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In his last dramatic and interminable years, Michael Cimino spent his days in solitude rewatching old movies in the Bel-Air mansion he bought during his heyday. On the rare occasions that he ventured out, he drove a Rolls-Royce he acquired while making The Deer Hunter in 1978, his chauffeur having left long ago, as well as his success.

Even in those final moments, he did everything he could to show a winning image to Hollywood, a town that had ostracized him ever since the colossal Heaven’s Gate fiasco that had bankrupted United Artists during the early ’80s. He had a perpetually ironic, scornful smile, but he was the first to know how pointless, even miserable, that act was. The only thing he had left from his triumphant years was some money, and he would show up at the hangouts of movers and shakers like the Polo Lounge, where he often ended...

It’s the most spookiest time of the year, and you’ll find a smorgasbord of creepy content on the Hulu streaming service in October! Not only has the streamer secured recent theatrical releases like Cobweb and Slotherhouse for you, but Huluween is here again to make sure things go bump in the night.

Huluween highlights this year include the first season of Living for the Dead, which comes from the creators of Netflix’s popular Queer Eye. Join five queer ghost hunters – Alex Le May, Juju Bae, Ken Boggle, Logan Taylor and Roz Hernandez – as they travel to a range of the world’s most haunted locations in an attempt to help the living by healing the dead.

Hulu will also premiere Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House from director Andrew Renzi. The new documentary follows the story of “Navy Veteran turned master of horror” Russ McKamey. His home,...

When Michael Cimino passed away this summer, the director behind “The Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate” hadn’t helmed a film since 1996’s “The Sunchaser.” However, apparently it was not for lack of trying.

Vincent Maraval, founder of French production company Wild Bunch, has revealed to Sofilm that he had been working with Cimino on a handful of projects over the years, none of which came to fruition, but all of which are pretty fascinating.

Continue reading Lost Projects: Michael Cimino Wanted To Make A Movie With Taylor Swift at The Playlist.

There are days where the Internet feels like the most ghoulish game of telephone ever, particularly when the word starts to spread that someone notable has died. Edgar Wright was the first one I saw mention the death of Michael Cimino this afternoon, quoting a Tweet by Cannes luminary Thierry Fremaux, who announced, “Michael Cimino died peacefully, surrounded by his family and these two women who loved him. We loved him also.” Without question, Cimino’s career was defined by one remarkable high and one remarkable low, and to some degree, his career is the perfect illustration of what happened as film culture moved from the ‘70s to the ‘80s, and part of what makes him such a fascinating figure is how questionable every “fact” about him was. Cimino was a mystery in many ways, and when he made his debut as a director with Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, he looked like...

Michael Cimino “The Sicilian” (1987) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 13 percent “The film is a mess, though hardly on the panoramic scale of ‘Heaven’s Gate,'” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times. “The Sunchaser” (1996) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 17 percent “Michael Cimino — a daredevil director for whom the tidy story is never worth shooting — pokes around interesting themes of mysticism, healthy (and unhealthy) lifestyles, bonds between men, and the joys of driving in the desert really recklessly but doesn’t know what to do with what he finds. Nothing jells,” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “Desperate Hours” (1990) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 36 percent “It’s a variation.

Michael Cimino, director of the Oscar-winning film The Deer Hunter, has died. He was 77. Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremaux announced Cimino's passing on Twitter Saturday. "Michael Cimino died peacefully, surrounded by his family and the two women who loved him. We loved him too," Fremaux wrote in French. Among the eight works in his directorial career, The Deer Hunter is arguably Cimino's best known film. In 1978, he directed, produced and co-wrote the war drama that starred Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Cazale. The Deer Hunter took home five Oscars that year. Michael Cimino est mort, en paix,...

Den Of Geek Jul 3, 2016

Michael Cimino, one of Hollywood's most infamous directors, has died at the age of 77.

Michael Cimino, who went from genius auteur with his Oscar-winning Vietnam film The Deer Hunter to to Hollywood pariah with the painfully accurate western Heaven’s Gate, has died at the age of 77.

The news was announced via Twitter by Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremaux, who said Cimino died in peace with the people closest to him. It has since been confirmed by friends.

Cimino directed eight films in his career. His first film was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, starring Clint Eastwood, in 1974. Cimino’s second was The Deer Hunter, which won five Academy Awards, including best picture and director. His third was Heaven’s Gate in 1980, which is blamed for the collapse of United Artists.

Michael Cimino was born in New York City on February 3, 1939. He initially picked up work directing television commercials.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Cimino has died at the age of 77.

Cimino was one of the filmmakers that made up the 'New Hollywood' wave in the 1970s which pushed directors as the driving creative force behind filmmaking. He broke onto the scene with the 1974 heist film "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges.

It was his second film though, 1978's post-Vietnam war drama "The Deer Hunter," which became a bonafide cinematic classic and Best Picture Winner. A scathing look at the fallout and impact of the war on the lives of people from small town Pennsylvania, it remains a major milestone in the careers of its stars like Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage.

Following up such a film was always going to be a tall order, and Cimino's third film became famous for other reasons. The 1980 western "Heaven's Gate" scored a reputation for being...

It had been a long time since I was in the same room with director Michael Cimino. My first job out of Nyu Cinema Studies was in the publicity department at United Artists in New York, where I witnessed the long delays on Cimino’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning 1978 anti-war diatribe “The Deer Hunter,” the period western “Heaven’s Gate.”

The director got caught up in chasing authenticity in the myriad details of the production, training for weeks the cast led by Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert to roller-skate for one scene — and demanding endless retakes until he shot more feet of film, over 1 million, than even Francis Coppola did on another memorably out-of-control UA movie, “Apocalypse Now.” The original $11 million budget bloated to $32 million (Cimino’s figure), as recounted in Steven Bach’s “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate.’

“Heaven’s...

It had been a long time since I was in the same room with director Michael Cimino. My first job out of Nyu Cinema Studies was in the publicity department at United Artists in New York, where I witnessed the long delays on Cimino’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning 1978 anti-war diatribe “The Deer Hunter,” the period western “Heaven’s Gate.”

The director got caught up in chasing authenticity in the myriad details of the production, training for weeks the cast led by Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert to roller-skate for one scene — and demanding endless retakes until he shot more feet of film, over 1 million, than even Francis Coppola did on another memorably out-of-control UA movie, “Apocalypse Now.” The original $11 million budget bloated to $32 million (Cimino’s figure), as recounted in Steven Bach’s “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate.’

“Heaven’s...

In the early 1970s, while in the midst of making his Trilogy of Life, Pier Paolo Pasolini publicly remarked that a kind of “cultural genocide” had overtaken his home country of Italy. Essentially, he pointed his finger at the overwhelming dominance of consumerism that he believed had begun to erase the positive values instilled by the nation’s history of peasantry.

Even decades removed, many will still find this statement heavily contentious, as it seems representational of a debate that’s raged in film culture — that, of course, over “aestheticizing poverty,” or, in some cases, romanticizing it. Among the many figures in contemporary world cinema who can be branded with this label, Pasolini’s countryman of a different generation, Roberto Minervini, certainly embraces the act while still complicating it.

His first three films forming a “Texas trilogy” showcase a deeply religious and increasingly abandoned milieu far from, say, the conservative...

Early this morning I left the cinema from one film on the way to another when a friend said why not this instead of that? Since nothing was driving me in my original direction more than curiosity, and my friend's own sparked more than enough for this other possibility, my path was diverted, as can happen so serendipitously at a film festival. And indeed I owe my friend thanks, as what I saw, Thithi, the debut feature by 25-year-old independent Indian director Raam Reddy, is the best new film I've so far seen in Locarno.Its beginning already promised greatness: a crumpled down, cranky old man sits in his village thoroughfare hilariously heckling and insulting every man, woman and child passing him by, each of whom pay him no mind. Walking to the nearest alley to relieve himself, this venerable citizen keels over, sending the story after his elderly son,...

The director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate revealed that he often wonders “why I made the crazy, suicidal turn in the road that I did”.

The day after receiving the Locarno Film Festival’s Pardo d’onore on the Piazza Grande, Us filmmaker Michael Cimino took part in a discussion about his career at the Spazio outdoor forum.

“I don’t know movies in the way that someone like my friend Quentin Tarantino does; I’m not a cinephile in that sense,” Cimino told a rapt audience.

A legendary figure in the industry thanks to his small but potent body of work (including The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and Year Of The Dragon) and eccentric reputation, Cimino added: “I’m a frustrated would-be architect who stumbled into this lunatic business of making movies. I don’t why I made the crazy, suicidal turn in the road that I did; I wonder that all...

Stuntman and Burt Reynolds director Hal Needham dead at 82: Received Honorary Oscar in November 2012 Veteran stuntman and stunt coordinator Hal Needham, whose stunt-work movie credits ranged from John Ford Westerns to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and who directed a handful of popular action comedies starring Burt Reynolds, died today, October 25, 2013, in Los Angeles. Needham, who had been suffering from cancer, was 82. (See also: "Stunt Worker Hal Needham: Honorary Oscar 2012".) Born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 6, 1931, Hal Needham began his long Hollywood stuntman career in the mid-’50s. A former tree trimmer and paratrooper, and a motorcycle and car racer, Needham performed stunts in both big-screen and small-screen Westerns, such as John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne and James Stewart; the all-star 1963 Best Picture Academy Award nominee How the West Was Won; and the television series Have Gun - Will Travel, doubling for star Richard Boone.

In HBO's "The Pacific," which premiered last Sunday, Jon Seda plays Marine John Basilone.   When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, John Basilone had just turned 25 and had already done three years of Army duty in the Philippines.   Seda will turn 40 later this year, but hardly anybody will look at him in the context of the epic 10-part World War II miniseries and think he looks older than any of his colleagues. It's only when you start thinking of Seda's work in movies like "Twelve Monkeys" and "The Sunchaser" from the mid-90s, or TV roles including "Homicide: Life...

There’s no end of blogging about wrong-headed Oscar wins. The litany of complaints about “Shakespeare in Love” winning over “Saving Private Ryan,” or “Forrest Gump” over “Pulp Fiction,” or “The Greatest Show on Earth” over any of the other nominees that year, not to mention how Gwyneth Paltrow won over Cate Blanchett for “Shakespeare,” or Costner over Scorsese for “Dances with Wolves.”

Sometimes, though, the win is totally justified; it’s the body of work after the win that drags the winner down, and makes you wonder if maybe the Oscar win wasn’t just some sort of one-trick point, a gold-plated piece of lightning in a bottle. That’s why there’s no quibbling in this post about the quality of the performances, but rather about everything that came afterwards.

With the 2009 nominations coming out tomorrow, and with plenty of nitpicking sure to abound, I’m presenting seven...