan is making waves in the documentary sphere through its sales division Mediawan Rights, which has its own boutique operation handling upscale auteur-driven docs.

Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat is screening at IDFA this week as part of the festival’s Grimonprez retrospective, while An American Pastoral by French director Auberi Adler is screening in the international competition.

“We wanted to develop something different from what we were doing,” says head of documentary sales Arianna Castoldi, of why Mediawan ventured into the feature doc sector. “We decided to create a feature documentary line-up which is very,...

Singaporean film director Eric Khoo has received numerous awards, including the Singapore Cultural Medallion and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. Since 1995, he has played a key role in reviving Singapore’s film industry and gaining international recognition. His notable works have been screened at prestigious film festivals including Berlin, Venice, and Cannes.

On the occasion of his latest film “Spirit World” screening at Tokyo International Film Festival, we speak with him about the casting of the movie and particularly Catherine Deneuve and Masaaki Sakai, his family’s involvement in the movie, surf music in Japan, the Japanese style of the film and other topics

The cast in the movie is one of its most impressive assets. Can you tell me how it worked and particularly how you managed to have Catherine Deneuve and Masaaki Sakai in the movie?

We were in contact with Catherine through our co-producer Matilde Incerti.

Jack Jones, a singer who found fame and chart success on the easy-listening side of the street in the 1960s, and who later became etched in television-watching America’s psyche with the “Love Boat” theme, died Wednesday at 86.

Jones died of leukemia at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, Calif., his wife of 15 years, Eleanora Jones, said.

Jones had hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, but his highest chart numbers could be found on what was then known as the easy listening chart, which later became adult contemporary. In the easy listening format, he had No. 1 singles with “The Race is On” in 1965, “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” in 1966 and “Lady” in 1967.

In particular, “The Impossible Dream” — a cover of the most popular song from the 1965 Broadway musical “Man of La Mancha” — became culturally ubiquitous, through Jones’ frequent TV appearances, even though it peaked at No. 35 on the Hot 100, where it...

Creed’s Michael B Jordan will direct and star in a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, and here are the details.

Since his star making performance in Ryan Coogler’s 2013 drama Fruitvale Station, Michael B. Jordan has taken on an eclectic range of films. He’s gone from starring opposite Chadwick Boseman in Marvel’s Black Panther to headlining Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky sequel Creed trilogy, making his directorial debut with 2023’s Creed 3. A fourth Creed film is reportedly in development.

According to Deadline, Jordan has closed a deal with Amazon MGM Studios and Outlier Society to direct and star in a remake of classic thriller The Thomas Crown Affair – this would be the third take on the material, with the first emerging in 1968.

Drew Pearce has written the remake’s script, rewriting a previous draft by Wes Tooke and Justin Britt-Gibson, which is based on the original film.

French director Claude Lelouch first broke out internationally with 1966 romance A Man and a Woman, starring Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a widow and widower whose fledgling love story is held back by past personal tragedies.

Nearly 60 years later, the soundtrack by late composer Francis Lai – and in particular its title track, which is often referred to as ‘Chabadabada’ for its catchy refrain – remains as famous, if not more famous, than the Oscar and Cannes Palme d’Or-winning feature

That movie would mark the start of a 52-year, 35-picture collaboration between Lelouch and Lai, which was at the heart of a music-themed masterclass by Lelouch at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.

The director is at the festival to receive the Cartier Glory To The Filmmaker Award as well as for the premiere of new work Finalement, starring an ensemble cast led by Kad Merad and also featuring Elsa Zylberstain,...

There must be something in the air lately because I have been seeing and reviewing a number of really good and intriguing documentaries on iconic showbiz figures. At Cannes I saw new docus on Faye Dunaway (Faye), Elizabeth Taylor (Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes) and others on Michel LeGrand and Jacques Demy. Currently on Max you can see a wonderful docu on the great Albert Brooks directed by his longtime friend Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.

Add to the list of must-sees in this sector Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, which clearly has the star’s blessing because she is prominently interviewed in it. The focus ultimately on how she became her own person, especially how she managed to navigate the spotlight put on her after mother Judy Garland’s all-too-tragic death caused much speculation that the same thing might happen to her equally talented powerhouse performer of a a daughter.

It has been a big week for beloved musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the 1964 Palme d’Or and went on to international acclaim and five Oscar nominations and served as one of the key inspirations for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.

The film got a special 60th anniversary Cannes Classics screening Thursday of the exquisitely new restoration at the Agnes Varda Theatre, which is named after the late director and is also wife of late Cherbourg writer-director Jacques Demy. This week also has seen the world premieres of two documentaries related to the film here. On Saturday night at the Buñuel Theatre in the Palais came the premiere of Once Upon a Time: Michel Legrand, an extensive two-hour documentary on the late great composer of Cherbourg and so much more.

Then on Wednesday night, also at the Buñuel, was the unveiling...

As Cannes Film Festival kicks off, the Paris-based international sales company MK2 Films has revealed it has acquired three films and made substantial investments in new restorations, set against the backdrop of a strong presence at Cannes Classics.

MK2 Films has entered into a collaboration with the Niki Charitable Art Foundation on the global rights (excluding the U.S.) for two films directed by artist Niki de Saint Phalle: “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” (1976) and “Daddy” (1973). “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” has been restored in 4K by L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna-Paris) under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle and with funding from Dior. It was presented at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, New York Film Festival and the new Los Angeles Festival of Movies. “Daddy” will soon be available in a restored version. MK2 Films described it as a “unique feminist work by one of...

Animation has the power to make even the simplest emotions feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories, which — despite the edifying nuance and eye-popping flair of recent films such as “Encanto” and “Across the Spider-Verse” — can make it frustrating that American studios have largely been trending toward overcomplicated plots and realistic design. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s extremely French “Chicken for Linda” is the clearest possible reminder of what we’ve been missing. It’s about an eight-year-old girl named Linda who wants to eat chicken for dinner. Delightful mayhem ensues.

As in Laudenbach’s “The Girl Without Hands,” all of the characters are traced with thick black lines that lend them the aspirational possibility of a fashion sketch; each of them is filled in with a single swash of color that spills over the charcoal borders of their body whenever they get excited. Linda (voiced by Melinée Leclerc) is yellow,...

The films in the running for the 2024 Best Original Score Oscar are “American Fiction,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Poor Things.” Our current odds indicate that “Oppenheimer” (3/1) will take the prize, followed in order of likelihood by “Killers of the Flower Moon” (4/1), “Poor Things” (9/2), “Indiana Jones” (9/2), and “American Fiction” (9/2).

Just two of the five musicians on this roster are returning contenders, with the first-timer subgroup consisting of Jerskin Fendrix (“Poor Things”), Laura Karpman (“American Fiction”), and Robbie Robertson (“Killers of the Flower Moon”). Robertson, who died last August at age 80, is this category’s eighth posthumous nominee and first since 1977, when Bernard Herrmann earned dual bids for “Obsession” and “Taxi Driver” nearly 14 months after his death. He would be the fourth deceased composer to win an Academy Award, following Victor Young and “Limelight” (1973) duo Raymond Rasch and Larry Russell.

Of the...

Nominated in five categories at the 39th Film Independent Spirit Awards, the darkly humorous and ominously cringey psychological drama May December is filmmaker Todd Haynes’ tenth (!) Spirit Award nomination. A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes previously won Best Director for 2002’s period romantic drama Far from Heaven (starring May December co-lead Julianne Moore), as well as the Robert Altman Award for 2007’s Bob-Dylan-inspired musical fantasia, I’m Not There.

Haynes has talked about how May December is about “the stories we tell ourselves” in order to “survive our lives.” Loosely based on the 1990s-era Irl story of Mary Kay Letourneau, the film follows 59-year-old housewife Gracie (Moore), who seems happily married with children to her 36-year-old husband, Joe Yoo, played by Charles Melton. Melton, too, is nominated for Best Supporting Performance at the 2024 Spirit Awards, streaming Live this Sunday at 2pm Pt.

The narrative tension kicks off when...

Raucher was nominated for an Oscar for the 1971 box office hit.

Herman Raucher, the Oscar-nominated American writer of Summer Of ‘42 as well as other films, plays and novels, has died aged 95.

A statement from his family said Raucher died of natural causes on December 28.

Born in New York, Raucher began his writing career in television and advertising. His early feature work included the screenplays for Sweet November, Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man and cult musical comedy Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? The latter brought him the Writers Guild of Great Britain award for...

Herman Raucher, whose Oscar-nominated Summer of ’42 screenplay became one of Hollywood’s best-loved coming-of-age tales, has died of natural causes at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Ct. He was 95.

His December 28 death was announced by daughter Jenny Raucher, who was by his side when he passed.

Subsequently adapted by Raucher into an international best-selling novel, 1971’s Summer of ’42 was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay. It told the nostalgic and bittersweet story of teenager Hermie — played by Gary Grimes and based on Raucher himself — who, during a summertime vacation on Nantucket Island, becomes infatuated with a beautiful (and soon grieving) older woman (Jennifer O’Neill) whose husband has gone off to fight in World War II.

The film, directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), was a critical success and a major hit for Warner Bros. Michel Legrand’s score won an Oscar and quickly became...

They say that one person’s loss is another person’s gain, but cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt had mixed emotions about his recent good fortune in landing the coveted director of photography gig on “May December,” the latest film from Todd Haynes. The director is known for his Oscar-nominated collaborations with longtime colleague Ed Lachman, which include “Carol” and “Far from Heaven.” Lachman, however, suffered a broken hip after a fall while shooting Pablo Larraín’s “El Conde,” and Haynes needed a new set of eyes. So he turned to his filmmaker pal Kelly Reichardt for recommendations, and Blauvelt stepped aboard the darkly comic tale of a tenacious actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), infiltrating the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a Mary Kay Letourneau-esque homemaker and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), who was 13 when they first got together.

“Kelly and Todd are teachers for me, I learned so much from them,...

Every few years, the Golden Globe awards have a category hiccup. In 2015, the Ridley Scott/Matt Damon Robinson-Crusoe-in-space sci-fi movie “The Martian” was nominated (and won) for best motion picture — musical or comedy, even though the movie contained no songs and no one thought it was a comedy. A month ago, in that same category, the Globes gave a nomination to “May December,” Todd Haynes’ acclaimed but hard-to-categorize film based, not so loosely, on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau. She, of course, was the sixth-grade teacher who spent seven years in prison after having been caught in a sexual relationship with one of her 12-year-old students, who she went on to marry and have a family with.

Categorizing “May December” as a “musical or comedy” is a lot more eyebrow-raising than calling “The Martian” one. In this case, though, the Globes at least have an ally: all the...

As Martin Scorsese once said, “Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together. It’s been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that’s true.” Indeed, the right piece of music––whether it’s an original score or a carefully selected song––can do wonders for a sequence, and today we’re looking at the 20 films that best expressed that notion in 2023.

From seasoned composers to accomplished musicians, as well as a smattering of soundtracks, each perfectly transported us. Check out our rundown of the top 20, which includes streams to each soundtrack in full where available.

20. Infinity Pool (Tim Hecker)

19. Knock at the Cabin (Herdís Stefánsdóttir)

18. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (Lorne Balfe)

17. Passages (Various Artists)

16. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Daniel Pemberton)

15. Master Gardener...

The preshoot rituals they can’t live without, the studio negotiations they’ve learned to finesse and the creative choices they still can’t believe they got away with — the directors of six of this year’s most remarkable movies got together and talked shop. In November, Blitz Bazawule (The Color Purple), Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Ava DuVernay (Origin), Greta Gerwig (Barbie), Todd Haynes (May December) and Michael Mann (Ferrari) convened for THR’s annual Director Roundtable.

How do you like to start on set? Do you actually call action?

Greta Gerwig I guess I say, “When you’re ready.” It seems less aggressive.

Ava Duvernay I call action. Or I have action called. It took me a long time in my filmmaking to feel confident not to be the one calling action. Now I’ll just tap my Ad, and he or she will do it. But I find it...

The boundary-pushing melodrama "May December" is a tonally unique film, and the stand-out score electrifies the audience into this strange mood. The dramatic piano music matches the off-beat camp of the absurd comedic moments, while more eerie dissonant notes immediately foreshadow the dark subject matter ahead. The film was composed by Marcelo Zarvos, an accomplished composer and proficient piano player. However, some of the music was taken straight from Joseph Losey's 1971 romance thriller "The Go-Between."

Todd Haynes' 2023 film follows an actress' background research as she prepares for a fictional adaptation of a true crime story about a woman who had an affair with a 13-year-old at age 36. Their relationship was the subject of tabloid fodder in the '90s, but the controversial couple remained married well into the boy's adulthood and raised several children together. However, the actress' arrival brings up questions for the young man about his relationship.

First reviews out of Cannes for Todd Haynes’ poisonously witty and complex new film “May December” heralded “a heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp,” “a camp and curious pleasure,” a “camp look at an actor’s process of transformation into a character.”

But how does “camp” figure into the context of a film starring Natalie Portman as a celebrity actress studying Julianne Moore as a Southern spin on Mary Kay Letourneau, the middle school teacher who had a sexual relationship with her 12-year-old student, was convicted of rape and imprisoned, and then married and had two children with him? Portman’s character is set to play Moore’s in a new movie. Is it by virtue of seeing these two gay-iconic actresses on a set with the director of “Carol,” “Velvet Goldmine,” and “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” a 1988 documentary about the ill-fated singer stop-motion-animated with Barbie dolls? Is it...

In one scene early in Todd Haynes’s new film, May December, Joe’s (Charles Melton) face flickers with the grey-blue light of the TV screen playing a commercial for face wash. The commercial stars Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), the TV star who will be playing his wife, Gracie (Julianne Moore), in an upcoming film and who will be visiting their home to do research for the role. The brief shot of Elizabeth’s face, sparkling with water and freshness and something like “realness,” loops on itself over and over again, while Joe’s eyes glaze over.

Later in the film, days into her research into Joe and Gracie’s lives, a lurid scene of an adult woman seducing a 13-year-old pet store employee plays on the television set in Elizabeth’s hotel room, a black bar on the screen boldly stating “Do Not Replicate.” It signals at once a trashiness...

There aren’t a lot of precedents in pop music for the pairing of Billie Eilish and Finneas, when it comes to brother-and-sister performing or songwriting duos. But in the world of music for films, it might not be too soon to start considering a comparison with a very famous married duo: Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the long-reigning king and queen of movie theme songs. The Bergmans weren’t a fully self-contained songwriting unit; they primarily worked as lyricists, joining up with outside composers like Michel Legrand or Marvin Hamlisch on Oscar-winning material like “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were” and the song score of “Yentl.” But it’s their names that are synonymous with film songs like few others’. Could it be that the O’Connells are following in their footsteps?

It’s much too soon to tell, with only a handful of movie songs to...

May December director Todd Haynes said of first reading Samy Burch’s script, “I loved how disquieting it was for the reader and thought, ‘Wow, if there was a way to convey this on screen and ignite that sense of engaged questioning and uncertainty’… It reminded me of the kind of movies that I came of age watching. It made you question your assumptions going in, made you want to discuss them and think about them later.” Haynes was speaking at Deadline’s Contenders London event this afternoon.

Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, the film picks up 20 years after an affair between Gracie (Moore), an adult woman and a much – much – younger man (Melton) made tabloid headlines. In the present day, famous TV star Elizabeth (Portman) visits the now-married couple while researching a film that will be based on the old scandal.

Burch said she was inspired...

The first shots of Todd Haynes’s May December (cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt), screenplay by Samy Burch, are of butterflies with one of them seemingly stuck, accompanied by the most perfectly ominous and playful music, which sounds a lot like Michel Legrand. Precisely because it is a variation of a Legrand score (for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between), adapted by Marcelo Zarvos for this film.

We enter the Southern world by the river - where the trees wear veils and moms bake pies for business and children hang out on the slanted roofs - with movie star Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) during a barbecue. Many mirrors reflect the journey of an actress through the looking glass into the world of Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman whose affair at age 37 with a seventh grader was tabloid fodder 20 years prior.

Elizabeth arrives in Savannah, Georgia, in understated, carefully chosen...

May December director Todd Haynes with screenwriter Samy Burch, and his producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Jessica Elbaum and Sophie Mas Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Todd Haynes’s May December, screenplay by Samy Burch, shot by Christopher Blauvelt and starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton opened the 61st New York Film Festival on Friday. Todd’s previous films screening at the New York Film Festival were Velvet Goldmine (NYFF 36), I’m Not There (NYFF 45), Carol (NYFF 53), Wonderstruck (NYFF 55 - Centerpiece Selection), and The Velvet Underground (NYFF 59).

Todd Haynes responding to Anne-Katrin Titze’s comment and question: “I did not create the lisp! There are some people who are missing today who could speak so beautifully about how they built these characters.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the press conference Todd Haynes spoke about connecting his composer Marcelo Zarvos to Michel Legrand’s score for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (Harold Pinter...

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore are splitting up their Oscar campaigns for awards season.

Although Todd Haynes’ delicious drama “May December” is interpreted by many as a two-hander, Netflix confirms to Variety exclusively that Portman will be submitted for lead actress consideration, while Moore will vie for supporting actress.

Co-leads from awards contenders are seldom campaigned alongside one another. One of Haynes’ most beloved films, the love story “Carol” (2015) starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, was famously criticized for separating its two presumed leading performers for its respective awards season. Blanchett was nominated in lead with Mara in supporting. While it can be debated for awards enthusiasts, there are only five instances of two women being nominated for the same movie in the Oscars’ 95-year history. The last was Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon for “Thelma & Louise” (1991).

Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.

Film composers easily rank among cinema's greatest unsung heroes. While many directors and movie stars eventually become household names, very few film composers receive adequate adulation from the mass audience. Film scores are integral to a movie's success, providing and enhancing the mood, tone, atmosphere, and emotion of the drama at hand.

Imagine the shark attack scenes in Jaws without John Williams' score or the shower scene in Psycho without Bernard Herrmann's score. The music is arguably the primary reason these scenes have become touchstone moments in film history. Cinema's elite film composers have impacted popular culture just as much as actors, directors, and producers.

Related: 10 Best Movies With Famous Soundtracks

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin is a foundational figure in movie history who is beloved for his acting and directing. However, a much-overlooked facet of Chaplin's career is his brilliance as a film composer. Starting with City Lights, Chaplin...

If anyone was going to dramatize the scandalous Mary Kay Letourneau story, it makes sense that it would be "Carol" director Todd Haynes. There's something about the way the filmmaker approaches the stories he is compelled to tell that uniquely positions him to decipher and reinvent what has always felt stranger than fiction. Haynes expertly capitalizes on that strangeness and turns it on its ear, employing it for demented laughs as much as he does for crushing awareness. In his hands, "May December" is all at once an exploration of the human condition and a tightrope line of boundaries uncrossable. Haynes' work positions this new film to be a high-drama Trojan horse filled with self-actualizing horrors, and it's safe to say that the playful yet sobering style the filmmaker uses this time will stick with audiences long past awards season.

"May December" chronicles the aftermath of a tabloid scandal romance...

In the experimental montage that opens “Persona,” a bare-chested teenage boy caresses a screen upon which the faces of two women slowly morph back and forth. It’s easy to imagine Todd Haynes being tempted to start his deep-as-you-want-to-go rabbit-hole drama “May December” the same way, seeing as how this endlessly fascinating movie focuses on the blurring of the lines between a Hollywood star (Natalie Portman) and her true-crime character (Julianne Moore), who was caught in a sexual relationship with a 7th grader at the age of 36. The movie wants to know: Can playing this Mary Kay Letourneau-like tabloid sensation really answer what makes such a woman tick?

A heady director whose entire oeuvre feels ripe for film-studies dissertations, Haynes makes movies not merely to be watched, but to be analyzed and deconstructed after the fact. From the rich Douglas Sirkian pastiche of “Far From Heaven” to the queer...

There’s a postmodernist horror movie about performance as predation hidden beneath the semiotician’s gaze in Todd Haynes’ May December, a complex drama that’s intrinsically intimate and yet also detached, at times almost clinical. The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach, likely making this a tough sell beyond Haynes’ devoted admirers.

What will give the film a significant degree of traction, however, are the riveting performances of Natalie Portman and frequent Haynes muse Julianne Moore, as two women at cross purposes, one seeking to excavate the past and another who has spent two decades endeavoring to bury it. An astonishing monologue delivered by Portman into a mirror in particular demands to be seen.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 17, with a streaming release to follow on Friday, December 1.

A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes’ delicious “May December” continues the director’s tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters — especially the ones played by Julianne Moore.

Here, the actress reteams with her “Safe” director to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who became a household name back in 1992 when she left her ex-husband for her 13-year-old fellow pet shop employee. Now it’s 2015, the situation has normalized somewhat, and Gracie and Joe (a dad bod Charles Melton) have been together long enough that their youngest children are about to graduate high school. The occasional package full of poop...

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Gene Cipriano, the always busy woodwind player who soloed on tenor sax for Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot and recorded with everyone from Miles Davis, Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra to Glen Campbell, Paul McCartney and Olivia Newton-John, has died. He was 94.

Cipriano died Nov. 12 of natural causes at his home in Studio City, his son Paul told The Hollywood Reporter.

Perhaps the most recorded woodwind player in show business history, Cipriano played soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, all the clarinets and flutes, the oboe and bass oboe, the piccolo and the English horn.

Affectionally known as “Cip,” the session musician performed as a member of the Academy Awards Orchestra in the neighborhood of 60 times since 1958. (At the 1977 show, he exchanged “yo’s” with Barbra Streisand, who had just arrived at the podium after having won for “Evergreen.”)

Cipriano...

The inarguably true cliché about Jean-Luc Godard was that the late filmmaker, who died this week at the age of 91, was a rule-breaker, an artist whose style changed the course of film history by revealing the medium for everything it had already been and pointing to the future of what it could eventually be. Obviously, his body of work has been influential — but that’s an understatement.

And not only for his extensive, time- and media-spanning filmography, ranging from his cucumber-cool debut, Breathless, to the didactic political experiments of the 1960s and 1970s,...

He was tough, he was sexy, and he was one of the most charismatic movies stars of the 1970s — he was James Caan, your go-to guy when you wanted someone who could be flinty yet charming, smooth yet volatile. A Bronx-born, Queens-raised actor who claimed he was the “only New York Jewish cowboy,” the former Michigan State football player got bit by the acting bug when he transferred to Hofstra University, and was already making the bit-player rounds on TV shows (Dr. Kildare, Combat!, Route 66, The Alfred Hitchcock Show) in the early ’60s.

Steve McQueen’s final film is an action-comedy compromise that will satisfy his fans even if it barely hangs together. The thrills are kinder & gentler, with plenty of hair-raising stunts but less gunplay and gore. McQueen’s eccentric bounty hunter collects toys and can barely drive a car, but he always gets his man. Kathryn Harrold is good; Eli Wallach, LeVar Burton, Ben Johnson, Richard Venture and Tracey Walter are along for the ride (and stay out of Steve’s spotlight). Steve’s in charge — he tailors everything to highlight his quirky star characterization, and the guiding principle is ‘low key.’

The Hunter

Region Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 110

1980 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date April 6, 2022 / Available from Amazon Au

Starring: Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, Kathryn Harrold, LeVar Burton, Ben Johnson, Richard Venture, Tracey Walter, Tom Rosales, Teddy Wilson, Ray Bickel, Bobby Bass, Karl Schueneman, Taurean Blacque, Al Ruscio, David Spielberg.

Streaming

Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru, best known for hit Amazon Prime Video India series “The Family Man,” are partnering with Netflix on series “Guns & Gulaabs” under their D2R Films banner. “The series is set to uniquely blend the romance of the 90s with a crime thriller while effortlessly lacing it in humor,” according to Netflix. The series is created, directed and produced by Krishna and Nidimoru, who also write alongside Suman Kumar and Sumit Arora.

Krishna and Nidimoru said: “Last year, we had a great outing on Netflix with our indie gem, ‘Cinema Bandi.’ And now we look forward to a larger collaboration on our first Netflix series, ‘Guns & Gulaabs.’ We are especially thrilled to roll out this wicked genre mash with some of the finest cast and crew from our country.”

Tanya Bami, series head, Netflix India, said: “Bringing their unique storytelling style to Netflix, Raj & Dk blend romance,...