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Going into "First Blood," director Ted Kotcheff and star Sylvester Stallone surely weren't aware they were making one of the best action movies ever made and crafting an action icon in the process. But they might have had an inkling, considering they were working from David Morrell's 1972 novel of the same name. The book contained the very mix of Hollywood-style bombast and social critique that would define the very first Rambo movie as the innovative outlier it is within the larger canon. Inspired by two harrowing true stories about war veterans, Morrell wrote John Rambo as a killing machine haunted by his experiences in Vietnam. While he could dispatch enemies with preternatural ease, Rambo was also a believably tortured man, with Morrell using his prose to interrogate the very real psychological effects of serving in 'Nam.

That combination of action and analysis made its way into the original script...

It takes a special kind of star charisma to succeed in two completely different mediums. Of all the singers/actors to work in the industry — from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga — and build up impressive resumes in both, few seem as unlikely as Kris Kristofferson. A pioneering figure in the Outlaw Country movement of the ’70s, that took country music out of the Nashville establishment, Kristofferson was an icon of that scene in his own right, and not exactly a conventional choice for a matinee idol or a film star, between his anti-conformist bonafides and his grizzled bearded appearance.

And yet, in the ’70s, that’s briefly exactly what happened. Kristofferson made his film debut in 1971 with “The Last Movie,” as a member of the big ensemble in the metafictional drama from Dennis Hopper, and became a leading man the year later with “Cisco Pike,” a drama in which he...

Kris Kristofferson, the soulful country music superstar who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” performed with the supergroup The Highwaymen and made audiences swoon in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star Is Born, has died. He was 88.

Kristofferson died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii, his family announced. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” they said in a statement. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

A native of South Texas, Kristofferson starred in football and rugby and won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament while attending Pomona College in California; earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study literature abroad; and piloted helicopters in the U.S. Army.

He threw away a career in the military and moved to Nashville, where he worked as...

Let’s say that, in January of 1972, you had never heard a note of Kris Kristofferson’s music. You didn’t know the former helicopter pilot and Rhodes scholar had written “Me and Bobby McGee,” which Janis Joplin had turned into her signature song. Or “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which he gave to Johnny Cash after allegedly landing a whirlybird in the Man in Black’s backyard. (Print the legend.) Or “Once More With Feeling,” “For the Good Times,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” or a number of...

Kris Kristofferson has sadly passed away at the age of 88, leaving behind an incredible legacy as a singer, songwriter, actor, Rhodes Scholar, football player, boxer, firefighter, and Army Ranger helicopter pilot.

According to reports, Kristofferson died peacefully in his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, September 28.

“We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” members of his family said in a statement. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Kristofferson was already well on his way to becoming a Country Music superstar when he made his acting debut in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971), before going on to appear in the likes of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Michael Cimino's Heaven’s Gate (1980), John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996), Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and the first...

Kris Kristofferson, the legendary “outlaw” country singer-songwriter and actor, died this weekend at 88. Kristofferson won four Grammys throughout his career, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He was a member of The Highwaymen, a platinum-selling country music supergroup that also featured Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and many of his songs were covered by other artists to great success including Cash (“Sunday Morning Coming Down”), Janis Joplin (“Me and Bobby McGee”), Al Green (“For The Good Times”), and Gladys Knight (“Help Me Make it Through the Night”) just to scratch the surface.

In the early 1970s, as his recording career began taking off, he began appearing in films. His first credit was in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” and then he starred in Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” with James Coburn and Bob Dylan. In 1974 he co-starred opposite Ellen Burstyn (who won an...

Kris Kristofferson, an iconic musician and actor, died on June 22nd at his home in Maui, Hawaii at the age of 88. According to his family, Kristofferson passed away peacefully surrounded by loved ones. For over five decades, Kristofferson left an indelible mark on the worlds of country music and film.

Born in 1936 in Brownsville, Texas, Kristofferson pursued a varied career path. He earned a Rhodes Scholarship and studied literature at Oxford University. Later, he joined the U.S. Army and became a helicopter pilot. While in the military, Kristofferson began writing songs and decided to follow his dream of becoming a musician.

In the late 1960s, Kristofferson moved to Nashville to break into the music business. He slipped demo tapes under the door of Columbia Records and famously landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s property to play new songs. This bold introduction caught the attention of many in the industry.

This story originally ran in an April 1974 issue of Rolling Stone.

In Peru, one kept a daily journal; now Kristofferson bends grinning over its pages, on which, in the winter of ’70, Andes mud spilled and dried like blood spots. “Hell,” he offers rurally, “wouldn’t surprise me none you said it was blood.”

One had gone there to write about the making, or rather, wresting from the soil, of Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie; Kris, totally unknown then, was doing the film’s score. Rain hung over the Andes...

Kris Kristofferson, the nine-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and actor, died Saturday at his home in Maui, a representative for the performer shared with TheWrap. Kristofferson was 88 years old.

His family confirmed the news in a statement. “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 28 at home,” their statement read. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Beyond his music, Kristofferson began to find success in acting. He made his cinematic debut in “The Last Movie,” which was directed by Dennis Hopper. One of his most prominent roles was opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 version of “A Star Is Born.” His additional credits include “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,...

Dennis Hopper was the Oscar-nominated performer who experienced many ups-and-downs throughout his career, with his off-screen antics often overshadowing his onscreen talent. Yet many of his movies have stood the test of time. Let’s take a look back at 15 of Hopper’s greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1936, Hopper made his movie debut at the age of 19 in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), where he became fast friends with James Dean. He had an even bigger role in “Giant” (1956), which would be Dean’s last film before his untimely death in 1955. Hopper struggled for several years trying to find his voice, making small appearances in such films as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “True Grit”(1969).

He burst onto the scene with the counterculture phenomenon “Easy Rider” (1969), which he also directed and co-wrote (with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern). The story of two bikers (Hopper and Fonda) traveling across...

Launching in 2017 with a reissue of The Last Movie, Arbelos Films grew out of co-founders’ David Marriott, Dennis Bartok, Craig Rogers and Ei Toshinari’s experiences working at Cinelicious Pics. Since then, their slate of reissues have included Sátántangó, whose restoration opened up a relationship with the Hungarian National Film Archive that’s led to further Hungarian films being put out by the company, including Son of the White Mare and Twilight. In addition to Arbelos, Marriott has now started a second company with Jonathan Doyle, Canadian International Pictures, specifically focused on his native country’s cinema. Invited to the Jeonju International […]

The post AI, Uhd and 35mm: Arbelos Films’ David Marriott on the Present and Future of Film Restoration first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Launching in 2017 with a reissue of The Last Movie, Arbelos Films grew out of co-founders’ David Marriott, Dennis Bartok, Craig Rogers and Ei Toshinari’s experiences working at Cinelicious Pics. Since then, their slate of reissues have included Sátántangó, whose restoration opened up a relationship with the Hungarian National Film Archive that’s led to further Hungarian films being put out by the company, including Son of the White Mare and Twilight. In addition to Arbelos, Marriott has now started a second company with Jonathan Doyle, Canadian International Pictures, specifically focused on his native country’s cinema. Invited to the Jeonju International […]

The post AI, Uhd and 35mm: Arbelos Films’ David Marriott on the Present and Future of Film Restoration first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Tom Cruise, one of the biggest movie stars of all time, has found a new home at Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group's Co-Chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy have announced they will jointly develop and produce original theatrical films (both original and within franchises) starring Cruise beginning in 2024. They have entered into what is being called "a new strategic partnership." Cruise and his production company will have offices on the Warner Bros. Discovery lot in Burbank, signaling the seriousness of the marriage.

Cruise is one of the last truly bankable movie stars on the planet, making this a big win for Warner Bros. The partnership marks a return to Warner Bros. for Cruise, whose filmography with the studio includes movies like "Edge of Tomorrow," "Rock of Ages," "The Last Samurai," "Magnolia," "Eyes Wide Shut," "Interview with the Vampire," "Risky Business," and "The Outsiders." De Luca...

Steven Caple, Jr.'s 2023 movie, "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts," took place partly in Peru and was filmed in notable locations around the country. According to Andina, the Peruvian news agency, "Rise of the Beasts" was filmed partly in the lush jungles of San Martin where Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) met to discuss tactics in taking down the wicked robot Scourge (Peter Dinklage). Other parts of "Beasts" were shot in Saqsayhuaman on the outskirts of the ancient city of Cusco, which is an enormous stone network of structures in the shape of a puma. It is one of Peru's most-visited locations. The filmmakers also filmed near the thousands of salt ponds of Maras, as well as near Macchu Picchu, the 15th-century Incan citadel you read all about in your fifth-grade geography class. 

Naturally, the Peruvian tourism boards have begun offering "Transformers"-themed tours of Machu Picchu.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

An essential retrospective of Ousmane Sembène, featuring 35mm prints and new restorations, has begun, while the 3D classic I, the Jury screens on Friday; Michael Roemer’s great The Plot Against Harry and the Tarantino-presented Winter Kills continue screening on 35mm; Contempt continues in a 4K restoration; four Laurel & Hardy shorts play on Sunday

Paris Theater

The Paris has reopened with a new Dolby Atmos screen and a 70mm series featuring Playtime and Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Sorcerer.

Bam

The Battle of Chile, newly restored, plays in three parts.

Roxy Cinema

A Dennis Hopper series is underway: his great, rarely screened directing efforts Backtrack and The Hot Spot play on 35mm, while a print of Waterworld also screens; The Last Movie shows Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A retrospective of the Yugoslav Black Wave is now underway.

The film festivals can always be counted on to deliver surprise hits at this time of year, but meanwhile Hollywood must deal with another issue: Its Barbitude hangover.

Barbie’s billions will importantly impact upon how decision-makers frame future strategies on budget, content and promotion.

The megahit could also cast a pink cloud over awards season: Will message-minded Academy voters levitate Barbie to the same somber stratum as Nomadland?

Further, will Greta Gerwig, its auteur, become a victim of the Tom Cruise syndrome – a filmmaker-star whose work we are encouraged to admire but not honor?

Complicating matters, the bizarre lure of Barbie clearly encouraged ticket buyers to rally behind another assured Oscar nominee, Oppenheimer. It’s hard to find a precedent for feminist frivolity stoking an appetite for nuclear terror.

As such, battles over Barbitude might open a unique opportunity for a reborn Golden Globes. If 300 or so Globe voters,...

Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér's seldom seen 1990 masterpiece, Twilight, gets a 4K restoration treatment by the Hungarian Film Institute and distributed by Arbelos.  The LA-based distribution and restoration company is known for their 4K rerelease of such classics as Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Matsumoto Toshio's Funeral Parade of Roses, and Wendel Harris's Chameleon Street, as well as fellow Hungarian master Béla Tarr's Satantango and Damnation. Fehér, who only directed two feature films during his lifetime, was a close collaborator on a number of Tarr's films and shared similar aesthetics. Shot by Miklós Gurban (Werckmeister Harmonies), the film is composed entirely of some 50 long tracking shots. And it is stunning. A retiring police inspector (Péter Haumann) is called in to investigate the murder of...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Arbelos, a Los Angeles-based boutique film distribution company, has acquired North American rights to the new 4K restoration of Béla Tarr collaborator György Fehér’s landmark but long unseen Hungarian masterpiece “Twilight” (“Szürkület”). The restored version of the film world premiered in the Berlinale’s Classics strand on Monday. Hungary’s National Film Institute handled the sale.

Fehér, who made only two theatrical features, shot the black-and-white film at the end of the 1980s. Based on the crime novella “The Pledge” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, it is the story of a retired detective who uses a girl as bait to try to catch a serial killer.

The 4K restoration, using the original 35mm camera negative and magnetic sound tapes, was carried out at Hungary’s National Film Institute. The color grading was supervised by the film’s cinematographer, Miklós Gurbán.

The film premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in...

Oscar nominees “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Tár” and “Top Gun: Maverick” have been nominated for the 73rd annual Ace Eddie Awards, the American Cinema Editors announced Wednesday.

The last Hollywood guild or professional society to announce its nominations, Ace did so a week after the Oscars had unveiled its top picks in the film editing category, and all of the Academy’s choices were also nominated for Ace Eddies. “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Everything Everywhere” are competing in the comedy category with “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness,” while “Elvis,” “Tár” and “Top Gun: Maverick” are up against “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Woman King” in the drama category.

Also Read:

Academy Says It Won’t Rescind Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar Nomination

Nominees in the animation category include “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On...

Paul Newman with wife Joanne Woodward-Photograph by Courtesy of HBO For many, many years, Paul Newman was the epitome of “Hollywood Cool.” From his early films, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor, to the voice work he did for Pixar’s Cars franchise, and everything in between — including iconic titles like The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke, The Verdict and his Oscar-winning performance in The Color of Money — Newman was a charismatic force driving every movie in which he appeared. Now, a new documentary called The Last Movie Stars focuses on Newman’s life and his greatest love, Joanne Woodward. The new film, directed by Ethan Hawke and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, incorporates content from a planned (and then abandoned) memoir, including plenty of Newman’s own words. Before his death in 2008, we had the pleasure of interviewing him several times,...

The Cannes Film Festival has set its lineup for this year’s Cannes Classics program, which shines a spotlight on restorations of classic movies and features contemporary documentaries about film. Kicking off the sidebar is Jean Eustache’s controversial film The Mother and the Whore, the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize winner which incited riots at the time. Also included in the program are films by Vittorio de Sica (Sciuscià), Satyajit Ray (The Adversary), Orson Welles (The Trial) and Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz), as well as a new 4K master of Singin’ in the Rain to mark the movie’s 70th anniversary.

Among the documentaries is Ethan Hawke’s study of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, The Last Movie Stars. Executive produced by Scorsese, it features Karen Allen, George Clooney, Oscar Isaac, Latanya Richardson Jackson, Zoe Kazan, Laura Linney and Sam Rockwell among others in an exploration of the iconic couple and American cinema.

Exclusive: The Hopper Art Trust has signed a partnership with the Louder Than Pop arts and entertainment company to create “Dennis Hopper: Widescreen,” a digital immersive experience that will tour eight cities next year, starting in Los Angeles.

The exhibit plans stops in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, London, and Paris, with a possibility to expand to other cities.

The Hopper experience will allow visitors to discover Hopper’s multifaceted career as an actor, director, photographer, and artist. The 30,000-square-foot space will include experiential designs, full-scale physical sets, 3D projection mapping, sound and lighting, an Ambi-Sonic guided headphone tour with soundtrack and video, and still footage.

The exhibit will highlight Hopper’s work as an actor and filmmaker, including some of his most iconic films, including Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider. Apocalypse Now, The Last Movie, and Blue Velvet.

Louder Than Pop, LLC is an arts and entertainment...

The new 4K restoration of Dennis Hopper’s mad-wheeling 1980 feature Out of the Blue opens with text detailing the fascinating behind-the-scenes turmoil that led to its creation. Hopper was only to star in the film, intended as a family-friendly drama about a rebellious young girl named Cebe (Linda Manz) and her reform by a kind therapist. Unhappy with the footage they were seeing, producers fired writer-director Leonard Yakir and planned to shut production down. But Hopper, still in director jail after the notoriously chaotic production and dismal reception of his previous feature The Last Movie, convinced them to not only continue, but restart it from scratch with him as director for an entirely new, far more provocative tale.

In the opening scene we see Cebe’s father, Don (Hopper), drunkenly barrel his big-wheeler truck directly into a school bus full of children, with Cebe right up front in the seat next to him.

When news of Dean Stockwell’s death hit last week, much of the coverage centered around his career as a child star in the Forties when he acted alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, his role as the holographic advisor Al on the cult time-travel show Quantum Leap, and his work in movies like Married to the Mob and Blue Velvet.

But he was also a part of the late Sixties–early Seventies Topanga Canyon art scene where he palled around with Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper, George Herms, Wallace Berman,...

Dean Stockwell, who died Sunday at 85, made every movie and television show he was in better. As an actor, he had a scurrilous twinkle that could light up a scene. He started off as a child star in films like “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “The Boy with Green Hair” — the latter of which I was shocked to discover really was about a boy with green hair (I’ve never forgotten what a poignant urchin the actor made him).

Stockwell was born in Hollywood in 1936, the same year as Dennis Hopper, and if his career had taken a slightly different turn he would have been part of the James Dean/Marlon Brando new-wave-of-Method-Hollywood rat pack. In 1959, he took on his edgiest studio-system role, playing one of the kinky killers in “Compulsion,” the drama based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, and he wound up sharing the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Chicago – In my one encounter with Dean Stockwell back in 2013, he was properly off-kilter and amazing, as you expect from Frank in “Blue Velvet.” But Stockwell was so much more, starting as a child actor in Hollywood’s Golden Age, morphing to the hippie era and getting a major comeback with David Lynch and TV’s Quantum Leap.” He died in New York City on November 7th, 2021, at age 85.

Robert Dean Stockwell was born in North Los Angeles, and because he was a child actor he worked in the Golden Age of the 1940s Hollywood studio system. His first major role came when he was 11 years old, playing opposite Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “Anchors Aweigh” (1945). He became the go-to child star in classics such as “The Boy with the Green Hair’ (1946), “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), “Song of the Thin Man” (1947) and “The Secret Garden” (1949), often with another child co-star (and...

“Subvert normality. Punk is not sexual, it’s just aggression. Destroy. Kill All Hippies. I’m not talking at you, I’m talking to you. Anarchy. Disco sucks. I don’t wanna hear about you, I wanna hear from you. This is Gorgeous. Does anybody outthere read me? Disco sucks, kill all hippies. Pretty vacant, eh? Subvert normality. Signing off. This is Gorgeous. Signing off.”

“Thumbs Up! Bitter, unforgettable. An unsung treasure.” – Roger Ebert

Shocking. Controversial. Unforgettable. – Dennis Hopper’s brilliant punk rock masterpiece of adolescent rebellion is ready for a new, long overdue close-up!

A kind of spiritual sequel (and cautionary counterpoint) to Hopper’s own Easy Rider, Out Of The Blue chronicles the idealism of the sixties decline into the hazy nihilism of the 1980’s. Here’s a new trailer for the restoration:

Don Barnes (Dennis Hopper) is a truck driver in prison for drunkenly smashing his rig into a school bus.

A few hours before the 2021 New York Film Festival opened with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Lady Macbeth herself sat onstage for a press conference in Lincoln Center and unleashed the ultimate understatement. “In 400 years, everybody’s done almost everything,” Frances McDormand said. “It’s not like we’re inventing anything new.”

She was referring to the daunting odds of her director-husband’s stark, expressionistic take on the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy, though she may as well have been addressing the greatest crisis in modern creativity, and one that the movies face more than most other mediums. With its silent cinema aesthetic and gruff, visceral performances, “Macbeth” certainly provides an original take on one very familiar narrative. But NYFF, as a whole, projects an ethos altogether different from other prominent festivals on the fall circuit, as its curatorial strategy heralds the art of the new.

Throughout the winding path...

By this point, creator Ryan Murphy has enough content to fill a shared universe. So it would make sense if his latest creation, “American Horror Stories,” wanted to be firmly placed in the “Ryan Murphy-verse” — using one-off episodes to establish extras space where preexisting characters and themes from old seasons of “American Horror Story” could stretch out. But having watched the series for three consecutive weeks now, that’s not exactly what the FX on Hulu show is aiming for, and I’m no closer to telling you who this show is made for or what message it’s hoping to impart.

The show’s official synopsis states it’s “an anthology series of stand-alone episodes delving into horror myths, legends, and lore,” but in three episodes (four if you include the two-part pilot as separate entities) it’s unclear what legends, myths, or lore we’re drawing from outside of Murphy’s universe.

It is hard to know where to begin and what to say first when it comes to Dennis Hopper, both on screen and off. As an actor he began in the late 50s with small roles in films like Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and numerous TV performances. James Dean was a hero and friend to Hopper. A great way to view Rebel Without A Cause is to watch Hopper’s intense studying of and admiration for Dean on screen in that film. Hopper was witness to so many periods of American culture, a complex masculine figure much like his friend and contemporary Harry Dean Stanton, the whiskey, cigarettes and American highway mythology follows his legacy. This mix scratches the surface of an iconic figure of 20th-century popular culture and a great artist, it is a time capsule with no linear trajectory, bending back and forth across genre and feeling.Coming...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

A sizzling neo-noir that should have boosted Dennis Hopper into feature bankability goes a tad slack — my guess is that Hopper’s fine directing instincts got blurred in the editing process. Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly and others are well cast in Charles Williams’ hardboiled sex ‘n’ crime yarn, and the temperature indeed rises when Johnson gets near his co-stars. The narrative momentum breaks down somewhat, yet the great-looking show remains a favorite, atmospheric and oversexed.

The Hot Spot

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1990 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 130 min. / Street Date May 4, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, William Sadler, Charles Martin Smith, Jerry Hardin, Barry Corbin, Jack Nance, Virgil Frye.

Cinematography: Ueli Steiger

Film Editor: Wende Phifer Mate

Original Music: Jack Nitzsche

Written by Nona Tyson, Charles Williams from the 1952 book Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams

Produced by Paul Lewis

Directed by Dennis...

Though renowned for his music, Phil Spector also harbored an ambition to direct and produce movies, and in 1966 asked me to drop by his house so he could explain his plan. At the time, I was a reporter covering politics for The New York Times in Los Angeles and had met Spector at a political party.

Spector, then 25, was already pallid and rather fragile in appearance. He lived in an imposing Edwardian mansion and, as I approached, I saw Spector’s limousine parked outside. It bore a bumper sticker stating ‘Send Batman to Vietnam.”

Once inside, I could see several young women frolicking in his pool. Spector was cordial. He told me his first movie would be titled The Last Movie and would be ‘an art movie.’ “I am an admirer of Truffaut, Kubrick, and Fellini,” he said.

A butler arrived with apple pie and root beer. “You might check...

At the time, in November 1970, it must have seemed like an ideal match, a meeting of renegade titans: Orson Welles, the long-ago boy genius of theater and films who never got a job directing in Hollywood after 1958, and Dennis Hopper, whose out-of-nowhere smash with Easy Rider in 1969 made him the boy wonder of the hippie age and ostensible leader of a new wave of counterculture movies.

Just as Welles had cratered from a Hollywood-career perspective, Hopper hit the rocks with his second film — the hopelessly pretentious, financially ruinous The Last Movie, which the younger man was editing when he sat down with Welles one night to film five hours of chatty material that ended up as mere snippets in Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, which was only finished and released in 2018 courtesy of Netflix.

Why Orson Welles’ ‘The Other Side Of The Wind’ Took Half A Century To...

An annual celebration in the finest cinematic offerings, the New York Film Festival has been a treasure trove of the latest work from seasoned auteurs along with new discoveries throughout its storied history. Now in its 58th year, the festival’s slate will be available to a wider audience than ever before. Due to the pandemic forcing theaters in New York to continue with their shutdown, Film at Lincoln Center has reimagined the event, offering nationwide virtual screenings with limited rentals as well as drive-in screenings in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Kicking off this Thursday with the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (to be followed by two more films in his Small Axe anthology), we’ll be providing reviews of the premieres and beyond, but to begin our coverage we’re highlighting the recommended films coming to the festival we’ve seen at Sundance, Venice, TIFF,...

Dennis Hopper meets Orson Welles: That sounds like an oil-and-water match-up of legendary filmmakers. Welles, for all his renegade gusto, was a defrocked classicist — maybe (or maybe not) the greatest film director who ever lived, and one who became the ultimate high-toned Hollywood dropout. Whereas Hopper, the scraggly counterculture bad boy, launched his career as a director with “Easy Rider,” at which point he had already, in essence, dropped out. (He made dropping out seem the aesthetic cutting edge of the New Hollywood.) Yet for one long, boozy rambling evening in November 1970, these two men who barely knew each other sat around the dingy brick-walled den of a rented home in Beverly Hills, lit by hurricane lamps and a flickering fire, shooting the breeze and sizing each other up as cross-generational kindred spirits.

“Hopper/Welles” is a fascinating curiosity. It’s two hours and 11 minutes long, and the entire...

Orson Welles doesn’t waste time searching for the truth. Moments into “Hopper/Welles,” he declares, “Fuck the audience!” Meanwhile, a bemused Dennis Hopper allows for a dutiful grin. Such are the joys of this glorified behind-the-scenes feature, cobbled together from footage produced for Welles’ long-delayed swan song, “The Other Side of the Wind.” Assembled by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski one year after they conjured “Wind” from Welles’ archives, this two-hour conversation from 1970 . It’s a long, drunken party conversation that allows you a seat at the table.

With Welles sitting just off-screen, cameraman Gary Graver sticks with Hopper’s bearded face for the duration, and the pair just go at it. The gorgeous black-and-white conversation was one of the many fragments produced for the “Wind” production, much of which takes place over the course of a long party hosted by the Wellesian protagonist and fictional...

For almost 40 years, the 100 hours of surviving footage that Orson Welles shot in the early 1970s for the movie “The Other Side of the Wind” remained largely unseen. First the director struggled in vain to finish the film, then its rights were tied up after his death. But that four decades of frustration has turned into a flurry of activity: In the last two years, that footage has been used not only in the completed version of “The Other Side of the Wind” that finally premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018, but in two different documentaries about the film, Morgan Neville’s “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” and Ryan Suffern’s short doc “A Final Cut for Orson.”

And now it’s serving as the basis for yet another side of “The Other Side of the Wind,” and another posthumous film on which Welles is credited as director.

“The Last Movie,” Dennis Hopper’s infamous directorial follow-up to “Easy Rider,” is a counterculture touchstone in its own right, even though it wasn’t given a national release for decades after its short-lived 1971 bow. Even longer in coming: a soundtrack album. This Saturday, nearly five decades after the movie first touched screens, a companion LP is arriving. The vinyl on the label Earth Recordings, distributed by Light in the Attic in the U.S., will be released for Record Store Day on August 29, in a limited edition of 1000. A CD version will be forthcoming.

Variety invited the album’s two producers to weigh in on “The Last Movie” and its music, then and now. Jessica Hundley, who knew Hopper, shares firsthand memories of the filmmaker and how the movie’s shelving affected him. Pat Thomas, one of the music industry’s foremost archival producers, tells what to expect from...

Call me a heretic, but I’m someone who never gloried all that much in the comedic awesomeness of Peter Sellers. Well, okay, I did in “Dr. Strangelove” — who would deny the delectable punch of that virtuoso hat trick of performances? But the “Pink Panther” films were always a hit-or-miss mélange of the funny and the slapdash corny, and there’s an underlying zaniness to the Sellers mystique that to me, at least, doesn’t age that well. I make a point of this because there’s a kind of cult for the idea that Peter Sellers was a mad genius: the guy who had no self and only came into being when he played a character, the Swinging Sixties devil who stole movies right out from under their creators. That cult is at the center of “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” a documentary about the making of one of...

Actor-writer Lawrence Michael Levine’s first two directorial features, “Gabi on the Roof in July” and “Wild Canaries,” were idiosyncratic indie hipster comedies of a familiar stripe. His third, “Black Bear,” is a much trickier proposition, a kind of narrative puzzle box in which one might be hard-pressed to find a solution, or even determine there is one. Rebooting midway to completely reframe its prior storytelling in very meta film-within-a-film-about-making-a-film terms, this adventurous seriocomedy has enough surprising elements and off-kilter humor to keep one intrigued, even if the payoff is debatable. Cast names will give it viability as a streaming item, but commercial prospects are not stellar.

The comedy of awkwardness, as ill-matched strangers stubbornly fail to click as friends, dominates the early going here to dryly amusing effect. Allison (Aubrey Plaza) is an actress turned writer-director of “small, unpopular films” whose latest creative drought lands her on the doorstep...

Igo Kantor, whose Hollywood career took him from Howard Hughes’ projection room to supervising post-production on “Easy Rider” and producing B-movies like “Kingdom of the Spiders” and “Mutant,” died Oct. 15. He was 89.

Kantor, who was born in Vienna and raised in Lisbon, met “Dillinger” director Max Nosseck on the ship to New York. Nosseck gave him an intro to his projectionist brother while Kantor was studying at UCLA, leading to a job screening screened movies for Hughes at a private theater while he was secretly dating actress Jean Peters, whom Hughes later married.

In the early 1960s, Kantor opened post-production house Synchrofilm, becoming the post-production supervisor on “The Monkees,” which led to Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson hiring him to head post-production on “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.”

He received Emmy nominations three years in a row for his work on the Bob Hope Christmas specials.

As far as black and white Hungarian dramas that push into the eight-hour running-time range, Bela Tarr’s epic “Sátántangó” doesn’t have much in the way of competition. And while many of its basic elements — its length, its style, its subject matter — might sound prohibitive, the wide-ranging study of life in a rural village during the final days of Communism is one of cinema’s most fascinating and immersive films.

It’s also one that’s rarely seen, thanks in part to that 439-minute length (not so appealing for many theaters) and a very brief home video release (many fans have been forced to watch it on VHS bootlegs). But that’s all changing, thanks to a brand-new restoration that will soon hit theaters and eventually be available for Blu-ray consumption. Fans of Tarr can thank Arbelos Films, which worked with the Hungarian Filmlab to restore the film from its original 35mm camera negative.

I’m tired of hearing how some novels are “impossible to adapt.” Balderdash! Just because some books don’t lend themselves to being translated from page to screen doesn’t mean that the attempt ought not to be made. Just ask James Franco, who’s shown a speed freak’s determination to tackle some of the unlikeliest literary adaptations of the last decade, from William Faulkner to John Steinbeck (“In Dubious Battle”) to Cormac McCarthy (“Child of God”). Frankly, he’s not very good at it, but that doesn’t stop him. Nor should it. Even Franco’s failures are fascinating, like asymmetrical pottery-wheel mishaps that wouldn’t passs for a vase, but wind up looking like modern art.

From the moment of its publication in 2007, Steve Erickson’s postmodern showbiz satire “Zeroville” was widely described as “unfilmable” — which was like waving a red flag in front of Franco. Truth be told,...

Family says, “In honor of Peter, please raise a glass to freedom.”

Peter Fonda, a symbol of 1960s counterculture who co-wrote and starred alongside Dennis Hopper in the iconic Easy Rider, has died at his home in Los Angeles following a battle with lung cancer. He was 79.

Fonda, the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget Fonda, earned two Oscar nominations in a career defined by Easy Rider – 50 years old this year – which celebrated the free-wheeling ethos of the 1960s as the United States careened into a darker odyssey in the decade that followed.

Family says, “In honor of Peter, please raise a glass to freedom.”

Peter Fonda, a symbol of 1960s counter-culture who co-wrote and starred alongside Dennis Hopper in the iconic Easy Rider, has died at his home in Los Angeles following a battle with lung cancer. He was 79.

Fonda, the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget Fonda, earned two Oscar nominations in a career defined by Easy Rider – 50 years old this year – which toasted the free-wheeling ethos of the 1960s as the United States careened into a darker odyssey in the decade that followed.

Film will go on international festival tour ahead of early 2020 theatrical release.

Ahead of its world premiere at Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, a restored version of Hungarian psychedelic animation Son Of The White Mare has landed at Arbelos Films.

The distributor has acquired North, Central, and South American rights to Marcell Jankovics’ cult film, set to screen at Fantasia on July 29. The quest story takes place in a mythological setting as three brothers led by Treehshaker set out to save the universe by destroying dragons attached to a huge oak tree at the gates of the underworld. The film...

Film will go on international festival tour ahead of early 2020 theatrical release.

Ahead of its world premiere at Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, a restored version of Hungarian psychedelic animation Son Of The White Mare has landed at Arbelos Films.

The distributor has acquired North, Central, and South American rights to Marcell Jankovics’ cult film, set to screen at Fantasia on July 29. The quest story takes place in a mythological setting as three brothers led by Treehshaker set out to save the universe by destroying dragons attached to a huge oak tree at the gates of the underworld. The film...

Tony Sokol Jun 12, 2019

Sylvia Miles was the original Sally on the Dick van Dyke Show, and a fixture of New York's entertainment world.

Iconic New York stage and screen scene-stealer Sylvia Miles died at age 94, according to Variety. Miles created a string of incredibly memorable, very New York characters, often with very little screen time. She was on the screen for six minutes in Midnight Cowboy (1969), about five and a half minutes in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for both. She only sold two apartments in Wall Street and its sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Miles had three short scenes selling Amy Irving to the pickle guy in Crossing Delancey.

Her starring role in Andy Warhol's Heat, is no less memorable, though criminally under-watched. A take on the classic Sunset Boulevard, as if any of Warhol's movies weren't, Miles played the Gloria Swanson...

Actress Sylvia Miles, who was Oscar-nominated for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely,” died Wednesday at her home in New York. Her friends, journalist Michael Musto and actress Geraldine Smith, confirmed her death. She was reportedly 94, although she gave various accounts of her age.

Celebrity journalist Musto, who was about to appear with Smith and Miles in an indie film, said, “She was one of my first celebrity interviews (in the 1970s) and was charismatic and career driven. She’d run up to directors at Studio 54 and say ‘Hire me!’ She was very proud of her two Oscar nominations.”

Smith said “Her family was her New York friends,” and related how she had been excited to get back to acting.

Miles’ first major role came in the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy” alongside Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Despite only appearing on screen for about six minutes, her role as Cass earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.