Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
When news broke last weekend that Diane Keaton had died at age 79, it came as an extraordinary shock because so much of Keaton’s screen presence and persona was rooted in a vitality, a sense of of being very much alive and open to everything.
Revisiting Keaton’s Oscar-winning performance in “Annie Hall” this week, I was struck by how much humor she mined from a hyperawareness of self, often commenting on her own dialogue and behavior as she was still in the act of doing it. She brought a tremendous charge to everything she did.
Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in the movie “Something’s Gotta Give.”
(Bob Marshak / Columbia Pictures)
In her appreciation of Keaton, Amy Nicholson called her “the icon who feels like a friend,” adding, “The contradiction of her career is that the things we in the audience loved about her — the breezy humor, the self-deprecating charm, the iconic threads — were Keaton’s attempts to mask her own insecurities. She struggled to love herself. Even after success, Keaton remained iffy about her looks, her talent and her achievements. In interviews, she openly admitted to feeling inadequate in her signature halting, circular stammers.”
There was a very genuine wave of emotion and affection after the news of Keaton’s death. One of the most heartfelt and moving tributes came from screenwriter and director Nancy Meyers, who worked with Keaton on four films, from “Baby Boom” to “Something’s Gotta Give.”
As Meyers said, “She made everything better. Every set up, every day, in every movie, I watched her give it her all.”
Meyers added, “She was fearless. She was like nobody ever. She was born to be a movie star. Her laugh could make your day and for me, knowing her and working with her changed my life.”
AMC Theaters have already announced limited showings of both “Annie Hall” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” Other screenings will certainly happen shortly.
Crispin Glover, still doing his own thing
Crispin Glover in “No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance.”
(Volcanic Eruptions)
Still best known for the eccentric screen presence he brought to movies such as “River’s Edge,” “Wild at Heart,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Back to the Future” and countless others, Crispin Glover is also extremely dedicated to his own filmmaking practice.
“No! YOU’RE WRONG” is the third feature Glover has made himself. He began developing the screenplay in 2007, started building the sets in 2010, began shooting in 2013 and didn’t commence editing until 2018. He goes at his own pace, though Glover is self-excoriating.
“None of this is acceptable,” he tells me during a recent video call from New York City following the film’s world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art. “I’m not happy that this has taken as long as it’s taken. Every step of this film just took ridiculously long.”
While Glover enjoys talking about the film, he struggles to explain what it’s actually about. Set across five time periods — 1868, 1888, 1918, 1948 and right now — Glover shot for the first time on 35mm and, for some scenes, used a hand-cranked camera that belonged to the Czech animator Karel Zeman. The negative was hand-processed, which can alter how it looks, with some sections then colored by hand to replicate early film techniques.
“It’s almost better for me to talk about the technical aspects because by talking about the the technical aspects, it sort of reveals things about the film itself,” Glover says. “All of my films on some level deal with surrealism in one aspect or another. And part of the way surrealism operates is to have either disparate pieces of information or withholding information so that the audience can make the correlations themselves and become a participant in the art.”
Bruce Glover in the movie “No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance,” directed by his son Crispin Glover.
(Volcanic Eruptions)
Aside from Glover himself, the film includes his father, character actor Bruce Glover, who died in March 2025, as well as his mother, dancer Betty Glover, who died in 2016. Following the death of his father, Glover had to make some changes.
“I don’t want to say too much,” says Glover as he catches himself starting to clarify an aspect of the story. “You’d have to see the film. It’s not good for me to talk about it because the way the film is made and layered, it’s something that people will have different interpretations of. And if I say too much, then it will sway the interpretation. They’ll think, ‘Oh, it’s wrong because the filmmaker said this,’ but it isn’t wrong. What they’re thinking is what’s right for them.”
Points of interest
Cronenberg movies at Brain Dead
Léa Seydoux, left, Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart in the movie “Crimes of the Future.”
(Nikos Nikolopoulos)
Brain Dead Studios has been running a program of David Cronenberg films through October and still has a few titles left to go. And while his films may not fit everyone’s strict definition of Halloween-style spooky, they are reliably unsettling in their examinations of the darker aspects of human existence.
Friday will see a screening of 2022’s “Crimes of the Future,” starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux, Monday will be Cronenberg’s 1991’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” Thursday brings 1979’s low-budget horror film “The Brood” and Saturday, Oct. 25 will have 1996’s controversial “Crash.”
I spoke to Cronenberg around the release of “Crimes of the Future,” which at the time felt like something of a summation of the director’s ongoing interests in technology and the body, though he claimed it wasn’t intentional.
“It’s not a self-referential film because I’m not thinking that when I’m writing it or directing it,” Cronenberg said. “But the connections are there because my nervous system, such as it is including my brain, is the substrate of everything I’m doing. So I might even say in the Burroughsian way that all of my work and all of my life is one thing. In which case, it now makes perfect sense that there should be these connections.”
David Fincher’s ‘The Game’
Michael Douglas in the movie “The Game.”
(Tony Friedkin / Polygram Films)
David Fincher’s 1997 thriller “The Game” is somewhat easy to overlook in his filmography, landing between the provocations of “Seven” and “Fight Club” and before fully-formed works like “Zodiac” and “The Social Network.” However, the movie, in which a wealthy man (Michael Douglas) finds his life turned upside in what may be a live-action role-playing game, is strange and unpredictable and among Fincher’s most purely pleasurable movies. It plays at the New Beverly on Friday — a rare chance to catch it in a theater on 35mm.
In his review of the film, Jack Matthews wrote, “Douglas is perfectly cast. Who else can blend moneyed arrogance, power and rank narcissism with enough romantic flair, intelligence and self-deflating humor to make you enjoy his defeats and his victories? What other major star is as much fun to watch when he’s cornered?”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This has turned into one of those weeks when there are just way too many movies opening. From titles that premiered earlier in the year, to films that popped up only recently, distributors have decided that today is the time to drop them in theaters. It can make for some tough calls as a moviegoer but hopefully ones with pleasant returns. Here’s some intel.
Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” was a standout at Sundance in January and remains one of the most powerful films of the year. Rose Byrne gives a knockout performance as Linda, a mother struggling to hold onto her own unraveling sense of self as she cares for her ill daughter.
Rose Byrne in the movie “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”
(Logan White / A24)
In his review Glenn Whipp said, “Linda makes dozens of bad decisions in ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,’ many of them seemingly indefensible until you realize that just how utterly isolated she feels. … Bronstein demands you pay attention to her, and with Byrne diving headfirst into the character’s harrowing panic, you will find you have no other choice.”
Speaking to Esther Zuckerman for a wide-ranging feature, Byrne said of the part: “Anything dealing with motherhood and shame around motherhood, whether it’s disappointment, failure — she’s got this line in the movie, ‘I wasn’t meant to do this’ — these are pretty radical things to say. People aren’t comfortable with that. So performance-wise, that was the hardest part because it was like a tightrope, the tightrope of this woman.”
Another Sundance premiere hitting theaters this week is director Bill Condon’s adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez. Already a novel, a movie and a Broadway show, the story involves two men imprisoned in an Argentine jail for political crimes during the 1980s, with Lopez playing a fantasy film star who exists in their imaginations — a reverie to which they can escape.
Tonatiuh in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(Roadside Attractions)
For our fall preview, Carlos Aguilar spoke to Tonatiuh, a native of L.A.’s Boyle Heights, whose performance is a true breakout.
“When I first met Jennifer, I was like, ‘Oh, my God — that’s Jennifer Lopez. What the hell?’ ” he recalled, with the enthusiasm of a true fan. “I must have turned left on the wrong street because now I’m standing in front of her. How did this happen? What life am I living?”
After praising both Lopez and Tonatiuh in her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote, “Still, my favorite performance has to be Luna’s, whose Valentin is at once strong and vulnerable, like a mutt attempting to fend off a bear. He’s the only one who doesn’t need to prove he’s a great actor, yet he feels like a revelation. Watching him gradually turn tender sends tingles through your heartstrings.”
Robert De Niro, left, and Martin Scorsese in an undated photo from Rebecca Miller’s documentary series “Mr. Scorsese.”
(Apple TV+)
The American Cinematheque is celebrating filmmaker Rebecca Miller this weekend with a four-title retrospective plus a preview of her documentary series “Mr. Scorsese,” a five-part portrait of the life and career of Martin Scorsese.
Miller will introduce a Saturday screening of her 2023 rom-com “She Came to Me,” starring Anne Hathaway and Peter Dinklage, then do a Q&A for the first two episodes of the Scorsese project on Sunday. Also screening in the series will be 2016’s “Maggie’s Plan,” starring Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig; Miller’s 2002 Sundance grand jury prize winner “Personal Velocity”; and 2005’s “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” starring Miller’s husband Daniel Day-Lewis, screening with an introduction from co-star Camilla Belle.
Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig in “Maggie’s Plan,” written and directed by Rebecca Miller.
(Sony Pictures Classics)
I spoke to Miller this week about the retrospective and her new Scorsese project, which premieres Oct. 17 on Apple TV+. Along with extensive interviews with Scorsese himself, the series includes insights from collaborators such as Robert De Niro, Paul Schrader and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker as well as childhood friends, Scorsese’s children, ex-wives and fellow filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Ari Aster, Benny Safdie and Spike Lee.
“It feels like such an honor and so weird in a way,” said Miller of the notion of having a retrospective. “You feel like you’re just in the middle of making everything, but then you realize, no, I’ve been making these films for 30 years. And it’ll be really interesting to see how the films play now for people. It’s exciting to have them still be sort of alive.”
When you look back on your own movies, what comes to mind for you?
Funnily enough, there is a connection between “Personal Velocity” and Martin Scorsese, which is that when I was about to shoot personal “Velocity,” I was in Rome, on the set of “Gangs of New York,” and I was watching the snack trolley go by and thinking my entire budget is probably the same as their snack budget. And thinking: What am I doing? What was I thinking? How am I going to do this? But talking to [“Gangs” cinematographer] Michael Ballhaus, I told him how long we had to shoot everything, and he said, “Oh, I envy you. We shot ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ in 10 days.” He was looking back on his days with Fassbinder as the good old days.
Then Marty gave me some advice on films with voiceovers to watch, and he ended up watching “Personal Velocity.” It was the first of my films that he saw, which then led probably to this [doc series] because he knew my films quite well. He watched them as time went on.
What interested you in Scorsese as a subject?
I knew that he was Catholic, that there was a strong spiritual element to his films. But I was interested in how that Catholicism kind of jogged with his fascination, or apparent fascination, with violence. Who is that person? How do those two things go together? And I thought that could be part of my exploration. I had a sense that all his work has a spiritual undercurrent in it, which I think it does. And I think that’s one of the things that I try to explore in the documentary. I felt I had something a little bit different to offer, for that reason.
The big questions that he’s asking: Are we essentially good? Are we essentially evil? And his immense honesty with himself about who he really is, the darkness of his own soul. I don’t think that people are usually that honest with themselves. And you realize that part of his greatness has to do with his willingness to look at himself.
Martin Scorsese in an undated photo from Rebecca Miller’s documentary series “Mr. Scorsese.”
(Apple TV+)
As much as we think we know about Scorsese, he seemed so candid about some of the darkest moments of his life, especially when he talks about his drug overdose and hospitalization in the late 1970s or about some of his issues with Hollywood, especially around “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Were you ever surprised that he was so willing to go there with you?
Oh, yeah, I was. I really didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have an agenda. I had the scaffolding of the films themselves and a strong sense that this was a man that you can’t separate from the films. So the thing is like a dance, it’s like a permanent tango between those two things. You’re not going to pry them apart. I didn’t know about the addiction. I didn’t know a lot of these things. My questions are totally genuine, there’s no manipulation. It’s all me. I was very prepared in terms of the films. But in terms of the chronology and the connective tissue of his life, I was really right there discovering it.
Martin Scorsese at work on his film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” as seen in Rebecca Miller’s documenary series “Mr. Scorsese.”
(Apple TV+)
You’re catching him such a remarkable point in his life and career. He seems very happy and settled in his personal life and yet he still makes something like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” full of passion and fire. What do you make of that?
[Screenwriter] Jay [Cocks] says he’s learned that he can be selfish in his art, but he doesn’t have to be selfish in his life. Even if your outside is regular, your inside can be boiling. And I think Marty’s inside is always going to be boiling. The seas are not calm in there and never will be.
‘They Live’ and ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’ together at last
Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s 1988 thriller “They Live.”
(Sunset Boulevard / Corbis )
There’s a real art to putting together a double bill. Sure, you can just program movies that have the same director or share the same on-screen talent. But what about deep, thematic links that might not otherwise be noticed?
The New Beverly has put together an inspired double bill playing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of John Carpenter’s 1988 “They Live” and Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s 2001 “Josie and the Pussycats.” Though one is a rough-and-tumble sci-fi action picture and the other a satirical teen-pop fantasia, they both use the idea of subliminal messages to explore how consumer culture can be a means of control.
In “They Live,” wrestler-turned-actor “Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays a drifter who lands in Los Angeles and discovers a secret network fighting against an invasion of aliens living among us.
In Michael Wilmington’s original review, after joking the movie could be called “Invasion of the Space Yuppies,” he adds, “You can forgive the movie everything because of the sheer nasty pizzazz of its central concept. … The movie daffily mixes up the paranoia of the Red Scare monster movies of the ’50’s with a different kind of nightmare: the radical’s belief that everything is tightly controlled by a small, malicious ruling elite. Everything — the flat lighting, the crazily protracted action scenes, the monolithic beat and vamp of the score — reinforces a mood of murderous persecution mania.”
Rosario Dawson, from left, Rachael Leigh Cook and Tara Reid in the movie “Josie and the Pussycats.”
(Joseph Lederer / Universal Studios)
In “Josie and the Pussycats,” a small-town rock ‘n’ roll band (Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson) are plucked from obscurity when they are signed to a major record label and all their dreams of stardom seem to come true. But they come to realize the company’s executives (a brilliant pairing of Parker Posey and Allan Cumming) are using them for their own nefarious purposes.
Aside from some very hummable songs, the film has a truly epic amount of corporate logos and branding that appears throughout. Many reviewers at the time brought this up, including the L.A. Times’ own Kenneth Turan, who noted, “It’s a potent reminder that no matter how innocent a film may seem, there’s a Hollywood cash register behind almost every frame.” In subsequent interviews, Kaplan and Elfont confirmed these were not instances of paid product placement and, in fact, the production had to fight to get them all on-screen.
Points of interest
‘Eight Men Out’ in 35mm
Charlie Sheen, center, in a scene from the film “Eight Men Out.”
(Archive Photos / Getty Images)
Writer-director John Sayles has been so consistently good for so long that it is easy to take his work for granted. Case in point: 1988’s “Eight Men Out,” which tells the story of the infamous “Black Sox” scandal, when players from the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally throwing the 1919 World Series in league with underworld gamblers. The movie is playing on Sunday at Vidiots in 35mm.
The film captures much of what makes Sayles so special, particularly his unique grasp of the interplay between social and economic dynamics — a sense of how things work and why. He also fully grasps the deeper implications of the forces of greed and money setting themselves upon such an unassailable symbol of wholesome Americana as baseball. It’s also what makes the movie particularly worth a revisit now. With a phenomenal cast that includes John Cusack, David Straithairn, D.B. Sweeney, Charlie Sheen, John Mahoney, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Lerner and Sayles himself, the film was a relatively early effort from cinematographer Robert Richardson, who would go on to work repeatedly with Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
In a review at the time, Sheila Benson wrote, “ ‘Eight Men Out’ is not a bad movie for an election year. Everything that politicians cherish as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘American’ is here. The Grand Old Game. Idealistic little kids. Straw hats and cat’s-whisker crystal sets. And under the slogans and the platitudes, a terrifying erosion and no one to answer for it. No wonder Sayles, hardly an unpolitical animal, found it such a relevant story nearly 70 years later.”
‘The Sound of Music’ in 70mm
Julie Andrews, center, in the 1965 musical “The Sound of Music.”
(20th Century-Fox)
On Sunday the Academy Museum will screen Robert Wise’s “The Sound of Music” in 70mm, a rare opportunity to see this classic in the premium format on which it was originally released. Based on the stage musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein , the film would eventually win five Oscars, including director and best picture.
Starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, it’s the story of the singing Von Trapp family, eventually forced to flee their native Austria as the Nazis take power.
In a Times review from March 1965, Philip K. Scheuer wrote of Wise and his collaborators, “They have taken this sweet, sometimes saccharine and structurally slight story of the Von Trapp Family Singers and transformed it into close to three hours of visual and vocal broilliaance, all in the universal terms of cinema. They have invested it with new delights and even a sense of depth in human relationships — not to mention the swooning beauty of Salzburg and the Austrian Alps, which the stage, of course, could only suggest.”
Even notorious gossip columnist Hedda Hopper liked the movie, presciently writing, “The picture is superb — dramatically, musically, cinematically. Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer were born for their roles. … All children — from 7 to 90 — wil love it. The following morning I woke up singing. Producer-director Bob Wise did a magnificent job and 20th [Century Fox] will hear nothing but the sound of money for years to come.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Among the week’s new releases is “The Smashing Machine,” written and directed by Benny Safdie and starring Dwayne Johnson as Mark Kerr, an early mixed-martial-arts fighting champion who saw his career flame out before the sport became a lucrative cultural phenomenon.
Safdie is known for the movies he made with his brother Josh, such as “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems,” and more recently created the series “The Curse” with Nathan Fielder. Safdie won the directing prize at the Venice Film Festival for “The Smashing Machine,” his first solo feature.
Dwayne Johnson in the movie “The Smashing Machine.”
(A24)
In her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote about Safdie and Johnson, noting, “These two high-intensity talents, each with something to prove, seem to have egged each other on to be exhaustingly photorealistic. Johnson, squeezed into a wig so tight we get a vicarious headache, has pumped up his deltoids to nearly reach his prosthetic cauliflower ears. And Safdie is so devoted to duplicating the earthy brown decor of Kerr’s late-’90s nouveau riche Phoenix home that you’d think he was restoring Notre Dame.”
I spoke to Safdie earlier this week. He explained how he and Kerr held each other’s hands during the film’s emotional premiere screening at Venice and what it has meant for them to go through the process of seeing through the project together.
“I wanted him to feel some kind of ownership of the movie and his life. And it was very meaningful to me,” says Safdie of Kerr. “Now I hear him talk about it and it’s very interesting because he can say, ‘Oh, I see where I made mistakes in that relationship.’ And he can take ownership of them. And part of it is I wanted to make a movie about somebody’s perspective on life changing.”
A celebration of Jafar Panahi
A scene from the movie “It Was Just an Accident.”
(Neon)
The American Cinematheque is launching a tribute series to Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi this week. Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for the dramatic thriller “It Was Just an Accident,” Panahi has become Iran’s most high-profile dissident filmmaker, having been repeatedly jailed, placed under house arrest and officially banned from making films.
Yet none of that has stopped him. Panahi is now one of only four filmmakers ever to win the Palme d’Or, Berlin’s Golden Bear and Venice’s Golden Lion, alongside such giants as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman and Henri-Georges Clouzot. And “Accident” has been selected to be France’s entry for the international feature Oscar race.
Panahi was scheduled to appear at three events in Los Angeles next week as part of the tribute, but he may not make it. His appearances at the New York Film Festival (now in progress), including a scheduled talk with Martin Scorsese, had to be canceled due to a delay in Panahi receiving his visa to enter the country, reportedly a result of the federal government shutdown.
Even if Panahi does not make it to L.A., his films will play on and deserve to be seen. “Accident” will screen in a double-bill with 2003’s “Crimson Gold” at the Aero on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Panahi’s 1995 debut feature “The White Balloon,” co-written with Abbas Kiarostami, will play in 35mm at the Los Feliz 3. Later on Wednesday at the LF3, Panahi’s 2000 drama “The Circle” will screen in a 35mm print from the Yale Film Archive, along with the 2010 short “The Accordion.”
In 1996, Kenneth Turan had this to write about “The White Balloon”: “A completely charming, unhurried slice of life, it is both slow and sure-handed as it follows a small but fearsomely determined little girl on her amusing search for just the right ceremonial goldfish for her family’s new year’s celebration.”
Discussing “The Circle” in 2001, Turan said, “Restrained yet powerful, devastating in its emotional effects, ‘The Circle’ is a landmark in Iranian cinema. By combining two things that are relatively rare in that country’s production — unapologetically dramatic storytelling and an implicit challenge to the prevailing political ideology — this new film by producer-director Jafar Panahi creates a potent synthesis.”
With or without Panahi in attendance, these are deeply necessary films that speak to their respective moments — and all too much to our current one.
‘All the President’s Men’ and remembering Robert Redford
Robert Redford, right, and Dustin Hoffman in the movie “All the President’s Men.”
(Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images)
Screenings have already begun to pop up in tribute to Robert Redford, who died recently at age 89. On Friday, Vidiots will screen Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller “All the President’s Men” in 35mm along with Phil Alden Robinson’s 1992 caper comedy “Sneakers.” On Sunday, Vidiots will also show Sydney Pollack’s 1973 romantic drama “The Way We Were.” (The Academy Museum will screen “The Way We Were” on Oct. 26.)
The American Cinematheque will also be a launching a Redford tribute series starting on Monday with a screening of Tony Scott’s 2001 thriller “Spy Game.” Other films currently scheduled include “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Sting,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Sneakers” and a 35mm showing of “All the President’s Men.” That barely scratches the surface of Redford’s work as an actor, let alone as a director, so more events are likely to come.
Redford was deeply involved in bringing “All the President’s Men” to the screen as quickly as possible following the Watergate scandal. Writing about “All the President’s Men” in 1976, Charles Champlin said the film has “a clarity born of historical perspective but also a newly quickened feeling of national concern. The central drama and suspense of ‘All the President’s Men’ is a reminder of the narrow margin of our safety and how close the coverup came to working. … The film invites no comfort. It was a narrow and almost accidental escape and the weight of a corrupted government had been tilted against the truth as never before. But never again? The movie makes no preachment but you are bound to think anew that forgiveness and forgetfulness ought to be two starkly different commodities.”
Points of interest
‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in 35mm
Mia Farrow in the 1968 horror landmark “Rosemary’s Baby.”
(Criterion Collection)
“Rosemary’s Baby,” a 1968 adaptation of the novel by Ira Levin written and directed by Roman Polanski (and produced by exploitation impresario William Castle), is still considered one of the creepiest movies of all time. The film stars Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse, who has moved into a grand old apartment building in New York City with her actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes). After she becomes pregnant, it begins to seem as if her nosy neighbors have been part of a coven of witches scheming to give birth to the son of Satan. Ruth Gordon won a supporting actress Oscar for her role as one of the neighbors. The movie plays in 35mm Tuesday through Thursday at the New Beverly.
Even back in 1968, the film touched off a nerve with reviewers, including our own. In his original June 1968 review, Champlin wrote, “Having paid my critical respects, I must then add that I found ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ a most desperately sick and obscene motion picture whose ultimate horror — in my very private opinion — was that it was made at all. It seems a singularly appropriate symbol of an age which, believing in nothing, will believe anything. … It is also all so sleazy and sick at heart. And the horror is that it presumes we are too indifferent to perceive what its horrors really are.”
‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’
An image from Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”
(Rialto Pictures)
Winner of the Oscar for international feature film and nominated for original screenplay, 1972’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” was directed by Luis Buñuel, who wrote the script with Jean-Claude Carrière. Screening at the Academy Museum as part of a series dedicated to Buñuel, the film is a bold satire of societal conventions — one that still largely holds up, as a group of friends meets for a series of meals.
In a November 1972 review, Charles Champlin wrote, “Watching a Buñuel film is a special experience because he creats a special world, somewhere west of hard reality but dealing — mockingly — with social reality and always reflecting Buñuel’s almost puritanical rage at any misuse of power, fiscal, political, ecclesiastical, military, social. … The surrealist attack sometimes makes him sound more formidable that he is. In fact he’s a sly humanist who has here created one of his most easily enjoyable works.”
In other news
PTA, ranked
Joaquin Phoenix in the movie “Inherent Vice.”
(Wilson Webb / Warner Bros.)
Last week, we mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which Amy Nicholson declared “fun and fizzy.” So this week, I set about the popular task of placing the new film within a ranking of Anderson’s 10 feature films, from his 1996 feature debut “Hard Eight” onward.
As I noted in the introduction, “More so than with other directors, it’s always tempting to overly psychologize Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, looking for traces of his personal development and hints of autobiography: the father figures of ‘Magnolia’ or ‘The Master,’ the partnership of ‘Phantom Thread,’ parenthood in the new ‘One Battle After Another.’ Yet two things truly set his work apart. There’s the incredibly high level of craft in each of them, giving each a unique feel, sensibility and visual identity, and also the deeply felt humanism: a pure love of people, for all their faults and foibles.
“Anderson is an 11-time Academy Award nominee without ever having won, a situation that could rectify itself soon enough, and it speaks to the extremely high bar set by his filmography that one could easily reverse the following list and still end up with a credible, if perhaps more idiosyncratic ranking. Reorder the films however you like — they are all, still, at the very least, extremely good. Simply put, there’s no one doing it like him.”
Would you have a different title at No. 1? Let us know in the comments.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The 13th edition of Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque has already begun but lasts until Oct. 8, so there is still plenty of excitement on the way.
Japanese icon Meiko Kaji will make a series of appearances during her first time visiting the U.S. A double-bill of 1973’s “Lady Snowblood” and 1974’s “Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance” will feature a Q&A with the actor moderated by Jen Yamato, while another Q&A will be moderated by “Anora” Oscar winner Sean Baker.
Other upcoming screenings include “The Testament of Ann Lee” in 70mm, “The Secret Agent” with filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, “It Was Just an Accident” with filmmaker Jafar Panahi, a Guillermo del Toro retrospective, Mike Nichols’ 1973 sci-fi thriller “The Day of the Dolphin” in 4K and a 10th anniversary screening of “The Invitation” with filmmaker Karyn Kusama, screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi and actor Logan Marshall-Green.
Meiko Kaji in the movie “Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion.”
(Arrow Films / Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque)
Saturday will see screenings of “Manhunter” and “To Live and Die in L.A.” with star William Petersen in attendance. I spoke to Petersen this week about going from being a Chicago theater actor to starring in two now-classic ’80s crime thrillers in the span of one year.
“It was never my intention to make any movies, it wasn’t like I was seeking them out,” Petersen said. “They kind of just came and found me.”
I also spoke to some of the team behind the festival about how they manage to harness the energy of L.A’s rep-house scene and point it toward an eclectic mix of new and old titles that increasingly includes legitimate prestige titles, including awards winners from the international festival circuit.
“It’s not just all about the films — it’s about the theatrical experience, seeing it all together,” said Grant Moninger, co-founder of Beyond Fest and artistic director of the American Cinematheque. “This does not happen online. You’re not watching a screener with a watermark at your house. You’re all together, you’re just celebrating cinema and going through all the emotions together. We put on a show every year at all these theaters because we’re thankful that everyone’s coming together and we’re going to try to give them as much as we can give them.”
‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ at 50
Tim Curry, center, as Frank-N-Furter in the movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
(20th Century Fox)
Tonight the 50th anniversary of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” will be celebrated at the Academy Museum with a screening of new 4K restoration and an appearance by star Tim Curry. The screening will include “a full-blown audience participation and shadow cast experience,” capturing some the feeling of the riotous fan-fueled midnight shows that made the film a sensation over decades. There will be additional screenings of the film Oct. 4 at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and Oct. 15 at the Grammy Museum.
Directed by Jim Sharman, who also mounted the original stage show, from a story and songs by Richard O’Brien (who also plays Riff-Raff), the film is said to have the longest theatrical release in cinema history, thanks to its ongoing life as a cult object.
Steve Appleford interviewed the film’s star, Tim Curry at the Roxy, where the original stage show was first performed in L.A. In the film, Curry’s character, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, is a singing scientist in fishnets and high heels who introduces a young couple (Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) to a world of new experiences.
“It was part of the sexual revolution, really,” said Curry. “Experiment was in the air and it was palpable. I gave them permission to be who they discovered they wanted to be. I’m proud of that.”
Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick do “The Time Warp” (again) in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
(John Jay / Disney)
The Times identified the “Rocky Horror” phenomenon from the very start. Gregg Kilday interviewed Curry for an article published in March 1974 as the stage show transferred from London to L.A. The feature follows Curry, then only 27, from the Roxy to Musso & Frank and on to the Chateau Marmont, a pretty enviable tour of the city.
Curry described the character at the time by saying, “He says he’s a transvestite transexual, whatever that means. I don’t play him as a transexual. But he’s a fairly complex guy. He just takes anything he can get. He’s not fussy, really. Though I think he’s something of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”
In his original review of the film from Sept. 26, 1975, critic Kevin Thomas (of course, it was reviewed by Kevin Thomas) said, “All of this plays less depraved than it sounds. … This Richard O’Brien musical is simply too exuberant and too funny to be seriously decadent. Indeed, there’s an underlying quality of tenderness and even innocence in this loving send-up of horror and sci-fi flicks and celebration of post-graduate sexuality.”
The format wars of ‘One Battle After Another’
Teyana Taylor in the movie “One Battle After Another.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another,” features another of the filmmaker’s impressive ensembles, one that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Alana Haim, Sean Penn, newcomer Chase Infiniti and Benicio del Toro.
The film is playing in a variety of film formats, and Los Angeles is lucky to be one of only four cities in the world to be screening the movie in VistaVision. (Appropriately enough, it will be at the Vista.) The film is also in Imax 70mm at the Universal Citywalk and in Imax at multiple locations including the TCL Chinese and in 70mm at the CGV by Regency in Buena Park. (Plus, it’ll be in more conventional digital formats at many other theaters.)
A politically minded action-comedy based loosely on Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland,” the film stars DiCaprio as a former bomb-making revolutionary who has gone underground to protect his daughter (Infiniti). When a power-mad military man (Penn) comes after them, Bob must spring into action in ways he is not ready for.
Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “One Battle After Another.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
In her review, Amy Nicholson wrote, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?”
Glenn Whipp spoke to Anderson in his first solo interview for the film. Despite the fact that the movie opens with a raid on a government immigration detention center, Anderson was reluctant to directly connect it to the current political moment.
“The biggest mistake I could make in a story like this is to put politics up in the front,” Anderson said. “That has a short shelf life. To sustain a story over two hours and 40 minutes, you have to care about the characters and take those big swings in terms of the emotional arcs of people and their pursuits and why you love that person and why you hate this person. That’s not a thing that ever goes out of fashion. But neither does fascism and neither does people doing bad s— to other people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t go out of style, either. That’s just how we humans are.”
Points of interest
‘A Scanner Darkly’ in 35mm
Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in director Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly,” based on the Philip K. Dick novel.
(Warner Independent Pictures)
On Friday night, Brain Dead Studios will host a 35mm screening of Richard Linklater’s 2006 animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly.” A comic, deeply paranoid tale of identity, the rotoscoped film features a cast that includes Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr.
Reviewing the film, Carino Chocano wrote, “As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everybody isn’t out to get you. In the dismal near-future of the film, when large-scale government spying has taken the next logical step into thought-surveillance, questioning the effect of shadowy forces no longer requires an overactive imagination. It doesn’t even require a drug habit (though, of course, it helps to have one). The dropouts and burnouts of ‘Scanner’ don’t have to wonder if they’re being watched; they are in every sense part of the program. … The brilliance of ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books.”
Much as Linklater has recently made “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague” in short order, in 2006 he had both “A Scanner Darkly” and “Fast Food Nation,” a fictional adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction book.
“I make the joke that I’m like that British bus,” Linklater said at the time. “You wait forever and then two show up at the same time.”
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Teorema” captures Stamp’s otherworldly beauty as a mysterious stranger who seduces all the members of a wealthy family in Milan (played by Massimo Girotti, Silvana Mangano, Laura Betti and Anne Wiazemsky) and then disappears from their lives as suddenly as he appeared, leaving them all in spiritual crisis.
“Toby Dammit,” directed by Federico Fellini, was one section of the anthology film “Spirits of the Dead,” with the other sections directed by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle. Stamp plays a fading alcoholic actor who makes a deal to shoot a film in Rome in exchange for a new Ferrari. He begins to suffer from terrifying visions.
Writing about the anthology in 1969, Kevin Thomas noted the film’s “swirling, shimmering worlds of fantasy populated by decadent Roman society,” adding that they only paled in comparison to Fellini’s previous triumphs “La Docle Vita,” “8½” and “Juliet of the Spirits.”
In other news
Henry Jaglom dead at 87
Henry Jaglom, arriving at a premiere in Los Angeles in 2009.
(Chris Pizzello / Associated Press)
An insistently independent filmmaker, Henry Jaglom died this week at age 87. His deep love of actors led him to a loose, improvisatory style that gave freedom to his performers. Often drawing story ideas from his own life (and casts from his wide circle of friends), his films included 1976’s “Tracks,” 1985’s “Always,” 1994’s “Babyfever” and 2007’s “Hollywood Dreams.” A new restoration of Jaglom’s 1983 film “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?” is premiering this weekend as part of the New York Film Festival.
I visited with Jaglom once at the offices he long kept on Sunset Boulevard, a warren of rooms stuffed with the accumulated memorabilia of a life dedicated to movies. In a corner was an editing machine he said belonged to John Cassavetes.
Jaglom well understood his own privilege in life and equally understood that there were those who would not respond to his work.
“I enjoy, even if I’m being attacked, knowing I’ve had an impact,” Jaglom told me. “People are looking at it, talking about it, thinking about it. And that some people are moved, feel better. It’s reaching out and trying to touch people. It’s what film can do. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
A PASTOR’S son held four people captive in his “basement of horrors” with no access to food or water for up to 10 years, police say.
Donnie Birchfield Jr., 36, is accused of keeping a vulnerable married couple and two women in his terrifying basement in South Carolina.
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Donnie Birchfield Jr. was arrested after cops found a dead woman in his basementCredit: Facebook
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He allegedly kept four people hostage in the basement of his homeCredit: Lancaster County Detention Center
The two women who were allegedly held hostage were reportedly romantically involved with Birchfield before the relationship spiralled.
He was arrested on August 1 after cops raided his Lancaster home on Churchill Drive following reports a woman had died in the property.
Authorities discovered that the woman, who died one day before they arrived at the scene, had faced neglect and abuse.
Police probed the dead woman and the three other victims – before revealing one of them had been inside the basement for 10 years.
They were all held against their will and denied access to food, water, medication and the outside world, police say.
Birchfield even oversaw what times each alleged hostage ate at, and controlled when they were allowed to use the bathroom.
One of the women he was romantically involved with had a “relationship” with him for one year, with the other lasting nearly 10 years.
Birchfield allegedly assaulted the victims routinely – controlling their movements and trapping them in the basement.
The accused captor also regularly policed their phone use.
One woman said Birchfield told her he was “going to kill her” and boasted how he “knows how to get rid of a body from past experience”, WBTV reported.
Disturbing video from horror house where 3 babies’ bodies found as mom ‘admits to wrapping child in towel to stop noise’
From September 2022, Birchfield made a slew of purchases for himself using the credit cards owned by the victims.
He even paying off his own debt with their money, police said.
Birchfield’s laywer told WBTV he is currently investigating the matter.
He said: “My client maintains his innocence in the case and it is important to remember that he is presumed innocent of these allegations.
“We look forward to litigating this case in the court system where facts, evidence, and the rule of law matter.”
Birchfield faces charges including but not limited to exploitation of a vulnerable adult, false imprisonment, domestic violence and financial identity fraud.
He was placed under a $150,000 bond.
Local police said more charges were possible as the case continues to be investigated.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Robert Redford died this week at age 89 at his home outside Provo, Utah. The actor, producer and director had been a star for more than 60 years, going back to the 1963 comedy “Barefoot in the Park” and covering an enormously long list of performances in films such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Hot Rock,” “Downhill Racer,” “The Way We Were,” “The Candidate,” “The Sting,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “All the President’s Men,” “The Electric Horseman,” “The Natural” and many more.
Redford was also an accomplished director, winning an Oscar for his debut “Ordinary People” and going on to make films such as “A River Runs Through It,” “Quiz Show,” “The Horse Whisperer,” “The Conspirator” and others.
In a survey of his career, Amy Nicholson wrote, “To appreciate Redford fully, we have to applaud not only the work he did but the simple, feel-good roles he rejected. He could have become a celebrity without breaking a sweat as the war hero, the jock, the husband, the cowboy, the American ideal made incarnate. Yet, he had the rare ability to sidestep what audiences thought we wanted from him to instead give us something we didn’t know we needed: selfish victors (‘Downhill Racer’), self-destructive veterans (‘The Great Waldo Pepper’) and tragic men who did everything right and still failed (2013’s ‘All Is Lost’).”
Robert Redford at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York in 2015.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)
Nicholson added, “Lately, the Redford roles I’ve been thinking about are the ones where his all-American appeal makes us examine all of America, good and bad. The two that instantly jump to mind are his pair of political thrillers: ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ in which he plays a CIA agent on the run from his own co-workers, and ‘All the President’s Men,’ in which he doggedly uncovers the Watergate scandal. Both films believe in the power of getting the truth out to the press; neither is so naive as to think the truth alone will save the day.”
And then there is a whole other side to Redford: his extensive work as an activist on behalf of environmental causes and his founding of the Sundance Institute, which lead to the creation of the Sundance Film Festival.
I took a look at Redford’s work with Sundance and how he did nothing less than transform Hollywood, carving out a space for independent artists and opening doors for those who had been previously shut out by the industry.
“Mr. Redford was a shining example of how to leverage success into community building, discovery and empowerment,” filmmaker Ryan Coogler said in a statement. Coogler’s own career was launched via Sundance.
“In these trying times it hurts to lose an elder like Mr. Redford, someone who through their words, their actions and their commitment left their industry in a better place than they found it.”
Robert Redford and Lauren Hutton in 1970’s “Little Fauss and Big Halsy.”
(Steve Schapiro / Fahey / Klein Gallery)
I personally met Redford only once, when I moderated a Q&A in 2013 for “The Company You Keep,” in which he starred as a former ’60s radical. It would be the last feature film he directed. I was introduced to him shortly before we were to go in front of an audience together and he wanted to sit and talk for a moment. He immediately asked me about myself, where I was from and how long I had been a journalist.
It was thoroughly disarming to have someone so famous engage with me in a way that felt so genuine. Suddenly he was not a movie star, though he did indeed possess an otherworldly grace, charm and rugged beauty, but rather something even larger, someone who engaged with the world from a place of true curiosity. He leaves a lasting legacy, having touched countless lives.
There will surely be many more tributes and events to come, but Vidiots has already announced a screening of Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 “All the President’s Men,” starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman, on 35mm for Friday, Oct. 3.
‘Mysterious Skin’ in 4K
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, left, and Brady Corbet in the movie “Mysterious Skin.”
(Tartan Films)
Seeing the ongoing revival of Gregg Araki’s filmography in restored versions as fans wait for his upcoming film, “I Want Your Sex,” has been very gratifying. Tonight, the Academy Museum will present Araki’s 2004 “Mysterious Skin” in a new 4K restoration followed by a conversation with Araki, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and novelist Scott Heim, moderated by “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker.
“Mysterious Skin” is a delicately told, crushingly disturbing tale of two young men (played by Gordon-Levitt and future “The Brutalist” director Brady Corbet) who each process an incident of sexual abuse from their childhood in different ways. The cast also includes Elisabeth Shue, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Michelle Trachtenberg, who died earlier this year.
Reviewing the film at the time, Kevin Thomas wrote, “The most mature work by the idiosyncratic and gifted Araki, ‘Mysterious Skin,’ based on the book by Scott Heim, highlights the director’s talent for inspiring the most demanding of portrayals from actors and for richly evoking the world his characters inhabit. The film has a mesmerizing floating quality, heightened by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie’s deceptively serene score, and it has considerable offbeat, deadpan humor to offset its dark undertow. … it’s hard to imagine a more serious or persuasive indictment of the horrors inflicted on children by sexual abuse than ‘Mysterious Skin.’”
“I like that it was a real departure for me and that people didn’t expect it,” said Araki. “I really appreciate that aspect of it, that I’ve never done a serious drama before. I do think that the film totally makes sense with all my other movies. There is a thematic similarity and the sensibilities of Scott [Heim] and myself are really attuned to each other. It’s not as if I’ve directed ‘Chicago.’”
J. Hoberman’s avant-garde NYC
An image from Ken Jacobs’ 1961 “The Whirled (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith).”
(The Film-makers’ Coop)
On Thursday at 2220 Arts + Archives, Acropolis will present an evening in celebration of J. Hoberman’s inspiring and vivid recent book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.”
Hoberman, formerly the longtime film critic for the Village Voice and an insightful cultural chronicler, will be present for a signing and Q&A along with a program of short films from the era surveyed by the book, when New York was a bubbling cauldron of creativity and restless energy. Titles screening will include Ken Jacobs’ 1961 “The Whirled (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith),” Ron Rice’s 1962 “Senseless,” Michael Snow’s 1964 “New York Eye and Ear Control” and Jud Yalkut’s 1966 “D.M.T.”
In the introduction to his book, Hoberman explains his thesis of creating a snapshot of a time and place — he pays incredible attention to actual addresses, mapping out what was happening where — by saying, “Cultural innovation comes from the margins and is essentially collective. … New York City in the 1960s was one such cradle of artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed, new forms created. A collective drama played out in coffeehouses and bars, at openings and readings, in lofts and storefront theaters and ultimately in the streets.”
Points of interest
Joe Dante’s ‘Pirahna’
A scene from the 1978 movie “Piranha.”
(New World Pictures)
It is always heartening to see longtime local hero Joe Dante celebrated. He will be appearing at Vidiots on Friday, this time with his 1978 film, “Piranha.” Made for producer Roger Corman, the movie was obviously one in a series of films intended to capture the excitement and scares generated by “Jaws,” and it certainly accomplishes that, but it is also so much more.
From a screenplay written by John Sayles, who would go on to an illustrious career as a director himself, and with sharp, smart direction by Dante, “Piranha” is about a mutant strain of killer fish engineered by the military and accidentally released into a small community’s waterways.
Writing about the film in 1978, Charles Champlin said, “‘Piranha’ is what it is: a swift, efficient program picture which squeezes the most out of its dollars to squeeze delicious chills from the audience. But it also plays to the attitudes as well as the emotional needs of its young customers. The bad guys are scientists, the military, the police, the politicians (what were we doing in Vietnam?), authority in almost any uniform.”
Writing about the film in 2012, Dennis Lim added, “This was Dante’s first solo directorial outing after several years at Corman’s New World Pictures, where he got his start editing trailers, and it establishes a distinctive tone that he has sustained throughout his career, right on the line between homage and parody. The actors — several, including [Dick] Miller and [Kevin] McCarthy, who would go on to become frequent Dante collaborators — give performances that are once committed and tongue-in-cheek and the effects, in contrast to the sophisticated animatronics of ‘Jaws,’ are charmingly rough and ready.”
Aaliyah x2
Jet Li and Aaliyah star in “Romeo Must Die.”
(Kharen Hill / Warner Bros. Pictures)
As part of an ongoing Y2K Fridays series, the Gardena Cinema is showing a double-bill of movies starring the late singer and actor Aaliyah, with Andrzej Bartkowiak’s 2000 “Romeo Must Die” and Michael Rymer’s 2002 “Queen of the Damned.”
Riffing on “Romeo and Juliet,” the story of “Romeo Must Die” revolves around Jet Li and Aaliyah as members of warring crime families in Oakland who fall for each other.
Kevin Thomas wrote, “Body counts run high in this genre, but ‘Romeo Must Die,’ which marks Li’s first English-language starring role, tries for some depth and sophistication. … The film is a new step for both Li, who hopes to break out with it, and for recording star Aaliyah, in an accomplished film debut.”
Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah in “Queen of the Damned.”
(Jim Sheldon / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Based on one of the novels from Anne Rice’s popular “Vampire Chronicles,” “Queen of the Damned” stars Stuart Townsend as the vampire Lestat, here taking on the guise of a rock star, and Aaliyah as Akasha, the first vampire.
In his review at the time, Kenneth Turan wrote, “As directed by Michael Rymer and with the late rock star Aaliyah in the title role, ‘Queen of the Damned’ turns out to be a muddled limp biscuit of a movie, a vampire soap opera that doesn’t make much sense even on its own terms. Though the previous film based on Anne Rice’s popular novels, the Tom Cruise-starring ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ was far from a success, this brain-dead venture makes it look like a masterwork by comparison.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The Venice Film Festival is already underway and next week I will be part of The Times’ team heading to Toronto. The Telluride Film Festival starts today and our own Joshua Rothkopf, Josh Rottenberg and Glenn Whipp are there covering the action.
Many of the season’s most anticipated films will be playing over the next few days. Among world premieres at Telluride are Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” starring Jeremy Allen White as the acclaimed singer-songwriter; Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” with Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s popular novel; and Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player,” with Colin Farrell as a down-on-his-luck international gambler.
Laura Dern, George Clooney and Adam Sandler in the movie “Jay Kelly.”
(Peter Mountain / Netflix)
Among the titles making their North American premieres after premiering at European festivals will be Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” Richard Linklater’s two films “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague,” Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life,” Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent.” Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered earlier this year at Sundance.
This week, Rottenberg spoke to Telluride’s festival director, Julie Huntsinger, who said, “The devotion people have to this weekend makes me think there’s hope. They’re not coming here for anything but film-loving. To hear people say, ‘I would not miss this for the world’ makes me really proud and hopeful. After everything we’ve all been through, I think we still have reason to keep doing this crazy little picnic.”
Even with so much happening elsewhere, there are still plenty of great events happening closer to home right here in L.A. On Wednesday, the Armenian Film Festival begins in Glendale, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Armenian Film Society with the Los Angeles premiere of Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade’s “Monsieur Aznavour,” starring Tahar Rahim as legendary French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour.
The highlight of the festival will likely come on Sept. 7 with a conversation between “Sinners” producer Sev Ohanian and writer-director Ryan Coogler about their ongoing creative collaboration. That night will also see an awards gala honoring Ohanian along with actors Madeline Sharafian (“Elio”) and Karren Karagulian, best known for his work in Sean Baker’s films, including “Anora.”
James Brolin on ‘Night of the Juggler’
James Brolin, left, and Mandy Patinkin in the movie “Night of the Juggler.”
(Kino Lorber)
“Night of the Juggler,” directed by Robert Butler and adapted from a novel by William P. McGivern, has been little seen for years, only released on VHS and rarely seen in theaters or on TV. Shot on the streets of late-1970s New York City and released in 1980, the movie captures the grime and sweat of the city, making for a vividly authentic action thriller.
That should all change shortly, as a new 4K restoration distributed by Kino Lorber is playing at the Aero on Sept. 4 with star James Brolin in person for a Q&A. Then the film will get a limited run at the Los Feliz 3 on Sept. 18, 20 and 22.
In the film, Brolin plays Sean Boyd, a former NYC cop now working as truck driver. His adolescent daughter, Cathy, is abducted by the psychotic Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman), who mistakes her for the daughter of a wealthy real-estate developer. This sets Boyd of on a frantic chase across the city to save Cathy before it is too late.
One dazzling early sequence begins as a chase on foot, finds both Soltic and Boyd stealing vehicles to make it a car chase and ends up with them hopping between cars on a moving subway train. There is a relentlessness to Brolin’s performance that is countered by the creepy, disturbing undertones of Gorman.
Brolin, 85, was on a Zoom call recently from the home in Point Dume he shares with his wife, Barbra Streisand. Turning his computer around to share a distinctly spectacular view of the ocean, Brolin said with a laugh, “I’m a lucky boy.”
Brolin began his career as a contract player at Fox and then Universal, winning an Emmy in 1970 for the first season of the hit TV show “Marcus Welby, M.D.” Among his film credits was 1976’s “Gable and Lombard,” which saw him playing Clark Gable opposite Jill Clayburgh as Carole Lombard for director Sidney J. Furie.
Furie was the original director on “Juggler.” A few weeks into shooting, Brolin broke his foot doing one of the chase scenes. In the time it took to heal, Furie left the project to be replaced by Butler.
James Brolin in the movie “Night of the Juggler.”
(Kino Lorber)
Besides his flowing hair, healthy beard and generously unbuttoned shirt, Brolin acknowledged “Juggler” was a different kind of role and a different kind of movie for him — a grittier project removed from the stalwart fare he was often known for.
“I felt released,” he said. “I felt this is what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Remembering a scene in which he bitterly argues with his ex-wife in the film (played by Linda Miller), Brolin added, “I’ve been married 30 years now, but it’s my third one. The first two were maybe kind of like that. So I was able to unleash on film some of my old nasty feelings.”
Besides Gorman, a Tony winner for his performance in “Lenny,” the cast also featured a young Dan Hedaya as a crooked cop holding a grudge against Brolin’s Boyd and a then little-known Mandy Patinkin as a Puerto Rican cab driver who has no reservations about racing through traffic and provides a running commentary along the way.
“He was like a puppy in those days: ‘Where are you guys going to eat? Can I go with you?’” recalls Brolin of Patinkin. “But for him to get in that car — so fun. He made whatever might have been repetitious about that sequence just full of fire. And right up until the cab crash, which was full-on.”
In his original May 1980 review of the film, Times critic Charles Champlin wrote, “Of its kind, the police-action thriller ‘Night of the Juggler’ is a superior piece of work. The action is non-stop, the dialogue is tough and authentic, the characters major and minor are vivid and credible as the form allows. The people and the New York world in which they movie and work are as real as muggings and racial tension.”
Brolin is happy to see the movie revived. “I’m so proud,” he told me. “It was such a wonderful experience.”
And in case anyone was wondering, yes, Barbra Streisand has seen “Night of the Juggler.”
“She saw it two weeks ago and she said ‘I’m in love all over again,’” said Brolin. “Which made me feel quite good. She thinks it’s a wonderful movie and she loved what I did in it. Because I’m a bore at home.”
Owen Kline on ‘Who Killed Teddy Bear’
Sal Mineo in the movie “Who Killed Teddy Bear.”
(Cinématographe)
Owen Kline was 7 years old when his grandfather, Joseph Cates, died. Though he knew of his grandfather’s career in show business, working on Broadway and in television, it was not until Kline became a teenage film fan, scouring movie guides and video stores in his native New York City that he discovered Cates had also directed a notorious cult film, “Who Killed Teddy Bear.”
“I’ve collected the receipts on this movie and tried to piece its history together since I was 14,” said Kline, whose parents are the actors Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline, during a recent phone call from New York. “Because there’s not much out there.”
A newly struck 35mm print of the film — in a director’s cut including some five minutes of footage removed from the film’s initial 1965 release — is playing at the Los Feliz 3 on Sept. 2, 6 and 7. The film was restored and scanned by the boutique video label Cinématographe, who have released a 4K disc set loaded with extras.
“Teddy Bear’s” cult reputation has grown over the years as a startlingly lurid artifact taking place in some of the seedier corners of New York City. Sal Mineo plays a young man of ambiguous sexuality who becomes increasingly obsessed with a female bartender (played by Juliet Prowse) at the nightclub where he is a busboy. Elaine Stritch plays the club’s boss.
Elaine Stritch, center, in the movie “Who Killed Teddy Bear.”
(Cinématographe)
“Every video store in New York, in the cult section, would have a bootleg copy of this movie because for years, until recently, the copyright was just murky,” said Kline. “So that did a great service to its unseemly reputation, as if it was one of the dirty paperbacks you’d smuggle out of one of these adult bookstores in the film.”
As those video stores around New York City began closing, Kline, now 33, would buy up their copies, taking note of the different covers and cuts of the film that were circulating.
Kline noted that within the additional footage in the director’s cut is a moment where Mineo thumbs through a paperback called “Beach Stud” in an adult bookstore, adding to the ambiguity of his character’s sexuality. (And also perhaps a nod to Mineo’s own bisexuality, rumored at the time but not yet public.) There’s also a moment in the new scenes in which a killer kisses the cheek of his dead victim.
“On a film with a laundry list of taboos, suggested necrophilia is a new one,” says Kline. “It does really feel like a throwback film to the pre-Code era. It’s almost like they compiled a gigantic list of these taboos. There’s some really shocking stuff.”
The original Dec. 1965 review in The Times by Margaret Harford called the film “a grim commentary,” while also noting, “No doubt about it, there are a lot of sick people walking around.” The review concludes with the line, “The trend now is never knowing when to stop.”
In a 1996 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Cates downplayed the film’s more shocking elements, while admitting, “Ours was a slightly sleazy film.”
“We didn’t set out about and say to ourselves, ‘Gee, let’s connive to do these things that are tasteless in the movie,’” said Cates. “There was a story and we had to figure out a way to do it.”
Kline’s own feature film, 2022’s “Funny Pages,” will be playing on a double bill with Andrew DeYoung’s recent “Friendship” at the New Beverly on Sept. 16 and 17.
Points of interest
‘52 Pick-Up’ in 35mm
Roy Scheider, left, and John Glover in the movie “52 Pick-Up.”
(American Cinematheque)
As if to prove that NYC does not corner the market on scuzzy depictions of an urban underbelly, Cinematic Void will be screening John Frankenheimer’s L.A.-set “52 Pick-Up” in 35mm on Monday.
A 1986 portrait of the sleazy glory of our city and an adaptation of a novel by Elmore Leonard, the film follows a successful businessman (Roy Scheider) who is caught up in a blackmail scheme when he is videotaped with his mistress. Desperate to keep things quiet so as not to damage the local political aspirations of his wife (Ann-Margret), he finds things escalate quickly and he sets out for revenge. The cast also includes a terrifying Clarence Williams III, Vanity, Kelly Preston and actual members of the adult film demimonde.
Actor John Glover, who plays the deranged lead blackmailer in the film, will be at Monday’s screening for a Q&A. In his original review of the film, Patrick Goldstein noted, “‘52 Pick-Up’ features a couple of stylish performances, especially by John Glover, who brings a flaky intensity to his role as extortionist leader.”
‘Barry Lyndon’ in 4K
Ryan O’Neal, right, and James Magee in the movie “Barry Lyndon.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
On Saturday, the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre will host the Los Angeles premiere of a new 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 “Barry Lyndon.” The film will also be shown in 35mm at the New Beverly on Sept. 5, 6 and 7.
An adaptation of the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, the film brings the world of the late 1700s to astonishingly vivid life in telling the story of the wayward adventures of Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), who eventually marries Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson).
The film won four Academy Awards and has over time seen its esteem only rise; now many consider it to be Kubrick’s greatest achievement. Yet, upon release, it confounded viewers, who found its pacing and picturesque imagery to be impenetrable.
Reviewing the film in Dec. 1975, The Times’ Charles Champlin said, “It is ravishingly beautiful and incredibly tedious in about equal doses.” He added, “Kubrick is at once the most zealous and monastic of present film-makers, living in reclusive independence from the larger world of movies, setting himself each time a quite different kind of challenge and then meticulously solving it.”
A January 1974 Times story by Thomas Wood as the film was in production was filled with thwarted attempts to get around the protective veil of secrecy Kubrick designed around it. One frustrated member of the Warner Bros. press team was exasperated by the lack of details about the movie that the studio had, noting, “What can you do with a man who is both a critic’s darling and a box-office winner? You let him pick his own game and make up his own rules.”
‘Sign O’ the Times’ in Imax
Prince performs his “Sign O’ the Times” concert in Paris in 1987.
(FG / Bauer-Griffin / Getty Images)
Starting Friday, Prince’s 1987 concert film “Sign O’ the Times” is getting a one-week run in Imax theaters. Directed by Prince himself, the film is a document of the stage show he created to tour the album of the same name, combining concerts filmed in Europe with footage created on his own Paisley Park soundstages in Minnesota. Seeing Prince’s mastery of performance at Imax scale may actually be too much for a brain to handle.
In Michael Wilmington’s original review he wrote, “‘Sign ‘O’ the Times’ shows him seemingly as much influenced by Martin Scorsese and ‘The Last Waltz’ — with its smokey, absolute lyricism — as was by Fellini and Dick Lester in ‘Under the Cherry Moon.’ And since the movie is predominately concert footage of his stage show, he’s in greater control here; singer-composer Prince is at the peak of his form. … So as a concert film, judge from the music, ‘Sign ‘O’ the Times is near the top. As a movie – carrying inside it the embryo of other movies – it’s not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he’ll always, catlike, leap back.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The LAT published its fall movies preview this week, taking a look at what is coming up through Thanksgiving. There is a list of the 21 movies we’re most excited about, which includes a broad selection of styles, genres and tones.
Some of these titles have already been seen at festivals, but many have not. And if even a fraction of them pan out, it should make for quite a season.
Zoey Deutch, photographed in Hollywood in July.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
I spoke to actor Zoey Deutch and director Richard Linklater about their collaboration on “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking 1960 debut feature “Breathless.” Deutch plays American-born actor Jean Seberg, who was living in Paris at the time and agreed to be in the movie. After Godard’s film made her an international star, Seberg had an unpredictable career until her death in 1979 at only age 40.
“Is the rest of her life incredibly fascinating and intense and tragic? Yes,” said Deutch. “But Rick was really adamant on telling a story at a very specific moment in time. We’re not telling anything that happens after. Godard is not a legend yet. You don’t know who this guy is, what he’s doing. He’s not who he was later. Don’t read the last page of the book when we’re still on Page 1.”
“When I first met Jennifer, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Jennifer Lopez, what the hell?’” Tonatiuh recalled. “I must have turned left on the wrong street because now I’m standing in front of her. How did this happen? What life am I living?”
And Tim Grierson spoke to Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest for an in-character interview as David St. Hubbins, Derek Smalls and Nigel Tufnel from the rock group Spinal Tap for their long-awaited sequel, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.” (Director Rob Reiner also is interviewed in character as documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi.)
“Can I ask a question?” Tufnel interjects at one point. “This has begun? The interview?”
Pocasters choice at ‘Friend of the Fest’
Shelley Duvall, left, Wesley Ivan Hurt and Robin Williams in Robert Altman’s “Popeye.”
(American Cinematheque)
Already underway, this year marks the third edition of the American Cinematheque’s “Friend of the Fest” series, in which podcasters pick their favorite movies to show. Most of the screenings will have the podcast hosts doing live intros, while some will even be recording live shows on site.
“It’s mostly trying to find that middle ground,” said Cindy Flores, film programmer at the American Cinematheque, in an interview this week. “You don’t have to be a connoisseur or a film geek or a cinephile. Everybody loves film. And that’s the great thing about the podcast festival is that you get to see a wide variety of titles and choices and things that people are interested in.”
The popular Ringer podcast network will have four shows represented, with “The Big Picture” selecting “Michael Clayton,” “The Watch” showing “24 Hour Party People,” “House of R” choosing “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “The Midnight Boys” presenting “Blade.”
Other podcasts in the series include “The Dana Gould Hour” showing “Carnival of Souls,” “Office Hours Live” with the “Weird Al” Yankovic-starring “UHF” (in a rare 35mm print with possible surprise guests), “Upstairs Neighbors” showing “Bottoms,” “Lifted” showing “Misssissippi Masala,” “Cinematic Void” screening “River’s Edge,” “Flightless Bird” choosing “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” and “Ticklish Business” presenting “Design for Living.”
A scene from the 1985 movie “Clue.”
(American Cinematheque)
The LAT’s own Amy Nicholson, along with her “Unspooled” co-host Paul Scheer, have selected the Kevin Costner sci-fi film “Waterworld.”
The “Linoleum Knife” podcast will screen “Clue” from a newly-made DCP that will feature only one of the film’s multiple endings, selected by hosts Alonso Duralde and Dave White.
The podcast “Perf Damage” is hosted by the husband-and-wife team of Charlotte Barker and Adam Barker, who actually worked on restoring their selection: the L.A. premiere of the new 4K update of Robert Altman’s “Popeye.”
Marc Maron, who will be shutting down his “WTF” podcast later this year, will screen Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”
Points of interest
Elizabeth Taylor triple bill
Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the 1968 film “Boom!”
(Express Newspapers / Getty Images)
As part of its “Summer of Camp” series, the Academy Museum will feature on Sunday a triple bill of Elizabeth Taylor movies, all screening in 35mm, with “Secret Ceremony” and “Boom!” — both from 1968 and directed by Joseph Losey — and then Brian G. Hutton’s 1972 “X Y & Zee.” These are all visually rapturous movies with some amazing costumes and will make for an incredible daylong experience.
In the horror-tinged psychodrama “Secret Ceremony,” Taylor co-stars with Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum. Adapted by Tennessee Williams from his own play “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” “Boom!” pairs Taylor with her real-life paramour Richard Burton in some astonishing Mediterranean locations. “X Y & Zee” co-stars Michael Caine.
In May 1968, Times film critic Charles Champlin wrote, “Filmland’s reigning vaudeville act, the Flying Burtons, are together again in a sleek, aberrational and posturing piece of nonsense called ‘Boom!’ … ‘Boom!’ is gorgeous to look at. Losey’s sense of place is I think unsurpassed by any director now working, and Mrs. Goforth’s house, with its sun-baked walls and cool, dark, artful interiors, its talking bird and chained monkey, the waves crashing on the rocks below the terrace, is perfectly realized.”
Elizabeth Taylor, with producer Elliott Kastner on the set of “X, Y and Zee” in London in 1971.
(Frank Barratt / Getty Images)
In June 1968, Kevin Thomas published an interview with playwright Williams. Of “Boom!” he said, “It’s a beautiful picture, the best ever made of one of my plays. I think Elizabeth has never been that good before. I don’t know whether the public is going to buy it, for Lord’s sake. I hope they do for Elizabeth’s sake as well as my own. … I can always make out, but inwardly she’s a very fragile being.”
In his Nov. 1968 review of “Secret Ceremony,” Champlin continued the thought on Losey, writing, “His most notable gift is the care and skill with which he conveys the atmosphere generated by a particular house or place.”
In a 1970 item as Taylor was about to begin shooting “X Y & Zee,” she was asked if she would consider retiring. “I’m so lazy, I think I should retire,” she responded. “The unfortunate thing is I enjoy acting.”
‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ 10-year anniversary
Kristen Wiig, left, Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård in the movie “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.”
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Also on Sunday, the Gardena Cinema will host a 10th anniversary screening of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” with a Q&A with producer Miranda Bailey. Adapted from the hybrid novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, it was the debut feature from Marielle Heller, who would go on to make “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” as well as “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and “Nightbitch.”
Starring Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård, the story is about the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old girl in 1976 San Francisco.
Reviewing the film, Rebecca Keegan wrote, “Big summer action movies can be thrilling, but if you really want to feel your heart pounding out of your chest, try being a 15-year-old girl for 101 minutes. That’s the running time of ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl,’ a rare gem of a movie that takes its audience inside the ecstatic, confused and unapologetically horny brain of a girl named Minnie Goetze. ‘Diary’ is a vivid and often shocking story of growing up female in 1976 San Francisco, told with tenderness and humor by first-time director Marielle Heller and starring a blue-eyed lightning bolt of an actress named Bel Powley as Minnie.”
In an interview with the director at the time, Heller said, “Teenage girls are represented really poorly; I think we as a society are afraid of teenage girls. We’re definitely afraid of their sexuality, and so teenage girls are either shown in this really virginal state or this really slutty state, but it’s never what it actually felt like to be a teenage girl as a full human.
“You’re just as complete of a person as a teenage boy,” she added. “Holden Caulfield is a really complex character, so where’s our female Holden Caulfield? It just felt really important, the chance to represent teenage girls in a way that actually felt real.”
‘Cooley High’
On Wednesday the Academy Museum will present 1975’s “Cooley High” in 35mm with director Michael Schultz and actors Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs and Glynn Turman present for a conversation with academy governor and filmmaker Ava DuVernay.
Written by Eric Monte and based on his own experiences growing up in Chicago, the film is set in 1964 and follows two high school friends through a series of endearingly freewheeling misadventures.
In a 2019 article on the occasion of a screening and tribute at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater — now included on the Criterion Collection disc of the film — Susan King spoke to many involved in the making of “Cooley High.” Robert Townsend, who would go on to make “Hollywood Shuffle” and most recently be seen on “The Bear,” had a one-line role as a teenager. “The movie changed my life,” he would say.
“It’s a movie, but it’s making me laugh, it’s making me think, and to me that’s what real movies do — speak to people that look like me and speak to everybody,” said Townsend. “That was my first lesson from Michael Schultz.”
‘The Lovers on the Bridge’ in 4K
Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche in the movie “The Lovers on the Bridge.”
First shown at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, the movie would not get a release in America until 1999. The story of a street performer (Denis Lavant) and an artist losing her eyesight (Juliette Binoche), the film is told with dazzling flair and overwhelming style. Unable to shoot on the actual Pont Neuf bridge in Paris where the plot is set, Carax built a full-scale replica, said to be at the time the largest set ever built in France.
Writing about the film in 1999, Kevin Thomas said, “Leos Carax’s ‘The Lovers on the Bridge’ has the raw, gritty look of a documentary on the homeless, but it is in the grand tradition of heady screen romances. It’s a throwback to the golden era of both Hollywood and of the fatalistic French cinema that teamed such international icons as Jean Gabin and Michelle Morgan … a go-for-broke dazzler that takes constant chances, dares to go over the top, indulges in one anticlimactic scene after another, only to make such risks pay off all the more at the finish.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This week, The Times published a series of articles looking at possible different futures for Los Angeles. Greg Braxton wrote two pieces, including one about Hollywood’s long-standing fascination with depicting the destruction of the city, including “Escape From L.A.” to “Blade Runner,” “This Is the End” and many more.
Anthony Edwards in the movie “Miracle Mile.”
(Hemdale Film Corp.)
Braxton noted, “In ‘Los Angeles Plays Itself,’ [Thom Andersen’s] 2003 documentary chronicling the portrayal of the city through cinema history, Andersen aims his own wrecking ball. The film’s narrator quotes the late Mike Davis, a noted historian and urbanist, when he says that Hollywood ‘takes a special pleasure in destroying Los Angeles — a guilty pleasure shared by most of its audience.’”
He also specifically examined “Miracle Mile,” Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 apocalyptic romantic adventure drama featuring the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard from La Brea to Fairfax.
Robert Altman’s centennial
Director Robert Altman speaks at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977.
(Levy / Associated Press)
The UCLA Film and Television Archive is in the midst of “Robert Altman’s America: A Centennial Review,” a look at the monumental filmmaker’s wildly unpredictable body of work to mark 100 years since his birth. The designated home of Altman’s personal print collection, the archive will show many of the films in 35mm.
Writing when Altman was to receive an honorary Oscar (an occasion that turned out to be just a few months before his death in 2006), Peter Rainer called him “perhaps the most American of directors. But his Americanness is of a special sort and doesn’t really connect up to any tradition except his own.”
Comparing Altman to such filmmakers as John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, Rainer added, “Altman, who has ranged as widely as any of these directors across the American panorama, is a more mysterious and allusive artist. He is renowned for the buzzing expansiveness of his stories, the crisscrossed plots and people, but what strikes home most of all in this sprawl is a terrible sense of aloneness. … If being an American means being rooted to the land, to a tradition, a community, then it also means being forever in fear of dispossession. Altman understands this better than any other filmmaker. It’s what gives even his rowdiest comic escapades their bite of woe.”
The series began last week with “Nashville,” a movie that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and which this column has recently discussed. This Saturday there will be a fantastic double-bill of 1977’s “3 Women” starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek with 1982’s “Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” starring Sandy Dennis, Karen Black and Cher.
Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s “3 Women.”
(20th Century Fox Film Corp. / Photofest)
Other pairings include “M*A*S*H” and “Brewster McCloud,” “The Long Goodbye” and “California Split,” “Thieves Like Us” and “Kansas City,” plus “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and “Popeye.” The series concludes with separate screenings of “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” which reestablished Altman’s vitality in the 1990s.
As Times critic Charles Champlin once wrote, “When Altman’s movies are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad they are infuriating because there is something so arrogantly self-destructive about them.”
In a 2000 interview with Susan King for a retrospective at LACMA that included a 25th anniversary screening of “Nashville,” the often-irascible Altman had this to say about his career.
“There isn’t any filmmaker who ever lived who has had a better shake than I did,” he said. “I have never been out of work and the only thing I haven’t made are these big, popular films. I have never wanted to and I never will. I would fail at it. I would be late for work.”
‘Close Encounters’ in 70mm
Melinda Dillon and Cary Guffey in the 1977 movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
(Columbia Pictures)
The American Cinematheque is premiering a newly-created 70mm print of the director’s cut of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The film will play at the Egyptian on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then at the Aero on Aug. 29 and Aug. 31.
“Close Encounters” was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Spielberg’s first for directing. It won for Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography as well as a special achievement award for its special effects.
The story, of course, revolves around a series of sightings of UFOs around the world that leads to a spacecraft being studied in Wyoming and interactions with extraterrestrial beings. The cast includes Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and François Truffaut.
In his original review of the film, Charles Champlin wrote, “The special effects conceived by Spielberg and executed by Douglas Trumbull and a staff that seems to number in the hundreds are dazzling and wondrous. That’s not surprising: The surprise is that ‘Close Encounters’ is so well leavened with humor. … ‘Close Encounters’ stays light on its legs, mystical and reverential but not solemn. It is a warm celebration, positive and pleasurable. The humor is folksy and slapstick rather than cerebral, as if to confirm that our encounter is with a populist vehicle.”
Points of interest
Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina and ‘Vivre sa vie’ in 35mm
Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre sa vie.”
(Janus Films)
Anyone looking to prepare for the upcoming release of Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” and a snapshot of Paris at the moment of the French New Wave, might well want to check out Sunday’s 35mm screening of Godard’s 1962 “Vivre sa vie” at the Los Feliz Theatre.
Starring Anna Karina, then in the midst of a tempestuous marriage to Godard, the film features what may be her greatest performance as Nana, an aspiring actress who finds herself drawn into the world of prostitution. The film stretches from the manic joy of her dancing around a pool table to the quiet devastation of seeing her tear-stained face as she watches a movie. There’s also an utterly heart-wrenching conclusion.
In an appreciation of Karina after her death in 2019 at age 79, Justin Chang wrote, “We often speak admiringly of a performer’s screen presence or charisma. Karina possessed something more: flinty intelligence and deadpan wit, dark feline eyes that could project playfulness and melancholy without her saying a word. She incarnated both a matter-of-fact toughness and an expressive glamour worthy of a silent screen star.”
‘Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues’
Barbara Hershey in 1972’s “Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues.”
(Warner Bros.)
The Aero Theatre will have a rare screening of 1972’s “Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues” in 35mm on Sunday afternoon. Director Paul Williams and actors Barbara Hershey and John Lithgow will be on hand for a Q&A moderated by screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, who recently declared it “the best 1970s movie you’ve never heard of.”
Adapted from a novel by brothers Michael Crichton and Douglas Crichton (credited as “Michael Douglas”), the story involves a Harvard student (Robert F. Lyons) who takes a job from his best friend (Lithgow, in his film debut) delivering marijuana across the country. Along the way he meets a woman (Hershey) and after she gets busted by a corrupt cop (Charles Durning), he tries to set things straight.
‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’ and ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’
Lisa Kudrow, left, and Mira Sorvino in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
(Mark Fellman / Touchstone Pictures)
On Saturday and Sunday, the New Beverly Cinema will have a double-bill of two comedies from 1997: David Mirkin’s “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” and George Armitage’s “Grosse Pointe Blank.”
With a screenplay by Robin Schiff adapting her own play, “Romy and Michele” is about two friends (Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino) who concoct a plan to impress everyone at their 10-year high school reunion by lying about how successful they are. The film also features clothes by “Clueless” costume designer Mona May.
In his original review, Jack Matthews wrote, “The dead-pan performances of Sorvino and Kudrow, who played Michelle in the original play, are perfect. Romy and Michelle are cartoon characters, but the actresses make them both real and enormously sympathetic. … Beneath the endless silliness of the movie beats a real heart, and its theme of loyal friendship keeps propping it up every time the thin walls of the story seem about to collapse. Though ‘Romy and Michelle’ doing Tucson doesn’t take us much further than Beavis and Butt-head doing America, the ride, and the company, are a lot more fun.”
John Cusack stars as Martin in 1997’s “Grosse Pointe Blank.”
(Melinda Sue Gordon / Hollywood Pictures)
From a screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink and star John Cusack, “Grosse Pointe Blank” features Cusack as a succeful hit man attempting to attend his 10-year high school reunion and rewin the heart of an old girlfriend (Minnie Driver). That is, until a cadre of competing assassins and federal agents all show up as well.
In his original review, Kenneth Turan drew comparisons to Armitage’s earlier caper comedy “Miami Blues,” writing, “A wild at heart, anarchic comedy that believes in living dangerously … Clever enough to make jokes about Greco-Roman wrestling and make them funny, ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’s’ greatest success is the way it maintains its comic attitude. Working with a smart script and actors who get the joke, director Armitage pulls off a number of wacky action set pieces. Even if you think you’ve heard actors say, ‘I love you, we can make this relationship work,’ in every conceivable situation, this film has a few surprises in store.”
In other news
U.S. premiere of ‘Onda Nova’ in 4K
An image from 1983’s “Onda Nova,” being released in the U.S. for the first time.
(Spamflix)
Also on Sunday, Mezzanine will have the U.S. premiere of a 4K restoration of the 1983 Brazilian film “Onda Nova,” which translates as “New Wave.” Directed by Ícaro Martins and José Antonio Garcia, the film was withheld by the Brazilian dictatorship and only released there after a lengthy legal battle. It is thought to have never before screened in the U.S.
Women’s soccer was banned in Brazil until 1979, and women were only allowed to start teams in 1983, the year “Onda Nova” was produced. The film brings a defiantly queer and anarchically rebellious attitude to the story of a group of women on a newly formed soccer team and features special appearances by figures involved in Brazil’s struggle for freedom, including musician Caetano Veloso, journalist Osmar Santos and well-known male athletes Casagrande and Wladimir.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Greg Braxton did an interview with the ever-quotable Spike Lee this week. Lee’s newest film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” starring Denzel Washington, is in theaters next week and begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5. Lee will make an appearance at the Egyptian Theatre next Thursday for a Q&A after a screening of the film.
The film is adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” in which a wealthy businessman believes his son is kidnapped and must scramble to put together the ransom money. When his son is found, it turns out that actually it is the son of his driver who has been abducted. The criminals still want their ransom, creating a moral dilemma for the businessman.
Lee likens the relationship between “High and Low” and “Highest 2 Lowest” to that between the renditions of the song “My Favorite Things” as done by Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” and performed by saxophone great John Coltrane.
“It’s a reinterpretation,” he says. “There’s a history of jazz musicians doing reinterpretations of standards. We’re jazz musicians in front of and behind the camera.”
Spike Lee, photographed in New York in July.
(Victoria Will / For The Times)
Likewise, audiences will bring their own feelings to how they would respond to the ethical dilemma at the center of the film.
“That is what makes the whole scenario great,” Lee continues. “Everyone would answer that situation differently. [Toshiro] Mifune laid down the foundation. He handed the baton to Denzel and Denzel took it, and did not miss a motherf—ing stride. You know like those brothers in the Olympics? We don’t drop the baton.”
The new film marks the fifth collaboration between Lee and Washington, a collaboration that also includes “Mo’ Better Blues,” “Malcolm X,” “He Got Game” and “Inside Man.” Lee hopes it won’t be the last. Even at 68, the director maintains an enthusiasm and focus for his work and the future.
“I’m just getting started,” he says. “As an individual and an artist, when you’re doing what you love, you win. I don’t see the finish line, the tape.”
“Highest 2 Lowest” also features a performance by Latin jazz great Eddie Palmieri, who died this week at age 88.
‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ turns 40
The late Paul Reubens, in his most famous role as Pee-wee Herman, on the big screen at the TCL Chinese Theatre for a special screening of 1985’s “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” at 2023’s AFI Fest.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
On Saturday the Academy Museum will present a 40th anniversary screening of Tim Burton’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” which finds Paul Reubens’ signature character on an epic quest to recover his beloved bicycle. As part of the evening’s program, the actual prop bicycle will be presented to the museum on behalf of Reubens’ estate.
The debut feature of director Tim Burton — who has recently found new success with the series “Wednesday” — “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is an endlessly surprising and delightful film, one in which absolutely anything seems possible.
In his original review of the film, Michael Wilmington drew comparisons to Peter Lorre and Soupy Sales in attempting to describe the particular appeal of Reubens’ petulant, perennially childlike character.
“That’s what makes the character work: this sense of absolute, crazed conviction. And it makes the movie work as well — for its own audience,” Wilmington said. “Be forewarned: This film is not for anyone whose taste in humor runs only to silky Oscar Wildean epigrams or naturalistic comedies of the ‘Tootsie’ school. The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time.”
Paul Reubens in the HBO documentary “Pee-wee as Himself.”
(Dennis Keeley / HBO)
The recent documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” Matt Wolf’s startlingly intimate documentary on Reubens, includes recordings made just a few days before his 2023 death and is currently nominated for five Emmy awards.
The film explores Reubens’ life and how the explosive popularity of the Pee-wee character came to overwhelm him.
“We’re all entitled to our inner lives,” Wolf said in an interview for the paper with Dave Itzkoff. “Artists, particularly, are many different people inside. Paul was no exception, except the way he went about that was more extreme than perhaps you or I.”
‘Children of Men’ in 35mm
Clive Owen in the movie “Children of Men.”
(Jaap Buitendijk / Universal Pictures)
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 “Children of Men,” will screen at the Academy Museum in 35mm on Wednesday. (Frankly, the movie does not play out nearly often enough.) As part of the museum’s ongoing Branch Selects program, “Children of Men” was selected by the cinematographers branch in recognition of the work by Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work here is staggering for how often it hides the difficulty of what is being accomplished, creating a sense of naturalism amid complicated technical achievements.
Set in 2027 Britain, the film presents a frightening scenario in which no child has been born on Earth for 18 years. Theo (Clive Owen) is a former activist-turned-disillusioned bureaucrat resigned to a staid hopelessness. An encounter with his former lover Julian (Julianne Moore), who has become even more of a militant, leads him to shepherding a young woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) to safety. She is well along in a secret pregnancy that could literally save the world.
In reviewing the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “The best science fiction talks about the future to talk about the now, and ‘Children of Men’ very much belongs in that class. Made with palpable energy, intensity and excitement, it compellingly creates a world gone mad that is uncomfortably close to the one we live in. It is a ‘Blade Runner’ for the 21st century, a worthy successor to that epic of dystopian decay. … This is a world of rubble, fear and hopelessness whose connections to our own are never forced; Cuarón is such a fluid director with such a powerful imagination, they don’t have to be. This could well be our future, and we know it.”
Kevin Crust wrote a piece spotlighting the use of sound and music in the film, noting, “After a provocative ending that keeps audiences in their seats for the credits, ‘Children of Men’ continues to reward aurally, finishing strongly with two politically pointed songs. Leaving us with Lennon singing the anti-nationalist rant ‘Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)’ and Jarvis Cocker declaiming global society’s ills with an unprintable refrain in ‘Running the World,’ Cuarón emphasizes the timelessness of this future-set film and stamps it with a humanistic double exclamation point.”
Points of interest
‘The Heartbreak Kid’ is back again
An image from 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid,” starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.
(LMPC via Getty Images)
We have mentioned Elaine May’s 1972 “The Heartbreak Kid” in these parts before, but any time it screens is worth mentioning. The Eastwood Performing Arts Center will be screening the film Friday and Saturday from the 2K scan of a 16mm print overseen by film historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell. (I spoke to Purchell about creating the scan last year.) Cybill Shepherd, one of the film’s stars, will be there to introduce the Friday night show.
Long notoriously difficult to see because of rights issues, the film is back in regular rep-house rotation thanks to this new scan — a true treat for local audiences. Seeing the film with a roomful of people laughing along is an experience not to be missed.
Directed by May from a screenplay by Neil Simon, the film stars Charles Grodin as a man who deserts his new bride (Jeannie Berlin) on their honeymoon so he can pursue another woman (Shepherd).
In a review at the time, Charles Champlin wrote, “We are in the presence of a harsh social commentary, revealing again the dark side of Simon’s humor as well as some of Miss May’s own angers (reflected in her first feature ‘A New Leaf’) about the men having it their own way, to everyone’s discomfort.”
‘Bully’ and ‘Another Day in Paradise’
Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Nick Stahl, Rachel Miner and cast in the movie “Bully.”
(Tobin Yelland / Lionsgate)
Though photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark is now largely known for his 1995 debut feature “Kids,” he did go on to make other films. The New Beverly Cinema will spotlight two of his best with 2001’s “Bully” and 1998’s “Another Day in Paradise” as a double bill Monday and Tuesday.
“Bully” is based on the 1993 true story of a group of South Florida teens who murdered someone in their own circle of friends. Graphic, sweaty and sleazy, the film has an emotional and psychological intensity that makes it deeply disturbing. The cast includes Brad Renfro, Nick Stahl, Bijou Phillips, Rachel Minor, Kelli Garner, Michael Pitt, Daniel Franzese and Leo Fitzpatrick.
In a review of the film, Kevin Thomas compares “Bully” to “Over the Edge” and “River’s Edge” for its study of disaffected youth, noting, “Clark presents virtually all the young people in his film as doomed by clueless parents, a boring, arid environment saturated with images of violence and their own limited intelligence. Yet Clark so undeniably cares for these kids, illuminating their out-of-control rage and passions with such clarity, that it’s hard to dismiss him as a mere sexploitation filmmaker.”
Clark’s second feature, “Another Day in Paradise,” is still arguably his most conventional film, something of a post-Tarantino riff on “Drugstore Cowboy” as a young drug-addicted couple (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner) fall under the tutelage of an older drug-addicted couple (James Woods and Melanie Griffith) who introduce them to a life of petty crime.
In a review, Thomas said, “‘Another Day in Paradise’ is as mercurial and reckless in tone as are its junkie characters, and Clark catches all these quicksilver shifts with unstinting perception and even compassion. As contradictory as it is energetic, the film takes as many risks as its people do and as a result strikes a highly contemporary nerve.”
A riveting and shockingly candid feature by Richard Natale chronicled the behind-the-scenes struggles between Clark, actor Woods (also a producer) and co-producer and co-writer Stephen Chin over final cut of the movie. Things reached a head on the evening of the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, leading to this most unusual quote from Chin: “The Larry Clark that punched me out in Venice is not the Larry Clark I know as a friend.”
For his part, Clark, who checked himself into rehab soon after that incident, said the attack came after a day in which he did “about 40 interviews and had about 60 margaritas. I was out of control. I have no defense. My motto is to never plead guilty. But in this case, I plead guilty.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
As awards season begins to take shape, this week the New York Film Festival announced its closing night selection: the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?”
Starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern as a couple on the brink of splitting up when he immerses himself in the world of stand-up comedy, the film has been described as a “pivot” from Cooper’s previous directing efforts “A Star Is Born” and “Maestro.”
Will Arnett in Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?,” which will have its world premiere on closing night of the New York Film Festival.
(Jason McDonald / Searchlight Pictures)
Dennis Lim, artistic director of the NYFF, said that in putting together a program each year, he doesn’t mind drawing from films that have already premiered at festivals throughout the year, including Sundance, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto and others.
“How do we make a case for cinema as an art form that is still vital and relevant? I think programming the New York Film Festival is answering this question,” said Lim. “If I’m going to put forward a list of films that makes the case for cinema as an art form that matters today in 2025, which are the films that I’m going to put forward as evidence? The program is our answer to that question.”
John Woo on Hong Kong action cinema
Chow Yun-fat, left, and Danny Lee in John Woo’s “The Killer.”
(Shout! Studios)
The stylish, delirious action cinema that emerged from Hong Kong in the late 1980s and early 1990s redefined the genre, creating a visual grammar and thematic template that is still wildly influential to this day. The American Cinematheque and Beyond Fest, in partnership with Shout! Studios and GKIDS, are launching “Hong Kong Cinema Classics,” a series to celebrate these explosively exciting films.
Due to tangled rights issues, many of these movies have been largely out of circulation in the U.S. for years. To have them now remastered in 4K from original camera negatives is a thrill and puts them back in front of audiences where they belong.
The series will launch Saturday with the U.S. premiere of the new restoration of John Woo’s 1992 “Hard Boiled,” his final film made in Hong Kong before coming to the U.S., starring Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung and Anthony Wong. Woo himself will be present for the screening at the Egyptian Theatre and will return on Sunday for 1989’s “The Killer” and a triple-bill of the “A Better Tomorrow” trilogy.
Other films in the series include Woo’s “Bullet in the Head,” Ringo Lam’s 1987 “City on Fire,” Tsui Hark’s “Peking Opera Blues” and Ching Siu-tung’s trilogy of “A Chinese Ghost Story” films.
Director John Woo, photographed in Los Angeles in 2023.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
After relocating to America in 1993, Woo would go on to make a string of English-language films in Hollywood such as “Hard Target,” “Broken Arrow,” “Face/Off,” “Mission: Impossible 2” and “Windtalkers” as well as the more recent “Silent Night” and a 2024 remake of “The Killer.”
Speaking from his home in Los Angeles recently, Woo noted what it means to him that audiences still respond to his Hong Kong films.
“I so appreciate all the fans — for all these years they still give me great support,” said Woo, 78. “That’s why I’m so excited. It’s hard to believe that after so many years, I still have a chance to meet the audience and the audience is still excited about it. So I’m very proud.”
The Hong Kong action movies celebrated in the series slowly found their way to western audiences via festival screenings, limited theatrical releases and eventually home video.
Writing about “The Killer” in 1992, The Times’ Kevin Thomas said, “Sentimentality and violence have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning of the movies, but seldom have they been carried to such extremes and played against each other with such effectiveness.”
For Woo, there was a creative freedom while making his movies at that time. Proven Hong Kong directors were often allowed to largely do what they wanted without interference.
“In the rest of the world, I’ve been told there are very clear rules for every kind of movie,” said Woo. “The comedy is comedy. Action is only for the action fan and people who enjoy the melodrama never go to see the action movie. So each kind of movie has a certain kind of audience. But for the Hong Kong film, it is so much different. We had — in one movie — a human drama, a sense of humor and then the action. We can put everything all together.”
Chow Yun-fat, left, and Tony Leung in John Woo’s “Hard Boiled.”
(Shout! Studios)
In a 1993 profile of Woo by Joe Leydon, writer-director Quentin Tarantino, then known only for his debut “Reservoir Dogs,” lavished praised on his fellow filmmaker, saying “John Woo is reinventing the whole genre. The guy is just terrific — he’s just the best one out there right now.”
Tarantino added, “After I saw ‘A Better Tomorrow,’ I went out and bought a long coat and I got sunglasses and I walked around for about a week, dressing like Chow Yun-fat. And to me, that’s the ultimate compliment for an action hero — when you want to dress like the guy.”
Woo has always been open about the influence of filmmakers such Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese on his own movies.
“I just feel like we are all in a big family,” said Woo of his enduring influence, which you can see evidence of as recently as the “John Wick” franchise. “We are all learning from each other. Every time it’s a learning process for me.”
Alex Ross Perry visits ‘Videoheaven’
Maya Hawke records the narration for Alex Ross Perry’s “Videoheaven.”
(Cinema Conservancy)
Having already released the boldly form-defying hybrid documentary “Pavements” this year, filmmaker Alex Ross Perry continues his adventurous streak with “Videoheaven,” an epic essay film about the rise and fall and continued life of video stores and their importance to film culture, with narration by Maya Hawke.
Perry will be in-person for a series of L.A. screenings this week, starting at Vidiots on Wednesday for a Q&A moderated by “The Big Picture” podcast co-host Sean Fennessey. On Thursday, the film will play at Videothèque with Perry in conversation with the store’s co-manager, Lucé Tomlin-Brenner. On Friday, Aug. 8, the film will play at the Los Feliz 3 with an introduction by Perry.
Points of interest
‘Zola’
Riley Keough, left, and Taylour Paige in “Zola.” Its director, Janicza Bravo, will attend the movie’s screening Thursday at the Academy Museum.
(Anna Kooris / A24)
The Academy Museum is screening Janicza Bravo’s 2020 “Zola” on Thursday with the filmmaker in person. Written by Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris, the film is based on a notorious 2015 Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” King that chronicled an uproarious tale of a road trip gone very wrong. With a cast that includes Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun and Colman Domingo, the film plumbs disorientation and information overload both with equal skill.
Bravo, who has directed recent episodes of “The Bear” and “Too Much” (also appearing in the latter as an actor) spoke at the film’s release about balancing outrageous humor with the darker currents of its story, which touch on complex issues around sex work, sex trafficking and race.
“If it were a not funny movie about sex work and sex trafficking, I don’t think that I would be the right director for it,” said Bravo. “But A’Ziah King, who wrote this story, had imbued it with so much dark humor — you’re laughing at some of the most disturbed moments. … Her way of exorcizing her trauma — it feels so familiar to me. I feel so close to it. This is how I move through the world.”
“Zola” is screening as part of the series “American Gurl: Seeking…” which spotlights coming-of-age films about women of color. Also upcoming in the series is Martine Syms’ “The African Desperate”; Minhal Baig’s 2019 “Hala,” starring Geraldine Viswanathan; Nisha Ganatra’s “Chutney Popcorn” in 35mm with the filmmaker in conversation with Fawzia Mirza; Robert Townsend’s 1997 “B.A.P.S.” in 35mm with screenwriter Troy Byer and Spike Lee’s “Girl 6” in 35mm.
‘Taxi Zum Klo’
The 45th anniversary re-release poster for “Taxi Zum Klo.”
(Altered Innocence)
For its 45th anniversary, Frank Ripploh’s 1980 German film “Taxi Zum Klo” is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration. A semi-autobiographical tale of a schoolteacher (played by Ripploh) exploring Berlin’s queer underground scene, the film was groundbreaking for its unapologetic candor. The film will have a limited run at the Los Feliz 3, playing on Aug. 5, 10 and 12.
In a 1981 review of the film, Sheila Benson wrote, “Films like ‘Taxi’ as so rare as to be unique, a collage of cinema journalism, an unblinking (but selective) view of homosexual life and intensely personal sexual images.”
Merle Oberon and ‘Dark Waters’
Merle Oberon, center, in 1944’s “Dark Waters.”
(United Artists / Photofest)
On Saturday the UCLA Film and Television Archive will have a 35mm screening of André de Toth’s 1944 “Dark Waters,” starring Merle Oberon. Along with the film there will be a Q&A with Mayukh Sen, author of the book “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star,” moderated by programmer and critic Miriam Bale. Sen will also do a signing before the screening.
A tense thriller that combines elements of Southern Gothic and film noir, the movie is about an heiress (Oberon) who finds herself taking refuge at a relative’s Louisiana plantation. She becomes embroiled in local intrigues and entanglements.
Writing about the movie in 1945, Philip K. Scheuer said, “The production builds suspense rather ingeniously, and culminates in an exciting night-shrouded chase in and around the bayou. … Miss Oberon never tops her initial outburst of hysterics, which I found pretty terrifying, but it is nice to see her in the part.”
In other news
‘Cat Video Fest’ returns
An image from “Cat Video Fest 2025.”
(Oscilloscope Laboratories)
The “Cat Video Fest” is back for its eighth installment, playing at Vidiots, the Alamo Drafthouse DTLA and multiple Laemmle locations. Created and curated by Will Braden, the series has raised more than $1 million since 2019 to help shelters, support adoptions and foster care and volunteer sign-ups.
Yes, you can watch plenty of cat videos on your phone. But sitting in a theater delighting in them with an audience is something else entirely.
HORRIFYING footage shows the moment a monster who killed his own grandad glassed a punter who confronted him for boasting about his evil crime.
Sick thug Jakob Walpole, 33, killed vintage car expert John Brown, 81, in a brutal attack on his grandfather in Bulkington, Warwickshire.
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A vile thug who killed his own grandfather was filmed glassing a patron in a nearby working men’s clubCredit: Warwickshire Police
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Jakob Walpole, 33, was found guilty of the manslaughter of his frail and vulnerable grandfather and of attacking two other victimsCredit: PA
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John Brown, 81, died after suffering an irreversible bleed on the brainCredit: PA
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He then glassed a man in a pub before attacking a barmanCredit: Warwickshire Police
The “internationally renowned”Jaguarrestoration expert suffered serious head injuries in his home at the hands of Walpole, who was convicted of John’s manslaughter.
Less than four minutes later, Walpole was seen on CCTV footage emerging from the property and from there headed to a village pub.
He stayed at the pub for a matter of minutes before moving on to a working men’s club.
It was here the cowardly thug was also convicted of breaching a restraining order and assaulting two other victims, acourtheard on Wednesday.
Now, footage released showing the cowardly killer boasting about his despicable crime and attacking others has surfaced.
Jurors heard drunken Walpole attacked Dennis Hopson from behind in Bulkington Working Men’s Club after openly speaking about the vicious assault on his grandad.
Drunken Wallpole also “ignored” Mr Hopson’s pleas to moderate his language as he continued to badger the drinker.
He was then caught on “clear” CCTV footage attacking the elderly drinker.
Matters came to a head when Walpole took the victim’s seat before smashing a pint glass over the back of his Hopson’s head after being told to move.
The attack caused cuts to Mr Hopson’s ear, neck and head and prosecutor Michael Duck KC told jurors: “There can be no suggestion (Walpole) was acting in self-defence or anything of that sort.”
Chilling moment evil killer wipes bloody nose after stabbing man, 19, to death in street brawl before he fled UK
A barman was then punched in the face as he frogmarched Walpole out of the club.
“Belligerent” Walpole was arrested for all three attacks later the same night.
He remained abusive throughout the process and “booking in” at a police station, the court heard.
Jurors were also shown “haunting” footage of “world-renowned” restoration expert John pleading for help on a security camera before he was attacked by Walpole.
Earlier that evening, Walpole had been seen on CCTV arriving at John’s bungalow, before going inside and attacking the pensioner.
The pensioner could be seen waving at the camera – said to be linked to his daughter, Walpole’s mum – while in the garden before heading inside.
Mr Duck told jurors: “John Brown is Jakob Walpole’s grandfather. He was a frail man and he had recently been diagnosed with the early stages of dementia.
“He was plainly a vulnerable individual and the evidence will demonstrate that this defendant was acutely aware of that.”
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Walpole filmed arriving at John Brown’s bungalowCredit: Warwickshire Police
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The degenerate then killed his own grandfatherCredit: Instagram
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The coward will be sentenced in the coming weeksCredit: Instagram
John was well known in the local community, having run a successful car panel and body repair business due to his expertise in respect of vintage cars, the court heard.
Police summoned to the bungalow by John’s daughter, Lynda Brown, found the pensioner “dazed and confused” and with significant injuries to his face and arms.
Despite being rushed to hospital, over the following hours John suffered a bleed on the brain as a result of the attack and passed away six days later.
Walpole had also attended a match at Coventry City‘s home stadium that lunchtime before visiting local pubs in the run-up to the spree of violence.
Concerns about Walpole’s “deteriorating behaviour” had led to a security camera being installed at his grandparents’ home address in Bulkington.
He was also already subject to a restraining order when he carried out the attack on his grandfather.
‘ACT OF COWARDICE’
Walpole, of School Road, Bulkington, Warwickshire, will be sentenced next Monday.
Commenting after the case, Natalie Kelly, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Jakob Walpole carried out a senseless and brutal attack on his own grandfather who had tried to help him.
“He showed no concern or remorse following the attack.
“Rather than call for help, he callously left his vulnerable and elderly grandfather severely injured and went to a local pub where he assaulted two further elderly victims.
“Everyone who knew Mr Brown saw how much he did for his grandson, often going out of his way to care and support him – but Walpole simply took advantage of his kindness.
“While this conviction ensures Walpole is held accountable for his actions, the family have been left with a deep and lasting pain that no justice can erase.”
Detective Inspector Gareth Unett, who led the investigation for Warwickshire Police, said: “John Brown was a kind, gentle, hardworking man whose loss has left a huge void in the lives of his loved ones and friends.
“Not only was he loved greatly by all those around him, he was known internationally as one of the best restorers of classic Jaguars.
“The legacy he leaves is not only in the love and generosity he showed to those around him, but also in the countless classic cars that will survive for generations more thanks to his work.
“Walpole’s attack on his grandfather, who had shown him nothing but kindness and generosity, was an act of cowardice and brutality that, in decades of policing, I struggle to find a comparison for.”
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Warwick Crown Court heard the harrowing case over a three-week trialCredit: Alamy
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Writer-director Ari Aster has refashioned himself from a maker of art-house horror films like “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” into a more overt social satirist with “Beau Is Afraid” and his latest film, “Eddington,” which opens this week.
Pointedly set in the spring of 2020 in a small town in New Mexico — a moment when uncertainty, paranoia and division over the response to COVID were maximally disorienting — the film’s story concerns a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who tosses his hat in the ring to run against an incumbent mayor (Pedro Pascal). Each spouts their own complicated, spiraling rhetoric as the race between them becomes more intense, and they seem swept away by circumstances much larger than they can understand or control.
Joaquin Phoenix in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
In her review of the film Amy Nicholson wrote, “Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch ‘Eddington’ once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.
“But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.”
Carlos Aguilar spoke to acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji, a former collaborator of David Fincher, James Gray and the Safdies, about working with Aster for the first time on “Eddington.”
“Ari and I have a common language,” Khondji said. “We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.”
‘Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse’ restored
Francis Ford Coppola in the documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.”
(Rialto Pictures / American Zoetrope)
The 1991 film “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” is widely thought of as among the greatest behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made. Directed by Fax Bahr with George Hickenlooper from documentary footage directed by Eleanor Coppola, the film explores the epically complicated production of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” A new 4K restoration of “Hearts of Darkness” will have a limited run at the American Cinematheque beginning Sunday, with Bahr in-person for multiple Q&As.
When Eleanor Coppola went to the Philippines in 1976 with her husband and their three children for the production of his hallucinatory Vietnam War saga “Apocalypse Now,” he enlisted her to shoot doc footage in part to save on additional crew and also to give her something to do.
Drawing from Eleanor’s remarkable footage, surreptitious audio recordings she made and her written memoir of the experience, “Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now,’” “Hearts of Darkness” becomes a portrait of the struggle to maintain creativity, composure and sanity amid chaos as everything that could possibly go wrong seemingly does. Military helicopters are redeployed during takes, star Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack, monsoons destroy sets, Marlon Brando is immovable on scheduling and the ending of what all this is leading toward remains elusive.
Frederic Forrest, left, Laurence Fishburne, Martin Sheen and Albert Hall in “Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut.”
(Rialto Pictures )
“I think it’s really held up and survived,” said Bahr of the documentary in an interview this week. “It works as a complement to this extraordinary film that Francis produced. Of course, [‘Apocalypse Now’] would be what it is without this, but I do think for people who really want to go deeper into the ‘Apocalypse’ experience, this is really a necessary journey to take.”
When “Apocalypse Now” first premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Francis Ford Coppola infamously said, “The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.”
The years between the lengthy production of “Apocalypse Now,” its turbulent release and the subsequent years before the “Hearts of Darkness” project came to be likely eased the Coppolas into participating with such candor and full-fledged access.
Eleanor Coppola in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.”
(Rialto Pictures / American Zoetrope)
“I think having almost 10 years after ‘Apocalypse Now’ was helpful,” said James T. Mockoski, who oversaw the restoration for Coppola’s company American Zoetrope. “It would’ve been a much different documentary when it was supposed to come out. It was supposed to support the publicity and the marketing of the film at that time. ‘Apocalypse’ was very difficult, as we have seen, obviously. I don’t know how much they would’ve had the hunger to revisit the film and go right into a documentary. It was a rather difficult, challenging time for them. And I think 10 years gave them a perspective that was needed.”
“He gambled it all and he won,” said Bahr. “And what I hope we really achieved with ‘Hearts’ was showing the despair that really all artists go through in the creative process. And even though you go there, if you keep at it and your goal is true then you achieve artistic greatness.”
According to Mockoski, Francis Ford Coppola has seen his own relationship to the documentary change over the years. While at times unflattering, and certainly showing the filmmaker racked by doubt and in deep creative crisis, “Hearts” also shows him as someone, improbably, finding his way.
“It’s a very hard relationship with the documentary, but he has grown over the years to be more accepting of it,” said Mockoski. “He doesn’t like the films to ever be shown together. If anyone wants to book it, they shouldn’t be on the same day. There should be some distance. And he doesn’t really want people to watch the documentary and then just figure out, where’s Francis and what is his state of mind at this point? They’re two separate things for him. And he would rather people watch ‘Apocalypse’ just for the experience of that, not to be clouded by ‘Hearts.’”
Martin Sheen in the movie “Apocalypse Now.”
(Rialto Pictures)
In his original review of “Hearts of Darkness,” Michael Wilmington wrote, “In the first two ‘Godfather’ movies, Coppola seemed to achieve the impossible: combining major artistic achievement with spectacular box-office success, mastering art and business. In ‘Apocalypse Now,’ he wanted to score another double coup: create a huge, adrenaline-churning Irwin Allenish spectacle and something deeper, more private, filled with the times’ terror. Amazingly, he almost did. And the horror behind that ‘almost’ — Kurtz’s Horror, the horror of Vietnam, of ambition itself — is what ‘Hearts of Darkness’ gives us so wrenchingly well.”
“What ‘Hearts’ is great about is that it shows you a period of filmmaking that’s just not seen today,” said Mockoski. “You look at this and you look at [“Apocalypse’] and there’s just no way we could make this film. Would we ever allow an actor to go to that extreme situation with Martin Sheen? Would we be allowed to set that much gasoline on fire in the jungle? Hollywood was sort of slow to evolve, they were making films like that up from the silent era, these epic films, going to extremes to just do art. It just captured a moment in time that I don’t think we’ll ever see again.”
‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’
The event’s poster.
(Vista Theater)
Having premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and screened only a few times since, Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” will play twice daily at the Vista Theater from July 18-28.
Clocking in at over 4 hours and screening from Tarantino’s personal 35mm print (complete with French subtitles), it combines the films known as “Kill Bill Vol. 1” and “Kill Bill Vol. 2” into a single experience with a few small changes. The main difference is simply taking it all in as “The Whole Bloody Affair,” an epic tale of revenge as a woman mostly known as “The Bride” (Uma Thurman in a career-defining performance) seeks to find those who tried to kill her on her wedding day. (I’ll be seeing the combined cut for the first time myself during this run at the Vista.)
Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill Vol. 2.”
(Andrew Cooper / Miramax Films)
Manohla Dargis’ Los Angeles Times reviews of the two films when they were first released in October 2003 and April 2004 still make for some of the most incisive writing on Tarantino as a filmmaker.
Dargis’ review of “Vol. 2” inadvertently helps sell the idea of the totalizing “The Whole Bloody Affair” experience by saying, “An adrenaline shot to the movie heart, soul and mind, Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill Vol. 2’ is a blast of pure pop pleasure. The second half of Tarantino’s long-gestating epic, ‘Vol. 2’ firmly lays to rest the doubts raised by ‘Vol. 1’ as to whether the filmmaker had retained his chops after years of silence and, as important, had anything to offer beyond pyrotechnics and bloodshed. Tarantino does have something to say, although most of what he does have to say can be boiled down to two words: Movies rock.
“In a world of commodity filmmaking in which marketing suits offer notes on scripts, this is no small thing. Personal vision is as rare in Hollywood as humility, but personal vision — old, new, borrowed and true blue to the filmmaker’s inspirations — shapes ‘Vol. 2,’ giving it texture and density. Personal vision makes Tarantino special, but it isn’t what makes him Quentin Tarantino. What does distinguish him, beyond a noggin full of film references, a candy-coated visual style and a deep-tissue understanding of how pop music has shaped contemporary life, affecting our very rhythms, is his old-time faith in the movies. Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.”
Points of interest
‘2046’ in 35mm
Tony Leung in the movie “2046.”
(Wing Shya / Sony Pictures Classics)
Showing at Vidiots on Friday night in 35mm will be Wong Kar-wai’s “2046,” the 2004 follow-up to his cherished “In the Mood for Love.” Loosely connected to both “In the Mood for Love” and Wong’s earlier “Days of Being Wild,” “2046” stars Tony Leung as a writer in late 1960s Hong Kong who has encounters with a series of women, played by the likes of Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Gong Li, Carina Lau and Zhang Ziyi. (He may be imagining them.) Fans of Wong’s stylish, smoky romanticism will not be disappointed.
In her original review of the film, Carina Chocano called it “a gorgeous, fevered dream of a movie that blends recollection, imagination and temporal dislocation to create an emotional portrait of chaos in the aftermath of heartbreak.”
‘Lost in America’ + ‘Modern Romance’
Albert Brooks in the movie “Lost in America.”
(Geffen Film Company)
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the New Beverly will screen a 35mm double bill of Albert Brooks’ 1985 “Lost in America” and 1981’s “Modern Romance.” Directed by, co-written by (with Monica Johnson) and starring Brooks, both films are fine showcases for his lacerating comedic sensibilities.
A satire of the lost values of the 1960s generation in the face of the materialism of 1980s, “Lost in America” has Brooks as an advertising executive who convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in quitting their jobs, selling everything they own and setting out in a deluxe RV to explore the country, “Easy Rider”-style.
In a review of “Lost in America,” Patrick Goldstein wrote, “Appearing in his usual disguise, that of the deliriously self-absorbed maniac, Brooks turns his comic energies on his favorite target — himself — painting an agonizingly accurate portrait of a man imprisoned in his own fantasies. … You get the feeling that Brooks has fashioned an unerring parody of someone who’s somehow lost his way in our lush, consumer paradise. Here’s a man who can’t tell where the desert ends and the oasis begins.”
Kathryn Harrold and Albert Brooks in the movie “Modern Romance.”
(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
“Modern Romance,” features Brooks as a lovelorn film editor in Los Angeles desperate to win back his ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold).
In his original review of ”Modern Romance,” Kevin Thomas wrote, “You have to hand it to Albert Brooks. To put it mildly he’s not afraid to present himself unsympathetically.”
In a 1981 interview with Goldstein, Brooks said, “As a comedian it’s really my job to be the monster. People either love me or hate me. If I wanted to be a nice guy, I’d make a movie about someone who saves animals.”
(Brooks would, of course, go on to appear as a voice actor in “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory.”)
In other news
‘The Little Mermaid’
A mermaid named Ariel contemplates what it would be like to be human in “The Little Mermaid.”
(Walt Disney Pictures)
For the next installment of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.’s ongoing series at the Egyptian, there will be a screening on Thursday, July 24, of 1989’s “The Little Mermaid” with directors Ron Clements and John Musker present for a Q&A moderated by Carlos Aguilar.
“The Little Mermaid” received LAFCA’s inaugural award for animation, the first of its kind among critics groups.
A far cry from his role as Emmerdale’s gentle-hearted vicar Ashley Thomas, John Middleton’s new character will be an evil mob boss as he returns to the telly on a rival soap
Emmerdale’s John Middleton joins rival soap to play show’s ‘most evil character ever’(Image: MDM)
John Middleton, who played Emmerdale’s kind-hearted vicar Ashley Thomas, is set to resurface in a rival soap, as its “most evil character” ever. The 71-year-old actor, who left Emmerdale in 2017 after his character’s harrowing dementia battle, will play a mob boss when he makes his debut in Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks.
His new role will take some getting used to for soap fans, who will remember John as the lovable clergyman, whose heartbreaking death moved viewers to tears. He was part of the ITV soap for more than 20 years, having first played PC John Jarvis briefly in 1994.
He returned with a permanent role in 1997, when the caring and sympathetic vicar Ashley Thomas joined the cast. Ashley’s slow deterioration after his dementia diagnosis saw him lose his memory, no longer able to recognise his wife, Laurel and their children.
But there will be no sign of gentle soul Ashley, when John’s character Fraser makes his entrance. A source said: “People usually think of Ashley when they see John but that won’t be happening any more, Fraser is about as far away to the kindly vicar you can get.”
John’s new role will be a far-cry from his character Ashley Thomas, who he played for 20 years
The insider explained to the Sun: “He’s possibly the most evil character Hollyoaks has ever had – and for a village plagued by serial killers, that’s saying something. Fraser will make his entrance very soon, and he’s got more than one connection to the village with his twisted family already there.”
And the new character’s connection to the village will soon be revealed as the father of notorious villain, Fraser Black, played by Jesse Birdsall. The cold, ruthless gangster terrorised the village for around a year, before being murdered in 2014.
Following a ‘whodunnit’ storyline that went on for several months, his killer was finally unveiled in July 2014. To everyone’s shock, he was shot by his own stepson, Freddie Roscoe (Charlie Clapham), in a bid to protect his family.
He is also the grandfather of dodgy Hollyoaks residents Clare Devine, Grace Black and Rex Gallagher. His first meeting with Clare – played by Gemma Bissix – is described as “explosive” with a “real battle” set to ensue.
Clare has been carrying on the family tradition of being an absolute terror recently. She was found out to have been running a secret exploitation ring in the village she used to live in, along with her husband, DI Banks (Drew Cain).
John, 71, will join rival soap Hollyoaks, eight years after leaving Emmerdale(Image: PA)
Unaware of Clare’s role in the scheme, Grace got involved too, going so far as to groom teenagers with her brother Rex, played by Jonny Labey. Her ‘niece’ Franke Osborne even fell victim, with her dad Darren heartbreakingly finding out.
Vulnerable teenage characters Frankie and Dillon Ray (Nathaniel Dass) have found themselves in an exploitative situation after they were targeted by criminals and bombarded with attention and gifts. Once lured in by the gang, the friends were encouraged to become addicted to drugs.
Their new addictions meant they had to first sell drugs in order to feed their habit, and then this turned into sexual exploitation. The village turned on Grace when they discovered what she’d done.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The new “Superman” is in theaters this weekend, written and directed by James Gunn and starring David Corenswet in the title role, with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as villain Lex Luthor. This film is seen as the first salvo of a relaunch of the DC Universe of characters for Warner Bros. and so there is more riding on it than just the outcome of this one film. There are several new characters introduced in the film, perhaps intended to topline future titles of their own.
“DC has been playing catch-up with Marvel,” said Arlen Schumer, a comic book and pop culture historian. “They’ve given James Gunn the keys to the DC kingdom and said, ‘You’ve got to restore Superman. He’s our greatest icon, but nobody knows what to do with him. We think you know what to do with him.’”
David Corenswet as Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Superman.”
(Warner Bros Entertainment)
The film has an impulsive sincerity that can be endearing. As Amy Nicholson wrote in her review, “Fine, I’ll say it. I need Superman. I’m craving a hero who stands for truth and justice whether he’s rescuing cats or reporting the news. Cheering for such idealism used to feel corny; all the cool, caped crusaders had ethical kinks. Even his recent movies have seemed a little embarrassed by the guy, scuffing him up with cynicism. I’m with the latest incarnation of Superman (David Corenswet) when he tells Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) that having a big heart is ‘the real punk rock.’”
Amy added, “This isn’t quite the heart-soaring ‘Superman’ I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next. Still, I left chewing over how comic book movies can be so popular and prescient, and yet people who’ve grown up rooting against characters like Lex Luthor cheer them on in the real world. Maybe Gunn can answer that in a sequel. Or maybe our stubborn myopia is what this Superman means when he says, ‘I screw up all the time but that is being human.’”
‘Drive’ in 35mm
Ryan Gosling in “Drive.”
(Academy Museum)
On Saturday the Academy Museum will show Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 romantic thriller “Drive” in 35mm. Composer Cliff Martinez will be there in person. The film is showing as part of the series “Bathed in Light: Saturated Colors in Cinema,” which will also see screenings of Michael Mann’s “Thief,” Walter Hill’s “Streets of Fire” in 70mm (with the director in person), Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” Pablo Larraín’s “Ema,” Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” Hype Williams’ “Belly” and more.
A Los Angeles getaway driver, known only as Driver (played with taciturn cool by Ryan Gosling), falls for his neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and soon becomes involved in a caper trying to help out her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) that sets him afoul of a local crime boss (Albert Brooks).
“Drive” won the directing prize when it premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and became something of a cultural sensation at the time of its release, thanks in part to the hypnotic use of dreamy synthesizer music. (And remember Gosling’s scorpion jacket?)
In his original review of the film Kenneth Turan wrote, “‘Drive’ is a Los Angeles neo-noir, a neon-lit crime story made with lots of visual style. It’s a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal. … Impeccably shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, ‘Drive’ always looks dressed to kill. Making fine use of Los Angeles locations, particularly the lonely downtown streets around the L.A. River, ‘Drive’ has a slick, highly romanticized pastel look calculated to win friends and influence people.”
Ryan Gosling in “Drive.”
(FilmDistrict and Bold Films and OddLot Entertainment)
“We would just drive for hours, talking and listening to music,” Gosling said. “And I would say, ‘This is what we want to capture in the movie, this feeling of being in a trance in a car with pop music playing.’”
For his part, Refn added, “I wanted to play with the classic notion of a fairy tale. Driver protects purity, and yet he can slay evil in the most vicious ways possible.”
This week will see two programs of work by the Chicago-based artist Heather McAdams, who, though primarily known as a cartoonist, has also been creating idiosyncratic, handmade films for decades. On Thursday at the Academy Museum will be a program titled “Kind of a Drag: Experimental Films, Documentaries and Scratch Animation by Heather McAdams, 1980-1995,” which will explore the range of McAdams’ filmmaking practice. An ongoing preservation project undertaken by the Chicago Film Society has spurred a revival of interest in her work.
“I spent a lot of time trying to make stuff happen,” said McAdams during a call this week from her home in Chicago. “I’ve always just been really doing a lot of different things, just doing stuff here at home and then all of a sudden the Chicago Film Society discovers this person that’s living up on the north side of Chicago. Those guys are really great and they’re very organized and they’ve got connections. I’ve gone to the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. You sit around all your life and you go, ‘Why doesn’t somebody call me up?’ And then the next thing when they call you up, you go, ‘Why are they calling me up?’”
Among the films to be shown will be 1980’s “The Scratchman” and 1982’s “Scratchman #2,” in which she scratched right onto the surface of found footage to create lively new images. “You” from 1983 uses Brian Eno’s song “King’s Lead Hat” as the background to a collage of footage. Among other titles showing are two documentary shorts, 1988’s “Meet … Bradley Harrison Picklesimer” and 1995’s “The Lester Film” (co-directed by her husband Chris Ligon), both unconventional portrait films. McAdams will be present for the event, joined by Picklesimer for a Q&A.
Filmmaker and artist Heather McAdams with Bradley Harrison Picklesimer, the subject of her 1988 film “Meet … Bradley Harrison Picklesimer” in a photo circa 1982.
(Heather McAdams)
“The couple of things that seem to relate to just about everything I do is working with my limitations, the kind of homemade, work-with-what-you-got type thing,” added McAdams. “I don’t see that necessarily as a complete negative, and that runs through my work. And the other thing is humor, I’m always trying to make myself laugh or make other people laugh, even though everything I do isn’t funny. Sometimes I just get weird and I go sideways and off the tracks or I make a comment about something that might be more spiritual or more important. Sometimes I make something that I go, ‘Oh, God, I wish I didn’t do that.’”
On Wednesday at 2220 Arts + Archives, Mezzanine and Los Angeles Filmforum will host McAdams and Ligon for what is being billed as “Chris & Heather’s Big Screen Blowout,” a screening drawn from their extensive collection of 16mm ephemera. The program will include trailers for films such as “Superchick” and “Trip With the Teacher,” TV performances by Ricky Nelson and Buffalo Springfield and commercials and more. The evening will also include five one-minute animated cartoons McAdams and Ligon made for MTV in the 1990s. The couple will be there for the event as well.
Of the “Blowout,” McAdams said, “It’s fun to just see how the audience reacts as it’s being projected. It’s hard to explain to people exactly what it is, unless they’re super hip and cool.” With a laugh she added, “Like you guys are out in L.A.”
Points of interest
‘Rosa la rose, fille publique’
Marianne Basler, left, in “Rosa la rose, fille publique.”
(AGFA)
On Tuesday, Mezzanine will be putting on 2 shows of the local premiere of a new restoration of Paul Vecchiali’s 1986 “Rosa la rose, fille publique” at Brain Dead Studios.
The film is an intensely emotional melodrama about a Parisian prostitute, Rosa, just turning 20 years old and the most popular among the stable of women run by her pimp, as she grapples with what her future should be. Stylishly shot, the film is marked by a richness of character detail, with a deeply felt performance by Marianne Basler as Rosa, as the world around the Les Halles neighborhood feels particularly vibrant even with its undercurrents of intrigue and violence.
Vecchiali, who died in 2023 and besides directing such films as “The Strangler” and “Encore” also produced Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” is among a number of French filmmakers currently undergoing a renewed interest in their work. Luc Moullet will see a tribute series at Lincoln Center in August, while Jacques Rozier currently has a program of his work available on the Criterion Channel. For as much attention as French cinema has gotten over the years, it is exciting to see that there are still new corners to be explored and fresh discoveries to be made.
‘Television Event’
A scene from the TV movie “The Day After.”
(ABC / Disney via Getty Images)
On Friday night the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 will host a screening of Jeff Daniels’ documentary “Television Event,” which takes a look at the end of the Cold War through the lens of the 1983 TV movie “The Day After,” which dramatized the aftermath of a nuclear weapons attack around Kansas City, Mo., and Lawrence, Kan., with a cast that included Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg and John Lithgow.
Nicholas Meyer, who directed “The Day After,” will be present for a Q&A on Friday moderated by his daughter, screenwriter Dylan Meyer. “Television Event” will also show on Saturday and Monday.
Seen by more than 100 million people when it first aired, the film was shocking for its depiction of the realities of a nuclear attack.
In a 2023 interview with Tim Grierson, Meyer said, “I realized that I didn’t want to make a ‘good’ movie. I didn’t want to make a good movie, because I knew that if I made a good movie, nobody would talk about the subject — they would only talk about the movie. I didn’t want a catchy theme song. I didn’t want brilliant cinematography, I didn’t want Emmy-nominated performances. All I wanted was to make a kind of public service announcement: If you have a nuclear war, this is what it might look like.”
‘Les vampires’
An image from Louis Feuillade’s ‘Les Vampires’
(Academy Museum)
On Sunday the Academy Museum will have a rare showing of Louis Feuillade’s 1915-16 complete 10-episode serial “Les vampires.” Set in the Parisian underworld, it follows a ruthless gang of criminals and the woman (played by the electrifying star Musidora) who infiltrates their ranks.
Ana Sophia Heger, left, and Taron Egerton in “She Rides Shotgun.”
(Lionsgate)
This Tuesday we will have an Indie Focus Screening Series event with a free showing of “She Rides Shotgun” at the Culver Theater. Director Nick Rowland and stars Taron Egerton and Ana Sophia Heger will be there for a Q&A. You can RSVP here.
Adapted from the novel by Jordan Harper by screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, the crime thriller involves a man (Egerton), newly released from prison, attempting to protect his daughter (Heger) from the violent gang who is now after them both.
Joe Layton’s evil character Mick Michaelis is back to cause chaos in Weatherfield but as Joe tells The Mirror he’s already received a torrent of online abuse from viewers
Joe Layton is back in Corrie
Corrie cop killer Joe Layton has been forgiven by Colson Smith for killing off his much-loved character PC Craig Tinker in a violent attack with a baseball bat. The same can’t be said for fellow Weatherfield residents, whose lives will be in danger next week when Joe’s character Mick Michaelis runs amok on the cobbles after a dramatic jail break.
As he tries to snatch his kids and flee abroad, Mick lands DC Kitt Green in hospital, needing lifesaving surgery. Joe, 33, who is leaving the soap, says of Colson: “He was such a positive energy and for the other cast and crew there’s obviously a massive Colson-sized hole everywhere at Coronation Street. “But we had a good chat when we first met and continued to chat.
“We were both Leeds United fans, so we bonded over that pretty quickly. And I was just struck by what a lovely warm-hearted person he is.“He never made me feel in any way shape or form: ‘I’m doing this bad thing to this popular character.’” Playing a Corrie baddie has prompted some unexpected encounters. Joe tells The Mirror: “I was in Scotland with my sister who lives up there. We were sitting outside a restaurant having a drink and a lady came out from the restaurant.
Joe Layton and Farrell Hegarty attend the British Soap awards at Hackney Town Hall on May 31, 2025 in London, England. (Image: WireImage)
“She stood next to me and looked at me and she went, ‘should you not be in prison?’
“She told me that she and the five ladies inside sitting looking at us through the window were all police officers, including the head of the constabulary in Scotland!” Monstrous Mick has had Corrie fans on the edge of their seats since he first stepped on to the cobbles back in February.
But Joe, who was spotted by a US agent at 22 and moved to the States – where he spent 6 years after being promised Hollywood stardom – says his younger self would have turned the role down. Joe, who returned to Britain five years ago, says: “If you’d asked me when I moved to America if I’d ever do a soap, I think I’d have said ‘no.’ No disrespect to soaps, but I didn’t think they were for me.
“I’m just so happy that I was offered the role in Coronation Street when I was. I’d grown up a bit and my attitude towards work had changed. “It’s a great lesson for me that you should try everything, because what I experienced in my six months at Coronation Street was incredible.” And he will be leaving the cobbles with a bang, as Mick causes mayhem after his jail break.
“No-one on the street is safe,” Joe warns. “We’ve seen what he’s capable of – he’s already killed Craig and attacked Kit. “His plan is to look for his kids and try to escape. We see a different side to him and how much his kids mean to him.
“Serving a life sentence isn’t something he can deal with and he’ll do whatever it takes to get out of the country and take his kids with him.” Joe’s big break came 11 years ago when he landed the lead role in the BBC drama series Tatau.
Joe is a seasoned actor and got his big break in US series Tatau in 2015
“I came out of drama school and hit the ground running,” he recalls. “I did Tatau and off the back of that I got picked up by a US manager and US agent and had the opportunity to go out there.
“They said ‘you’re going to come over and you’re going to do whatever you want to do.’ In your early 20s why would you not believe that?”
But, renting a studio apartment in the middle of Los Angeles, the scales soon fell from his eyes “It was great, but it was like living next door to Harrods, but not having any money,” he laughs. “I was walking past all these lovely shops and restaurants, but I was cooking baked beans back in my apartment.”
Still, he was delighted to land a role in the hit American TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “When I first drove into the Universal Studio parking lot, I remember sitting in my car calling my dad saying ‘you’ll never guess where I am,’” he smiles.
But, despite this great role, life in LA could be tough. At times, he admits: “I also worked as a carpenter and doing food delivery. I was a very small fish in a very big pond. “It was demoralising at times, but it also taught me to stand on my own two feet.”
And when he started being offered bigger jobs back in Blighty, he came home. Since then, he’s worked alongside Jodie Comer in Thirteen, he appeared in the Dawn French comedy The Trouble with Maggie Cole and in the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander, as well as being cast in the BBC series The Bombing of Pan Am 103.
Mick and Lou Michaelis first arrived on the street in February as the nightmare nightmares (Image: ITV)
Then came Mick – a wife beating thug and one of Corrie’s nastiest characters of recent years. “I got a lot of hate online in the form of comments or tweets or direct messages,” Joe recalls. “I think everybody just thought ‘There’s no room for this guy on the street, we don’t like him, get rid, we wish that you’d never existed as an actor or a person!’ “Because Corrie is such a staple in so many people’s day to day and because it’s been on so long, there’s sometimes a fine line separating reality and your character.
“I was lucky that my previous job was The Bombing of Pan Am 103. That was airing at the same time on BBC. So, the night that Craig was killed I was on ITV at 8-9pm and then 9-10pm I was on BBC playing a really nice American character.”
London-born Joe, who grew up in Ilkley in the Yorkshire Dales, wrote a journal as Mick, to help understand his character. “I wrote it first person as Mick,” he explains. “It was just a stream of consciousness. “I was playing an abusive husband who kills a police officer. On paper that’s dreadful and horrible, but my job as an actor is to get to the why and the motivation. You don’t judge the character; you try to understand them and step into their shoes.
“Mick is a really wounded, angry man who has been let down and fallen through the cracks at multiple different times in his life. Sadly there are lots of men out there like that.”
Corrie spoilers confirm a prison escape leading to a siege, as someone faces grave danger(Image: ITV)
But Joe, who would happily return to Corrie, won’t be watching his final scenes. He is filming in Lithuania for a new Apple TV sci fi series Star City, in which is is playing a Russian cosmonaut alongside Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin.
“It was really exciting to go straight into that,” he says. Joe, who will also be touring the UKwith the play Lost Atoms in September, is glad he will miss his soap exit. He says: “When I did my very first TV job my mum organised for lots of friends and family to come over and watch and I felt more nervous than I’d ever felt performing on stage in my entire life!’ he says. “I was hardly in it, but I still felt self-conscious.
“So, the morning that Craig was killed, I went on ITVX at 7.30am to watch it on my own, to prepare myself before I watched it with my girlfriend and our friends in the evening!”
Lost Atoms premieres at Curve Leicester from 22 September before a nationwide tour. For tickets and information go to: www.franticassembly.co.uk
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Our colleagues at De Los ran a thoughtful and provocative interview this week with Patricia Riggen, director of “Under the Same Moon,’ which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Andrea Flores spoke to Riggen about the film’s legacy and how it might be different trying to make the film today.
“Under the Same Moon” traces the journey of 9-year-old Carlitos (Adrián Alonso) as he heads from Mexico to Los Angeles to find his mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo), an undocumented worker. He is aided along the way by another migrant, Enrique (Eugenio Derbez). Also featuring America Ferrera in a small role and an appearance by the band Los Tigres del Norte, the movie is currently available for rent on multiple digital platforms.
Adrián Alonso in the 2007 movie “Under the Same Moon.”
(Twentieth Century Fox)
At the time, the film broke box-office records for a Spanish-language film in the U.S., audiences resonating with its heartfelt emotions and focus on the bond between and mother and son.
“If I made ‘Under the Same Moon’ right now, I would not make it like that,” said Riggen. “It would be dark as hell.”
Riggen added, “I wanted to make a movie that the Latino audience connected with and immigrants could watch. But the tone would be different. I would do a deep dive into the problem. I stayed away from making the movie political and concentrated more on the love story with the mother-son relationship. … Now I feel like it’s time to have more of a political angle. Half the country still believes that immigrants are criminals, but being able to feed your loved one is a human right.”
Riggen said she and “Same Moon” screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos have been working to adapt the story into a series.
“I find Hollywood, my industry, to be a little bit responsible for the hostility that Latinos and immigrants find as a community in the U.S.,” Riggen said. “Our representation of Latinos has rarely been positive. We have to turn things around and represent the community in a positive light, not just the negative way that is prompting hostility by half of the country.”
Fireworks and more for the Fourth
Sasha Jenson, left, and Matthew McConaughey in the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused.”
(Gabor Szitanyi / Gramercy Pictures)
Maybe it’s just me, but this year the Fourth of July is feeling extra emotional: fraught and complicated as America as a concept, an ideal and a current practical reality that feels so imperiled and fractured. It’s difficult not to be in a mode of reflection rather than celebration. Local theaters are coming through with an array of films to help you meditate on the state of the nation, get away from all that or maybe a bit of both.
The New Beverly Cinema will be screening “Dazed and Confused,” Richard Linklater’s 1993 ode to hanging out as a pathway to figuring yourself out, on Friday afternoon. “The Return of the Living Dead,” Dan O’Bannon’s horror-comedy, set over the Independence Day holiday, will play in the evening on Friday and Saturday.
Steven Spielberg’s 1981 “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” still a rousing action-adventure delight, will be at Vidiots on Friday. Tim Burton’s 1985 “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” will play Friday and Saturday. Vidiots will also be showing John Carpenter’s painfully prescient 1988 sci-fi-action classic “They Live” on Saturday in 35mm.
Harrison Ford and Karen Allen on the set of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1980.
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
The American Cinematheque will screen Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” which, with all its contradictions, might sum up America about as well as any movie can. It plays at the Egyptian on Friday. I recently spoke to one of the film’s stars, Ronee Blakley, about the film’s enduring impact. “It was just a bunch of talent put together by a bunch of great people,” she said.
The Cinematheque will also screen the original Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s 2006 “Southland Tales” at the Los Feliz 3. With a ridiculously huge cast including Dwayne Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar, a convoluted conspiracy plot and a musical number with Justin Timberlake, the film captures something about 21st century America that few others manage. I spoke to Kelly about the film in 2019, ahead of when the Cannes cut played for the first time in the city.
“It was this really incredibly ambitious, sprawling film,” Kelly said. “I was writing graphic novel prequels and it was just too much. We really didn’t have the technology or the resources to finish it. It was that the ambition was just overflowing. I didn’t have the discipline at the time to reign myself in. So we knew we were going into a situation where we had to just put our best foot forward. I think it was my lawyer who said at the time that getting into the competition at Cannes was the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to ‘Southland Tales.’”
Roy Scheider in the 1975 movie “Jaws.”
(Universal Pictures)
On Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl will be a 50th anniversary screening of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” with a live performance of John Williams’ score by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by David Newman.
The Frida Cinema will be showing Brian De Palma’s “Blow-Out,” which contains an astonishing sequence set against a fireworks display, along with a whole week of other Fourth of July-themed movies, including “Nashville” and “Dazed and Confused.”
70mm festival returns
Tom Hulce as Mozart in the 1984 movie “Amadeus.”
(Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.)
The American Cinematheque is launching the latest edition of its 70mm festival this week and it is (again) such a warm confirmation of why this is such a special moment for moviegoing in Los Angeles. The intersection of a specific print of a certain title at an exact time and theater leads to experiences that simply cannot be repeated.
This year there are a handful of new titles and prints to the selection. Among those being promoted as playing the series for the first time are Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs,” David Lynch’s “Dune,” Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” Joel Schumacher’s “Flatliners,” John McTiernan’s “Die Hard,” and Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters”
George Wyner, left, Rick Moranis and Mel Brooks in the movie “Spaceballs.”
(Peter Sorel / MGM)
Also among the films playing will be Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and “Vertigo,” John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall,” James Cameron’s “Aliens,” Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s “West Side Story,” Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” and Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts.”
Keke Palmer in Jordan Peele’s 2022 horror movie “Nope.”
(Universal Pictures)
Filmmaker Willard Huyck will be present for a screening of his “Howard the Duck.” Director Margaret Honda will be there for 70mm screenings of the experimental films “Spectrum Reverse Spectrum” and “Equinox.”
More recent titles have also been programmed: Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” and “The Master,” Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist.”
Points of interest
‘In the Mood for Love’ 25th anniversary
Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 movie “In the Mood for Love.”
(Janus Films)
To commemorate the film’s 25th anniversary, Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” is back in theaters along with the rarely seen short film, “In the Mood for Love 2001” that reunites the film’s stars, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung.
In the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, “In the Mood for Love” was the highest-ranking film released during the 21st century. The story of two people in 1962 Hong Kong, each married to others yet feeling an intense connection, unsure of how to act on their emerging bond, the film is an overwhelming emotional experience in which every slight nuance or touch takes on cascading impact.
In his original review, Kenneth Turan wrote, “A swooningly cinematic exploration of romantic longing, both restrained and sensual, luxuriating in color, texture and sound, this film raises its fascination with enveloping atmosphere and suppressed emotion to a ravishing, almost hypnotic level.”
‘Sinners’ on streaming
Michael B. Jordan, center, in the movie “Sinners.”
(Warner Bros. Entertainment)
Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” starts streaming today on Max. Whether you are just catching up to the movie or checking it out again, it’s nice to have it so easily accessible. (And a 4K disc will be available next week.)
The story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, as they return to their hometown in 1930s Mississippi to open a juke joint nightclub only to be beset by roving vampires, “Sinners” is an astonishing horror film and a thoughtful treatise on legacy. And makes for a fine Fourth of July movie as well.
In her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote, “What a blood rush to exit Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ aware that you’ve seen not merely a great movie but an eternal movie, one that will transcend today’s box office and tomorrow’s awards to live on as a forever favorite. If the cinema had a dozen more ambitious populists like Coogler, it would be in tip-top health. The young filmmaker who started his career with the 2013 Sundance indie ‘Fruitvale Station’ had to make three franchise hits — one ‘Rocky’ and two ‘Black Panthers’ — before getting the green-light to direct his own original spectacle. It was worth the wait. Let the next Coogler get there faster.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Opening this weekend and winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sorry, Baby” is the feature film debut for writer, director and actor Eva Victor.
Personally, it’s among my favorite films of the year for its complex mix of comedy and drama, offbeat whimsy and deep vulnerability. (I’d previously called it “fresh, inventive and invigorating” and that still feels right to me.) The story tells some five years in the life of Agnes (Victor), a teacher at a small East Coast college attempting to move forward following a traumatic event.
Director Eva Victor of “Sorry, Baby,” photographed at the Los Angeles Times Sundance studio in January.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In her review for the paper, Katie Walsh called the film “a movie that lingers,” attributing that to “the profound and nuanced honesty Victor extracts from each moment.”
I spoke to Victor about the process of making the film. The story is rooted in Victor’s own experiences, so every stage, from writing to production to bringing it to audiences, has had its own nuances and contours.
“It’s a very personal film for a lot of people and there’s a sadness to that because it’s a community of people who have experienced things that they shouldn’t have had to,” says Victor. “It’s life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: ‘Is anyone else feeling like this?’ And it’s nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.”
World premiere ‘Tombstone’ restoration
Val Kilmer, photographed at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan in 1993 circa the time of “Tombstone.”
(Joe Tabacca / For The Times)
On Saturday, the Academy Museum will screen the world premiere of a 4K restoration of 1993’s “Tombstone” as a tribute to actor Val Kilmer. Directed by George P. Cosmatos, the film tells the legendary story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, which has become one of the foundational myths of the American western. Kilmer stars as Doc Holliday, who comes to the aid of his friend, retired lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell). The cast also includes Bill Paxton, Sam Elliott, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason Priestley and Dana Delany.
The role was a special one for Kilmer, who titled his memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry” after a line in the movie.
In his original review of the film, Peter Rainer declared the film the latest of the then-in-vogue “designer Westerns” and highlighted Kilmer’s turn, writing, “Val Kilmer’s Holliday is classic camp performance, although it may not have started out that way. His Southern drawl sounds like a languorous cross between early Brando and Mr. Blackwell. Stricken with tuberculosis, his eyes red-rimmed, Doc coughs delicately and matches Ringo line for line in Latin. He also shoots straighter than anyone else in the movie — his powers of recuperation make Rasputin seem like a pushover.”
The film will also be playing on July 26 at Vidiots.
‘Familiar Touch’
Kathleen Chalfant, left, and Carolyn Michelle in the movie “Familiar Touch.”
(Music Box)
Winner of three prizes at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, “Familiar Touch” is the narrative feature debut of writer-director Sarah Friedland. The sensitive and compassionate story follows Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an 80-something retired cook, as she settles into an assisted-living facility while grappling with memory loss.
Friedland and Chalfant will be at select showings throughout the weekend for Q&As.
In his review of the movie, Robert Abele wrote, “The mystery of Ruth’s mindfulness — which ebbs and flows — is at the core of Chalfant’s brilliant, award-worthy performance. Hers is a virtuosity that doesn’t ask for pity or applause or even link arms with the stricken-but-defiant disease-playing headliners who have gone before her. Chalfant’s Ruth is merely, momentously human: an older woman in need, but no less expressive of life’s fullness because of it.”
Esther Zuckerman spoke to Friedland about shooting the film at Pasadena’s Villa Gardens retirement community in collaboration with staff and residents. The production held a five-week filmmaking workshop, involving the residents as background actors and production assistants.
“It came a lot from the anti-ageist ideas of the project,” Friedland says. “If we’re going to make this film the character study of an older woman that sees older adults as valuable and talented and capacious, let’s engage their capaciousness and their creativity on all sides of production.”
Points of interest
Tsui Hark’s ‘Shanghai Blues’ in 4K
Sylvia Chang in the movie “Shanghai Blues.”
(Film Movement)
Though he is best known to American audiences for his action movies, Hong Kong director Tsui Hark has been versatile in many other genres. Now getting a new 4K restoration from the original negative for its 40th anniversary is Tsui’s 1984 screwball romantic comedy “Shanghai Blues.”
Opening in 1937 Shanghai, the story concerns an aspiring musician, Do-Re-Mi (Kenny Bee), and a woman, Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang), who, after a chance encounter, vow to meet again in the same spot after the war. Leaping forward to peacetime a decade later, the two find themselves living in the same building without realizing it, as he becomes involved with her roommate (Sally Yeh).
The film will be playing at the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 on Fri., Tues. and Sat., July 5. It will also play multiple Laemmle locations on Weds.
And expect more on Hong Kong cinema later this summer when Beyond Fest launches a series of new restorations of such classics as “Hard Boiled,” “The Killer” and Hark’s 1986 “Peking Opera Blues.”
‘Much Ado About Nothing’
Director-actor Kenneth Branagh, left, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard and Denzel Washington at Cannes in 1993.
(Patrick Billard / AFP via Getty Images)
On Monday, Vidiots will screen Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” About a bunch of incredibly good-looking people having a great time in the Italian countryside, the film stars Branagh, Emma Thompson, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington.
Branagh and Thompson were married in real life at the time, and in his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Actors as well as athletes have a prime of life, a time when everything they touch seems a miracle. And the crowning pleasure of watching Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in this rollicking version of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is the way it allows us to share in that state of special grace, to watch the English-speaking world’s reigning acting couple perform at the top of their game. … Seeing them beautifully play off each other is an enormous pleasure for lovers of the romance of language as well as fanciers of romantic love.”
‘The Spirit of ’76’ live commentary
David Cassidy in the movie “The Spirit of ’76.”
(Philosophical Research Society)
On Thursday, July 3, as part of the 7th House screening series at the Philosophical Research Society, there will be a screening of 1990’s “The Spirit of ’76” featuring a live commentary by stars Jeff and Steven McDonald of the band Redd Kross.
The film is something of a singular object: a loving satire of the 1970s made from the perspective of the burgeoning ’90s, written and directed by Lucas Reiner, with a co-story credit to Roman Coppola, costumes designed by Sofia Coppola and a cast that includes David Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Olivia d’Abo, Don Novello, Rob Reiner, Carl Reiner and Devo.
From the extremely drab future of 2176, three adventurers are sent back in time to July 4, 1776 but mistakenly land in the year 1976. They meet two teenagers (the McDonald brothers) who help them navigate the present and find their way back to their own time.
In his original review of the film, Kevin Thomas did not catch the vibes, as he wrote, “Movies do not get more inane than ‘The Spirit of ’76’ … You have to wonder how this film ever got made, let alone released.”
In other news
Jerry Bruckheimer is still revved up
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, photographed at his Santa Monica office in June.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Among the big releases this weekend is Joseph Kosinski’s racing drama “F1,” starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris. The film reunited Kosinski with screenwriter Ehren Kruger and producer Jerry Bruckheimer following their huge success with “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Josh Rottenberg spoke to the 81-year-old Bruckheimer about his legendary career working on movies such as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Bad Boys,” “Armageddon” and countless more, making sleek commercial pictures that have been defining the Hollywood blockbuster for decades.
“It’s changed a lot,” Bruckheimer says of the movie business. “Streaming hit a lot of places hard. They spent too much money and now they’ve got problems with that. Some of the studios aren’t healthy. But the business, if you do it right, is healthy.”
Bruckheimer is not one of the doomsayers foretelling the end of movies.
“I’ve been doing this over 50 years and that doom has been there every time a new technology shows up,” he says. “And yet, look at what’s happened. Look at ‘Minecraft.’ Look at ‘Sinners.’ Look at ‘Lilo & Stitch.’ If you do it right, people show up.”
June 20 (UPI) — Calling Iran an “evil regime,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday visited the Weizmann Institute of Science, close to where an Iranian missile hit earlier this week.
“This is the world-renowned Weizmann Institute, where the most advanced research in human biology is conducted — medical research, genetic research,” Netanyahu told reporters during the tour of the institute in the city of Rehovot in central Israel, some 12.5 miles south of Tel Aviv with a population of 150,000 people.
“This research was shattered by a missile from the evil regime. They seek to destroy human progress. That is the essence of this regime. They have enslaved and oppressed their people for nearly 50 years — half a century. Iran is the leading terrorist regime in the world. It must not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. This is Israel’s mission: to save itself from the Iranian threat of annihilation. In doing so, we are saving many, many others.”
Netanyahu’s tour of the site where two buildings were completely destroyed came a day after the prime minister said in a post on X, “We will make the tyrants from Tehran pay the full price.”
Iranian missile strikes also hit the largest hospital in Southern Israel earlier in the week. The two countries are engaged in hostilities over Iran’s nuclear program.
The Weizmann Institute is known as the research crown jewel of Israeli science, with laboratories dedicated to studying health issues such as cancer, heart disease and neurodevelopmental disorders.
“It’s completely gone. Not a trace. Nothing can be saved,” Professor Oren Schuldiner told The Economic Times.
Officials estimate the damage from Iranian missiles to the institute at more than $500 million. Thousands of hours of research have also been lost.
“The most valuable resource of the Weizmann Institute, aside from property, are samples that have been stored for decades in labs for scientific research — and all of it is gone, with no backup,” Biomolecular Sciences Department Professor Tslil Ast told Y Net News.
Netanyah also toured an Israel Defense Forces base Friday where he praised intelligence officers for their work in the recent operations carried out in Iran.
“I am here at an IDF Intelligence base with the head of IDF intelligence, and with our amazing people, the soldiers, both conscripts and reservists, who are doing sacred work in providing us with the intelligence that wins wars,” Netanyahu said, accompanied by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, National Security Council Director Tzachi Hanegbi and other top officials.
“I cannot exaggerate the importance of the work that has been done, and which is being done at the moment, in achieving the total victory. Head of IDF Intelligence, thank you very much. For myself, the citizens of Israel and the Government of Israel, please convey my gratitude to everyone.”
Tensions in the region continue to escalate, with representatives from the European Union and Britain meeting for ciris talks on Friday with the Iranian counterparts.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday set a 14-day deadline to decide on possible American military involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict.
On Friday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the goal of Western allies is “obtaining from Iran a lasting rollback of its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs.”
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Among this week’s new releases is “28 Years Later,” the third film in the series that dates back to 2002’s “28 Days Later.” The new project reunites the core creative team from the first movie: director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and producer Andrew Macdonald.
This time out the “rage” virus that turns people into crazed cannibal monsters has been isolated to the U.K., which has been quarantined from the rest of the world. A small community of uninfected survivors live on a coastal island and make their way to the mainland to hunt and for supplies. A teenage boy (Alfie Williams), having made one expedition with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes back with his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) in search of a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rumored to be able to help them.
In her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote that it “has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It’s a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.”
Screenwriter Alex Garland, left, director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, photographed in London in June.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
“28 Years Later” is the first film in a planned trilogy, with the second film, directed by Nia DaCosta, having already been shot.
I spoke with Boyle, Garland, Mantle and Macdonald for a feature story that will be in print on Sunday. Whereas the original “28 Days Later” was notable for its use of consumer-grade digital video cameras, this time the production used modified iPhones to capture most of its imagery. The result is a fresh and distinctive look with both a sense of immediacy and an unexpected beauty.
“What was great about the script is that although you were inheriting some DNA from the original film, it was a completely original story,” said Boyle. “And deserved to be treated like that.”
Cinématographe heads to L.A. theaters
Norm Macdonald, left, and Artie Lange in the 1998 movie “Dirty Work,” recently restored to an extended “Dirtier Cut.”
(Jack Rowand / MGM)
This week the boutique home video label Cinématographe is participating in screenings all over town, further cementing the evolving relationship between physical media and the local revival scene.
Curated and produced by Justin LaLiberty as an offshoot of the Vinegar Syndrome label, Cinématographe is among a handful of companies that create releases meant to look as nice on your shelf as they do onscreen. With beautiful restorations presenting the titles as optimally as possible, the releases come with many extras highlighting their production and what makes them special, alongside new critical essays on the films. Among the titles released by the company so far are John Dahl’s “Red Rock West,” Paul Schrader’s “Touch,” Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us” and Martha Coolidge’s “Joy of Sex.”
“Cinématographe has a very specific kind of curatorial approach,” said LaLiberty in a Zoom call this week from his home in Connecticut. “And it also has a mission in that it’s trying to shine a light on these movies that have fallen into obscurity for one reason or another.”
Working in conjunction with the local screening collective Hollywood Entertainment in pulling together some of the local events, LaLiberty got a sense of the current repertory scene in L.A. and hopes that putting on Cinématographe screenings here is something that can become a regular occurrence.
“What I like about L.A.’s cinema scene, without being there, is seeing how the spaces cater to different audiences,” said LaLiberty. “It happens in New York to an extent too, but I’ve noticed it a lot more with L.A. where I think just by virtue of geography, those theaters have to build a community that’s a lot more specific to whatever their mission may be or whatever audience they’re trying to cultivate is. So that’s what I tried to do with these screenings is kind of hone in on what demographic those spaces are going to reach and what film made the most sense for each one.”
The cover art for the Cinématographe home video release of Jim McBride’s 1983 remake of “Breathless.”
(Cinématographe)
On Sunday at Brain Dead Studios there will be a restored 4K screening of the exuberant 1983 remake of “Breathless” with director Jim McBride in person. That will be followed by the Los Angeles premiere of the 4K restoration of Bob Saget’s 1998 comedy “Dirty Work,” starring Norm MacDonald, in its newly created “Dirtier Cut,” which restores the film to a version screened for test audiences before it was chopped down to earn a PG-13 rating. Co-writer Frank Sebastiano will be in attendance.
On Monday, LaLiberty will be at a pop-up at the Highland Park video store Vidéotheque, selling discs from Cinématographe, Vinegar Syndrome and affiliated titles from OCN Distribution — including some that are out of print. (Discs will be on sale at all the events too.)
On Tuesday at Whammy Analog Media, 1994’s essential lesbian rom-com “Go Fish” will show in a 4K restoration with director and co-writer Rose Troche in person. On Wednesday, there will be a 45th anniversary screening at Vidiots of the 4K restoration of Ronald F. Maxwell’s 1980 “Little Darlings,” starring Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol as two teenage girls having a private competition at summer camp to lose their virginity.
On Thursday, in conjunction with Cinematic Void, the Los Feliz 3 will host a showing of John Badham’s 1994 action-thriller “Drop Zone” starring Wesley Snipes, with the director in person.
And while it may seem counterintuitive for a home video label to be encouraging people to go see movies in theaters, for LaLiberty the two go hand in hand.
“My ultimate mission is for these films to find an audience,” LaLiberty said. “‘Little Darlings’ is one of those movies that was out of circulation for so long that now that it’s back and people can find it — to me that’s the work. The end goal is that these films are brought back and that they’re available for people to see and talk about and share. Theaters can play them and have them look great. I don’t see it as cannibalizing. I see it as just being a part of the job.”
‘Rebels of the Neon Millennium’
Shu Qi in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 film “Millennium Mambo.”
(Kino Lorber)
The American Cinematheque is launching a series looking at films from Southeast Asia made around the turn of the 21st century and shot through with the energy of specific Y2K anxieties. These were films that felt cutting-edge and of the moment when they were released, but now perhaps function at least in part as memory pieces of their time and place. This is a sharp, smartly put-together series that contextualizes a group of films and filmmakers.
Kicking off with Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 “Fallen Angels,” the series also includes Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 “Millennium Mambo,” Tsai Ming-liang’s 1992 “Rebels of the Neon God,” Fruit Chan’s 1997 “Made in Hong Kong,” Shunji Iwai’s 2001 “All About Lily Chou-Chou” Jia Zhangke’s 2002 “Unknown Pleasures” and Lou Ye’s 2000 “Suzhou River.”
Writing about “Fallen Angels” in 1998, Kevin Thomas called it “an exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people. … Indeed, ‘Fallen Angels’ celebrates youth, individuality and daring in a ruthless environment that is wholly man-made, a literal underworld similar to the workers’ realm of ‘Metropolis’ — only considerably less spacious. Life proceeds at a corrosive rock music beat.”
Points of interest
‘Dogtooth’ in 4K
An image from Yorgos Lanthimos’ movie “Dogtooth.”
(Kino Lorber)
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ second feature, “Dogtooth,” was his international breakthrough, winner of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and nominated for an Oscar. Yet even its most ardent admirers at the time would likely never have imagined Lanthimos would become the maker of commercially successful, Oscar-winning (and still weird) films such as “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.”
A new 4K restoration of “Dogtooth” will screen at the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 on Saturday, Tuesday and Sunday the 29th. The story feels abstracted and fractured, as a family lives in comfortable isolation, creating their own rules and language as the parents attempt to keep their children, now young adults, in a state of arrested development.
When it was first being released, “Dogtooth” struggled to find screens in Los Angeles. In my January 2011 review, I referred to it as “part enigma, part allegory and even part sci-fi in its creation of a completely alternate reality.”
When the film had its local premiere as part of the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival some seven months earlier, I spoke to Lanthimos, who perhaps pointed the way to some of his future work when he said, “It’s much more important to me for the audience to be engaged and to think about things themselves. If they miss any information, I’m OK with that instead of explaining every little detail and telling everyone what they should be thinking and how exactly things are.”
Lanthimos added, “People ask me if the film is about home-schooling or if it’s political, about totalitarian states or the information we get from the media. And of course all those things were not in our minds as we were making the film, but it was intentional to make the film so people can come in and have their own thoughts about it.”
‘The Seven Year Itch’ 70th anniversary
Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell re-create a scene from 1955’s “The Seven Year Itch” on the Fox Studio Lot on Stage 9.
(Twentieth Century Fox)
On Wednesday the Laemmle Royal will present a 70th anniversary screening of Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” introduced by film writers Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan. Starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, “Itch” was written by Wilder and George Axelrod, an adaptation of the hit Broadway play that also starred Ewell.
Though the movie does include the iconic scene of Monroe standing over a subway grate, it deserves to be remembered for much more than that. It’s a bracing satire of midcentury masculinity, with Ewell playing a mild-mannered family man who lets himself be taken away by fantasies of what may happen while he is on his own for a summer with a young single woman living upstairs from his New York apartment.
Writing about the movie in June 1955, Edwin Schallert said, “This picture is nothing for the moralists, though it may not quite satisfy the immoralists either, whoever they are.”
In other news
Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton among honorary Oscar recipients
Tom Cruise and Dolly Parton will be honored at the upcoming Governors Awards.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / Charlie Riedel / AP)
This week the motion picture academy announced four honorees for the Governors Awards in November. Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, while honorary Oscars will go to actor, dancer, choreographer and director Debbie Allen, production designer Wynn Thomas and actor and producer Tom Cruise.
As always, it must be noted how disappointing it is that these awards will be bestowed at an untelevised ceremony and not as part of the Academy Awards telecast itself. The idea of giving an award to Tom Cruise, who has recently refashioned himself as nothing less than an international ambassador for movies and Hollywood in general, and not putting it on TV is just beyond reason.
Here is hoping that Cruise will perhaps be able to do what his co-star in “The Color of Money” Paul Newman once did, which is win a competitive Oscar after already being given an honorary one.
