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Day for Night (1973) More at IMDbPro »La nuit américaine (original title)

4 items from 2013

1 June 2013 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Boy meets girl meets typewriter in this thoughtful, witty French take on classic Hollywood romcoms

There was an old but not inaccurate joke that romantic movies from the Soviet Union were about triangular affairs between a boy, a girl and a tractor. The attractive new French movie Populaire, the feature-length debut as writer-director of Régis Roinsard, is about a boy, a girl and a typewriter. A typewriter originally meant the female operator, and the machine in this picture takes on a dramatic identity of its own.

In many ways Populaire is a companion piece to Michel Hazanavicius's Oscar-winning The Artist in its knowing love for American cinema. It also has the same star, Bérénice Bejo (though not here in the leading role), and the same photographer, Guillaume Schiffman, who grew up in the movie business as the son of Suzanne Schiffman, the long-time assistant to François Truffaut, with whom »

- Philip French

10 April 2013 4:28 PM, PDT | Rope of Silicon | See recent Rope Of Silicon news »

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 363 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies, the Up docs and Decalogue) and of those 363, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do, »

- Brad Brevet

10 April 2013 4:28 PM, PDT | Rope of Silicon | See recent Rope Of Silicon news »

I've mentioned before how several years ago I created a list using Roger Ebert's Great Movies, Oscar Best Picture winners, IMDb's Top 250, etc. and began going through them doing my best to see as many of the films on these lists that I had not seen as I possibly could to up my film I.Q. Well, someone has gone through the exhaustive effort to take all of the films Roger Ebert wrote about in his three "Great Movies" books, all of which are compiled on his website and added them to a Letterbxd list and I've added that list below. I'm not positive every movie on his list is here, but by my count there are 362 different titles listed (more if you count the trilogies and Decalogue) and of those 362, I have personally seen 229 and have added an * next to those I've seen. Clearly I have some work to do, »

- Brad Brevet

19 February 2013 11:08 AM, PST | The Backlot | See recent The Backlot news »

Five underrated Oscar speeches. Five opportunities to applaud fine podium behavior. Let's go.

1. Ingrid Bergman, Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express

This is one of my all-time favorites: Ingrid Bergman, who had probably forgotten all about her tiny, insignificant part in Murder on the Orient Express (which, by the way, is mysteriously popular among Agatha Christie stories despite having the most ridiculous, unenjoyably stupid conclusions in her entire catalog -- how is that trash heap more well-known than the glorious Witness for the Prosecution? Tell me!) won her third Oscar in 1974 against, among other notable performances, Madeline effing Kahn in Blazing effing Saddles. But Ingrid knew how weird this win was: In her speech, she immediately announced that sometimes the Oscars' "timing is wrong" before cheering on fellow nominee Valentina Cortese, explaining how Cortese's performance in Day for Night illustrated wonderful truths about acting, and announcing that »

- virtel

4 items from 2013