For some reason, it just now occurred to me that the last line of Shutter Island and the key closing line of The King of Comedy are almost identical.
“Now, tomorrow you’ll know I wasn’t kidding… and you’ll think I was crazy. But, look, I figure it this way. Better to be king for a night than schmuck [...]

Raging Bull began as Robert De Niro’s obsession, but the only man he believed could film it, Martin Scorsese, wasn’t interested—until the director’s near-fatal collapse gave him a visceral connection with the story of troubled boxing champion Jake La Motta. Three decades on, the author tells how one of Hollywood’s great friendships, forged by Mean Streets [...]

On hearing of JD Salinger’s recent death, most fans probably experienced a single emotion: sadness. Over in Hollywood, however, the hills shook with the cackling of a hundred avaricious studio execs. Finally, someone will get to make The Catcher in the Rye film.
Salinger never wanted one when he was alive. A letter to a Hollywood producer [...]

Damn Julia Roberts. Damn her charm and intelligence. Damn her easy laugh, gangly-limbed grace, oceanic charisma, the Georgia lilt to her voice that speaks of hard work, humidity and perfectly ripe peaches. Damn it all.
Let’s be clear: I love Julia Roberts. She’s one of the few people – along with George Clooney, perhaps, and Meryl Streep – [...]

Every now and again, Hollywood makes a go at depicting the working class, often around Oscar season and usually to hilarious effect. The story is generally some slow-moving, minor-key piece involving ordinary folks struggling with ordinary problems in ordinary parts of the country. To offset the dreariness of such an errand, the lead character—a waitress, [...]

One thing magazines love to do is call dibs on who will be the new “It” celebrities in the year to come. Sometimes they pick stars whose careers are destined to take off, occasionally they make incredible calls with near-nobodies who later become A-listers, and usually the majority of their picks fade into oblivion.
While we’d [...]

In a miracle of brains over brawn, Kathryn Bigelow has just become the first woman to win best director for her film The Hurt Locker, beating her ex-husband’s behemoth, Avatar. Bigelow’s unprecedented success at the Directors’ Guild of America Awards, which often predict the Oscar results, is a sign that cinema is in a thrilling state of [...]

Only a few years ago, a first-time filmmaker might bring a good movie or fresh idea to the Sundance Film Festival and, simply because they made it into the event, walk away with a paycheck. But not anymore.
Sundance, the top U.S. gathering for independent film, headed into the second-half of its 10-day run on Tuesday with [...]

If sex sells, TV programmers are adding inventory to an already humongous sale.
Viewers are about to see full-frontal male nudity, heterosexual, homosexual and group sex, and graphic scenes rarely — if ever — seen on mainstream TV. And that’s just on pay-cable Starz’s fornication-heavy, 13-episode Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a 300-meets-Caligula epic about the Roman Empire’s notorious slave/gladiator.
MTV plans [...]

Fifty years ago, a brief letter to the editor of a student newspaper led to a national furor over academic freedom. When it broke in 1959, the Leo Koch Case dominated front pages and newscasts. It remained a story for three years. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that not even Wikipedia, which knows everything, [...]