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Spoilers for "Andor" to follow.

Now that "Andor" is over, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) is likely to go down as one of the show's best creations. The Rebellion Alliance may not want to remember Luthen's legacy in helping to build it, but it's a legacy "Star Wars" fans won't forget. "Star Wars" has been political from the beginning, but "Andor" threads the needle like never before. A lot of that is Luthen's presence; he's a Rebel who feels like an actual revolutionary.

There's no Death Star yet in "Andor," but the Rebels have challenges aplenty — real challenges, like factionalist infighting and compromises for greater goods. Luthen saying in "One Way Out" that "I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I'll never see" is one of the most succinct and beautiful sentiments explaining political resistance I've heard — knowing...

Academy Award winner Alvin Sargent, who penned an extraordinary number of popular and critically successful films, from “Paper Moon” and “Ordinary People” to the “Spider-Man” sequels of the 2000s, died Thursday, his talent agency Gersh confirmed to Variety. He was 92.

Sargent won adapted screenplay Oscars for “Julia” in 1978 and “Ordinary People” in 1981 and was also nominated in the category in 1974 for “Paper Moon.” (He also received Writers Guild awards for all three films.) The writer worked with many of Hollywood’s top directors over the course of his career, including Alan J. Pakula, John Frankenheimer. Paul Newman, Peter Bogdanovich, Sydney Pollack, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Redford, Martin Ritt, Norman Jewison, Stephen Frears and Wayne Wang, though not always when those helmers were doing their best work.

Sargent started as a writer for television but broke into features with his screenplay for 1966’s “Gambit,” a Ronald Neame-directed comedy thriller starring Michael Caine,...

We all would like to believe that we have that someone special to look up to for guidance and direction. From time to time we practice the art of worship for the mentor that appears larger than life to us. Whether our designated mentors that we choose to follow are inspirational or insidious it does not matter because that yearning to follow in their footsteps are so great that we blindly give anything to replicate that original blueprint.

Maybe if one dreams of being a famous astronaut you designate Neii Armstrong or John Glenn as your mentoring heroes? Perhaps your foray into film criticism was ignited by Judith Crist, Vincent Canby or Siskel & Ebert? How about emulating your favorite actor or singer and following their paths to success?

In Follow My Lead: Top Ten Mentors in the Movies we will look at some movie characters that served as mentors to...

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will open the 2014 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival with the world premiere of a brand new restoration of the beloved Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955). TCM’s own Robert Osborne, who serves as official host for the festival, will introduce Oklahoma!, with the film’s star, Academy Award®-winner Shirley Jones, in attendance. Vanity Fair will also return for the fifth year as a festival partner and co-presenter of the opening night after-party. Marking its fifth year, the TCM Classic Film Festival will take place April 10-13, 2014, in Hollywood. The gathering will coincide withTCM’s 20th anniversary as a leading authority in classic film.

In addition, the festival has added several high-profile guests to this year’s lineup, including Oscar®-winning director William Friedkin, who will attend for the screening of the U.S. premiere restoration of his suspenseful cult classic Sorcerer (1977); Kim Novak, who...

Versatile production designer, screenwriter and producer of Hollywood films

Popular legend has it that the new wave of American film-making in the late 1960s and early 1970s was an exclusively masculine phenomenon, a myth bolstered by the hard-living excesses documented in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But women were instrumental in many of the movies which defined that era, and few more so than Polly Platt, who has died aged 72 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

"I call myself a confused careerist," she said of her switches from production and costume design to writing and producing. She was credited as production designer on the films which brought to prominence her second husband, the director Peter Bogdanovich, notably The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973), but her contribution extended far beyond that job description. "They discussed every shot," wrote Biskind of the making of The Last Picture Show.

By Elisabeth DonnellyTatum O'Neal became the youngest Oscar winner in history as part of a maybe father-daughter grifter duo in Peter Bogdanovich's charming Depression-set relic of the golden age of '70s cinema. Paper Moon Dir. Peter Bogdanovich (1973)With the recent dispiriting news that father-daughter duo Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal are shopping around a reality series about their potential reconciliation, let's go back to happier times in the '70s, when Ryan and Tatum were co-starring in the classic Paper Moon.Based on the book Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and adapted snappily for the screen by Alvin Sargent, Paper Moon is a delightful film about a Depression-era con man, Moses Pray, who is saddled with a grifter kid, Addie, who may or may not be his daughter. It's funny to think that the film came out of the...

Paper Moon Dir. Peter Bogdanovich (1973) With the recent dispiriting news that father-daughter duo Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal are shopping around a reality series about their potential reconciliation, let's go back to happier times in the '70s, when Ryan and Tatum were co-starring in the classic Paper Moon. Based on the book Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and adapted snappily for the screen by Alvin Sargent, Paper Moon is a delightful film about a Depression-era con man, Moses Pray, who is saddled with a grifter kid, Addie, who may or may not be his daughter. It's funny to think that the film came out of the golden era of the '70s, where, for a short while, directors got away with smart mainstream entertainment about likable people and interesting stories. Shot in crisp black-and-white, the film feels like a tribute and a lost film from the '30s,...