News

The first thing you want from a history of MTV is to get dunked in the hot-but-cool nostalgia of it, and the fast, fleet documentary “I Want My MTV” delivers those 1980s goods about as good as you can get. Here’s “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the novelty single by the Buggles that launched the channel on Aug. 1, 1981 — a tune that, in hindsight, sounds as sing-song catchy in its percolating bliss as a Divertimento by Mozart. Here are the five original VJs — shaggy Mark Goodman, earnest Alan Hunter, snarky Martha Quinn, jovial J.J. Jackson, and hipstery Nina Blackwood — fumbling around against a set that looks more like Wayne Campbell’s basement than a television studio, tossing off we’re-making-this-up-on-the-spot-and-we-know-it patter that became the casual formative version of “attitude.”

Here are those primitive early days when for every music video that was made with flair, like the S&M-flavored Old...

The 18th Tribeca Film Festival will host big screen world premieres of major new small screen shows such as The Boys, Chernobyl, Tuca & Bertie and The Hot Zone. There will also be a special Tribeca Talks Farewell Conversation with the cast and creator of Mr. Robot and the creative team behind The Simpsons will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the longest-running animated series in television history.

James Kleinmann takes a look at some of the TV highlights at this year’s Tribeca, for the full lineup and to purchase tickets head to the official Tribeca website.

The Simpsons – 30th Anniversary The Simpsons – 30th Anniversary. Image courtesy of Fox

Following a screening of the episodes Marge vs the Monorail and The Day the Earth Stood Cool, the creative team behind The Simpsons will celebrate the show’s incredible thirty year run, and counting. Executive producers James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean and Matt Selman,...

It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...