Critic Stephen Farber’s TCM Fest 2016 movie round-up 1

Film
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The fun of the TCM Classic Film Festival [arts•meme has covered since 2010] is the sheer range of offerings, from obscure rarities to Oscar-anointed hits. Three of my favorite events from this year’s festival featured memorable guest appearances. The Yearling was shown in a magnificent 35mm print from The George Eastman House. Not all studio ...

TCM Fest: Angela Lansbury brings wit, hauteur, menace to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’

Film
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In 1961 Angela Lansbury was playing the mother of rising star Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, an intense family drama adapted by playwright William Inge from the novel by James Leo Herlihy. In that film she seemed thoroughly convincing as the overbearing mother to Beatty, even though she was only 11 years older than ...

TCM Fest: Stacy Keach recalls his fighting form for ‘Fat City’ 1

Film
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“I was a hero that day,” Stacy Keach told a TCM festival crowd Sunday afternoon. He was talking about the time, on the movie set of “Doc” in Almeria, Spain, when the legendary filmmaker John Huston paid him a visit, hoping he would star in his next feature, Fat City. There may be no conventional ...

Gina! The great Lollobrigida appears @ TCM Fest 2

Film
So much fun, at Friday’s TCM Fest 2016, to view director Carol Reed’s marvelous Cinemascope circus movie, “Trapeze,” a color-drenched treatment of a world gone-by; the setting, a circus smack in the middle of Paris. Cast as a foxy and ambitious she-acrobat, Gina Lollobrigida brings her earthy presence to the film, as she jockeys her ...

A visit with Anna Karina @ TCM Fest 2016

Film
Looking forward to hearing French New Wave film goddess, Anna Karina, introduce Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders at TCM Fest 2016 this weekend. Karina, a Danish-French actress, director and writer is known for roles in influential French New Wave films, including A Woman is a Woman (1961), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965) and Pierrot ...

Dark doings under SoCal sun in “Private Property” at TCM Fest

Film
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The Big Sleep and Horse Feathers are among the treasured favorites unspooling in spiffed-up restorations at the TCM Classic Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night in Hollywood. But it’s not all starry A-listers on this year’s lineup. The vintage-film faithful will have a chance to discover an obscure and deeply weird independent film from ...

Remembering Mia Slavenska

Dance · Film
This simply spectacular photo memorializes a tremendous dancer of the twentieth century, the great Croatia-born prima ballerina Mia Slavenska. The rock solid legs, the startling physical intensity, the blazing eyes, all Slavenska. Following her career with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Slavenska’s long and winding road led, in the 1970s, to teaching classical ballet ...

LACMA’s purchase of movie poster collection a boon to Los Angeles, says Michael Govan 2

Film · Visual arts
Joyful news as the artistic merits of the marketing of movies during the High Hollywood era gets strong validation with the addition of an important movie-poster collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director,  announced on Saturday April 16 the acquisition of the Mike Kaplan ...

Film maestro Claude Lelouch’s visual symphony, “Un + Une”

Film · Reviews
Director Claude Lelouch (far right) with his A-list cast of “Un + Une” — Jean Dujardin, Christophe Lambert, Elsa Zylberstein. The director of some fifty films brought his latest to COLCOA French film festival’s big screen last night. The film explores Lelouch’s central theme and his career concern: to plummet the love that exists between ...

Phantasmagoria on tap in ‘Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema’

Film · Visual arts
A treasure trove of hand-colored cinematic footage restored in rare films illustrate the first-ever uses of applied color in movies. Accompanied by live music, superb digital transfers of restored work from the archives of EYE Film Institute Netherlands transport viewers to a moment in time when colored moving images truly opened a portal into otherworldly ...