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This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

This year's poster for the Vienna International Film Festival is of a flame, and while around the world in other cinema-loving cities and at other cinema-loving festivals one might that that as a cue for a celluloid immolation and a move forever to digital, here in Austria cinema and film as film aren't burning up but rather are burning brightly.

The tributes and special programs in artistic director Hans Hurch's 2014 edition make this position clear: John Ford, Harun Farocki and 16mm, with new films by Tariq Teguia, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub accompanying older ones by the same directors. These aren't just retrospectives, they are revitalizing redoubts, inexhaustible fountains of flame, of sensitivity, of consciousness, and of intervention. With such a profound retrospective program, I hope you'll forgive me telling you very little of anything new at the festival; unless, that is, you like me count cinema revived as something always new.

Speaking from first-hand experience, this should be a grand time. AMPAS puts on a fine show at their home base in Beverly Hills. If you live in the La area, definitely check this event out.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will honor Oscar®-nominated actress Gloria Stuart’s career in film and celebrate her 100th birthday with a program featuring film clips and an onstage conversation between Stuart and her longtime friend, film historian Leonard Maltin, on Thursday, July 22, at 7:30 p.m., at Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

Born July 4, 1910, in Santa Monica, Stuart attended the University of California at Berkeley and began her acting career on the stage, making her movie debut in the 1932 pre-Code drama “Street of Women.” From the 1930s through the mid-’40s, her many appearances as a stunning blonde ingenue included roles in James Whale’s pioneering horror...

HollywoodNews.com: The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will honor Oscar®-nominated actress Gloria Stuart’s career in film and celebrate her 100th birthday with a program featuring film clips and an onstage conversation between Stuart and her longtime friend, film historian Leonard Maltin, on Thursday, July 22, at 7:30 p.m., at Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

Born July 4, 1910, in Santa Monica, Stuart attended the University of California at Berkeley and began her acting career on the stage, making her movie debut in the 1932 pre-Code drama “Street of Women.” From the 1930s through the mid-’40s, her many appearances as a stunning blonde ingenue included roles in James Whale’s pioneering horror films “The Old Dark House” and “The Invisible Man.” She dabbled in musicals, appearing as Dick Powell’s love interest in “Gold Diggers of 1935” and as Queen Anne alongside The Ritz Brothers...