Raymond Burr was in excruciating pain as he filmed the final “Perry Mason” episodes in 1993. Almost no one on the set knew he was dying of cancer. Biographer Michael Seth Starr is not surprised. According to Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Ray

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (out now on Blu-ray disc) was the unexpected indie success of 2008, rising from the brink of oblivion to triumph on Oscar night. The British director of Trainspotting and 28 DaysLater has matured without losing his exub

John Malkovich is everyone’s idea of a decadent, slightly dangerous aesthete. He brought this persona to its sharpest point as the cultured American expatriate killer in the little seen Ripley’s Game and as the Faustian German filmmaker F.W. Murnau in S

Milwaukee native Michael Nehs is coming home to make a movie. The president of Chicago's Frontsight Productions is filming his next picture, Blue World, in his hometown. The cameras are set to begin rolling in May. Blue World is based on the 1990 n

Playing Oscar trivial pursuit is probably more fun than watching the actual event live on TV. HollywoodWinners & Losers A to Z (published by Limelight Editions) is an almost up to date guidebook for Oscar trivia: actors department. The book went to

Afghanistan became the red-hot front line of the Cold War when the occupation by the Soviet Union was resisted by an uneasy, American-supported coalition. Some of the anti-Soviet forces, especially the Taliban and Al Quaeda, later turned on the U.S. i

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were among the fresh new faces of ‘70s Hollywood. But the towering dramatic actors of that now fabled decade never appeared together in a film until the ‘90s and then only once, in Michael Mann’s tense crime drama Heat (19

The Chinese government is trying to suppress Summer Palace. After its debut at Cannes, the regime banned its director, Lou Ye, from filmmaking for five years. Fortunately, Summer Palace has been released in the U.S. on DVD. Chances are it won’t be on

Marion Cotillard was “speechless,” she insisted, while hugging her Best Actress Oscar (La Vie en Rose) and giving thank you after thank you. I was even more speechless. The French star of a subtitled film about Edith Piaf (“I didn’t even know who Edith

The word “holocaust” had no particular meaning for most people until the 1970s, when it was given a capital H and turned into shorthand for the genocide waged against the Jewish people by the Nazi regime. The CBS mini-series “Holocaust” helped populariz

Even before the advent of the Milwaukee International Film Festival, the Cream City was home to a variety of smaller, specific-focus events such as the Latin American Film Festival and the French Film Festival. Last year saw the addition of a new conte

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association was a ring of wannabes who decided to crash Hollywood society by throwing a party no one could refuse to attend. Only this year no one attended. The Golden Globes Awards show was shut down by the Writers Guild str

For me, Abba was never a guilty pleasure. They were usually a pleasure, period. Most of their hits were great little soap operas sung in Berlitz lesson English to irresistible melodies with unassailable arrangements. They were pure pop for now people in

Americans looked forward to what one columnist called "a new world of peace" after World War II, but history took the opposite course. Between rapid incursions, air strikes and massive interventions, the U.S. military has seldom rested for long

In the 1960s directors from the still new medium of television began migrating to the movies. One of them, John Frankenheimer, made several films characteristic of that decade’s uneasy shadow side. His masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), is in

Predicting Oscar winners is like forecasting the weather. Reasonable minds assume you've done a good job by being right half the time. It's a hard business with all those variables, those shifting winds of insider gossip and cold fronts of media speculat

Was Alex Proyas’ 1998 film Dark City a forerunner to the Warchowski brothers’1999 hit The Matrix? For me, the connections never clicked until seeing Dark City on DVD. In Proyas’ movie spinning blades (not bullets) are stopped in mid flight by mental for

Forty years after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a black man stands a chance of becoming President. Perhaps America has finally become the Promised Land King foretold in one of his much quoted sermons—a land he somehow knew he woul

Movies were never just entertainment. Even if a filmmaker doesn’t aspire to great art, his work often has the power to suggest not only new ways of looking at the world but new ways of being in it. In 2007 Variety magazine asked a series of celebritie

It’s not hard to imagine: Frank Capra, who directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, would have made Swing Vote had he lived today. He might have made this civics lesson in American politics more concise and a bit sharper, but he

When a trained-to-kill Israeli commando switches professions and becomes a Manhattan hairdresser, a fish-out-of-water comedy is sure to follow. And when this Israeli hairdresser falls in love with the Palestinian woman who owns the salon, you can bet yo

Inspector Foyle The War at Home December 01, 2007 | 08:07 AM War can be a proving ground for character, a theater where bravery and cowardice play out and values are tested in the heat of conflict. Inevitably, war is hell. In one of the greatest British

Actor, do you want a thankless role? Then consider playing Adolf Hitler. The challenge of depicting the world’s most visible symbol of evil has defeated almost everyone. Capitalizing on his similar mustache, Charlie Chaplin gave it a good whirl with The

Breezy, sophisticated comedies on the ever popular subjects of sex and romance aren’t especially popular this summer—at least not with the thick-fingered men who run Hollywood or the thick-necked frans who crowd the multi-plexes to watch cars explode.

It isn’t true that David Kepesh cares for nothing but himself. As a literature professor at a prestigious New York university and a respected public intellectual, Kepesh cares about books, music and art, probably for the pleasure he derives from them ra