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John Huston is one of the most celebrated directors and screenwriters in Hollywood. Born on August 5, 1906, in Nevadaville, Colorado, he was the son of actor Walter Huston and Rhea Gore. He began his career as a journalist and later worked as an amateur boxer before entering movies.

Huston’s movies were often morally ambiguous, with elements of both comedy and tragedy. He rose to fame for movies such as “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), which starred Humphrey Bogart, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, and “The African Queen” (1951), starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. He also wrote many movies including “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950) and directed iconic movies such as “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975).

Huston was highly acclaimed by critics for his skillful direction in movies that explored complex themes such as greed and morality. Many of his movies featured actors who had trained under revered director Erich von Stroheim.

by Daniel Walber

Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) is an odd movie to categorize. It has the moody pessimism of the late ‘60s and the earnest hero-worship of a biopic from the ‘40s. It’s Montgomery Clift’s second-to-last film, but it doesn’t have the “end of an era” energy of its immediate predecessors, The Misfits and Judgment at Nuremberg. In terms of Oscar history, it feels perhaps most significant as Jerry Goldsmith’s first nominated score. And practically no one has seen it.

But I’m here to tell you that’s a shame, because Clift was perfect for Freud. I’ve realized this over the course of the past couple of weeks, reading everyone else’s fabulous Monty @ 100 coverage. Freud is, in a sense, the ultimate fusion of two essential parts of Clift’s star persona: the heartthrob and the priest...

Odessa Young (Assassination Nation) and Ella Rumpf (Raw) are the latest to join HBO Max’s forthcoming series Tokyo Vice as series regulars. Michael Mann cast the pair and they join previously announced cast members Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe in the adaptation of Jake Adelstein’s book of the same name. Mann is set to direct the pilot with a script written by Tony-winning playwright J.T. Rogers. Endeavor Content is set to produce.

The 10-episode series is based on Adelstein’s real-life, first-hand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat. Elgort is set to play Jake Adelstein, an American journalist who embeds himself into the Tokyo Vice police squad to reveal corruption. It chronicles Jake’s daily descent into the neon-soaked underbelly of Tokyo, where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem.

Young will step into the role of Samantha, an American expat living in late 90s Tokyo.

Estelle Leonard and Joey Tribbianni had an agent-client relationship in F.R.I.E.N.D.S . Estelle was played by June Gable on the show and boy, did she do a phenomenal job with it, including the time when she played a nurse on "The One With The Birth".

When Estelle was written off the show in "The One Where Estelle Dies," a part of us died too. Estelle Leonard was important to Joey. First, she kicked-off his career and later tried to bad mouth him all over town. Nevertheless, she was instrumental in shaping Joey for the role of a "man in a woman's body."

Related: Friends: The 10 Worst Things Monica Has Ever Done, Ranked

Estelle hired Joey after seeing him in a low-budget musical called "Freud!" and leaving her card, "Estelle Leonard Talent Agency" for him. Here are 10 times she had us in splits.

The organizers of Berlinale Series, part of the European Film Market, have unveiled an eight-strong lineup for 2020 with projects including Damien Chazelle’s “The Eddy,” Cate Blanchett’s “Stateless,” and Jason Segel’s “Dispatches from Elsewhere” set for world premieres in Berlin.

Julia Fidel oversees the Berlinale Series screenings and has put together an international selection that brings together author-led series from Australia, North America, and the U.S.

As well as Chazelle’s “The Eddy,” written by Jack Thorne, Blanchett’s immigration-focused “Stateless,” and Segel’s upcoming AMC anthology series “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” also screening will be BBC drama “Trigonometry.”

As well as “The Eddy,” Netflix will screen three episodes of Marvin Kren’s “Freud” in Berlin, which will launch internationally on the streamer. The drama comes from Bavaria Fiction and Satel Film.

In addition to “Stateless,” the second Australian entry is noir detective series “Mystery Road.” The opening...

The Berlin Film Festival’s sixth Berlinale Series lineup will include Damien Chazelle’s anticipated Paris-set musical-drama The Eddy for Netflix, Jason Segel’s starry AMC series Dispatches From Elswehere, buzzy Cate Blanchett project Stateless and BBC-HBO Max show Trigonometry.

Moonlight star André Holland leads cast in The Eddy, about a French club owner dealing with the everyday chaos of running a live music venue in the heart of Paris. The festival will show the world premiere of the show’s first two episodes.

The compact, high-quality lineup also includes German-language drama Freud. Scroll down for the lineup in full and details about each show.

This is the first program for new Berlinale Series head Julia Fidel who previously worked on the festival’s Panorama and Generation strands. The dramas will screen at the Zoo Palast cinema, which will also host the Berlinale Series Market, formerly known as Drama Series Days.

European Film Promotion has unveiled the 10 Shooting Stars, up-and-coming acting talents set to break out internationally, who will be honored at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.

The selection comprises Bartosz Bielenia from Poland, star of Jan Komasa’s “Corpus Christi,” among films shortlisted for this year’s best international feature film Oscar; France’s Zita Hanrot, the voice talent of Zunaira in animated Oscar contender “The Swallows of Kabul” who broke out locally with Philippe Faucon’s “Fatima”; and Portugal’s Joana Ribeiro who is currently shooting Antoine Fuqua’s action thriller “Infinite” for Paramount alongside Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Previous Shooting Stars include Alicia Vikander, Alba Rohrwacher, Matthias Schoenaerts, Pilou Asbæk and Baltasar Kormákur.

The Shooting Stars initiative is also honoring German actor Jonas Dassler, who made a splash at Berlin last year with his performance as a serial killer in Fatih Akin’s “The Golden Glove”; Dutch actor Bilal Wahib,...

The 2020 edition of European Shooting Stars has unveiled the 10 young acting talents it will spotlight, with participants arriving with credits including Polish Oscar shortlisted feature Corpus Christi.

On the list is Polish actor Bartosz Bielenia, whose turn as an amateur priest in Jan Komasa’s Corpus Christi has already earned him acting awards at the Stockholm, Chicago and El Gouna film festivals.

He is selected alongside Danish actress Victoria Carmen Sonne, who has appeared in Hlynur Palmason’s Winters Brothers and Isabella Eklöf’s 2018 Sundance pic Holiday; she has won two Danish Academy awards (Bodils).

Also named is Swiss actress Ella Rumpf, who lead the cast of Julia Ducournau’s 2016 Cannes selection Raw, which won her the Révelation prize at the 2018 César Awards, and Jakob Lass’s 2017 Berlin title Tiger Girl. Rumpf will also appear this year in upcoming German Netflix series Freud.

Portuguese talent Joana Ribeiro makes the 2020 cut...

Another TV head-to-head is brewing with the announcement of a second period drama series about Austrian Empress Elisabeth II – known as Sisi – in the works.

Germany’s Story House Pictures and Austria-based Satel Film, which made Netflix’s “Freud,” are collaborating on “Sisi,” a six-part drama that goes into production in 2020. News of the project comes as Picture Perfect Federation, the company recently launched by Patrick Wachsberger and Pascal Breton, sets to adapting books about Sisi for its own series on the strong-willed empress.

Andreas Gutzeit and Heinrich Ambrosch are the producers of the Story House-Satel Film project. Told from the perspective of her closest confidants, the series takes a new look at its subject’s life and reveals a multi-layered woman as she evolves from the youthful Sisi into Empress Elisabeth. Dorothee Schön and Sabine Thor-Wiedemann are writing.

“‘Sisi’ is a premium TV series that revives the splendor of...

David Schalko’s post-war drama “Big Bones” is headed to Series Mania after coming out on top at the Berlin Co Pro Series pitching event. Schalko’s gangster series in-the-making had already fared well in Berlin, landing an international distributor, and it is now headed to France after being selected by the Series Mania team following its Drama Series Days pitch.

“Big Bones” was one of ten scripted projects being presented at the Co Pro Series 2019 event, part of the Efm and Drama Series Days, in Berlin. The organizers have an exchange whereby one series is chosen to be taken to Series Mania drama event in Lille and presented to finance and production partners again.

In a lineup heavy on noir series and crime thrillers, Vienna-set drama “Big Bones” prevailed. Beta Film had already recognized its potential and swooped for international rights the day before the pitching session.

“We have...

Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Bavaria Film continues to move forward as a modern film and television group while looking back on a legacy that has shaped Germany’s cinematic landscape.

Established in 1919 as Münchener Lichtspielkunst near Munich, Bavaria’s history spans silent film and talking pictures, the onset of television and the modern digital era. Among the countless films that have shot at Bavaria’s studios are such diverse works as Elia Kazan’s 1953 thriller “Man on a Tightrope,” Robert Wise’s beloved “The Sound of Music” and Oliver Stone’s eye-opening “Snowden.”

Today one of Germany’s main film and TV producers and a leading provider of studio services, Bavaria ranked fourth last year among the country’s top producers in terms of production revenue. Fremantle’s Ufa was at No. 1 with €240 million ($273 million), followed by Constantin Film, Studio Hamburg and Bavaria with $176 million.

Bavaria, which generated...

Robert Finster has landed the title role in “Freud,” the upcoming Netflix and Orf series set during the father of psychoanalysis’ younger years, and which imagines him on the trail of a murderer.

Austrian actor Finster has starred in several German-language movies and series. With Netflix taking “Freud” global, and German-language series such as “Dark” performing well on the streaming service, this is sure to boost his international profile.

Ella Rumpf has been cast as Fleur Salomé, the infamous medium who teams up with Freud alongside war veteran Alfred Kiss, played by Georg Friedrich. Swiss actress Rumpf starred in Julia Ducournau’s “Raw” and was named in the 2018 edition of Variety’s 10 Europeans to Watch. Austrian actor Friedrich’s film credits include “Wild,” and “Aloys.”

“4 Blocks” director Marvin Kren was already on board the eight-parter. The series will shoot in Vienna and Prague, starting in January. Kren wrote the...

THR just passed along news that Netflix has just given the green light to a new thriller featuring a young Sigmund Freud. And how do you feel about that? Kidding. The upcoming thriller series Freud will be Netflix’s first original drama out of Austria and imagines the young psychoanalyst using his groundbreaking techniques and teaming […]

The post Sigmund Freud Hunts Serial Killer in New Netflix Series Freud appeared first on Dread Central.

Netflix is set to produce a new thriller called Freud, which will center around a young Sigmund Freud as he is hunting down a serial killer in the 19th century alongside a medium named Fleur Salomé and a surly war veteran and police inspector named Kiss.

This certainly sounds like it could make for an interesting series! I love the concept and it's sure to deliver and dark and disturbing story. 

This is a German-language murder thriller that will be developed in Austria. Netflix has found success with their other German series Dark, so they are looking to dive into another German project. 

Freud actually studied in Vienna and is considered the founder of psychoanalysis, but this whole thing of hunting down a serial killer is a fictionalized account. 

The eight-part series will be directed by Marvin Kren who previously worked on the TNT Series hit original drama 4 Blocks.

The first mystery of Criminal Minds Season 14 may have been solved. Or… not.

Executive producer Harry Bring tweeted over the July 4th holiday that the crime drama will return on Wednesday, Sept. 26. CBS however has not announced any fall premiere dates, and sources suggest that Bring’s “confirmed” announcement may have been premature.

Bring has also tweeted to fans that Season 14 will run at least 15 episodes, but CBS has not officially confirmed anything (neither minimums nor totals) on that front.

Ready for more of today’s newsy nuggets? Well…

* NBC’s broadcast of the Macy’s Fireworks on Wednesday night averaged 7.5 million total viewers,...

Stop me if you've heard this one: Sigmund Freud, a medium, a cop, and a serial killer with deep-rooted familial issues walk into a bar. It's been announced that Netflix has booked some time on the couch with Freud, an upcoming Austrian thriller series that imagines the young psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud using his groundbreaking techniques to track a serial killer in 19th century Vienna. As a... Read More...

Netflix has boarded “Freud,” the upcoming German-language thriller following a young Sigmund Freud as he teams with a medium and a police inspector to track a serial killer in 19th century Vienna.

Netflix will launch “Freud” internationally. It will be its first original drama out of Austria. The streamer is enjoying success with its German scripted series “Dark,” setting an overall deal with its creators and greenlighting a second season. Austria-Germany co-production “Freud” will bow on Austrian pubcaster Orf locally, and Netflix will take it into the U.S., U.K., Germany and other international markets.

Freud studied in Vienna and is considered the founder of psychoanalysis. In the “Freud” series he is on the trail of a killer, alongside medium Fleur Salomé, and a surly war veteran and police inspector, Kiss.

Marvin Kren is attached to direct, off the back of working on TNT Serie’s hit original drama “4 Blocks.

Netflix has boarded Freud, an upcoming Austrian thriller series that imagines the young psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud using his groundbreaking techniques to track a serial killer in 19th century Vienna.

Netflix will launch Freud internationally outside Austria, Belgium, Finland and Hungary. Austria's public broadcaster Orf is the commissioning network on the eight-part series, which begins production this fall.

The crime drama imagines the founder of psychoanalysis teaming up with a medium and a local cop to track a serial killer terrorizing Vienna.

Marvin Kren, whose credits include the acclaimed German series 4 Blocks for TNT Series, is attached to direct the German-language series and ...

The producer and production manager associated with Chinatown and Groundhog Day, died on Wednesday from heart complications.

Born on December 17,1923, C.O. ‘Doc’ Erickson was living in Las Vegas when he died from heart complications, according to The Gersh Agency.

Erickson began his career at Paramount Pictures, serving as production manager on five Alfred Hitchcock films during the mid-to-late 1950s, including Rear Window, To Catch A Thief, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo.

The producer left Paramount in the early 1960s to become John Huston’s associate producer on The Misfits, Freud, and 1967s Reflections In A Golden Eye.

He went on to serve as production manager on Joseph L Mankiewicz’s There Was A Crooked Man and also spent three years supervising film production for Brut Productions.

He would later become associated with Robert Evans on Chinatown, Players, Urban Cowboy, and Popeye.

Other producer-production credits include 55 Days At Peking, [link...

On the day a U.S. appeals court lifted an injunction that blocked a Mississippi “religious freedom” law – i.e., giving Christian extremists the right to discriminate against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, etc. – not to mention the publication of a Republican-backed health care bill targeting the poor, the sick, the elderly, and those with “pre-existing conditions” – which would include HIV-infected people, a large chunk of whom are gay and bisexual men, so the wealthy in the U.S. can get a massive tax cut, Turner Classic Movies' 2017 Gay Pride or Lgbt Month celebration continues (into tomorrow morning, Thursday & Friday, June 22–23) with the presentation of movies by or featuring an eclectic – though seemingly all male – group: Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Dirk Bogarde, John Schlesinger, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins. After all, one assumes that, rumors or no, the presence of Mercedes McCambridge in one...

Jerry Goldsmith was already a veteran film composer with numerous iconic scores under his belt by the time he was enlisted to work on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). He’d worked in radio and television through the 1950s, contributing music to classic shows such as The Twilight Zone (1959) and Perry Mason (1959) before making the move to film, writing scores for films as diverse in subject matter (and sound) as Stagecoach (1966) and Planet of the Apes (1968) in the 1960s and Chinatown (1974) and The Omen (1976) in the 1970s. Goldsmith’s rich orchestral scores for such films, which were informed and influenced by early 20th century modernist composers, are both experimental and economical in their use and development of thematic material. He explained, “What I really try to do is to take one simple motif of the material for the picture, and a broad theme, and construct it so they always can work...

The actress is mostly remembered for her good looks, but what about her impressive performances?

In Richard Dyer’s book Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, he writes that Marilyn Monroe was “the most visible star”: an actress whose life was put on display, and remains so over 50 years after her death. She is one of the most iconic Hollywood stars of all time, her face instantly recognizable to even those who have never seen any of her movies. She is a symbol of beauty, glamor, cinema, femininity, blondness, sexuality, and tragedy. While the world speculates about her personal life — who was she romantically involved with? How did she die? What was she really like? — her career as an actress is overshadowed by her fame.

While she may not have been the greatest actress of all time, she certainly had her fair share of talent and intelligence, and always worked incredibly hard to bring her...

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

We love to collectively pore over the biographies of history’s most monstrous figures, usually in search of both meaning and sensationalism. Our fantasies are full of vindictive parenting, traumatic events and uncanny brilliance. It’s as if we want to reverse Freud, using psychoanalysis as a tool to craft new mythology. And they certainly are myths: Fascism can’t be blamed on paternal cruelty alone.

But what if the protagonist weren’t real? With The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet has contributed a fictional allegory to this evergreen genre. Loosely based on a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre and a novel by John Fowles, the film chronicles a short period in the life of Prescott (Tom Sweet), a very moody child. The year is 1919, in the midst of the post-Armistice treaty negotiations. The boy’s father...

If actor-turned-director Brady Corbet’s post-World-War-i saga, The Childhood of a Leader, did little more than send American readers to Jean-Paul Sartre’s lesser known short story of the same name, one would be thanking the cinematic gods for its appearance.

The final story in his Sartre’s 1939 collection, The Wall, “The Childhood of a Leader” chronicles the life of Lucien from his rebellious potty training days as a lovely, long-haired tot, son of a rich industrialist, to his transformation into anti-Semitic murderer. There goes Holden Caulfield but for the grace of God.

When we first meet Lucien, with his lustrous blond curls and attired in a blue angel’s costume, he is mistaken by his mother’s consorts as a girl.

“What’s your name? Jacqueline, Lucienne, Margot?”

The embarrassed boy blushes and sets the record right, but “[h]e was no longer quite sure about not being a little...

At one point in Ira Sachs’ Little Men, the young Jake (Theo Taplitz) explains to his parents (played by Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle) how they can avoid evicting their tenant, Leonor (Paulina García), from the store she’d been renting from his late grandfather for years. Jake’s simple economic plan makes the heart ache because of how perfect it is: it calls for empathy, equality, and, without being completely naive, proposes something that could be achievable within the right political system. But his plan is even more heartbreaking because he knows it’s his last chance to salvage his friendship with Tony (Michael Barbieri), Leonor’s adolescent son, who’s become his closest, dearest friend. As the adults stand in disbelief of Jake’s plea, is he addressing their inner child or are they merely getting a preview of the troublesome teenage years ahead? Sachs makes us wonder...

Mario Bava turns from spooky gothic tales to a relentlessly violent murder spree in the glossy world of high fashion. The large cast gives us a fistful of prime suspects, while the main draw is Bava's powerful direction and razor-keen images - and in this excellent transfer, the colors can only be described as hallucinatory. Blood and Black Lace Blu-ray + DVD Arrow Video U.S. 1964 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 89 min. / Sei donne per l'assassino / available through Mvd Entertainment / Street Date July 5, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Ariana Gorini, Dante Dipaolo, Mary Arden, Franco Ressel, Claude Dantes, Luciano Pigozzi, Lea Lander, Massimo Righi, Francesca Ungaro, Giuliano Raffaelli, Harriet White Medin. Cinematography Ubaldo Terzano Editor Mario Serandrei Original Music Carlo Rustichelli Written by Marcello Fondato, Giuseppe Barilla, Mario Bava Produced by Alfredo Mirabile, Massimo Patrizi <Directed by Mario Bava

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

When Arrow Video released a U.K. Blu-ray...

When John Huston went to war he took his mission seriously... as an artist. He made four wartime docus for the army. San Pietro and the long suppressed Let There Be Light are the classics we studied in film school; Winning Your Wings is typical enlistment booster material and Report from the Aleutians a remarkably good record of how the war was really fought in far-flung locations. Let There Be Light: John Huston's Wartime Documentaries Blu-ray Olive Films 1942-1945 Color and B&W 1:33 flat full frame 281 min. Street Date January 19, 2016 available through the Olive Films website 29.95 Directed by John Huston

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Of the Hollywood directors who 'went to war' and made high-profile Signal Corps films for the public, John Huston was surely the most innovative. He made one enlistment booster for the Army Air Corps and then three pictures that the Army thought were either too long,...

Adieu au langage - Goodbye to Language

A Works Cited

Introduction

From its bluntly political opening (Alfredo Bandelli's 'La caccia alle streghe': "Always united we win, long live the revolution!") to its hilarious fecal humor and word play—with 3D staging that happily puts to shame James Cameron and every other hack who's tried their hand at it these past several years—Adieu au langage overwhelms us with a deluge of recited texts, music and images, hardly ever bothering to slow down to let us catch our breath. Exhilarating and certainly not surprising—this is the guy who made Puissance de la parole after all!

The release of a new Godard film or video means a new encounter with texts, films and music often familiar from the filmmaker's earlier work—reworked and re-contextualized—as well as new discoveries to be sorted through and identified. This life-long interest in quotation...

David McCallum with event host Bruce Crawford. (Photo: Steve Gray)

By Jon Heitland

On any list of the best films based on World War II, The Great Escape, directed by John Sturges and based on the novel by Paul Brickhill, will always rank near the top. The compelling story of a group of British and American prisoners of war and how they outwitted their Nazi captors observes its 50th anniversary this year, and actor David McCallum, who plays Ashley-Pitt in the film, travelled to Omaha, Nebraska on November 9, 2013, to help celebrate the classic film. Proceeds went to the Nebraska Kidney Foundation, which was why McCallum took time from his busy television schedule to make an appearance. The evening event centered around a showing of the film at the large, concert-style theater at the prestigious Joslyn Museum, to an enthusiastic, full house crowd of 1000.

The Great Escape 50 year retrospective was another...

Nick and Meg go to Paris for their 30th anniversary and confront some tricky questions. In his new film, Le Week-End, Hanif Kureishi meditates on the old problem of marriage and desire

Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema, just as it has been at the centre of our lives. Most of us have come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort. And the kind of questions that surround lengthy relationships – what is it to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? – are the most important of our lives. Marriage brings together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property.

Le Week-End is a...

Anybody who has ever been to a high school reunion (and I’ve been to my share) will tell you that the calendar and the clock can be incredibly cruel (particularly when combined with the long-term effects of gravity, but let’s not go there).

Time punishes creative works as well. Some work grows dated, stale, stiff. Time and the evolving form of the given art leaves a once vibrant and exciting work behind looking dead and obsolete.

More cruel, perhaps, is work that is simply…forgotten. Not for any good reason. Good as it was, maybe it was simply not successful enough to lodge very deeply in the popular consciousness; working well enough in its day, but soon lost among the ever-growing detritus of a lot of other pieces of yesterday.

Movie music is particularly vulnerable to the cruelties of time. Outside of the form’s devotees, it rarely...

With a shiny new version of iTunes just having arrived from Apple’s secret labs, the timing is just perfect to introduce you to this software as a powerful tool for organizing reference material. iTunes is maybe the most underrated and misunderstood application on the planet. Many people just see it as a way to fill their iPhones. While it certainly is pretty good at doing that, it also can serve as a tool to give you access to music you might want to listen to for inspiration. iTunes also works great for cataloguing your own work for reference, but we will come to that in a future article.

So what are we talking about here? I don’t know about you, but at least I am constantly prompted to cal up this or that film score. People say „I want something like Xy did in that film!“. Fortunately, with a big record collection,...

(John Huston, 1962, Transition Digital Media, 12)

John Huston originally commissioned a screenplay about Sigmund Freud from Jean-Paul Sartre. It proved overlong and unwieldy and the ultimate film came closer to one of the respectful Warner Bros biopics of great men on which both Huston and the film's German-born producer, Wolfgang Reinhardt, had worked in the 1930s. Set in Vienna in the 1880s, it's about what Huston in his prologue portentously describes as "Freud's descent into a region almost as black as hell itself, man's unconscious and how he let in light". In his penultimate screen appearance, a troubled but generally impressive Montgomery Clift plays the young neurologist who challenges the medical establishment, moving from hypnosis towards psychoanalysis and developing his revolutionary theories, most especially about infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.

Susannah York and David McCallum play two key patients, with the long-blacklisted Larry Parks as Freud's friend Joseph Breuer.

As the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death approaches, Lois Banner argues in this extract from her new book that the star – complex and powerful – had many qualities associated with the women's movement

In one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe stands on a subway grate, trying to hold her skirt down as a gust of wind blows it up, exposing her underpants. The photo was taken in New York on 15 September, 1954, in a photoshoot during the filming of The Seven Year Itch.

Marilyn is a vision in white, suggesting innocence and purity. Yet she exudes sexuality and transcends it; poses for the male gaze and confronts it. The photoshoot was a publicity stunt, one of the greatest in the history of film. Its time and location were published in New York newspapers; it attracted a crowd of 100 male photographers and 1,500 male spectators, even...

La Grande Illusion

Jean Renoir's 1937 classic still stands out as a remarkable achievement, just as much for what it doesn't do as what it does. It's set during the first world war, but is hardly what you'd call a war film. Similarly, it involves escapes from PoW camps but isn't really a movie about escape. Renoir's approach was always too subtle to make movies full of blatant hectoring.

A French pilot (Jean Gabin) and captain (Pierre Fresnay) are shot down and imprisoned behind enemy lines. They are taken to prison camps where escape is treated as a sport ("A golf course is for golf … a prison camp for escape."). While we see the planning in great detail (much repeated in The Great Escape) Renoir is more interested in the microcosm of society that the camps present, particularly that presided over by the aristocratic Eric von Stroheim. As these are officers' camps,...

Reviewer: James van Maanen

Ratings (out of five): ****

At times, and very briefly, as I watched David Cronenberg's new movie A Dangerous Method -- about Freud and Jung, their relationship, a female patient whom they "shared" for a time and another, male, whom one analyst passed to his peer -- the 1962 John Huston film Freud would flicker through my mind. This was brief, yes, because I wanted nothing to distract me from the excellent work at hand. But I could not help but marvel at how much movies have grown up -- in terms of subject matter and how it is handled -- in the nearly half-century between the two films. That is to say, when cinema actually takes the trouble to make real and intelligent use of what is permitted, now that so many barriers have fallen in regard to what may be shown and discussed on screen,...

David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (see review) is out this week and will provide some challenging holiday viewing for those of you lucky enough to live in a limited-release city.

The biopic deals with the intersection of thinking that occurred between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein in the early years of the twentieth century. Their shared ideas created the thought and practice of psychoanalysis and shaped the way we think and talk about ourselves to this day, and much has been written about their intellectual (and in Jung and Spielrein’s case, physically consummated) ménage a trois.

Knightly as the troubled Sabina Spielrein in 'A Dangerous Method'

Although its central theme is sex, both the theory and the practice, the movie is, to all intents and purposes, a mannered costume drama, scripted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Carrington, Atonement, Chéri) and starring actorly heavyweights Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen.

A novel based on the records of Monroe's analysis is grimly fascinating

It is hard to know by what standards the author of this book can claim it to be a novel. Certainly it does not have the shape, tone or atmosphere of a crafted piece of fiction. What it most resembles is one of those immensely long Vanity Fair articles which start off with screaming headlines and lurid cross-heads, but which after a short distance one has to pursue into the ad-less wastes of the magazine's back pages. One keeps reading in the hope of finding shocking revelations, scurrilous imputations or at least good low-grade gossip, all the while suspecting that one is wasting one's time, which would probably be better spent watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.

This is not to say that Marilyn's Last Sessions is a bad book, but it is such a strange hybrid...

Film Clip: ‘A Dangerous Method’

Everett Collection Viggo Mortensen arriving for the premiere of “A Dangerous Method” at the Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, September 10, 2011.

With his chiseled good looks and clear blue eyes, actor Viggo Mortensen may be the last person a casting director would think of for the role of Sigmund Freud, the Jewish-born father of modern psychoanalysis. Mortensen, 53, was skeptical of the idea when his friend and longtime collaborator, director David Cronenberg, sought him out for...

I’m not exactly a cultist for David Cronenberg — I didn’t think A History of Violence was very convincing, or even that The Fly was a great horror film — but I was primed, in Toronto, to see A Dangerous Method, in which Viggo Mortensen plays Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung. Keira Knightley — yes, Keira Knightley — plays the sexed-up, tormented Russian Jewish hysteria patient-turned-psychoanalyst prodigy who comes between the two of them. When you consider that Freud and Jung, along with Einstein, were arguably the most influential thinkers of the last hundred years, there have been precious...

Her father was scary. Vincent Gallo got vicious. And Jack Nicholson taught her never to give a brown present. Anjelica Huston tells John Patterson about a life among Hollywood royalty

The last time I met Anjelica Huston was six or seven years ago in a luxury oceanfront hotel in Venice, California. It was windy and cold, Huston was still a smoker – we talked outside in the wind while she lit up like a naughty schoolgirl. Today, it's a blisteringly hot day, she's an enviably youthful 60, an ex-smoker now, sitting in the lounge of the luxury hotel next door, before a gigantic cinemascope window affording guests a million-dollar view of the Pacific, which looks seriously tempting in today's heat.

"I went in the ocean this year, the day after my birthday," she tells me as we watch the breakers gently roll in, "and it was actually really nice. It's like the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians,...

I was saddened to learn this morning that Betty Garrett, the great star of stage, screen, and TV, passed away yesterday at the age of 94 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.

Garrett was one of those rare people — like, say, Jack Valenti — who happened to be a witness to and/or participant in a remarkably high number of historic events of the 20th century. She was a member of Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre company, and was with him on the night that he shook up America with his infamous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” (1938); she was Frank Sinatra’s leading lady in two of the earliest great M-g-m musical-comedies, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1949) and “On the Town” (1949); her career was greatly hurt by the Hollywood Red Scare after her husband, the Oscar nominated actor Larry Parks, refused to name names before the House Committee...

Timothy Hutton, Peter Sarsgaard, Liam Neeson as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Chris O'Donnell in Bill Condon's Kinsey Kinsey Review: Part I Also like the controversial heroes of previous biopics, Dustin Hoffman's Lenny Bruce in Lenny and Montgomery Clift's Dr. Sigmund Freud in Freud, Kinsey is ostracized because he dares tell the uncomfortable truth to a hypocritical society that wants none of it. But unlike Hoffman's abrasive stand-up comedian or Clift's detached psychoanalyst, Condon's Alfred Kinsey is an eccentric but wholly likable fellow. And therein lies Kinsey's biggest flaw. Since this is a (mostly) American movie, one can accept hunky Liam Neeson playing the hound-faced Alfred Kinsey, a carbon copy of actor Tom Ewell (the quasi-errant husband in the Marilyn Monroe comedy The Seven Year Itch). However, I found it difficult to accept a sex-obsessed hero who is hardly ever shown enjoying the pleasures of sex. Even if...

Though York couldn't maintain the Christie-like success of her 60s peak, her unusual choices made for an interesting career

There was a rage for Susannah York in the 60s like there was for Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave, so it seemed odd when it ended in the mid-70s. All of a sudden, the rush of good parts stopped. This seemed odd, after her Oscar nomination as best supporting actress in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). But then, why did she let herself take such roles as that of the superfluous wife in The Battle of Britain in the same year?

In her early career, York had seemed a conventional English beauty: as Alec Guinness's daughter in 1960's Tunes of Glory (her actual debut) and a touching lead performance the following year in Lewis Gilbert's The Greengage Summer as a young woman in France coming to sexual maturity.

Susannah York, film star of the 1960s, has died aged 72. We look back over her career in clips

Susannah Yolande Fletcher was born in Chelsea in 1939. After growing up in Scotland and studying at Rada, she got her screen break in the Highland army drama Tunes of Glory (1960) and her first lead, as a teenager growing into her sexuality, in Lewis Gilbert's The Greengage Summer. She continued her association with frank subject matter opposite Montgomery Clift in Freud. A further boost came with 1963's Oscar-winning Tom Jones, in which York played the true love of Albert Finney's Tom. Although her Sophie was less bawdy than much of the movie, she still had fun, as the trailer shows.

York's career continued to thrive throughout the 1960s, with roles in Sands of the Kalahari, espionage adventures Kaleidoscope and Sebastian, and as Sir Thomas More's daughter in A Man for All Seasons...

Star of Tom Jones and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, she defied typecasting

Susannah York, who has died aged 72, was a vibrant, energetic personality with a devouring passion for work, strong political opinions and great loyalty to old friends. Her international reputation as an actor depended heavily on the hit films she made in the 1960s, including Tom Jones (1963) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. But, even when her movie career waned, she worked ceaselessly in theatre, often appearing in pioneering fringe productions. It was typical of her that, although diagnosed with cancer late in 2010, she refused chemotherapy and fulfilled a contractual obligation to do a tour of Ronald Harwood's Quartet.

In her early years York was often cast as an archetypal English rose. But, although born in Chelsea, south-west London (as Susannah Yolande Fletcher), she was raised...

Sad news to report. The lovely, talented 60s star Susannah York, aka Superman's Mom (the biological one back on Krypton) has died at the age of 72. Here's why she'll live on though... They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969)

They Shoot Horses Don't They (1969)

They Shoot Horses is my personal favorite film of 1969 and an all-time Oscar record holder (most nominations without a corresponding Best Picture citation, a grand total of Nine!) but it's sadly underdiscussed these days. Susannah was nominated for playing Jane Fonda's main dancing rival in the marathon contest at the film's center, a neat metaphorical object, human suffering as entertainment. Susannah's psychotic break in the shower rivals any femme unravelling in Black Swan.

York also holds the distinction of being the only female cast member of Best Picture winner Tom Jones (1963) to not be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. I'm exaggerating but since an incredible three...

The London-based actress has passed away after losing a fight with cancer. She was 72. Susannah York had her Hollywood breakout with an Oscar-nominated performance in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and won a BAFTA for the same role. She first became popular with the public co-starring in the quadruple-Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963) before appearing in A Man For All Seasons (1966) and playing Beryl Reid’s gay lover in The Killing of Sister George (1968). Her place in film history is assured through those groundbreaking films. The 70s weren’t so good for York – the highpoint of which was playing Superman’s mother Lara in Superman (1978). I only spoke to her last month when she told me how excited she was to be flying to Princeton University to be interviewed after a screening of John Huston’s Freud (1962) in which she starred opposite Montgomery Clift.

Repertory theaters on the coasts are truly offering a window onto the world this spring, with Jia Zhangke and Bong Joon-ho retrospectives, as well as New French Cinema in New York, "Freebie and the Bean," "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" and Jason Reitman's favorite films invade Los Angeles, and the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin is offering a fond farewell to the video cassette. But consider this a hello to seeing classics, oddities and rarities on the big screen over the next few months.

Cities: [New York] [Los Angeles] [Austin] More Spring Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]

[Anywhere But a Movie Theater]

New York

92YTribeca

Is there a more energetic way to start the spring than with a screening of Russ Meyer's "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (Feb. 20, with editors Rumsey Taylor, Leo Goldsmith and Jenny Jediny in attendance)? Perhaps not, but it's only the start of an exciting spring season at the 92YTribeca Screening Room, which will present several special events over the next few months.

No 79: Montgomery Clift 1920-66

Like Marlon Brando, his close friend, fellow maverick and chief rival for the title of greatest American actor of his generation, the tall, lean Clift was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was an overbearing, right-wing banker and stockbroker of considerably fluctuating fortunes; his ambitious mother, an illegitimate child adopted at birth, was obsessed with establishing her membership of a distinguished patrician family from the south. Along with his twin sister and elder brother, Clift was privately educated.

At the age of 15, Monty, as everyone called him, made his Broadway debut and for the next decade was constantly employed there, usually playing handsome, sensitive sons, though with the possible exception of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (directed in 1942 by Elia Kazan) none of the plays he appeared in entered the classic repertoire. For years, he rejected Hollywood offers until accepting the role...