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AS A FILM professor, I teach my students to scrutinize the screen closely to better 'read' a movie. For example, is there a snippet of another film within the film. [...]

MOVIES have the power to redefine popular music, including changing its signature status from one performer to another, or making it the background soundtrack of our lives, and sometimes even [...]

MOVIES never have been without music. Even in the silent era, large cities had orchestras accompanying these pioneering pictures (sometimes even with a sound effects person), while smaller towns and/or [...]

THE MOST POPULAR college class I teach is Film Genres. Each week a different type of movie is examined. Sometimes these genres are best linked under a broader umbrella. It [...]

BEFORE addressing the unique and often unexplored nature of the iconic screwball comedy 'My Man Godfrey' (1936), some guidelines need to be established. The term 'screwball' often has proven to [...]

'For all of the film's tearjerker traits... the movie also functions as a poignant love story of equal nontraditional dimensions. How often does this genre have a focus romantic couple [...]

'[Sydney Pollack] never has received the consistency of theme status of an auteur. Instead, he has been given that lefthanded compliment of creating films known for their proverbial 'wonderful workmanship.'' [...]

ONE OF MY FAVORITE movies last year was the Richard Curtisscripted 'Yesterday' (2019, directed by Danny Boyle). Himesh Patel plays a struggling contemporary musician, Jack Malik, involved in a biking [...]

SINCE MY FAVORITE actor/activist/sometime director Robert Redford essentially has retired, George Clooney now occupies that spot. As well as occasionally directing, Clooney, like Redford, is an activist. Another parallel is [...]

'The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball. America has [rollicked on] by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased [...]

MARK TWAIN once observed, 'The older I get the more clearly I remember tilings that never happened.' He died approximately 15 years into the history of film (1910). While there [...]

I AM WRITING a book on American film comedy, with a modest foundation in print humor. I am splitting the subject into comedic subgenres, with the current focus on parody. [...]

'THE THIRD MAN' (1949) takes place in Vienna, Austria, immediately after World War n. It largely was shot on location in the city's bombed out ruins. The German term for [...]

NOTHING is created in a vacuum. For instance, the visual inspiration of Bob Fosse's 'Cabaret' (1972) was influenced heavily by the caricaturist drawings of German artist George Grosz. His work [...]

IN THE PAST, I have written about the 'found essay.' For example, in doing a column about sound movies helping derail Buster Keaton's career, I came across so many stage [...]

SHORTLY after COVJD-19 hit, I was flying out of Los Angeles following my annual spring break research trip--a historian's version of a vacation. As flight attendants were sanitizing eveiything in [...]

IF ONE HAD WRITTEN about Bette Davis' 'Jezebel' (1938) a year ago, it would have required taking an intellectual off-ramp to stop and ponder the many options. For example, this [...]

'Today, every year seems like 1957, except now the warning often appears to apply more to political products. Satire can be a savior here, but it would help if the [...]

WHEN Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis split up in 1956, the duo turned out to be Hollywood's last significant seemingly permanent comedy team. Ironically, a major neglected historical fact about [...]

THE ROTUND, 260-pound John Bunny (1863-1915) was America's first international cinema comedy star. A prominent stage performer, he entered the fledgling film industry when it largely was based in New [...]

'BULL DURHAM' (1988) might not seem to gel with populism's normally straight-arrow Frank Capra film. However, actor Kevin Costner frequently has described 'Field of Dreams' (1989) as an attempt to [...]

THROUGH THE YEARS, there have been many alleged 'trials of the century,' ranging from the 1931 Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping (with the visceral revelation that the child accidentally was dropped [...]

FIFTY YEARS AGO, 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' opened. Recently, a major publication showcased an article which keyed on the critical storm that greeted the inclusion of the song, [...]

NO MATTER HOW good the movie, there always is at least one scene that some viewers feel is a little too hard to believe. This is human nature, or call [...]

CHARLIE CHAPLIN is the greatest comedy auteur in cinema history. His ability to write, direct, perform, produce, and compose the music for one groundbreaking picture after another is unprecedented. 'The [...]

For instance, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) essentially is a personality comedian pinballing back in time: Will Rogers played the title character in the 1931 film. Other personality comedies involving time travel with a twist would include Woody Allen's "Sleeper" (1973) and Bill Murray in "Ground-hog Day" (1993) As the former film opens, Allen's character realizes he died during routine surgery and was cryogenically frozen and forgotten. Set in and around a European castle, Pollack creates a Vietnam War dark comedy by shooting a theater of the absurd look at the conflict through the prism of having an allegedly World War II film pinball through time and space with seemingly several wars existing simultaneously. EACH SUNDAY, The New York Tunes "Book Review" section does an opening page interview with a prominent author. [Extracted from the article]

QUENTIN TARENTINO has put--as is his wont--a provocative twist on history with 'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood' (2019). The film--which runs 189 entertaining minutes--evolves slowly, before closing in [...]

SCREWBALL COMEDY turns 70 this year. While clown comedy has existed since the earliest days of cinema, the screwball variety arose during the Great Depression. One might liken it to […]

A PRESTON STURGES film often falls under the label of screwball comedy, such as his satirical farces 'The Lady Eve' (1941) and 'The Palm Beach Story' (1942). Yet, just as [...]

WHEN JAMES DEAN DIED with two movies yet to be released, Warner Bros. Pictures saw catastrophe. Jack Warner bluntly observed, 'Nobody will come and see a corpse.' He could not [...]

IN 1962, Johnny Carson began his unprecedented 30-year run as host of NBC's 'The Tonight Show.' The 36-year-old Midwest-raised comedian was known at the time as the witty daytime emcee [...]

A photo-album look at the great comics who have filled audiences' hearts with joy since silent film days. There is a tendency to jam everything comic under one overextended umbrella. [...]

Director/writer James Cameron's 'Titanic' looks to be the epic film of the 1990s. Cost overruns and his perfectionism originally had critics predicting a 'Heaven's Gate' (1980) debacle, Michael Cimino's costly, [...]

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980), cinema's master of A suspense, arguably remains the most well-known director in movie history. Beyond the fact he was a legendary filmmaker, no small part of this [...]

Rather than taking a chance on original screenplays, the film industry attempts to play it safe financially by working with proven material--sequels, imitations of his movies, big-screen adaptations of TV [...]

DEXTER MORGAN (Michael C. Hall) is a bloodstain pattern analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department in the Showtime series 'Dexter.' Imagine late artist Jackson Pollock moonlighting for your local [...]

THE ROAD STORY WAS nothing new when Miguel de Cervantes wrote what often is credited as the first novel, Don Quixote. in the early 1600s, while road pictures have been [...]

THE LIBERAL POLITICS of Charlie Chaplin, creator of arguably cinema's most iconic figure ('the little fellow' Tramp), ultimately found himself being labeled un-American during the reactionary period now known as [...]

MY SOON TO BE next project is a book on Charlie Chaplin's 'A Woman of Paris' (1923). You have not heard of it?--that is part of my reason for the [...]

'... The strongest argument for letting comedians play darker parts is that, despite the stereotype concerning tragedy's superiority, many would argue that comedy is more significant.' IN RECENT YEARS, a [...]

The actor 'was not the aimless angst-ridden youth he played in the movies.... He was not that suffering, rudderless figure in real life. ' IN MANY WAYS, JAMES DEAN is [...]