Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates Pride Month with a host of extraordinary queer-themed films, including a new installment of our Queersighted series focusing on taboo-breaking artists, a trio of outré underground classics from John Waters, and a restrospective dedicated to the nonfiction trailblazers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose films have helped bring LGBTQ stories out of the closet and into the mainstream. There’s also a spotlight on screwball great Carole Lombard, a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Justin Simien, and hundredth-birthday tributes to Judy Holliday, Jane Russell, and Luis García Berlanga.
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The 16 Best Will Smith Movies Ranked
The 16 Best Will Smith Movies Ranked Jerod Harris/Getty Images
By Rob Clough/May 13, 2021 8:09 am EDT/Updated: May 18, 2021 1:54 am EDT
Will Smith has long been one of the most successful, popular stars in Hollywood, voted as its most bankable in 2009 by Forbes.com. He started as a rapper, winning four Grammys and getting nominated for another four from the 1980s through the 1990s. He then transitioned to acting, starting with everyone s favorite 1990s sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, before going on to movies. He s since been nominated for two Oscars and five Golden Globe awards. His charm, magnetic personality, and versatility as an action star, comedic actor, and dramatic performer have allowed him to carry a wide variety of films.
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Norman Lloyd Remembered by Ben Stiller, Rosanna Arquette and More: ‘What a Career. From Welles to Apatow’
Actor known for Alfred Hitchcock films and “St. Elsewhere” died at 106
Brian Welk | May 11, 2021 @ 3:55 PM
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Hollywood is in awe of the legendary career of Norman Lloyd, who died this week at age 106 after having worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Judd Apatow to Charlie Chaplin to Alfred Hitchcock.
Karl Malden once referred to Lloyd as “the history of our business,” and it shows in his enormous filmography, in which he worked as an actor, director and producer, not only continuing to work well past age 100 but being willing to share stories and histories with other film fans at screenings of classic films all across town.
Walter Bernstein
Late in the summer of 2019, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, probably best known for his work with Martin Ritt on
Paris Blues (1961) and
The Front (1976) and with Sidney Lumet on
Fail Safe (1964), turned one hundred. To mark the occasion, his good friend of thirty years, novelist Walter Mosley, interviewed him for Literary Hub. “In all my adult life,” wrote Mosley, “I have never met a more intelligent, loving, sensitive, questioning, heroic man.”
Bernstein, who passed away over the weekend at the age of 101, grew up in Brooklyn among left-leaning Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Early on, as a teen during the Depression, he developed a sense that “the system was out of whack,” as he told Camera in the Sun editor Christian Niedan in 2013. “There was something wrong there that was
Five years ago, while she watched and rewatched 1970s and â80s crime genre classics, certain scenes lingered with filmmaker Julia Hart: the moment the study doors close on Diane Keatonâs Kay in âThe Godfather,â shutting her out of her husbandâs inner circle; how Tuesday Weldâs Jessie is abruptly shuffled into a car in the dead of night and sent away from the action, an infant in her arms, in âThief.â
Female characters in movies like these often exist in service to a male protagonistâs story â when they arenât pushed out of the narrative completely. (Or rendered mostly silent, as in Martin Scorseseâs more recent âThe Irishman.â) Devouring these films with her husband, co-writer and producer Jordan Horowitz, shortly after the birth of their first child, Hart wondered about the women left to the margins of the stories on-screen.