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Director Alex Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy have worked together to make worlds that all feel like they could beat you up, whether they’re vast and weird (“Annihilation“), contained and sharp (“Ex Machina“), or geometric and severe (“Devs”). The pair’s collaborations have a consideration of space and power with an almost magnetic pull. The firepower of their latest film, “Civil War,” is quite literal. The camera’s job is to watch the journalist characters embedded in a military assault on Washington, D.C., witness the Lincoln Monument get blown up.

In this, “Civil War” joins a robust tradition of war films stretching back as far as 1925’s “The Big Parade” and 1926’s “What Price Glory?” that try to convey the power of violence itself: its horror, its allure, its twisted humor, and most of all its undeniable pull towards more violence. Hardy told IndieWire that he was much...

Marisa Pavan, the Italian actress and twin sister of Pier Angeli who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as the daughter of Anna Magnani’s seamstress in the 1955 drama The Rose Tattoo, has died. She was 91.

Pavan died Wednesday in her sleep at her home in Gassin, France, near Saint-Tropez, Margaux Soumoy, who wrote Pavan’s 2021 biography, Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Pavan also portrayed the French queen Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), starring Lana Turner; an Italian girl who had an affair years ago with a corporate exec (Gregory Peck) in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956); and the love interest of a former cop (Tony Curtis) investigating the murder of a priest in the film noir The Midnight Story (1957).

In Paramount’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that won four Tony Awards, including best play,...

John Wayne gets a bit of a bad rap as an actor. Yes, he mostly made star vehicles after his breakthrough performance in John Wayne's "Stagecoach," but he was willing to challenge himself (and his audience) by playing unlikable protagonists in Howard Hawks' "Red River" and Ford's "The Searchers." He had an acute understanding of film acting, and, according to Ron Howard, could make minor adjustments on the fly that would turn an otherwise ordinary scene into a classic Wayne moment.

But did anyone want to see John Wayne play King Lear on Broadway? Not particularly. At least, not because they thought it would be good.

Wayne was not a classically trained actor. He found his way to motion pictures because Tom Mix owed a favor to legendary USC football coach Howard Jones. When Wayne was forced to quit the team, Mix and Ford brought the young man into their extended company.

Constance Cummings in 'Night After Night.' Constance Cummings: Working with Frank Capra and Mae West (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Actress Went from Harold Lloyd to Eugene O'Neill.”) Back at Columbia, Harry Cohn didn't do a very good job at making Constance Cummings feel important. By the end of 1932, Columbia and its sweet ingenue found themselves in court, fighting bitterly over stipulations in her contract. According to the actress and lawyer's daughter, Columbia had failed to notify her that they were picking up her option. Therefore, she was a free agent, able to offer her services wherever she pleased. Harry Cohn felt otherwise, claiming that his contract player had waived such a notice. The battle would spill over into 1933. On the positive side, in addition to Movie Crazy 1932 provided Cummings with three other notable Hollywood movies: Washington Merry-Go-Round, American Madness, and Night After Night. 'Washington Merry-Go-Round...

Martha Mendoza, Associated Press

San Francisco (AP) - Shirley Temple, the dimpled, curly-haired child star who sang, danced, sobbed and grinned her way into the hearts of Depression-era moviegoers, has died. She was 85.

Temple, known in private life as Shirley Temple Black, died Monday night at her home near San Francisco. She was surrounded by family members and caregivers, publicist Cheryl Kagan said.

"We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and adored wife for fifty-five years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black," a family statement said. The family would not disclose Temple's cause of death.

A talented and ultra-adorable entertainer, Shirley Temple was America's top box-office draw from 1935 to 1938, a record no other child star has come near. She beat out such grown-ups as Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor,...

Jean Dujardin Actor Jean Dujardin won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical for his performance as a fading silent-film star in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist. In the above photo, Dujardin — who also won the Best Actor Award for The Artist in Cannes last year — poses backstage in the press room with his Golden Globe at the 2012 Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, CA, on Sunday, January 15. In many ways, The Artist borrows elements from George Cukor's What Price Glory?, in which Constance Bennett plays a rising star and Lowell Sherman a troubled producer, and the first two A Star Is Born movies, the first directed by William A. Wellman, and starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; the second directed by Cukor, and starring Judy Garland and James Mason. All three movies, in turn, were inspired by real-life...

Harry Morgan never planned to be an actor, yet he spent 10 years on one of the top TV series of all time, made 50 films and appeared on Broadway. He became one of the best-known character actors in Hollywood.

But it was Morgan’s portrayal of the fatherly Col. Sherman Potter on M-a-s-h for which Morgan became most famous, and he knew it.

“M-a-s-h was so damned good,” Morgan told The Associated Press. “I didn’t think they could keep the level so high.”

His wry humor, which helped net him an Emmy for the CBS-tv hit, carried onto the show.

Los Angeles — Harry Morgan never planned to be an actor, yet he spent 10 years on one of the top TV series of all time, made 50 films and appeared on Broadway. He became one of the best-known character actors in Hollywood.

But it was Morgan's portrayal of the fatherly Col. Sherman Potter on "M-a-s-h" for which Morgan became most famous, and he knew it.

"M-a-s-h was so damned good," Morgan told The Associated Press. "I didn't think they could keep the level so high."

His wry humor, which helped net him an Emmy for the CBS-tv hit, carried onto the show.

"He was an imp," said Mike Farrell, who starred as B.J. Hunnicutt in "M-a-s-h" along with Morgan and Alan Alda. "As Alan once said, there's not an un-adorable bone in the man's body. He was full of fun, and he was smart as a whip."

Morgan died Wednesday at...

Many genres that Hollywood used to rely on for lots of hits have long since fallen by the wayside. Zoe finds out what happened to them…

Hollywood, the world's entertainment factory, has, for the past one hundred years, been producing films that have been enjoyed by audiences around the world. And in that time, a lot has changed, society, technology, fashions, tastes, and lifestyles, all of which Hollywood has continued to accommodate.

It's come a long way from its humble beginnings in the days of melodramatic, black and white, silent films with somewhat crude production methods. Hollywood has evolved into something more sophisticated and streamlined. But with so much change in such a fast paced industry, have some genres fallen behind? Or is it the case that these too have simply evolved into something more sophisticated and subtle?

Musical

The musical is arguably the most uplifting and escapist genre to...

They shall beat their swords into plowshares

and their spears into pruning hooks;

One nation shall not raise the sword against another,

neither shall they learn war any more.

Isaiah 2:4

War is a nation’s ultimate commitment of blood and treasure. As such, the stories a people tells about its wars – and don’t tell – and the ways it remembers its wars – or chooses to forget them – tells us much about the kind of people they consider themselves to be at different times in their history, as well as the kind of people they really were…and are.

For most of the 20th century, the war film was a Hollywood staple. From one era to the next, war movies documented the nation’s conflicts, reflected the national consciousness on particular combats as well as on thinking going far beyond any one, particular war. They’ve been propagandistic and revisionist,...

As happens every year around this time, the cable spectrum has been heavily laced with programming throughout the week commemorating Veterans Day. HBO trundled out its full epic and brutal miniseries The Pacific for a one-day re-run broken up by the debut of the James Gandolfini-hosted documentary War Torn 1861-2010, a disturbing look at the psychological scars America’s soldiers have suffered in every conflict since The Civil War; The History Channel ran an all-day marathon of Ww II in HD, sprinkling its commercial breaks for the week with commemorative spots; AMC ran a day of war movies like The Enemy Below (1957) and A Few Good Men (1992) under the umbrella, “Vets Best” ; and so on.

The bulk of memorializing programming focused on World War II – unsurprising, in that it remains, to this day, America’s greatest, defining, and least morally problematic war. Even 65 years later, despite a half-century of...