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Fred Astaire was an Oscar-nominated song and dance man best remembered for a series of musicals he made alongside many female dancer, but especially Ginger Rogers. Yet his filmography extends well past those titles. Let’s take a look back at 20 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

As a dancer, Astaire was known for his perfectionism, doing multiple takes to get the most precise movements correct. His immaculate steps were matched only by his outfits, which often consisted of top hats and coats.

After making a name for himself on the stage in London and on Broadway, Astaire came to Hollywood. He first appeared with fellow dancer Rogers in “Flying Down to Rio” (1933), where they played second fiddle to Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond. Their first starring vehicle came just one year later: “The Gay Divorcee” (1934).

Their subsequent films, including “Top Hat” (1935), “Follow the Fleet” (1936), “Swing Time...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. On the subject of Metrograph’s “It Happens to Us,” we also encourage donations to local abortion funds, while the theater will be donating 50 of all proceeds from ticket sales towards Naral Pro-Choice America and additional U.S. reproductive rights orgs.

Japan Society

Films by Chris Marker and Nagisa Oshima play in the incredible new series “Okinawa in Focus,” which you can see a trailer for here.

Museum of the Moving Image

The great Dp James Wong Howe is given his dues in a new retrospective, while Coming to America and war films by John Huston and John Ford both screen on Sunday.

Roxy Cinema

2046 screens on 35mm this Sunday, while a print of Wild at Heart shows Friday and Sunday; Friday the 13th Part IV shows on 35mm this Friday.

Metrograph

Emma Myers has curated “It Happens to Us,...

by Cláudio Alves

87 years ago, someone at Rko had the brilliant idea to pair up an up-and-coming vaudevillian with a brassy character actress used to playing comic relief. The result was pure movie magic. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers quickly became two of their studio's biggest stars and their collaborations live on as some of the most glamourous musicals to ever grace the Silver Screen. Thanks to HBO Max, the majority of those flicks are now available to stream. The only one that isn't, Follow the Fleet, can be rented from Amazon if you wish to see its dancing delights.

With that in mind, it seemed like a good time to delve into the wonderful world of Fred and Ginger onscreen. Here's a ranked list of their ten movies together…...

Fred Astaire would’ve celebrated his 120th birthday on May 10, 2019. The Oscar-nominated song and dance man is best remembered for a series of musicals he made alongside Ginger Rogers. Yet his filmography extends well past those titles. In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 20 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

As a dancer, Astaire was known for his perfectionism, doing multiple takes to get the most precise movements correct. His immaculate steps were matched only by his outfits, which often consisted of top hats and coats.

SEEOscars flashback: Gold Derby celebrates 84 years of Best Original Song at the Academy Awards

After making a name for himself on the stage in London and on Broadway, Astaire came to Hollywood. He first appeared with fellow dancer Rogers in “Flying Down to Rio” (1933), where they played second fiddle to Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond. Their...

Steve Ross C'mon and Hear: An Irving Berlin July 4th Celebration Birdland Jazz Club, NYC June 26, 2016

In a letter to Alexander Woollcott, Jerome Kern wrote that "Irving Berlin has no place in American Music… He is American Music." What better person to present the art of Irving Berlin than venerable singer and pianist Steve Ross, who presented this great American composer's work in a sterling evening entitled C'mon and Hear: An Irving Berlin July 4th Celebration, at the historical Birdland Jazz Club on Manhattan’s West 44th Street, where he shared the stage with seasoned bassist Jered Egan.

Steve deeply understands the art behind Berlin's voluminous body of work, in a manner unique to himself. His renderings of both well-known, lesser known, and even obscure Berlin songs are historically astute and performed in an exceedingly skillful manner which is at once serious and at the same time carefree. The word...

A version of this article originally appeared on EW.com.

Thanksgiving has arrived and with it comes bingeing of all kinds — but mainly food, shopping and TV. We’ve rounded up all the movie and TV show marathons airing over the long holiday weekend so you can watch your favorite while digesting on the couch.

There’s something for everyone to enjoy, whether you’re a Parks and Recreation fan and just want to spend time with your favorite Pawnee residents or a horror fan looking for a scare-fest like those on IFC and Syfy. Perhaps you’d prefer to...

Veteran’s Day is November 11. While we all try to escape from the most exasperating Presidential Campaign in our history let me pay tribute to the Men and Women who have served in the military to insure we keep our electoral process and our freedoms.

Having served in the Navy four years (there he goes again!) I have a keen interest in any movie about the military, especially the sea service. I did serve during peace time so had no experience with combat but still spent most of my tour of duty at sea on an aircraft carrier, the USS Amerca CV66. Among other jobs I ran the ship’s television station for almost two years. Movies have always been important to me and so providing a few hours of entertainment every day when we were at sea was just about the best job I could have had.

The author...

Fred Astaire ca. 1935. Fred Astaire movies: Dancing in the dark, on the ceiling on TCM Aug. 5, '15, is Fred Astaire Day on Turner Classic Movies, as TCM continues with its “Summer Under the Stars” series. Just don't expect any rare Astaire movies, as the actor-singer-dancer's star vehicles – mostly Rko or MGM productions – have been TCM staples since the early days of the cable channel in the mid-'90s. True, Fred Astaire was also featured in smaller, lesser-known fare like Byron Chudnow's The Amazing Dobermans (1976) and Yves Boisset's The Purple Taxi / Un taxi mauve (1977), but neither one can be found on the TCM schedule. (See TCM's Fred Astaire movie schedule further below.) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals Some fans never tire of watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together. With these particular fans in mind, TCM is showing – for the nth time – nine Astaire-Rogers musicals of the '30s,...

Teresa Wright and Matt Damon in 'The Rainmaker' Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright vs. Samuel Goldwyn: Nasty Falling Out.") "I'd rather have luck than brains!" Teresa Wright was quoted as saying in the early 1950s. That's understandable, considering her post-Samuel Goldwyn choice of movie roles, some of which may have seemed promising on paper.[1] Wright was Marlon Brando's first Hollywood leading lady, but that didn't help her to bounce back following the very public spat with her former boss. After all, The Men was released before Elia Kazan's film version of A Streetcar Named Desire turned Brando into a major international star. Chances are that good film offers were scarce. After Wright's brief 1950 comeback, for the third time in less than a decade she would be gone from the big screen for more than a year.

Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...

Claudette Colbert movies on Turner Classic Movies: From ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’ to TCM premiere ‘Skylark’ (photo: Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier in ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’) Claudette Colbert, the studio era’s perky, independent-minded — and French-born — "all-American" girlfriend (and later all-American wife and mother), is Turner Classic Movies’ star of the day today, August 18, 2014, as TCM continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" film series. Colbert, a surprise Best Actress Academy Award winner for Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, was one Paramount’s biggest box office draws for more than decade and Hollywood’s top-paid female star of 1938, with reported earnings of $426,944 — or about $7.21 million in 2014 dollars. (See also: TCM’s Claudette Colbert day in 2011.) Right now, TCM is showing Ernst Lubitsch’s light (but ultimately bittersweet) romantic comedy-musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a Best Picture Academy Award nominee starring Maurice Chevalier as a French-accented Central European lieutenant in...

American entertainer and singer popular in the 1940s and 50s

The American entertainer Tony Martin, who has died aged 98, was once described as a singing tuxedo. Although he was rather a stiff actor, he was handsome and charming, with a winning, dimpled smile. What mattered most, however, was his mellifluous baritone voice, which he used softly in ballads such as To Each His Own and I Get Ideas, and powerfully in Begin the Beguine and There's No Tomorrow, all hit records in the 1940s and 50s.

He was one of the top crooners of the period with Vic Damone, Andy Williams and Dick Haymes, all of them just below Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in esteem and popularity. According to Mel Tormé: "Tony Martin was technically the greatest singer of them all, as well as being the classiest guy around, both as an entertainer and a person."

He was...

Tony Martin singer dies. Actor-singer Tony Martin, once married to Fox singing star Alice Faye and the widower of MGM dancer-actress Cyd Charisse, died of "natural causes" at his West Los Angeles home on Friday, July 27. Martin was 98. Tony Martin movies Though never quite a movie star, Tony Martin (born Alvin Morris on Dec. 25, 1913, in San Francisco) was featured in nearly 30 films. Of those, most were programmers or B movies, with only two or three major productions interspersed among them. (I’m not including Martin’s few bits in mid-’30s movies such as Follow the Fleet, Murder on the Bridle Path, [...]...

Tony Martin, a successful pop crooner and the last of the big stars from the golden age of film musicals, has died. He was 98. The singer-actor, who was married to Cyd Charisse for 60 years, died July 27 of natural causes at his West Los Angeles home, his friend and accountant Beverly Scott said Monday. He was featured in more than two dozen movies, starting with small roles in post-Depression films including the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet and Poor Little Rich Girl with Shirley Temple. He went on to star in such films

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From Fred and Ginger to Jennifer and Ashton, romantic comedies used to be one of the safest bets in Hollywood. But it seems that rom is just not into com any more

Is it the end for the romcom? You can imagine the celebrity mag headlines: "Romcom's relationship on the rocks?" "Com: I'm just not that into Rom" "Rom: Com doesn't make me laugh any more."

After all, who says romance and comedy go together like a horse and carriage? It seems to be a chiselled Hollywood commandment that the two shall be forever conjoined in cinematic matrimony, but perhaps it's time they went their separate ways. Sure, they got off to a great start: in those early years it was all fun and games and sparkling repartee, but recently they haven't quite looked the happy couple; the spark just hasn't been there.

They've been stuck in the same repetitive formula: boy meets girl,...

Taylor Lautner on the cover of V Man

Happy 72nd Birthday to Lily Tomlin , and Happy 65th Birthday to Barry Gibb. Time to name your top five Bee-Gees songs! Here are mine: 5. "The Woman In You" 4. "More Than A Woman" 3. "Tragedy" 2. "Shine Shine" (Barry solo song) 1. "How Deep Is Your Love"

Cher will become guest programmer for Turner Classic Movies on Wednesday, September 7th, and present four of her favorite films: Follow The Fleet, Hobson's Choice, The Big Street and Lady of Burlesque. I'm going to refrain from any snarky comments about Cher and Follow The Fleet. Playbill.com has a two-day picture diary from hunky Caesar Samayoa, one of the stars of Broadway's Sister Act. Some of the pics are beyond adorable. (h/t Brokeback Bill) Below you can see another quick promo for the new season of Glee, with the emphasis on flying food stuffs.

Today is the...

An art deco oasis with a warm personality in the heart of Letchworth Garden City is the subject of our ninth cinema review

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On location: The last building at the end of a high street containing – among other things – a Wilkinsons, Poundstretcher and Pizza Hut. You get to City Kebab and Pizza, and suddenly, towering above you on your left, is the magnificent art deco Broadway Cinema.

It's walkable from the train station, and has plenty of parks and other green areas on hand to demonstrate Letchworth's garden city status. It's only a couple of minutes' walk from the local Morrisons, should you fancy a pre- or post-screening scotch egg.

Crowd scene: A typical daytime weekend queue at the box office will consist of some students, a family of four, two early teens deciding whether or...

As Hollywood threatens to remake The Thin Man, Turner Classic Movies and Warner Home Entertainment are releasing a Thin Man collection as one of three new classic film collections being added to their Greatest Classic Films and Legends lines (The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man), all starring the iconic screen couple William Powell and Myrna Loy as happily tipsy sleuths Nick and Nora Charles. The other two collections also feature Golden Age screen couples, but of the singer-dancer variety: young MGM-era Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (Girl Crazy, Strike Up the Band, Babes in Arms, Babes on Broadway) and the second-tier Astaire and Rogers Volume Two (Flying Down to Rio [pictured], Follow the Fleet, The Story ...