News

If you’re going to remake a movie, why not remake one of the most acclaimed movies ever made?

Paramount Pictures has preemptively acquired a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic psychological thriller “Vertigo,” as a possible starring vehicle for Robert Downey Jr. The actor is producing the project with his wife Susan Downey through their Team Downey production company, along with John Davis and John Fox via Davis Entertainment.

“Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight is set to write the script, hot on the heels of his commitment to write an untitled “Star Wars” movie for Lucasfilm, as Variety reported on Wednesday.

Downey has kept a low profile as an actor since the release of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” which is one of the highest grossing movies ever made, and 2020’s “Dolittle,” which is not. He produced and appears in the documentary “Sr.,” about his father, and he’s next set...

So many great stories in history start out with the key players hating each other — as it is in Netflix and A24’s “Beef,” streaming on Netflix in April. Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun) meet via parking lot bump turned action-movie car chase, their lives connecting and their road rage lingering in weeks and months after the incident. In reviewing the series, IndieWire’s Ben Travers said that “’Beef’ does a fine job balancing Amy and Danny’s practical intelligence and impractical passions; their bitterness toward the other driver ebbs and flows as their personal lives better or worsen, and it’s in these moments that the half-hour drama thrives.”

The series from Lee Sung Jin premieres on April 6. See below for more titles coming to Netflix in April 2023.

April 1

“28 Days”

“A League of Their Own”

“American Hustle”

“Battleship”

“The Birds”

“Born on the Fourth of July...

Paul Schrader is back at it, and this time he’s taking aim at the Oscars.

The screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “Obsession,” who was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “First Reformed”, is taking aim at what he feels is a muddled awards show and member base. “Oscars So Not Hollywood. Diversifying membership, recalibrating how votes are counted, these changes have transformed the Hollywood Oscars into the International Oscars,” Schrader wrote on Facebook (via Twitter). “I rather like the provincial origins of the Oscars: Hollywood coming together to celebrate its own.”

Just In: Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver (1978) and world-renown filmmaker responsible for First Reformed (2018) and The Card Counter (2021) calls Oscars too “woke” and says the Oscars are too “international” and must “return to its origins.” pic.twitter.com/ARVxlrVjN6

— Lance (@lancenyyc) March 13, 2023

Schrader continued, less coherently: “Barry Diller is right. If the Oscars are to...

Reggaeton stars Tainy and Yandel appeared together on Jimmy Kimmel Live to perform their new joint track, “Si Te Vas.” The duo showcased the song during a nighttime performance on a basketball court with a DJ on the decks.

Earlier this month, the pair dropped “Deja Vu,” the first single off their upcoming collaborative album, Dynasty, out July 16th. “Si Te Vas” will also appear on the album.

Si Te Vas out now. @yandeloficial @saintjhn @Neon16_ @JimmyKimmelLive tonight...

It’s not a reach to say that Olivia Rodrigo is this year’s biggest artist. The 18 year-old Disney alum has had a meteoric rise, starting with the instant success of her debut single, “Drivers License.” The song not only debuted at number-one on the Billboard Hot 100, an unprecedented achievement for a debut single, it also held on at the top for eight weeks, becoming one of the longest-running number-one hits by a female artist in the past five years.

SEE2022 Grammys Best New Artist preview: Who to look out for Besides likely front-runner Olivia Rodrigo

Rodrigo’s success continued with her follow-up single, “Deja Vu,” which debuted in the top 10 of the Hot 100 and has so far peaked at number-three on the chart. Her superstar status was cemented with the release of her most recent single, “Good 4 U,” which, like “Drivers License,” had a chart-topping launch on the Hot 100. Her debut album,...

Olivia Rodrigo has had one of the fastest rises to music stardom in recent history. The teenage singer-songwriter released songs as a cast member of the Disney+ series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” but her first official single, “Drivers License,” was only released in January, and just since then she’s racked up two number-one hits, two other top-10 hits, and 11 total entries on the Billboard Hot 100. That comprises the entirety of her debut album, “Sour.” So what’s the best song on the collection? Scroll down to vote in our poll at the bottom of this post.

SEEWill Olivia Rodrigo sweep the Grammys in 2022 like Billie Eilish did in 2020?

“Drivers License” debuted at number-one and stayed there for eight weeks, so it’s the longest-running chart-topper of 2021 as of this writing. Making such a big splash with your first single, there’s always the risk that it...

Two givens for Los Angeles living in 1969: perpetual driving around listening to the radio, and stereo cartridge needles dropping onto record grooves. Those things were the basics of our existence! CineSavant closes out his pre-Christmas cheer with his favorite picture of ’19. It’s possibly Quentin Tarantino’s best. Yes, yes I know it has that crazy finale, but overall it has much less violence than most anything else he’s done. Plus it has scenes that can be described as heartwarming, and quietly sentimental… practically new territory for this director. The respect shown for Sharon Tate is gratifying. Bring us more great stories that inspire you this way, Mr. T. !

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

4K UltraHD + Blu-ray + Digital

Sony/Columbia

2019 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 161 min. / Street Date December 10, 2019 / 27.96

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern,...

This artistic depiction of the dark side of female sexuality, depicted by first time director and renowned actress Halina Reijn, takes us inside of a seasoned, freelance psychologist who becomes completely infatuated by the sex offender she is treating in a penal institution.

Halina Reijn is a renowned director, actress, author and producer. She is the winner of multiple awards, including the Dutch film Award, the Golden Calf for Best Actress , the Dutch theater awards Theo D’Or and Colombina, as well as the Courbois Pearl, an award which honors an actress who has made an indelible impression, both on stage as in film and television. Since 2017 she is also the proud owner of the Theo Mann-Bouwmeester Ring, an award to honor an actress who has contributed greatly to the Dutch theatre.

Halina Reijn takes on her first directorial challenge without inhibition, fully aware of tackling sensitive issues which society...

‘Top End Wedding.’

Americans will have the chance to see Wayne Blair’s Top End Wedding early next year, but only on VOD and other digital platforms.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired the Us rights to the romantic comedy which raked in $5.26 million in Australian cinemas, the year’s second highest grosser behind Ride Like a Girl’s $11.5 million.

The specialty distributor plans a multi-platform release on February 21, its third recent Oz acquisition following Mirrah Foulkes’ Judy & Punch and Koko: A Red Dog Story, the third edition of the franchise written and directed by Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce, which opens here on 80 screens tomorrow.

“Top End Wedding is a delightfully fun romantic comedy that also showcases the breathtaking beauty of Australia,” says Meg Longo of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Goalpost Pictures’ Rosemary Blight, who produced with Kylie du Fresne and Kate Croser, added: “The team at Samuel Goldwyn are passionate...

In today’s film news roundup, Jacki Weaver gets cast, Mekhi Phifer’s “Obsession” gets acquired and MiLa Media launches an open script submission system.

Castings

Two-time Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver will join Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln in the family drama “Penguin Bloom.”

Weaver will portray the mother of Watts’ character in the drama, which follows a young family on Sydney’s northern beaches who must come to terms with a near-fatal accident that leaves their mother paralyzed. As they learn to adjust to her new situation, an unlikely ally enters their lives in the form of an injured Magpie chick, dubbed “Penguin” by the family.

“Penguin Bloom” is adapted from the bestseller by Bradley Trevor Greive and Cameron Bloom. The film is directed by Glendyn Ivin from a script by Shaun Grant and Harry Cripps. “Thor: Ragnarok” star Rachel House is also joining the cast as a...

"Sonny, are you going to turn on me?!" Samuel Goldwyn Films has unveiled an official trailer for an indie crime thriller now titled Obsession, the latest from Croatian filmmaker Goran Dukic (of Wristcutters: A Love Story). This has gone under a few other titles including Ruthless or American Dream, but now they're releasing it this fall with this Obsession title. The film is about an out-of-work mechanic, played by Mekhi Phifer who, after saving an older man and befriending him begins to fall for his mysterious wife. The older man has plans to build a motor sports park, and his wife puts together a plot to murder him and rob him of his riches. Also starring Elika Portnoy, Brad Dourif, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Kerry Cahill. Looks like an old school love affair crime caper, with a racetrack heist and murder and everything thrown in. Here's the first official trailer (+ poster) for Goran Dukic's Obsession,...

Samuel Goldwyn has acquired the Goran Dukic-directed thriller Obsession about an out-of-work mechanic played by Mekhi Phifer who, after saving an older man (Brad Dourif), begins to falls for his wife (Elika Portnoy). Dourif’s George has plans to build a racetrack, and his wife forms a plot to murder him and rob him of his riches, drawing Phifer’s Sonny into the mix. The pic is set for a theatrical and VOD release for Sept. 27. Deal was negotiated on behalf of Meg Longo at Samuel Goldwyn and ICM Partners on behalf of the filmmakers.

Pic was financed by Mutressa Movies, which was founded by Portnoy in 2008 with Alex Orlovsky recently joining the company to run the Los Angeles office. The duo’s shared credits include Beasts of No Nation, Love Is Strange, Blue Valentine and Place Beyond the Pines among others. Their next project Eliza Hittman’s Never...

George Litto, a longtime Hollywood talent agent who represented blacklisted writers and collaborated with Melvin Van Peeples and Ossie Davis, has died. He was 88.

Litto passed away at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on April 29 from complications of aortic stenosis, his daughter and business partner, Andria Litto, told Deadline.

George Litto started in the mailroom at William Morris New York in 1954, and worked his way up to an agent, booking summer stock theatre. Among his early successes was helping Mae West secure a role in Come On Up (Ring Twice).

There would be many other famous clients when he moved to boutique agencies in Los Angeles before opening The George Litto Agency in the mid-1960s.

Litto represented Mel Davenport, aka Waldo Salt, who at the time was working in New York under his pseudonym because he was blacklisted. George put him to work under his own name on the film, Midnight Cowboy (1969).

Soon after,...

George Litto, a former talent agent who represented the likes of Robert Altman, Dalton Trumbo and Waldo Salt before producing the Brian De Palma films Obsession, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, has died. He was 88.

Litto died April 29 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from aortic stenosis, his daughter Andria Litto announced.

Litto packaged creative elements for M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975), all directed by Altman, and Hang 'Em High (1968) and Play Misty for Me (1971), both starring Clint Eastwood, as well as other notable films like ...

George Litto, a former talent agent who represented the likes of Robert Altman, Dalton Trumbo and Waldo Salt before producing the Brian De Palma films Obsession, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, has died. He was 88.

Litto died April 29 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from aortic stenosis, his daughter Andria Litto announced.

Litto packaged creative elements for M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975), all directed by Altman, and Hang 'Em High (1968) and Play Misty for Me (1971), both starring Clint Eastwood, as well as other notable films like ...

In American pop culture, when people think of the fantasy genre, they usually think of the same things: magic, wizards, elves, orcs, fairies, dragons, a European Middle Ages setting. Despite the genre predating these concepts, the unprecedented influence of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has so thoroughly wedged itself in our collective consciousness […]

The post Why ‘Shadow and Bone’ Could Be Your Next Big Netflix Obsession appeared first on /Film.

Review by Roger Carpenter

Before Brian De Palma became That De Palma and before Robert De Niro scored big with multiple high-profile roles, they were just two twenty-somethings trying to put together film careers. De Palma was a film school student and De Niro was a no-name actor.

The two first met around 1963 when De Niro was cast in a supporting role in De Palma’s first film, The Wedding Party. The film is a farce about a groom who visits his soon-to-be bride’s family estate for the forthcoming nuptials. His two friends and groomsmen (played by De Niro and William Finley), who are there to support him, initially try to talk the groom out of the marriage. The groom refuses to listen to their arguments and turns them away. Yet as the day looms large, the groom begins having second thoughts even as the groomsmen have changed their...

Directed by Brian De Palma and written by Paul Schrader from a story concept by the pair, the 1976 film Obsession gets a new Blu-ray release today from Scream Factory. (It's a collector's edition with a slipcover.) This early entry in De Palma's filmography is quite Hitchcockian, begining from the very first frame with legendary composer Bernard Herrmann's bombastic score. Cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond is a literal sight to behold, and the cast is very good, from lead Cliff Robertson, who plays a land developer, to his partner played by John Lithgow, and Geneviève Bujold, who plays a doomed woman in a double role --- very De Palma. Robertson's character Michael Courtland lives in a nice mansion in the lush Garden District of New Orleans, and celebrates...

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

Eerie and haunting … Unforgettable. See it.” – Liz Smith, Cosmopolitan Obsession De Palma’s Hitchcockian Thriller Comes to Blu-ray January 15th, 2019 from Scream Factory This riveting mystery thriller by Brian De Palma will leave you breathless. On January 15th, 2019, Shout! Factory will release this sinister melodrama as a Collector’s Edition …

The post Hitchcockian Thriller “Obsession” Comes to Blu-ray January 15, 2019 appeared first on Hnn | Horrornews.net. Copyrights 2008-2018 - Horrornews.net...

After he dazzled viewers with Phantom of the Paradise and before he took horror fans to prom with his adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, Brian De Palma delivered a multi-faceted mystery with 1976's Obsession, coming to Blu-ray in a new Collector's Edition on January 15th from Scream Factory, and we now have a look at the full list of bonus features for the anticipated release:

From the Press Release: "This riveting mystery thriller by Brian De Palma will leave you breathless. On January 15th, 2019, Shout! Factory will release this sinister melodrama as a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray. Obsession features new bonus material including a new audio commentary with author Douglas Keesey, and new interviews with producer George Litto and editor Paul Hirsh, as well as the vintage featurette “Obsession Revised”, theatrical trailer, still gallery and more! Fans can pre-order their copies now by visiting ShoutFactory.com

A tenth wedding...

Happy 73rd birthday on October 19, 2018, to one of the most honored actors in the business, John Lithgow! Whether it be recordings, television, the stage and film, Lithgow has had one of the most wide-ranging careers of any actor working today.

Lithgow has been nominated for two Academy Awards for his supporting performances (as a mild-mannered banker and a transsexual football player). For television, he has been nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, winning six, and has won two Golden Globe Awards from his five nominations. He has also been nominated for nine Screen Actors Guild Awards, of which he has won three times. For his stage work, Lithgow has won two Tony Awards (for 1973’s “The Changing Room” and 2002’s “Sweet Smell of Success”) from six Tony nominations. And he has even been nominated for four Grammy Awards for his recording work.

To celebrate this celebrated actor’s birthday, let’s look...

Two years ago today, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris hotel room. And now, the reality star's former bodyguard, Pascal Duvier, and the company he worked for, Protect Security, are being sued for $6.1 million. This is the amount the insurance company paid Kim for her stolen jewelry after the terrifying incident on Oct. 3, 2016. To be clear, Kim, 37, is not suing. The insurance company, Aig, filed the lawsuit and is now going after the "individual and company it believes were negligent and caused the robbery." The lawsuit claims that if the security was up to par, the masked gunmen wouldn't be allowed to enter the hotel or make their way up to Kim's room, where she was tied up and gagged. The concierge, who unlocked Kim's door while being held at gunpoint, was also called out for not having any security training, but neither him or the hotel are being sued.

Stars: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger, Michael Gaston, Bill Hoag, Kristin Villanueva | Written and Directed by Paul Schrader

Infamous writer and director Paul Schrader returns to cinema screens after a desolate and toxic decade fighting against studio interference and the ideals of an auteur’s final cut. Spending a large amount of his career being the backbone and spine to many utterly outstanding and defining films in American cinema and masters at the helm, notably writing four Martin Scorsese features: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and as of 1999, Bringing Out the Dead, while also the screenplay for NYC alumni Brian De Palma’s cult classic Obsession. First Reformed is his latest effort as an artist devastating his white canvas in a slow, artistic, impact of torturous stoic emotional grievance and psychological abuse that haunts the screen hours after the fact.

Brian De Palma celebrates his 78th birthday on September 11, 2018. While his films have ranged from the sublime to the atrocious, there’s no denying the impact he’s had on cinema. In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 20 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

De Palma began his filmmaking career directing underground features shot on a shoestring, many of which starred a young Robert De Niro. He came into his own with the Hitchcock-inspired thriller “Sisters” (1973), starring Margot Kidder as a pair of killer Siamese twins. The Master of Suspense would serve as a muse to De Palma throughout his career, influencing such films as “Obsession” (1976), “Dressed to Kill” (1980), “Blow Out” (1980) and “Body Double” (1984) both in style and substance.

He enjoyed his first box office success with “Carrie” (1976), an adaptation of Stephen King’s chilling novel about a shy teenager (Sissy Spacek) with telekinesis.

Too far? Kanye West is known for saying some pretty outrageous things both in and out of the recording studio, but it looks like his newest bars really went overboard. Kanye dropped a new song on Saturday, Aug. 11 called "Xtcy" where he made a pretty shocking comment about his wife Kim Kardashian's sisters. "You got sick thoughts? I got more of 'em / You got a sister-in-law you would smash? I got four of them / Damn, those is your sisters / You did something unholy to them pictures / Damn, you need to be locked up / Nah, we need a bigger hot tub," Kanye rapped in the first verse of the track. Birthday Behavior! Were All Turning 21!! A post shared by Kylie (@kyliejenner) on Aug 9, 2018 at 10:48pm Pdt Kanye was basically insinuating that he would have sex with all four of Kim's sisters — 39-year-old Kourtney Kardashian, 34-year-old Khloé Kardashian, 22-year-old Kendall Jenner,...

“This is what happens when you make up stories,” one character says about three-fourths of the way through the confidently ambitious “The Second,” and the line is a succinct summation of the deceptively deep goings-on beneath the film’s faintly sordid surface. The maiden project developed and produced under the Screen Queensland Originals program in partnership with the streaming service Stan (the film is playing commercially now and will commence it’s Stan stand July 20), “The Second” is a sexy and satisfying thriller that toys with time, memory and the provocative side of storytelling.

In keeping with the mysterious spirit of the proceedings, shhh — no names, please: riding the crest of her well-received and best-selling erotic thriller, the Writer (Rachael Blake) is off to her family’s sprawling and regally laid-out country estate for a sex-fueled working weekend with her boyfriend the Publisher (Vince Colosimo). Soon after they settle in,...

For the second time in recent memory, a Jean-Luc Godard film has inspired the annual Cannes Film Festival poster — this year with an image from his 1965 crime/romance pic Pierrot Le Fou. It’s a fitting tribute to have another Godard movie memorialized given this year’s event marks half a century since the legendary filmmaker played a part in halting the 1968 proceedings amid a wave of civil unrest throughout France. The last Godard movie to inspire the poster was Contempt (Le Mépris) in 2016.

The fest has been teasing out info ahead of tomorrow’s lineup reveal and today unveiled the official affiche — a collectible that’s annually anticipated and dissected.

Pierrot Le Fou, based on the 1962 novel Obsession, starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. He’s a TV executive bored by his bourgeois Parisian life who drops everything and runs off with an old girlfriend (Karina) who’s being chased by hitmen.

Milestone Media’s best-known character, Static, is back in the third volume of his animated adventures after the release of the first two seasons last year. Static Shock was somewhat revolutionary back in the day, featuring an African-American teen super-hero who juggled classes, girls, villains, and parents, not all that dissimilar to a certain wall-crawler. The comic was long gone, but he left a mark.

Virgil Hawkins (Phil Lamarr) arrived for the Static Shock the Complete Third Season sporting a brand new costume and during the season, his Bff Richie (Jason Marsden) gained powers, taking on the name Gear. Throughout the thirteen episodes comprising the series, which aired in the Kids’ WB, he left the confines of Dakota and journeyed to Africa and even partnered with Superman after fighting alongside the Justice League.

It helped that there were strong scripts from Milestone co-founder Dwayne McDuffie, backed by Paul Dini, Len Uhley,...

High school girls are cheering, yelling, laughing as they take part in a game of volleyball, an everyday scene that could be taking place in any high school, anywhere. The girls are seemingly confident; strong and resilient. That is, all the girls bar one, whom we soon learn is named Carrie (Sissy Spacek). After she misses a shot that causes her team to forfeit the match, a chorus of defeated whines erupts and the girls reprimand Carrie en route to the locker room. “Look at her. Just standing there!” Such is their disdain for her very existence. One girl who is especially disgusted by the Carrie’s presence even turns back and glares at her, spitting aggressively, “You eat shit!” Before we have time to process the words directed at Carrie, or to speculate as to the girls’ reasons for them, the voices of her angry teammates and the mood...

Article by Dane Eric Marti

Sometimes a film will speak directly to a person in an audience: A preternatural, unearthly tendril of luminous light tapping you on the shoulder, a benevolent yet mysterious voice reminding you of an obligation, or a musical, colorful Dream Message entering your eyes and speaking to your soul with wonder, awe and truth. Like other Art forms, film can do amazing things.

For me, there are definitely a few choice films of overwhelming, pristine power. Yet one cinematic work is not just great, deeply special to me: ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ Directed by the Wonderkind, Steven Spielberg, directly after his landmark suspense-adventure film, ‘Jaws’.

Now, his new flick, released in 1977, also dealt with the fantastic, with riveting moments of terror… but its endgame was something quite dissimilar.

I think it would take either a first-rate Psychologist or an Exorcist with a lot of...

To celebrate the release of Raising Cain – out Dual Format 30th Jan. 2017 – we are giving away a copy courtesy of Arrow Video!

Having spent the latter half of the eighties trying out new styles of filmmaking – Wise Guys’ knockabout comedy, The Untouchables’ prestige gangster pic, Casualties of War’s Vietnam movie and The Bonfire of the Vanities’ satirical misfire – Brian De Palma returned to what he knew best, the Hitchcockian psycho-thriller, for Raising Cain.

John Lithgow plays three roles: child psychologist Carter, his evil twin brother Cain, and their Norwegian father, Dr Nix, who likes to experimental on the young. Carter’s wife is concerned that her husband isn’t quite paying their daughter the right kind of attention; she’s also having an affair which, upon discovery, threatens to send him into a psychotic rage…

A relentless blend of murder, multiple personalities, cross-dressing, crazed parents, bizarre dream sequences and stunning cinematic assurance,...

“He is the one who distilled the essence of film. He’s like Webster. It’s all there. I’ve used a lot of his grammar,” Brian De Palma says of Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, when we looked back at the Blow Out director’s entire filmography this past summer, there was more than a few mentions of The Master of Suspense. It’s not just his riff on Vertigo with Obsession and Body Double or his many homages to Psycho in Dressed to Kill — the DNA of Hitchcock can be found in virtually all of De Palma’s films.

More than just an imitation though, he was able to build on his techniques and formal expertise to further the cinematic language of suspense, and today we have a video essay that shows his sprawling influence. “Hitchcock & De Palma: Split Screen Bloodbath” by Peet Gelderblom (via RogerEbert.com) is an...

Paul Schrader’s filmmaking credits include some of the most iconic films of the 20th century, from “American Gigolo” to “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull.” In the latest episode of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Schrader discusses how the creation of his new film, “Dog Eat Dog,” is part of a “post-rules” generation, his screenwriting methods and the fallouts he’s had with some of his contemporaries.

In “Dog Eat Dog,” Schrader says he wanted to explore the current state of the crime film genre, something that’s changed in a post-Scorsese and post-Tarantino world. For his latest film, Schrader gathered a group of people from fields outside the film industry to work on it. He calls them the “post-rules” generation: A group of filmmakers who aren’t even aware of the classical film rules that have been utilized, broken and codified over the decades. For these filmmakers, says Schrader,...

Last Friday night, Daily Dead had the distinct pleasure of attending the 40th anniversary screening of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, presented by Scream Factory, weSPARK, and The Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The event was packed with eager fans of De Palma’s Stephen King adaptation, and there was a great Q&A after the screening hosted by Bryan Fuller, who moderated an engaging discussion between Carrie co-stars Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, P.J. Soles, Doug Cox, Noelle North, and editor Paul Hirsch, who also collaborated with De Palma throughout his career on films including Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury, Sisters, Obsession, Blow Out, Raising Cain, and the original Mission: Impossible.

Prior to the screening, this writer had the opportunity to speak briefly with Allen—who also serves as the executive director of weSPARK—about reuniting with her Carrie family for such a truly special occasion.

Ryan Lambie Published Date Friday, September 23, 2016 - 06:17

If director Brian De Palma was sometimes criticised for settling for style over substance in his thrillers, this feature-length documentary about his career is reassuringly basic in its approach. Barring archive footage and one, solitary moment, directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow divide their retrospective between sequences from De Palma’s movies and interviews with the filmmaker himself, seated in front of a grey fireplace.

It’s the kind of move that could be regarded as lazy or tentative in some circumstances, but Baumbach and Paltrow are shrewd enough to recognise that a director known for his technical flourishes needs room to breathe; and besides, De Palma and his movies are interesting enough subjects that they hardly need further embellishment.

Even De Palma’s structure is straightforward: we start at the beginning, when the future director of Carrie and The Untouchables was a kid,...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Edward Yang’s little-seen The Terrorizers will get its first theatrical run at BAMcinematek from October 21 through 27.

Watch a video essay on the search for family in There Will Be Blood:

Little White Lies‘ Nick Chen on how Brian De Palma influenced the films of Noah Baumbach:

If Hitchcock is a language, then De Palma has been fluent in it for decades: Obsession is Vertigo, Body Double is Rear Window, and so on. “I was the one practitioner that took up the things he pioneered,” De Palma asserts in Baumbach’s film. Alternatively, there’s Blow Out – often deemed the most representative of his aesthetic – which...

There’s an alternate version of Brian De Palma’s career where 1972’s Get to Know Your Rabbit stands as one of the most seminal entries. The last of De Palma’s early-70s comedies, the film is most readily recognized as a prelude to his directorial turning point. Just a year later, he began a string of legacy defining films: Sisters, Obsession, and Carrie.

But this early-period black sheep is more than a mere historical footnote. It’s the transitional fiasco that De Palma needed. Coming after the modest hits of Greetings and Hi, Mom!, this was the big leagues, a chance for the nascent but rising director to work with Hollywood and establish himself as a conjunction of artistic and financial impulses.

It’s only inevitable that even De Palma’s crowd-pleasing comedy scans as commentary about the prison of working with studios. In an impish reversal of the artist’s own circumstances,...

These days, there’s the buffer of Redacted to shore up Brian De Palma’s credentials as a Godardian ironist. Perhaps in the time when it was fashionable for high-minded critics to bolster De Palma’s significance while decrying the filmmakers he cited as influences, the takedowns by card-carrying auteurists might have seemed a necessary antidote to all the doting. De Palma long represented the negative end of a New Hollywood excess, championed by one side of a polemic and lambasted by the other.

De Palma’s bad taste and his love of schlock discounted him from the pantheon erected by auteurists, while the same characteristics attracted the attentions of less-serious-minded populist critics, who saw the director’s near-indistinguishable alternations between facetiousness and sincerity as a plus. Still, even these De Palma diehards generally struggled to explain why he was significant, outside of an anti-intellectual impulse towards celebrating baroque kitsch...

The camera tracks towards a gate leading to a Victorian mansion, the shot coming to center on the home’s front door. It’s the evening and lights are on in the house, tinting the window in the door a translucent yellow. This block of color is interrupted by an alternation of total blackness and person-shaped silhouettes, evoking the action of a shutter masking a frame of a film strip as it passes by the aperture of a projector. This shadow play veils the activity occurring inside the house: a slideshow of photographs. Thus begins the post-opening-credits scene of Brian De Palma’s Obsession. In this reading, it functions as a metonym of the film’s concern with dissimulation, an abiding theme in De Palma’s body of work. Perhaps, in bringing to mind the operation of the film apparatus, this image is also the director’s ontology of cinema.

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Director Brian De Palma followed Carrie with another gory vaunt into the supernatural. Here's why The Fury deserves a revisit...

When it comes to telekinesis and gory visual effects, the movie that generally springs to mind is David Cronenberg’s 1981 exploding head opus, Scanners. But years before that, American director Brian De Palma was liberally dowsing the screen with claret in his 1976 adaptation of Carrie - still rightly regarded as one of the best Stephen King adaptations made so far. A less widely remembered supernatural film from De Palma came two years after: De Palma’s supernatural thriller, The Fury.

The Fury was made with a more generous budget than Carrie, had a starrier cast (Kirk Douglas in the lead, John Cassavetes playing the villain), and it even did pretty well in financial terms. Yet The Fury had the misfortune of being caught in a kind of pincer movement between Carrie,...

Bringing up Brian De Palma as if he’s still some kind of marginalized or misunderstood figure is now heavily contentious, not just in the sense that “the discussion” has, with the presence of the Internet, become so heavily splintered that every figure has at least seem some form of reappraisal, but in that this is being discussed on the occasion of a new documentary and retrospectives in New York, Chicago, Austin, and Toronto (the lattermost of which this symposium will be timed to). Yes, the line has probably tipped past “divisive,” but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t room for debate.

It’s not hard to understand why De Palma’s work strikes a cord with a new cinephilia fixated on form and vulgarity. Though, in going film-by-film — taking us from political diatribes against America to gonzo horror to gangster films your parents watch to strange European...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

The Brian De Palma retrospective has its best weekend yet: Carlito’s Way and Raising Cain on Friday; Body Double and Femme Fatale on Saturday; and, this Sunday, Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes, and the underseen, Paul Schrader-penned Obsession.

A program of Chuck Jones shorts plays on Saturday; Party Husband screens this Sunday.

Museum of...

The setup to De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's engrossing new documentary about the life and career of controversial filmmaker Brian De Palma (opening in theaters on June 10th), couldn't be simpler: The 75-year-old director dissects most of his films and shares analyses and behind-the-scenes anecdotes in between clips. Forget talking-head testimonials from collaborators, flashy visuals or dramatic reenactments. You just get the man himself, looking back and holding court in all his verbose, insightful glory.

And that is more than enough. Known primarily for his obsession with voyeurism,...

Vilmos Zsigmond shot François Truffaut and Bob Balaban in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who won an Oscar for his work on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, died on New Year's Day at his home in Big Sur, California at the age of 85. The legendary collaborator with Robert Altman (McCabe And Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye), Brian De Palma (Blow Out. Obsession, The Bonfire Of The Vanities) and Woody Allen (Cassandra’s Dream, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Melinda And Melinda), also received Oscar nominations for Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Mark Rydell's The River and De Palma's The Black Dahlia. The Cannes Film Festival in 2014 presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Vilmos Zsigmond, with fellow cinematographer Yuri Neyman (Liquid Sky) founded the Global Cinematography Institute in 2012. Two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler for Hal Ashby's...

Vilmos Zsigmond, the celebrated cinematographer behind such classics as The Deer Hunter and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has died aged 85.

News of Zsigmond’s passing was confirmed by his long-time business partner Yuri Neyman, revealing that the Oscar-winner died on Friday in Big Sur, California.

Born and raised in Hungary in 1930, Zsigmond’s eye for cinema started early, when he would go on to study at the Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest, earning a Master of Arts in cinematography. After nurturing a series of low-key B-movies in Austria, his big break arrived in the form of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller in the early 70s, before earning critical acclaim for his work on Close Encounters in 1977, along with The Deer Hunter the following year.

Throughout his long career, Zsigmond also stepped up to the plate to try his hand at directing, though...

Vilmos Zsigmond, one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, died on New Year’s Day at the age of 85. Ironically, his death came less than a week after the death of Haskell Wexler, another great cinematographer of the 1970s. (Check out the memorable Budapest episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" which focused on Zsigmond and his 1956 escape after the Soviet invasion with canisters of film under his arm.) Credit for good films is usually given to the director and then to the actors. Yet Zsigmond’s stamp on Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate,” on Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for which he won his only Academy Award, on Brian De Palma’s “Obsession” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” and, most clearly on Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is unmistakable. Asked what makes good cinema by Filmmaker magazine two years...

Visionary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who escaped his native Hungary to set up in Hollywood and became one of the most acclaimed practitioners of his generation, has died aged 85 in Big Sur, California.

The cinematographer fled Budapest in 1956 with his hidden footage of Soviet forces crushing the Hungarian Revolution and along with his dear friend and fellow émigré the late László Kovács went on to establish a brilliant career in the United States.

Zsigmond and Kovács got their foothold shooting B-movies under the Americanised names William Zsigmond and Leslie Kovacs before they embarked on more illustrious projects.

Zsigmond’s career spanned collaborations with Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Woody Allen.

He shot Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller and won the Oscar in 1978 for Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. He was nominated subsequently for The Deer Hunter, The River and The Black Dahlia, a collaboration with frequent associate Brian De Palma.

Zsigmond...

Vilmos Zsigmond, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as films like The Deer Hunter, Deliverance and Heaven's Gate, passed away Friday, his business partner Yuri Neyman confirmed to Variety. Zsigmond was 85.

The Hungarian-born Zsigmond – who filmed the Hungarian Revolution alongside his friend and fellow cinematographer László Kovács before they both relocated to Los Angeles – began his Hollywood career as a director of photography on low-budget exploitation and horror films and TV movies before he was hired by director Robert Altman – another veteran of...

Brian De Palma has become the directorial litmus test of cinephiles everywhere. To supporters, he stands as a startling visual genius with a penchant for set pieces and lurid subject matter. To naysayers, he remains a lowbrow imitator who spends his studio budgets chasing the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard. Great director or high class hack? Inconsistent misogynist or Master of the Macabre? Much like his fractured narratives, the answer is never an easy one to attain.

Both sides provide ample support for their case. De Palma’s resume is riddled with enough hollow imitations (Sisters [1973], Raising Cain [1992]) and bloated commercial flops (The Bonfire of the Vanities [1990], The Black Dahlia [2006]) to sink any director. But even in misfires such as these, an undeniable attention to detail remains.

The split screen cover-up of Sisters or the heartbreaking screen tests of The Black Dahlia are breathtaking in scope and execution,...

Special Mention: Dressed To Kill

Directed by Brian De Palma

Written by Brian De Palma

1980, USA

Genre: Thriller

Brian De Palma’s films, like Tarantino’s, are a cinematic mash-up of influences from the past, and in De Palma case he borrows heavily from Alfred Hitchcock. Obsession is De Palma’s Vertigo, Blow Out his Rear Window, and with Dressed to Kill the director set its sights on Psycho. Dressed To Kill is more thriller than horror but what a stylish and twisted thriller it is! The highlight here is an amazing ten-minute chase sequence set in an art gallery and conducted entirely without dialogue. There are a number of other well-sustained set pieces including a race in the subway system and even, yes, a gratuitous shower murder sequence. Dressed To Kill features an excellent cast (Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Angie Dickinson), a superb score (courtesy of Pino Donaggio) and...