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Back in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood operated with a different set of rules. Before the Hays Code cracked down on content in the middle of 1934, films were brushed with hot topics such as sex, female liberation, alcoholism, and depression. These movies are the Pre-Code films.

Working within this realm was just one female director – the Queen, Dorothy Arzner. This director not only created films at a time where men dictated and controlled the industry, she also produced films that had a clear feminist voice. With snappy and head-strong female leads dominating her movies, Arzner helped change the landscape with these incredible films. She was so popular that she was the first woman to be included in the Directors Guild of America.

Thanks to the BFI Film On Film Festival, audiences got to see a newly restored print of her nifty comedy, Working Girls (1931).

Written by Zoe Akins...

Diane Keaton was Woody Allen‘s ex-girlfriend and muse when she played the lead in his 1977 hit film, Annie Hall — but she wasn’t the only one who served as inspiration.

In her new memoir, Brother & Sister, the 74-year-old star explains that Annie’s troubled brother Duane (Christopher Walken) was based on her own brother John Randolph Hall, an artist who has struggled with mental illness, alcoholism, and dark fantasies his whole life. Now 71, Hall suffers from dementia and lives in a care facility, where his sister visits him weekly.

“Sometimes, when I’m driving on the road at night,...

Diane Keaton, 74, has forged a decades-long career for herself as an award-winning actress. Her younger brother, John Randolph Hall, has lived a life that couldn’t be more different: “on the other side of normal,” as Keaton puts it, since childhood, Hall received a variety of diagnoses over the years (bipolar disorder, schizoid personality disorder) but nothing definitive. Now 71, he is suffering from dementia and lives in a care facility, where his sister visits him every Sunday.

In an exclusive interview with People, Keaton shares memories of her brother and their relationship, the subject of her new memoir, Brother & Sister.

This affable memoir is too self-effacing for comfort

The key quote in Diane Keaton's memoir does not come from Diane Keaton. Nor from one of her unbeatable back catalogue of exes (Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino and the unconfirmed but fairly inevitable Jack Nicholson). Nor even from Dorothy Hall, Keaton's late mother, whose disconsolate diaries are spliced with her daughter's story – homespun sourdough added to the jammy showbiz. It comes from Cher.

"There is only value to having the look you have when you are young," Keaton quotes the Mermaids star as saying, "and no value to the look you have when you are older." It is an astonishingly boring thought, hard to get through without a nap. What's significant is that Keaton feels moved to waste space with such generic soundbites rather than risk her own.

It's not a one-off. Almost everyone else's insight gets priority treatment.

Diane Keaton's autobiography is an endearing ramble that reveals more about her close relationship with her mother than it does about her films

You would not expect a memoir by Diane Keaton to be a conventional "as told to" or ghosted showbusiness autobiography, and indeed she recognises her own eccentricity in a 1969 letter to her mother written after failing an audition for a Broadway comedy. "Too tall and too 'kooky' – a nice way of saying strange," she reports, using a newly fashionable term to describe the ditzy likes of Goldie Hawn, Liza Minnelli and herself. Her rambling, endearing book is not short of glamorous names, nor does it scorn ambition and fame. But she shares the stage with her family and most particularly with her mother, Dorothy Hall, as co-star. On the final page she calls the book "our memoir – your words with my words". In 1968 when she got...

Diane Keaton recently released a new book, "Then Again," but just like the idiosyncratic actress, it's not your run-of-the-mill celebrity autobiography. The book is really a joint effort between Keaton and her late mother, Dorothy Hall, who kept extensive journals throughout her life, and the result is a poignant and deeply moving memoir.

In "Then Again," the 65-year-old actress candidly writes about the three big loves of her life: Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, and reveals her secret struggle with bulimia during her early 20s.

Why did you decide to focus half of the book on your mother, Dorothy?

Because my family ... seemed to believe that documentation was key. My mother collected and saved everything. She left 85 journals; I never read them when she was alive. I, too, collect and save everything. Let's say you send me an email -- I'll be saving it. The point is, I'm not a writer,...