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The teaser trailer for director James Gunn’s newest movie version of Superman was recently released online. And, unlike previous films, this one has a cute dog that everyone seems to already love.

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Of course, Superman has proven to be one of the most enduring heroes in the history of pop culture, even surviving John Cleese’s awkward take on the character. But this multibillion dollar franchise began as a simple idea from two guys who were eventually screwed out of those billions of dollars: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Also, it could be argued that the character of Superman wouldn’t be quite the same if not for the influence of one of Canada’s most famous comedians: Joe’s cousin Frank Shuster.

Frank, along with Johnny Wayne, performed as the comedy duo Wayne and Shuster for decades. They had their own shows on radio and television in Canada,...

For over 25 years, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival called the Castro Theatre home. With the iconic theater now closed for a year-plus-long renovation, Sfsff has relocated to the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, located in a beautiful park created for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition at the north edge of the Presidio. The auditorium, primarily a performance space, seats nearly a thousand and features a spacious foyer where passholders could visit and relax between shows (particularly useful on chilly weekends).

Sfsff prides itself on mixing landmark productions and audience favorites with rediscoveries, revelations, and rarities, often recently uncovered and restored. And for its 27th edition this year, the festival presented 20 features and six short films over five days, all with live musical scores by some of the finest silent film accompanists in the world.

The opening night film, Albert Parker’s 1926 swashbuckler The Black Pirate, certainly qualifies as both landmark and favorite.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGuy Maddin’s next film, Rumours, recently wrapped production in Hungary. The ensemble piece is led by Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, who play world leaders who end up stranded in a forest during the annual G7 summit. Maddin has shared a breathless, spoof press release (below) announcing the film, describing the project as “an elevated dramedy and erotico-political threnody cum sylvan moodbank.”Paul Thomas Anderson is also at work on something new. So far, all we know is that his project is set in the present day and will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall. Production begins in California later this year.Recommended VIEWINGOne of the most exciting rediscoveries of the 2023 Il Cinema Ritrovato festival was the restoration of David Schickele’s Bushman...

Guillermo del Toro takes a walk on the noir side in his first film since winning the Oscar for directing the 2017 best picture winner “The Shape of Things.” “Nightmare Alley,’ based on the uncompromising 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, offers a bleak depiction of humanity including low-rent carnivals filled with has-beens, geeks and “rum-dums.” Searchlight Pictures is giving “Nightmare Alley,” which had to shut down production during the height of Covid in 2020, the “A” treatment, opening the film on Dec. 3 just in time for awards consideration.

The innovative Mexican filmmaker best known for his acclaimed fantasy, horror (“The Devil’s Backbone”) and sci-fi (‘Hellboy”) productions, co-wrote the screenplay with Kim Morgan. Bradley Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, a handsome manipulative carny worker who has a massive chip on his shoulder. Stan wants to hit the big time and with the help of carnival headliner Zeena (Toni Collette) resurrects her old mentalist act.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association rallied a roster of film world heavy-hitters Saturday at the Ace Hotel’s United Artists theater in downtown Los Angeles for the organization’s first Film Restoration Summit devoted to celebrating classic films and the urgent need to put more resources into saving them.

Naturally, the importance of preserving the big-screen experience was a major theme, but the event was mainly dedicated to celebrating films that have been brought back to life through the efforts of organizations such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the UCLA Film Archive.

The HFPA has donated $6.5 million to such efforts since 1996, going toward 125 restoration projects.

Panelists Jane Fonda, Thierry Fremaux, Alexander Payne, Sony’s Grover Crisp and UCLA’s Jan-Christopher Horak came together to discuss the necessity of stepping up preservation efforts, particularly for silent, independent and international films. A restored print of “A Fistful of Dollars” screened after the presentation.

Growing up in India, Meher Tatna could see the spoils of child labor first hand. There were pint-sized beggars on the road and child servants in homes; out of view, youngsters toiled in factories rather than attend school, in some cases sold into slavery due to their families’ grinding poverty.

So the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s $500,000 grant to an Indian organization dedicated to eradicating child labor and slavery hit especially close to home for Tatna, HFPA’s president since June 2017.

“It’s one thing I am just really proud of,” says Tatna of the grant to Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation.

Part of the $3.1 million HFPA is awarding educational and cultural organizations this year, the donation is an outgrowth of a conversation Tatna had with David Linde, head of Participant Media. He suggested several possible candidates for HFPA’s big annual international grant, Kscf among them.

Tatna, who left...

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents "A Day of Silents" tomorrow featuring The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks, a long lost Harry Houdini film (The Grim Game), Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine, Anna May Wong in Piccadilly and more. Meantime, Ben Rivers will be presenting work in Los Angeles, there's an Antonio Pietrangeli retrospective on in New York, the Notebook reviews an exhibition of installation work by Chantal Akerman in London and, in Gateshead, in the UK, there's an exhibition devoted to Bill Murray. » - David Hudson...

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents "A Day of Silents" tomorrow featuring The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks, a long lost Harry Houdini film (The Grim Game), Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine, Anna May Wong in Piccadilly and more. Meantime, Ben Rivers will be presenting work in Los Angeles, there's an Antonio Pietrangeli retrospective on in New York, the Notebook reviews an exhibition of installation work by Chantal Akerman in London and, in Gateshead, in the UK, there's an exhibition devoted to Bill Murray. » - David Hudson...

A long time ago, sometime around 1912, a director by the name of D.W. Griffith packed up his filmmaking wares and took his crew, including favored cinematographer Billy Bitzer and star Mae Marsh, across the water to a relatively mysterious island off the Southern California coast to shoot a short film. The project, Man’s Genesis, subtitled A Psychological Comedy Founded upon the Darwinian Theory of the Evolution of Man (Is that Woody Allen I hear whimpering with envy?), isn’t one for which Griffith is well remembered, in the hearts of either academics or those given to silent-era nostalgia. (One comment on IMDb suggests that no one would ever mistake Griffith’s simple tale of a landmark of human development—man discovers his ability to craft and use tools in order to achieve a specific goal-- for “a serious work of speculative anthropology” and wonders “what the director and his...

'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl': Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' review: Mostly an enjoyable romp (Oscar Movie Series) Pirate movies were a Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-'20s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-to-late '50s (Moonfleet, The Buccaneer), when the genre, by then mostly relegated to B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the '80s and '90s turned out to be critical and commercial bombs (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn't bode well for the Walt Disney Company's $140 million-budgeted film "adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. But Neptune's mood has apparently improved with the arrival of the new century. He smiled – grinned would be a more appropriate word – on the Gore Verbinski-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,...

If you've watched a pirate movie, you've seen the stunt where the captain balances precariously atop a ship's mast, pierces its sail with his cutlass, grabs the hilt with both hands and slides fearlessly down to the deck. Daredevil Douglas Fairbanks Sr. originated the move in 1926's The Black Pirate. It's as ubiquitous on screen as an adventurer swinging from the rigs. But the dusty sea dogs of the new Starz period drama Black Sails would call it bloody foolish — unless cracked...

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If you think you’ve never seen this poster for William Wellman’s 1931 The Public Enemy (playing tomorrow in Film Forum’s invaluable Wellman retrospective) before, it’s with good reason. Unseen for decades, it was discovered last fall, along with about 30 others posters from the same era, in an attic in Pennsylvania. The Berwick Discovery, as it is known, was described to me by Grey Smith, Director of Heritage Vintage Movie Poster Auctions, who will be auctioning the posters on March 23, as “the most exciting find of my 35 years in the business.”

What is extraordinary about these posters is that they had not been lovingly preserved by a collector. Instead, they had initially been glued one on top of each other for display (one replacing another each time a new release came to town) and then peeled off in one stack. While most posters would have been thrown out at that point,...

In the first part of a new series, Zoe takes a look back at the history of MGM, one of Hollywood’s oldest and most notable studios...

Studios have come and gone since the birth of cinema, and the film business is an unpredictable one, as the history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer reveals. Founded in 1924, its name conjures up images of lavish musicals, sweeping historical epics, glamorous stars and its mascot, Leo the lion.

It’s fair to say that MGM is one of the most famous and influential studios in Hollywood, and certainly one of the most iconic studios to come out of American film industry. But where did it all begin?

The story begins in the early 1920s. Vaudeville, previously one of the most popular forms of entertainment, is beginning to dwindle, as movies capture the public’s imagination. Enter Marcus Loew, a theatre chain owner. What Loew wanted was...

Kevin Brownlow has won a lifetime-achievement Oscar and made superb films. So why isn't he better known?

On 13 November last year Kevin Brownlow received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, alongside Francis Ford Coppola (Jean-Luc Godard didn't turn up). In his letter of nomination, Martin Scorsese declared that "Mr Brownlow is a giant among film historians and preservationists, known and justifiably respected throughout the world for his multiple achievements: as the author of The Parade's Gone By, a definitive history of the silent era, and . . . a biography of David Lean . . . and as the director with Andrew Mollo of two absolutely unique fiction films, Winstanley (1975) and It Happened Here (1964) . . . On a broader level, you might say that Mr Brownlow is film history." This sums up pretty well the extraordinary record of a remarkable Englishman.

But while Brownlow's achievements – as a historian of film, in preserving and restoring silent-era classics, and...

Each week within this column we strive to pair the latest in theatrical releases to the worthwhile titles currently available on Netflix Instant Watch.

This week Captain Jack returns to theaters to face off against – well, no one really…That’s right. Not one single studio feature wanted to do battle with Pirates 4 at the box office. Happily a trio of new features will be opening in limited release, including the latest from Woody Allen, an African-American ensemble dramedy, and documentary about the power of slam poetry. And as always, if you’re keen to take the gasps, laughs, love, and real-world drama home – we’ve got you covered.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

In this high seas adventure, Captain Jack (Johnny Depp) joins forces with his old foe Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to uncover the legendary Fountain of Youth. But these unlikely allies find a new enemy...

Tomorrow sees the release of the 4th instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, On Stranger Tides. The return of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is sure to excite cinemagoers – particularly the loins of legions of devoted female fans! – with his distinct droll, ebullient personality and comic timing. He’s the quintessential pirate figure of our generation, glamorising the lifestyle on the high seas!

However, pirates have been a stock character within film industry for as long as cinema has been in existence. The first known pirate feature was a silent 1 reel, short film adaptation of Treasure Island in 1908. Unfortunately, the American Film Institute has deemed the film lost and a copy is extremely unlikely to be in existence any more. As film technology progressed, so did the pirate subgenre of action cinema, with every decade of the 20th and 21st century having at least one major production based...

Tron/Tron: Legacy

Blu-ray, Walt Disney

The release of the belated sequel to Tron was greeted as open season to unfairly ridicule the original.

It flopped at the box office, but remember, 1982 was the year of Et; everything not Et flopped that year, leaving Tron to keep company with Blade Runner, The Thing and Conan, and there's no shame in that. Tron was staggeringly ahead of its time – its makers had no idea if any of it was even possible to achieve – proving Disney to be a far more innovative and progressive studio than it gets credit for. With stunning Syd Mead and Moebius design and the mix of early CGI (often little more than lines of perspective and colour) and hand-augmented live action, it still looks unique. At least star Jeff Bridges recognised its worth, which is why his first film after his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart was...

0:00 - Intro 4:58 - Jay's Retail Rant / Confession 20:20 - Headlines: Judd Apatow to Direct Knocked Up Spin-Off, Gareth Edwards to Direct Godzilla Reboot, Mickey Rourke to Remove Front Teeth to Play Gay Rugby Player? 33:25 - Review: Somewhere 1:00:15 - Top 5: Most Anticipated Movies of 2011 1:18:45 - Other Stuff We Watched: Fubar II, The Ghost Writer, 24/7 Penguins/Capitals: Road to the Winter Classic, Boardwalk Empire, The Vice Guide to Everything, Global Metal, Desperado, The Black Pirate, The Garden, Beautiful Losers, Frontrunners, A Woman Under the Influence, The Red Shoes 1:52:58 - Junk Mail: The Man Responds, The Ozarks, Movies That Make You Reconsider Relationships, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Remake in Sweden, Name That Movie, The Prestige and Batman Begins, A Favour 2:20:25 - This Week's DVD Releases 2:24:42 - Outro » Download the MP3 (67 Mb) [1] » View the show notes [2] » Vote for us on Podcast Alley!

Filed under: Columns, Cinematical, Blu-ray DVDs

'Best in Blu-ray' is a weekly column that runs on Tuesday; from the week's new Blu-ray releases, we recommend titles for both the Blu-ray veteran and newbie, as well as the coolest special feature (unique to the format) and most intriguing rental.

For Blu-ray Vets:

'The Black Pirate'

Twitter Tag Line: Douglas Fairbanks stars as a pre-Johnny Depp swashbuckler in this innovative silent film from 1926 -- in color!

New Features Unique to Blu-ray: Organ score, 30 minutes of previously unreleased outtakes, photo gallery. Other features are carried over from the DVD edition.

Transfer/Audio: "Kino's restoration-and this Blu-ray's 1080p/Avc-encoded transfer-is a wonder to behold. There's something completely surreal about watching color footage from 1926. ... The music sounds exactly as it ought to-clear, dynamically solid, and unobtrusive." (Blu-ray.com)

Replay Value: "The first great pirate movie and one of the best early uses of Technicolor,...

Filed under: Columns, Cinematical, Blu-ray DVDs

'Best in Blu-ray' is a weekly column that runs on Tuesday; from the week's new Blu-ray releases, we recommend titles for both the Blu-ray veteran and newbie, as well as the coolest special feature (unique to the format) and most intriguing rental.

For Blu-ray Vets:

'The Black Pirate'

Twitter Tag Line: Douglas Fairbanks stars as a pre-Johnny Depp swashbuckler in this innovative silent film from 1926 -- in color!

New Features Unique to Blu-ray: Organ score, 30 minutes of previously unreleased outtakes, photo gallery. Other features are carried over from the DVD edition.

Transfer/Audio: "Kino's restoration-and this Blu-ray's 1080p/Avc-encoded transfer-is a wonder to behold. There's something completely surreal about watching color footage from 1926. ... The music sounds exactly as it ought to-clear, dynamically solid, and unobtrusive." (Blu-ray.com)

Replay Value: "The first great pirate movie and one of the best early uses of Technicolor,...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Gasland" (2010)

Directed by Josh Fox

Released by New Video Group

"Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"

Directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg

Released by Mpi Home Video

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" (2010)

Directed by Banksy

Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories

If you haven't caught up on the year's best documentaries in time to fill out your top 10 list, three of them will be hitting DVD shelves this week, beginning with Josh Fox's Sundance award-winning "Gasland," an exploration of the "hydraulic fracturing" going on in own backyard, a type of drilling that has spread to 34 states in the U.S. and has left a host of reservoirs of toxic waste and frequent gas explosions along the way. For something less serious, but equally compelling, there is also Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," which follows the...

In TheWrap, writer and television producer Irma Kalish writes about Billie Dove’s last years at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, inland from Malibu. The article is a great read. Billie Dove, though not the "Queen of Silent Movies" as claimed in Kalish’s piece, was a popular star in the 1920s. Not one of her fifty or so movies could be called a classic, but Dove did appear in a number of well-regarded and/or box-office friendly vehicles. Among her films of that era were All the Brothers Were Valiant (1922), with Lon Chaney; The Black Pirate (1926), [...]...