News

After taking over the reins of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, director Chris McQuarrie quickly put his own stamp on the series. From 2015's "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" to 2023's "Dead Reckoning Part One," McQuarrie's take on the series has brought it back to its roots in creating heightened, suspenseful espionage scenarios. It's also made the movies even bigger.

The stunts of Ethan Hunt are one aspect in which the series has to consistently top itself. But for McQuarrie, it's also important that each movie embraces a different kind of spectacular filmmaking, something spontaneous and creative that goes beyond simple James Bond-esque globetrotting gunfights and car chases. Because of that impulse, he might have gone too far with a scene in 2018's "Mission: Impossible - Fallout," which is probably why it didn't make the final cut.

The scene in question would have involved the introduction of Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), or the White Widow,...

The UK disc purveyors Powerhouse Indicator are back with a second installment of Region B Film Noir goodies from the darker end of the Columbia Torch Lady’s film vault. This time around we have a couple of Femme Fatale thrillers (does she or doesn’t she?), a trio of organized crime mellers, and a hit man saga so minimalist, it’s almost avant-garde. The icing on the noir cake is the curated selection of extras, plus the absurd counter-programming of Three Stooges short subjects. Why did nobody think to cast Moe, Larry and Shemp as cold-blooded Noir hit men?

Columbia Noir #2

Region B Blu-ray

Framed, 711 Ocean Drive, The Mob, Affair in Trinidad, Tight Spot, Murder by Contract

Powerhouse Indicator

1947-1958 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen & 1:37 Academy / Street Date February 15, 2021 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £49.99

Starring: Glenn Ford, Janis Carter, Edmond O’Brien, Joanne Dru, Broderick Crawford, Richard Kiley, Rita Hayworth,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Braguino (Clément Cogitore)

Le Cinéma Club excels in presentation—opening their clean website every Friday reveals a free, new, conveniently sized film playing alongside original written content—but more important is their reach: time and again they’re screening unavailable, underseen, sometimes thought-missing work by auteurs established and upcoming alike. Their current program concerns recent documentaries—starting today is French filmmaker Clément Cogitore’s Braguino, which surveys two rival families in images merging you-are-there immediacy with stunning high-definition clarity. At 49 minutes the experience is ideal for your dense quarantine lineup. – Nick N.

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

Columbia Noir

To celebrate their one-year anniversary, The...

Revisiting Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Girish Shambu's made a fresh discovery. Also in today's roundup: Whither women critics? Plus pieces on reviving Hong Kong cinema, David O. Russell's Joy, Rita Hayworth in Affair in Trinidad, a biography of Maggie Smith, "Noël Coward, Reluctant Screenwriter," Dennis Lim on his book on David Lynch, Douglas Sirk in New York and Martin Scorsese in Paris, remembering Lemmy Kilmister—and Michael Haneke's reuniting with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant for his next film. » - David Hudson...

Revisiting Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Girish Shambu's made a fresh discovery. Also in today's roundup: Whither women critics? Plus pieces on reviving Hong Kong cinema, David O. Russell's Joy, Rita Hayworth in Affair in Trinidad, a biography of Maggie Smith, "Noël Coward, Reluctant Screenwriter," Dennis Lim on his book on David Lynch, Douglas Sirk in New York and Martin Scorsese in Paris, remembering Lemmy Kilmister—and Michael Haneke's reuniting with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant for his next film. » - David Hudson...

Oscar-nominated actor who brought sensitivity and warmth to her most famous role in Imitation of Life

From its earliest days, Hollywood, which has always lagged behind wider social advances, limited the roles of black actors to stock, wide-eyed cowards, simpletons or servants, often referred to as "uncles" and "mammies". Juanita Moore, who has died aged 99, suffered from this limitation by having to play maids throughout most of her long career. However, Moore could have echoed what Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award, once said: "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one."

Where McDaniel as Mammy, Scarlett O'Hara's lovable, sassy servant in Gone With the Wind (1939) was the apotheosis of the black maid, Moore's Oscar-nominated portrayal of Annie Johnson, housekeeper to the glamorous Broadway star Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) in Douglas Sirk...

On its way to Italy the title of this little known 1952 film about an American reporter in Paris got changed from Assignment - Paris to Destination Budapest. Perhaps, in the midst of the cold war, Budapest was more alluring and dangerous than Paris, which certainly suits the typically dramatic artwork of the great Anselmo Ballester (1897-1974). What Leonard Maltin describes as a “fitfully entertaining drama of reporter Dana Andrews trying to link together threads of plot between Communist countries against the West” looks, in Ballester’s hands, like the most torrid of noirs. As in his great poster for Affair in Trinidad, Ballester renders his male lead in monochrome, all the better to highlight his leading lady, here resplendent in a tight yellow sweater and a shimmering green skirt (who ever painted the folds of women’s clothes more transcendently than Ballester?).

The Ballester website maintained by his grandson Claudio...

Rita Hayworth, Gilda Rita Hayworth is Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Evening. TCM will be presenting the quintessential Hayworth in Gilda at 5 p.m. Pt. That'll be followed by the quintessential anti-Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, plus Fire Down Below, The Happy Thieves, The Lady in Question, and Affair in Trinidad. If you haven't watched Gilda (1946), you must. Charles Vidor's dark melodrama oozes romance, lust, desire, intrigue — and Nazis, too. All that set in a Hollywood-made Buenos Aires, where Hayworth's Gilda is married to George Macready's forbidding casino boss, but loves the youthful Glenn Ford's Johnny, who loves Gilda and has a deep, huh, respect for her husband, who, for his part, also happens to be, huh, deeply attached to Ford. As a son. Hayworth moves her body beautifully while singing "Put the Blame on Mame" and "Amado Mio," but the voice coming out of...

The great Italian poster artist Anselmo Ballester, who worked for more than half a century, has more breathtaking designs than I can encompass in one single post. So I thought I’d concentrate for now on one of his favorite subjects: Rita Hayworth, the Hollywood goddess in the face of whom Ballester seemed especially inspired.

I only came across Ballester’s work recently, struck by his unusually torrid compositions and his superb handling of color, as well as something strange about the eyes of many of his protagonists (something about the whites of their eyes, not much in evidence in these posters, but often giving the impression that his subjects are the undead). When I asked Dave Kehr, author of the Museum of Modern Art’s invaluable 2003 book Italian Film Posters and an avid collector himself, about Ballester I knew I was onto a good thing when he called him “for my money,...

Glenn Ford, the laconic actor best known for his roles in Gilda, Blackboard Jungle, and as Jonathan Kent, the adoptive father in Superman, died Wednesday (8/30) in Los Angeles. Ford had suffered a series of strokes over the last ten years and was in failing health. He was 90. Ford played the strong but silent type, most frequently on the range in films such as The Rounders and 3:10 to Yuma, but just as effectively in urban settings such as his role as the put-upon teacher in Blackboard Jungle. Born May 1st, 1916 as Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford in Quebec, Canada did not seem a likely start for a man to become a box-office draw in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. When his family moved to Southern California at age 8, however, Ford became smitten with all things show business, leading to high school plays and West Coast stage productions. Under contract with the notoriously difficult Harry Cohn at Columbia Ford was requested to change his name to something catchier. He salvaged what he could of his birth name, keeping his last name and switching his first to Glenn, after his father's birthplace of Glenford, Wales. Ford labored for several years in productions that ranged from the broad serialized comedy of Blondie Play Cupid to program westerns such as Texas (which also starred contemporary and sometimes rival for acting parts, William Holden). But Ford found particular on-screen chemistry with Rita Hayworth and their 1946 noir classic Gilda catapulted them both into stardom. Ford played Hayworth's ex-lover, who is put into the tempting position of watching over her by her unsuspecting crime-boss husband. The sultry turn for Hayworth made her a superstar and Ford a leading man, assuring work for him for the next two decades, including several more films with Hayworth (The Loves of Carmen and Affair in Trinidad). In The Big Heat Ford was given the chance to work with Fritz Lang, a true craftsman (and again in Human Desire), and the actor also starred in lesser films of Frank Capra (Pocketful of Miracles) and Vincente Minelli. The second film Ford made with Minelli, a collaboration called The Courtship of Eddie's Father, was quite popular and inspired a television show of the same name. More often than not, however, he took direction from under-appreciated, work-for-hire helmers such as Budd Boetticher and George Marshall. His work in the `70s was largely restricted to television, of varying quality. In 1978 his brief role as Jonathan Kent, the man who adopts Kal-El in Superman, Ford lent some moral heft and humanity to the film as the warm counterpart to Kal-El's Krypton father, Marlon Brando's cold intellectual, Jor-El. Ford was married to famed dancer-actress Eleanor Powell for 16 years (1943-1959) and they had one son, Peter. Powell passed away in 1982. Peter hosted a gala birthday celebration at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on Ford's 90th birthday in May (featuring a restored 35mm print of Gilda) but, due to setbacks in his health, the actor was unable to attend and sent a videotaped message in his stead.