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'Being Julia' movie: Annette Bening and Shaun Evans 'Being Julia' movie review: Annette Bening showcase tells us a little about Avice A little Being Julia movie background: In Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 Oscar-winning classic All About Eve, Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a major Broadway star who, despite her talent, wit, and some forty-odd years on this planet, falls prey to the youthful, ambitious wannabe Eve Harrington: sweet, soft-spoken Anne Baxter on the outside; ruthless, poisonous gargoyle on the inside.* More than a decade earlier, in 1937 to be exact, W. Somerset Maugham had written Theatre, a novel about West End diva Julia Lambert. In Maugham's tale, Julia, despite her talent, wit, and some forty-odd years on this planet, succumbs to her vanity when she falls madly in love with Tom Fennel, a handsome – and deceptively innocent-looking – American half her age. Through Tom's "special friendship" with the renowned Julia, an ambitious young actress,...

Elisabeth Bergner, who started in German silents went on to a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Escape Me Never (1935)Schweigen a fine collection of 1920s and 1930s postcards of film actors. I loved looking at it despite my Richard Dix aversion. And this postcard left makes me desperate to see Escape Me Never, one of the 30s Best Actress nominations I still haven't seen

Cinema Blend profiles the 5 pilots from Amazon Studios including Hand of God with Dana Delany and Ron Perlman

E! Online Neil Patrick Harris responds to rumors that he and David Burtka are breaking up. It ain't so.

Pret-a-Reporter Inside Madonna's 56th birthday bash

THR Cinematography Gordon Willis who died earlier this summer, was memorialized in Hollywood this weekend

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Rope of Silicon every death in a Quentin Tarantino movie thus far

Cinema Enthusiast has been investigating 1992 cinema. Loves Howards End, The Player, Batman Returns...

Maximilian Schell movie director (photo: Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell) (See previous post: “Maximilian Schell Dies: Best Actor Oscar Winner for ‘Judgment at Nuremberg.’”) Maximilian Schell’s first film as a director was the 1970 (dubbed) German-language release First Love / Erste Liebe, adapted from Igor Turgenev’s novella, and starring Englishman John Moulder-Brown, Frenchwoman Dominique Sanda, and Schell in this tale about a doomed love affair in Czarist Russia. Italian Valentina Cortese and British Marius Goring provided support. Directed by a former Best Actor Oscar winner, First Love, a movie that could just as easily have been dubbed into Swedish or Swahili (or English), ended up nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Three years later, nominated in that same category was Schell’s second feature film as a director, The Pedestrian / Der Fußgänger, in which a car accident forces a German businessman to delve deep into his past.

Cinematographer on the first Star Wars film who worked with the Boulting Brothers, Hitchcock and Polanski

The British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who has died aged 99, was best known for his camerawork on the first Star Wars movie (1977). Though its special effects and set designs somewhat stole his thunder, it was Taylor who set the visual tone of George Lucas's six-part space opera.

"I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science-fiction genre," Taylor declared. "I wanted Star Wars to have clarity because I don't think space is out of focus … I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean … But George [Lucas] saw it differently … For example, he asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm camera lens and the sand and sky of the Tunisian desert just meshed together. I told him it wouldn't work,...

Elizabeth Hartman and Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue (1965)

Look, I can't help it: The Oscars rule. I care about them. I refuse to stop thinking about them. And if you read snicks' recent Oscar snubs piece, you'd refuse too. If you love entertainment, glamor, and winning, you simply have to love the Oscars. And Project Runway. But hey, back to the Oscars! Even the biggest Oscarphiles can stand to know more about the precious gold statuette, and I'm willing to bet most of you don't know about these five nominees, actresses who've faded from public consciousness. Let's revisit the weird and wild catacombs of the Academy's most fascinating forgotten ladies, shall we?

Eva Le Gallienne: Respected Actress, Kickass Lesbian

Before Gloria Stuart hurled an ugly diamond into the Atlantic in Titanic, Eva Le Gaillienne was the oldest woman nominated for an Oscar at age 80 for Resurrection, a...