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In Preston Sturges' posthumous memoir Sturges by Sturges, finished by his widow Sandy and published in 1990, the director recounts an outlandish story from his childhood that would end up inspiring one of the most chaotic sequences in his 1942 screwball masterpiece The Palm Beach Story. His mother, a socially and culturally ambitious woman who was friends with dancer Isadora Duncan and had an affair with satanist Aleister Crowley, had brought him to Dresden while she worked on an operetta and the two of them (plus maid) were heading back to Paris in a train compartment stuffed with masses of...

George Lucas could be forgiven if he felt triumphant on March 22, 1976. That was the day cameras started rolling on Star Wars, his epic movie project that had already been underway for two years. Despite the success of his previous film, the coming-of-age story American Graffiti, the director struggled to secure studio support for his new movie, and he even considered quitting the business before studio Fox decided to back him. “I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity,” he told Rolling Stone later. “So, I was going to try to write a very interesting project. Right...

The 13th Academy Awards – the ones where The Philadelphia Story was nominated in six categories – were the first held with sealed envelopes to keep the winners secret. For the very first awards in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel the winners had been announced three months in advance; there were only 270 people in attendance, the ceremony only lasted fifteen minutes and it wasn't broadcast. For the next decade the Academy did its best to make the awards an event, but they announced the winners hours before the ceremony and in 1939 the L.A. Times published a leaked...

There's a clip on YouTube of director Samuel Fuller in the early '80s talking about the opening scene of his classic 1953 film noir Pickup on South Street. He would be about seventy years old at the time but he's full of energy and enthusiasm, as you would be if you were Samuel Fuller being interviewed for what I presume is French television. Fuller was and had been for decades something like a deity for French cineastes (the director had moved to France around this time) and he would never have an audience this avid anywhere else in the world....

I watched this last night and was blown away by how stupid it was. It had a good plot but the character portrayal of the military and executive government officials under the stress of nuclear missile launched against the US was horrific. Every one involved from the initial launch detection to the president issuing the go code was so overcome with stress that they couldn't focus and function. Missile commander left his position, SECDEF committed suicide, blah blah blah.

The Oscars, once Hollywood's premier celebration of cinematic artistry, have increasingly come under fire for prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates over pure merit and storytelling excellence. Titled "Why the Oscars Suck: Diversity, Equity Inclusion Standards Fail Art," this critique highlights how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Representation and Inclusion Standards-introduced in 2020 and fully enforced for Best Picture eligibility since 2024-have transformed the awards into what many view as a politicized checklist rather than a genuine honor for filmmaking achievement.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t host the Oscars on Sunday — that job went for the second year in a row to the fantastic Conan O’Brien — but in presenting the documentary categories, the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host still had a few sharp things to say. In coming out to present the documentary short and documentary feature Oscars, Kimmel joked that O’Brien had gone out and accidentally “exposed his face to the sun and was incinerated. So I will be finishing out the rest of the program.” But turning serious, he noted that with documentaries, “We hear a lot about courage at...

It was One Battle After Another’s night. Paul Thomas Anderson’s action-thriller took home six Oscars at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, including Best Supporting Actor, Best Directing and Best Picture. The film also won awards for Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the first-ever Oscar for Best Casting. Upon accepting his award, Anderson — who had previously been nominated for an Oscar around a dozen times — joked, “You make a guy work hard for one of these, I really appreciate it.” Sinners also had a big night, bringing home four Oscars, including Best Actor for...

The movie is just another sign that Hollywood has once again driven itself to total moral, artistic, and creative ruin.What would I do if I were one of America’s greatest film directors?The thought occurred to me sometimes as I was dawdling through film school, admiring the work of men and women whose talent I knew I lacked. With little hope of ever joining the pantheon myself, I daydreamed about what it must be like to be, say, Paul Thomas Anderson. Suppose I were him? Having delivered three of the finest cinematic masterpieces in recent history—Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and...

The 2026 Oscars have been placed on high alert following the FBI’s warning about a potential “surprise attack” from Iran. This year’s Oscars ceremony is due to take place on Sunday evening in Los Angeles, and is expected to be attended by an array of Hollywood A-listers including Timothée Chalamet, Rose Byrne, Kate Hudson, Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. According to an alert reported by ABC News, the FBI notified law enforcement across California in recent days that Iran could potentially retaliate for American military actions by launching drones toward the West Coast. “We want everybody to feel safe and...

When anti-regime protests spread like wildfire throughout Iran in mid-October of 2022, the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to lay the blame on the usual foreign suspects. “I say explicitly that these riots and this insecurity were a design by the U.S. and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them,” he told a class of cadets at a police college in Tehran. He suggested that the ultimate goal of the U.S. and Israel was regime change in Iran. This elicited a response on Twitter from Iranian rapper Hichkas, who defended foreign support for...

Quentin Tarantino is firing back after Rosanna Arquette criticized his use of the N-word in his films during a recent interview. In a career-spanning conversation with The Sunday Times, Arquette discussed her minor role in Tarantino’s 1994 black comedy, “Pulp Fiction,” saying that while it’s “a great film on a lot of levels,” she generally disapproves of the director’s repeated use of the racial slur in his films. “Personally I am over the use of the N-word — I hate it,” Arquette said in the interview, published on Saturday. “I cannot stand that he [Tarantino] has been given a hall...

“Previous versions of the film reportedly showed Elio with a pink bike and had a scene where he imagines a life together with his male crush,” it reported. “The changes sparked backlash within the Pixar staff, drama that was compounded by Disney’s decision to cut a transgender character from Pixar’s animated series Win or Lose.” Docter’s comments garnered significant backlash online.

L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between begins with one of the most famous first lines in modern literature: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The quote has certainly outlived Hartley; it's invoked constantly by anyone trying to make a point about "presentism" and the tendency to judge historical motivations and events by current standards or morality. It even got referenced (and subverted) in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The quote paraphrased some lines delivered by Hartley's old school friend Lord David Cecil in a lecture he delivered at Oxford in 1949. It was...

Phil was the youngest brother of Australian motorsport legend Peter Brock and affectionately known as ‘Split Pin’ due to his lofty stature. The Brock brothers won the 1976 Sandown 400 in a Holden Torana, beating Allan Moffat’s Ford Falcon by two laps. Brock raced with his brother in the Bathurst 1000 on two occasions in 1976 and 1977, finishing third and then fourth. ‘Split Pin’ was perhaps best known for missing out on winning the Bathurst 1000 in 1983 in controversial circumstances. That year, the leading #05 Holden Commodore of Peter Brock and Larry Perkins blew its engine just eight...

In Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach there's a scene set in the "Pastoral Club" in Melbourne – a fictional combination of the real-life Australian Club and Melbourne Club, relics of the country's "more British than Britain" men's social clubs. John Osborne, a scientist, is visiting with Peter Holmes, a lieutenant in the Australian navy, and they encounter John's great-uncle, Sir Douglas Froude, a commander of the country's army during the last war. The old man tells the two younger men that "three years ago my doctor told me that if I didn't stop drinking the club port he...

North Korea hacked into the computers of a Hollywood studio in 2014, and the company's former executive now blames himself—or his own childhood—for okaying a movie that angered the dictator in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un. "Curiously, I never really got angry at the North Koreans, on the assumption that if you kick the hornet's nest and get stung, you can't really blame the hornets," the former CEO of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, writes in an excerpt that appeared in the Wall Street Journal of his new book, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You. In...

The real horror of most western movie stories is that the frontier exists in a lawless state that's particularly obscene as it's the leading edge of America moving west – a country founded on an almost divinely inspired Constitution and the expectation that law will create the conditions for democracy as the country fulfills its manifest destiny. I couldn't help but think of this during one particular scene in Budd Boetticher's 1958 b-western Buchanan Rides Alone – the fifth of six (or seven, depending on what you read) films in the director's Ranown Cycle (including 7 Men From Now, The...

Art reflects the human condition in all its messiness—violence, identity, madness The classic horror film, The Silence of the Lambs has recently been labeled as transphobic. Progressivism is seeking to sacrifice another Hollywood masterpiece to their “problematic” gods because the mentally ill villain of the film is a man so desperate to be a woman that he murders for it. While the character is never labeled as trans, the fictional portrayal has been deemed offensive. In the annals of cinematic history, few films have left as indelible a mark as The Silence of the Lambs. Released in 1991, Jonathan Demme’s...

Disney's live-action Snow White has reportedly flopped - with the woke rebrand costing the company a staggering $170 million loss. The fairy-tale epic, led by 'progressive' Rachel Zegler, came with a jaw-dropping $336.5 million production price tag. But the film brought in just $87.3 million during its May 2025 opening weekend and went on to earn a total of $205.7 million, per Forbes. This live action princess movie now ranks as the fifth-lowest grossing among the 21 live-action remakes produced by The Walt Disney Company, per the outlet. Alongside its financial flop, the classic faced backlash over changes made to...