German Currents Film Festival a glimpse into latest & best European cinema
Sep
25
2023
We are fans and supporters of the Goethe-Institut’s spectrum of wonderful German/American cultural activities in Los Angeles, but since it’s Los Angeles we especially love the movies. That’s why we so anticipate a fun weekend at the annual German Currents Film Festival, lively ads for which you see posted on artsmeme now. Click on ’em ...
Opening the floodgates of early-cinema disaster movies at Laemmle Theatres
Sep
18
2023
Irving Cummings’ THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD (1926), a pioneering disaster and special effects movie, starring Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien, re-creates one of the greatest disasters in American history, when, in 1889, over 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, lost their lives. In her first major role, Gaynor plays a teenage girl smitten with dashing engineer O’Brien, ...
Meet Ernest Belcher’s prize pupil, Pola Negri 2
News of the digital restoration of The Spanish Dancer (1923) by Milestone Film & Video and the Eye Film Museum caught our fancy for several reasons. The silent movie is promoted as a “great romance epic,” and gosh, you can never get enough of that, right? In its making, director Herbert Brenon employed a “cast ...
The ‘Beauty’ of Disney-100 Thursdays
Aug
28
2023
We don’t have kids, so somehow lived through the 1990s (and beyond) without seeing Beauty and the Beast (1991). It was a great delight to make up for lost time. Last Thursday evening, we attended a centenary celebration of the Walt Disney Company at the marvelous El Capitan Theatre — to be enchanted and entertained ...
Smashingly trashy: John Waters retrospective at AMPAS Museum
Aug
8
2023
John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the eponymous artist’s contributions to cinema, opens at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on September 17, 2023. The exhibition will trace the grotesque, daring, tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year career of filmmaking and reveal how his movies have ...
Review: Restive political offspring find romance in ‘Red, White & Royal Blue,’ the movie
Anyone who read Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, or who continues to be thoroughly demoralized by all-things-MAGA, will be thrilled to stream this rom-com/ alternate-reality/LGBTQ fantasy-fairy-tale produced by Amazon Studios and directed by Matthew Lopez (the acclaimed playwright of The Inheritance). The story imagines a world in which the son ...
Beyond Barbenheimer: small & good summer Euro-movies
Aug
1
2023
Hey guys, there’s more to movie life than the bizarre blockbuster hits of summer 2023, BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER. There are at least two small, artful European films worthy of your popcorn budget. A movie about a verrrry messy love triangle, set in Paris, tells the tale of a German film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski), who ...
REVIEW: ‘Rise’: dance film earnestly misses its pointe
The French film En Corps, curiously translated as Rise and presented by Blue Fox Entertainment, is a well-made, earnest, and thoroughly innocuous movie. It will interest anyone who watched Natalie Portman in Black Swan and railed to the heavens, “Why didn’t they cast a real dancer in the role!?” This new film will more than ...
For the kid in you! Saturdays with Max Fleischer cartoons at The Panorama
May
19
2023
The great Polish-American animator Max Fleischer (1883-1972) and his production studios created iconic animations with characters like Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Felix the Cat, Popeye the Sailorman, Superman and more. In 1926, Fleischer released the first cartoon with synchronized sound, My Old Kentucky Home. His love of jazz led to cartoons (live action & ...
Through the doors of Abbey Road Studios — at The Wallis
Remember the famous shot …? Taken a few seconds after this one? The crosswalk photo of the Beatles crossing in London’s St John’s Wood before their recording session at Abbey Road Studios, in which the image of a barefooted Paul McCartney spawned a crazed conspiracy theory that Paul was dead? And that John Lennon’s subterfuging ...