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Rotten Tomatoes might just be a review aggregator, but its influence is significant — inordinate, you might say. The website that should give you a rough guide as to what critics think about a film has become the arbiter of whether a film is deemed good or not, or in Rt parlance, "fresh" or "rotten." This binary would be fine if Rt wasn't as influential as it is, but these days the Tomatometer's reach is wide, and our adherence to its decrees often borders on unflinching. A green splat is enough to put most casual viewers off a film, which is a shame because that means hordes of people are overlooking unfairly-maligned classics like "The Comedy," or worse, the delights of the seven John Travolta movies to achieve a 0% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are a handful of movies that have garnered a rare 100% rating,...

It's odd to think of stars like Audrey Hepburn within a modern context. The Egot winner seems to belong so perfectly to a bygone era of Hollywood — one characterized by a kind of romanticism and graceful dignity that just doesn't map on to the age of streaming and ubiquitous "content." Of course, in reality the Hollywood of the mid-20th century was often anything but a halcyon dream, with the star system still very much in operation, shackling actors to their respective studios to be traded off and sold like commodities. Still, it's just plain weird to think about these titans of Hollywood in the context of, for instance, Rotten Tomatoes — the great arbiter of our contemporary collective taste in cinema.

Imagine, if you will, the career of this Unicef Goodwill Ambassador, fashion icon, and legendary starlet summed up in a list of cartoon splats and tomatoes. It doesn't feel quite right does it?...

Courtesy of Studiocanal

by James Cameron-wilson

Two of the most famous characters Audrey Hepburn ever played were Eliza Dolittle and Maid Marion. In StudioCanal’s new 4K restoration home entertainment release of The Lavender Hill Mob, Audrey Hepburn shares her first film with Stanley Holloway, who played Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady, and Robert Shaw, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin & Marion. Not that Audrey Hepburn actually shares the screen in The Lavender Hill Mob with either Stanley Holloway or Robert Shaw, but she does get the film off to a bright start with a nuzzle with Alec Guinness The Lavender Hill Mob arrived in the middle of the golden era of the Ealing Comedy cycle, two years after Kind Hearts and Coronets and just four years before The Ladykillers. And it remains a pure joy. Unlike heist movies of the future, it manages to be...

To celebrate the release of The Lavender Hill Mob out on 4K Uhd Collector’s Edition and on Digital from 22 April – we have a 4K Uhd Collector’s Edition to give away to one lucky winner!

Studiocanal are proud to announce the release of a spectacular 4K restoration of one of the most-loved British comedies from Ealing Studios, The Lavender Hill Mob, written by T.E.B. Clarke (winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar), directed by Charles Crichton (A Fish Called Wanda) and starring Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway (My Fair Lady), Sid James (Carry On films) and Alfie Bass (Alfie). The enduringly funny story of a nobody bank employee’s ingenious plan to rob the Bank of England and the motley crew that he assembles to carry out the raid, will be released in UK cinemas on 29 March and as a 4K Uhd Collector’s Edition and on Digital from 22 April.

Franchise animation Kung Fu Panda 4 and creature clash Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire lead a bumper weekend of 16 new films at the UK-Ireland box office.

Universal’s Kung Fu Panda 4 has the biggest opening of the weekend in 715 sites – a significant jump for the series, after 2008’s Kung Fu Panda (448) and sequels in 2011 (514) and 2016 (585), all through Paramount.

Conversely, the total grosses of each film have dropped, with the first title making £20.4m, followed by £17m and £14.2m for the sequels. All of these were pre-pandemic; number four will look to cross the £10m mark before challenging any of those totals.

Sony’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” debuted atop the U.K. and Ireland box office with £4 million ($5.1 million), according to numbers from Comscore.

In the process, the band of ectoplasm hunters ended the three-week reign of Warner Bros.’ “Dune: Part II” in pole position. The Timothée Chalamet-starring film collected £2.6 million in its fourth weekend in second place for a total of £30.7 million.

Black Bear’s “Immaculate,” starring Sydney Sweeney, scared up £522,583 in a third place debut. In fourth place, in its fifth weekend, Studiocanal’s “Wicked Little Letters” earned £373,505 and now has a total of £8.1 million.

Rounding off the top five was Universal’s “Migration” that collected £370,464 in its eighth weekend for a total of £19.5 million.

There were two more debuts in the top 10 – Vertigo’s “Late Night With The Devil” in seventh place with £220,436 and Trafalgar’s “Romeo Et Juliette – Met Opera 2023/24” in 10th with £81,880.

With the Easter holidays imminent,...

"How very delightful!" Studiocanal UK & Park Circus have unveiled an official trailer dubbed Once More with Ealing, celebrating classic films made by the UK's iconic vintage production company Ealing Studios. 1949 saw the release of a trio of classic British comedies that really cemented Ealing’s place in history as this country’s finest film studios: Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts & Coronets and Whiskey Galore! 75 years later, these films still seem as fresh, innovative and, above all, as funny as ever. To celebrate the 75th Anniversary of these landmark films, and to compliment the theatrical reissue of a new 4K restoration of Ealing's sweetest crime caper film The Lavender Hill Mob (out 29 March), cinemas nationwide will be offering a selection of Ealing classics, both comedy and drama. The trailer below includes clips from a various selection of these classic films, and it's a nice reminder to book tickets and enjoy.

Classic heist caper The Lavender Hill Mob is getting a cinema rerelease. But which of these 40s and 50s film fancies are slyly subversive, and which have dated less well?

Anyone wanting a look at Dublin in the late 1940s might like this, but there’s not much else especially compelling about this weird Walter Mitty-ish comedy about a park loafer hoping to finance a one-way trip to the South Seas by helping rich people who have fallen over. Inspired by the anywhere-but-here mood of postwar privations, this is pretty charmless, and almost completely tone-deaf to the class/ethnic sensitivities of a crew of posh Brits rolling around the Irish capital. Not director Charles Crichton’s finest hour.

Two Ealing classics – The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts & Coronets – are heading to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray: more here.

Lovely, lovely news for fans of the wonderful Ealing Studios: a pair of its most-loved films have been given a 4K restoration, and are heading to the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format.

Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob – which is also getting a cinema re-release in the UK this March – is arriving in a special Vintage Classics Collectors Edition set. That set includes a 64-page booklet, artcards, postcards, a Blu-ray and a 4K disc. Included too is an introduction from Martin Scorsese, and new extra features including a London Comedy Film Festival Q&a with Paul Merton.

The film is available for preorder now, and you can find more information – and get a copy – right here.

The release date for The Lavender Hill Mob on 4K disc is 22nd April,...

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will open the 15th annual TCM Classic Film Festival on Thursday, April 18 with a 35mm screening of the classic neo-noir Pulp Fiction (1994). Two-time Academy Award nominee John Travolta will attend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film.

Pulp Fiction kicks off a weekend of programming set within the theme “Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film,” as well as the 30th anniversary of the network.

“Pulp Fiction is one of the most important and influential movies of the 1990s. It was Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus and the beginning of a well-deserved comeback for John Travolta,” said Ben Mankiewicz, TCM primetime anchor and official host of the TCM Classic Film Festival. “Like Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather, it changed our thinking about the type of stories Hollywood could tell.”

Pulp Fiction gives an inside look at a community of criminals, starring Travolta, Uma Thurman,...

Grab your royale with cheese and double-check your grandfather’s watch because “Pulp Fiction” just turned 30.

To honor the anniversary of the Oscar-winning Quentin Tarantino film, the 2024 Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival will kick off with a special 35mm screening of “Pulp Fiction.” Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe and Emmy winner John Travolta will be in attendance to toast to his 1994 comeback role.

“‘Pulp Fiction’ is one of the most important and influential movies of the 1990s. It was Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus and the beginning of a well-deserved comeback for John Travolta,” TCM Classic Film Festival host and TCM primetime anchor Ben Mankiewicz said. “Like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘The Godfather,’ it changed our thinking about the type of stories Hollywood could tell.”

The theme of tje 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival is “Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film” to mark the network’s 30th anniversary.

Happy New Year! This week’s film quiz features movies that, according to Rotten Tomatoes, absolutely everybody likes.

Film Quiz Fridays are here again! In weeks to come, we’ve got rounds themed around Jason Statham films, movie musicals, and the Oscars, as well as the usual random movie trivia. But today’s theme is inspired by films like Next Goal Wins – not the Taika Waititi football comedy (read Simon’s 3-star review here) but the 2014 documentary of the same name – which has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Older readers will remember we did a quiz on the 0% club last year, but this time, we’re swinging the other way.

As always, there are three rounds of film trivia in total, and this is all just for fun. Once you’ve completed all 30 questions, you’ll find a link to a separate post with the correct answers at the bottom of this post.

Moms loved actor Robert Shaw. He wasn’t traditionally handsome, but he was sexy with his piercing blue eyes and forceful British accent. There was a gravatas to his performances, a danger that was appealing to women of a certain age. And he knew how to make an entrance on the big screen. Who could forget his introduction as the fanatical shark hunter Quint in the 1975 blockbuster “Jaws” when he runs his fingernails down the blackboard. He was the bad boy of many a mother’s dreams in the 1970s.

Let’s face it, they don’t make them like Shaw anymore. In its 1978 obit of the British actor, the Washington Post declared him as “one of the most forceful and successful character actors on the contemporary English-speaking screen.” He was also a true renaissance man having written five novels and three plays. He was writing his sixth novel when...

f it was the summer of the megawatt blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” September has turned into a month of sequelitis with “The Nun 2,” “Equalizer 3” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3.” Even Kenneth Branagh’s “A Hunting in Venice,” is the third installment in the actor/director’s Hercule Poirot mystery series. It’s all a bit of a snooze. That wasn’t the case 70 years ago this month.

There were some oddball films that were released September, 1953 including “Cat-Women of the Moon” with Sonny Tufts and Marie Windsor and “The Sins of Jezebel” starring Paulette Goddard. But 70 years ago, audiences were introduced to a new wide-screen format and young actress who would become one of the biggest stars of the 1950s and ‘60s and Clark Gable returning to a role he originated in 1932.

Twentieth Century Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck unveiled the studio’s new widescreen process Cinemascope...

Roger Michell’s delightful art-theft romp starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren joins robbery classics from The Lavender Hill Mob to Rififi and Widows

When it comes to the heist film genre, “based on a true story” isn’t an obvious selling point: knotty crime capers tend to be better the more elaborately and imaginatively concocted they are. The Duke (Amazon) is an exception. The last feature directed by the late Roger Michell, it has a daft underdog story that could have been plucked straight from the brain of Richard Curtis, but just happens to be rooted in fact. Even the name of its true-life protagonist sounds fanciful: Kempton Bunton, a working-class pensioner who, in protest against the TV licence fee imposed by the British government, set out to steal Goya’s painting Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery.

The reasoning, like many of the plot mechanics here,...

Perfection is a word used too frequently to describe a movie. But in the case of the 1953 romantic comedy “Roman Holiday,” perfection is not hyperbole. Directed by William Wyler and nominated for 10 Academy Awards, “Roman Holiday” is a gem of a fairy tale.

Audrey Hepburn plays Princess Ann, a young sheltered monarch from a European country bored to tears on a goodwill trip who decides to escape her guardians while in Rome. She ends up falling in love with a handsome American reporter (Gregory Peck). He recognizes the princess on the lam and initially befriends her to get her story only to fall for the winsome young woman. Eddie Albert plays Peck’s carefree, womanizing friend who is a photographer.

“Roman Holiday,” which just made its Blu-Ray debut, was a change of pace for Wyler, who was best known for his dramatic work, having already won Oscars for 1942’s “Mrs. Miniver...

“Two Pints Of Guinness”

By Raymond Benson

Kino Lorber’s new double-bill Blu-ray release of comedy classics starring the legendary Alec Guinness features the nautical-themed The Captain’s Paradise, and Barnacle Bill. The former is often thought of as one of the Ealing comedies, but it is not so.

Paradise was nominated for the “Story” Academy Award (a category that no longer exists), and it was written by Alec Coppel. It is indeed a well-written and clever vehicle for Guinness, who delivers his usual above-it-all confident demeanor when his character is faced with domestic and professional disaster. He plays Captain Henry St. James, whom his chief officer Ricco (Charles Goldner) constantly calls a “genius” because Henry has found the perfect path to “paradise”—a double life with two women—one in the Spanish town of Kalique (actually Ceuta) in North Africa, next to Morocco, and one in Gibraltar. His ship, The Golden Fleece,...

“Testubular Bells”

By Raymond Benson

In 1951, Ealing Studios in Britain were on a roll. The so-called “Ealing Comedies,” which became a sub-genre all their own, had become a sensation, especially when the pictures starred the versatile and charismatic Alec Guinness. Earlier that same year, The Lavender Hill Mob was one of the most popular films ever released in the U.K., and it was proving to be a hit in America as well.

Following hot on the heels of Lavender Hill was The Man in the White Suit, which featured Guinness as Sidney Stratton, a brilliant but over-zealous scientist who will stop at nothing to realize his dream of creating an impervious textile.

As discussed in the supplemental documentary, “Revisiting ‘The Man in the White Suit,’” the picture was made at a time when Britain was on the precipice of “the future” in terms of technological advancements, but there was...

They’re ‘The Men Who Broke the Bank and Lost the Cargo!’ Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway shine in one of the funniest crime comedies ever, Ealing Studios’ tale of a pair of nobodies who take the Bank of England for millions. Guinness’s bank clerk follows his dreams into a big time bullion heist, and the joke is that his ad-hoc mob is the most loyal, ethical band of brothers in the history of crime. This being a caper picture, the suspense is steep as well — just what is going to trip up these brilliantly gifted amateurs?

The Lavender Hill Mob

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1951 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 81 min. / Street Date September 3, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sidney James, Alfie Bass, Audrey Hepburn.

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Film Editor: Seth Holt

Original Music: Georges Auric

Written by T.E.B. Clarke

Produced by Michael Balcon

Directed by...

File this great comedy under social science fiction, subheading ‘H’ for hilarious. Alec Guinness’s comic boffin hero is both a bringer of miracles and one of the most dangerous men alive. The story of Sidney Stratton, brilliant chemist and inadvertent industrial terrorist, is a consistent laugh riot. Call the jokes droll, understated, dry, and reserved, but they certainly aren’t stupid — Ealing’s high-class comedy is slapstick heaven, yet hides a lesson about modern economics that most people still haven’t learned. And Guinness’s romantic foil is the woman with the velvet-gravel voice, Joan Greenwood.

The Man in the White Suit

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 85 min. / Street Date September 3, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough, Ernest Thesiger, Howard Marion-Crawford, Henry Mollison, Vida Hope.

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Art Direction: Jim Morahan

Film Editor: Bernard Gribble

Original Music:...

July 9th is bringing all kinds of horror-rific awesomeness our way with this week’s genre-related Blu-ray and DVD releases. Easily one of my most anticipated discs of this year, the new Silent Hill Collector’s Edition from Scream Factory heads home on Tuesday as well as Mill Creek’s stunning Steelbook for Mothra, which looks to be a must-have for any movie monster aficionados out there. In terms of recent films, both Pet Sematary (2019) and Claire Denis’ High Life are hitting various formats this week, and for you Andy Sidaris fans out there, Savage Beach is hitting Blu-ray as well.

Other releases for July 9th include Dead of Night, Division 19, This Island Earth, and Waterworld in 4K.

Dead of Night

A group of strangers, mysteriously gathered at an isolated country estate, recount chilling tales of the supernatural. First, a racer survives a brush with death only to receive...

Audrey Hepburn would’ve celebrated her 90th birthday on May 4, 2019. The Oscar-winning actress only appeared in a handful of movies before her death in 1993 at the age of 63, but many of them remain classics. In honor of her birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Hepburn was born in 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels. Her family moved to the Netherlands in 1939 after Britain declared war on Germany, and when Hitler’s army invaded in 1940, they were forced to remain for another five years. Hepburn was affected by the occupation both physically and psychologically, witnessing atrocities and suffering from malnutrition when food became scarce. (She would owe her famously slim waistline to this.)

SEEOscar Best Actress Gallery: Every Winner in Academy Award History

Once the war ended in 1945, Hepburn began ballet training in Amsterdam and started appearing as a chorus girl in several musicals after moving to London.

Audrey Hepburn would’ve celebrated her 90th birthday on May 4, 2019. The Oscar-winning actress only appeared in a handful of movies before her death in 1993 at the age of 63, but many of them remain classics. In honor of her birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Hepburn was born in 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels. Her family moved to the Netherlands in 1939 after Britain declared war on Germany, and when Hitler’s army invaded in 1940, they were forced to remain for another five years. Hepburn was affected by the occupation both physically and psychologically, witnessing atrocities and suffering from malnutrition when food became scarce. (She would owe her famously slim waistline to this.)

Once the war ended in 1945, Hepburn began ballet training in Amsterdam and started appearing as a chorus girl in several musicals after moving to London. She popped up in small roles...

Alec Guinness would’ve celebrated his 105th birthday on April 2, 2019. The Oscar-winning performer excelled in comedy, drama, and most famously, science fiction, starring in dozens of movies before his death in 2000 at age 86. But how many of those titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1914, Guinness got his start in theater, winning a Tony for his performance in the Broadway play “Dylan.” He adapted and starred in a stage version of Charles Dickens‘ “Great Expectations,” playing the role of Herbert Pocket. Among the audience members was David Lean, who brought the book to the screen in 1946 and cast Guinness in his first movie.

SEEDavid Lean movies: All 16 films ranked worst to best

He would go on to make five more films with Lean, including the Oscar-winning “The Bridge on the River Kwai...

Alec Guinness would’ve celebrated his 105th birthday on April 2, 2019. The Oscar-winning performer excelled in comedy, drama, and most famously, science fiction, starring in dozens of movies before his death in 2000 at age 86. But how many of those titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1914, Guinness got his start in theater, winning a Tony for his performance in the Broadway play “Dylan.” He adapted and starred in a stage version of Charles Dickens‘ “Great Expectations,” playing the role of Herbert Pocket. Among the audience members was David Lean, who brought the book to the screen in 1946 and cast Guinness in his first movie.

He would go on to make five more films with Lean, including the Oscar-winning “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) for which he won Best Actor playing the crazed British military officer Col.

Anthology films are almost by definition a mixed bag, and even when one of their sort garners strong critical acclaim, as the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs did last November, most reactions end up settling into a “this story is better than this story” sort of comparison game. Horror anthologies tend to be even more wildly variant in quality within their individual films, and British production company Amicus Films released a string of them in the ‘60s to mid ‘70s– titles like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, And Now the Screaming Starts, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum and Tales That Witness Madness were a real hit-or-miss selection, with Amicus scoring highest when they adapted EC Comics stories into their big hits Tales from the Crypt (1972) and the follow-up Vault of Horror (1973).

But probably the best horror anthologies—Dead of Night (1945), an atypically creepy release from Britain’s Ealing Studios,...

Stars: Florence Henderson, Pam Grier, Judge Reinhold, Randall Batnikoff, Susie Wall, Sally Eaton, David Wassilak, Randall Batinkoff | Written by Srikant Chellappa, Jack Snyder | Directed by Srikant Chellappa

Bad Grandmas recounts the misadventures of senior citizens Mimi (Henderson), Coralee (Grier), Bobbi (Wall), and Virginia (Eaton), whose quiet life is upended when Bobbi’s son-in-law, Jim (Wassilak), cons her and she loses her house. Mimi, the unofficial leader of the group, decides to take matters into her own hands but things spin out of control, and Jim is inadvertently killed. It isn’t long before local detective Randy McLemore (Batinkoff) begins to investigate. Adding further complication, and danger, is Jim’s criminal associate Harry Lovelace (Reinhold), who’s on the hunt to collect the money his partner owes him.

It’s been a while since we’ve an “old person’s” crime caper this solid and this funny – the last great example being The Maiden Heist,...

Stars: Florence Henderson, Pam Grier, Judge Reinhold, Randall Batnikoff, Susie Wall, Sally Eaton, David Wassilak, Randall Batinkoff | Written by Srikant Chellappa, Jack Snyder | Directed by Srikant Chellappa

Bad Grandmas recounts the misadventures of senior citizens Mimi (Henderson), Coralee (Grier), Bobbi (Wall), and Virginia (Eaton), whose quiet life is upended when Bobbi’s son-in-law, Jim (Wassilak), cons her and she loses her house. Mimi, the unofficial leader of the group, decides to take matters into her own hands but things spin out of control, and Jim is inadvertently killed. It isn’t long before local detective Randy McLemore (Batinkoff) begins to investigate. Adding further complication, and danger, is Jim’s criminal associate Harry Lovelace (Reinhold), who’s on the hunt to collect the money his partner owes him.

It’s been a while since we’ve an “old person’s” crime caper this solid and this funny – the last great example being The Maiden Heist,...

Mubi's retrospective Ealing Comedies is showing May 31 - August 7, 2018 in the United States.Kind Hearts and CoronetsRe-reading his memoirs from his prison cell, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) narrates the story of his life in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Disowned by his maternal family, the aristocratic D’Ascoynes, and thus condemned to a life of poverty, Louis decides that his only option is to swiftly murder his living relatives in order to obtain the dukedom which is rightfully his. As the guiding light of the film, being both narrator and protagonist, Louis takes up the greatest amount space. But it is Alec Guinness who has made Kind Hearts most memorable, by playing all eight members of the D’Ascoyne family that Louis encounters. With a broad range of characters—young and old, men and women, as caricatures or with honesty—Kind Hearts is perhaps the perfect example of Guinness’ work with the Ealing comedies,...

“The funniest movie I have seen in a long time” – Roger Ebert

A Fish Called Wanda will be available on Blu-ray October 3rd from Arrow Video

In 1988, John Cleese, former Python and the mastermind behind Fawlty Towers, teamed up with the veteran Ealing Comedy director Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob) to produce another classic of British comedy.

Cleese plays Archie Leach, a weak-willed barrister who finds himself embroiled with a quartet of ill-matched jewel thieves – two American con artists played by Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline, Michael Palin’s animal-loving hitman and London gangster Tom Georgeson – when Georgeson is arrested. Only he and Palin know the whereabouts of the diamonds, prompting plenty of farce and in-fighting as well as some embarrassing nudity and the unfortunate demise of some innocent pooches…

Nominated for three Academy Awards and winning one for Kline’s outstanding supporting turn as the psychopathic Otto,...

Head to the movies this weekend to see Logan Lucky, and you'll see more than Steven Soderbergh ending his moviemaking retirement phase and returning to the big screen. (You've been greatly missed, sir.) You'll see more than just Channing Tatum and Adam Driver playing down-on-their-luck Southern brothers who hatch a plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. You'll even see more than Daniel Craig sporting a bottle-blond crop-cut hairdo and Seth MacFarlane sporting something on his head that looks like a cross between a mullet, a Jheri curl and roadkill.

By Lee Pfeiffer

Few would argue that George C. Scott was one of the greatest actors of stage and screen. His presence in even a mediocre movie elevated its status considerably and his work as the nutty general in "Dr. Strangelove" was described by one critic as "the comic performance of the decade". When Scott won his well-deserved Oscar for Best Actor in "Patton" (which he famously refused), he seemed to be on a roll. His next film, the darkly satirical comedy "The Hospital" predicted the absurdities of America's for-profit health care system in which the rich and the poor were taken care of, with everyone else falling in between. The film earned Scott another Best Actor Oscar nomination despite his snubbing of the Academy the previous year. From that point, however, Scott's choice of film roles was wildly eclectic. There were some gems and plenty of misfires that leads...

Seth Holt is an odd figure. An editor at first, his career spans classic Ealing comedies (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951) and gritty kitchen sink drama (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960), while his overlapping career as producer saw him preside over the classic The Ladykillers (1955). On becoming a director, he worked mainly at Hammer, which made radically different content from Ealing but perhaps shared the same cozy atmosphere.Taste of Fear (a.k.a. Scream of Fear, 1961) is a zestful Diabolique knock-off, while The Nanny (1965) continued Bette Davis' career in horror. It's incredibly strong, beautifully made and quite ruthless: Bette referred to Holt as "a mountain of evil" and found him the most demanding director she'd encountered since William Wyler. During the daft but enjoyably peculiar Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971), Holt developed a persistent case of hiccups that turned the screening of rushes into hilarious occasions. Then he dropped dead of a heart attack,...

Richard Brooks' exciting Humphrey Bogart picture is one of the best newspaper sagas ever. An editor deals with a gangster threat and a domestic crisis even as greedy heirs are selling his paper out from under him. Commentator Eddie Muller drives home the film's essential civics lesson about what we've lost -- a functioning free press. Deadline - U.S.A. Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date July 26, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter, Ed Begley, Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart, Martin Gabel, Joe De Santis, Audrey Christie, Jim Backus, Willis Bouchey, Joseph Crehan, Lawrence Dobkin, John Doucette, Paul Dubov, William Forrest, Dabbs Greer, Thomas Browne Henry, Paul Maxey, Ann McCrea, Kasia Orzazewski, Tom Powers, Joe Sawyer, William Self, Phillip Terry, Carleton Young. Cinematography Milton Krasner Film Editor William B.Murphy Original Music Cyril J. Mockridge Produced by Sol C. Siegel...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSThai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose brilliant Cemetery of Splendor will be released in the Us this spring, has revealed a new installation work, Home Movie, made for Sydney's 2016 Biennale. According to his website, "an exhibition space hosts a cave-like ritual where people gather to simply take in the light": "In this home-cave, the heat is both comfortable and threatening. A fireball is an organic-like machine with phantom fans to blow away the heat and, at the same time, rouse the fire, which is impossible to put out even in dreams."This season seems to be one of cinema masters passing. In addition to the directors who've died over the last month, we've lost two great cinematographers this week. First, Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indian Jones films,...

The three-time Oscar nominee is best known for shooting the first three Indiana Jones films and nearly all the classic Ealing comedies

Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer Douglas Slocombe has died aged 103 in London.

The Oscar-nominated British director of photography is best known for shooting the first three Indiana Jones films in the 1980s, and nearly all the classic comedies produced by London-based Ealing Studios, including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). In total, he shot 80 films.

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Douglas Slocombe, the cinematographer for “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” has died. He was 103. According to Afp, his daughter Georgina confirmed his death. Slocombe received Oscar nominations for “Travels With My Aunt” in 1973, “Julia” in 1978 and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1982. He also shot “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Maids” and “Rollerball,” as well as Ealing comedies including “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Man in The White Suit.” Also Read: Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Author, Dies at 89 “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) as the last film he worked on.

Vivien Leigh ca. late 1940s. Vivien Leigh movies: now controversial 'Gone with the Wind,' little-seen '21 Days Together' on TCM Vivien Leigh is Turner Classic Movies' star today, Aug. 18, '15, as TCM's “Summer Under the Stars” series continues. Mostly a stage actress, Leigh was seen in only 19 films – in about 15 of which as a leading lady or star – in a movie career spanning three decades. Good for the relatively few who saw her on stage; bad for all those who have access to only a few performances of one of the most remarkable acting talents of the 20th century. This evening, TCM is showing three Vivien Leigh movies: Gone with the Wind (1939), 21 Days Together (1940), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Leigh won Best Actress Academy Awards for the first and the third title. The little-remembered film in-between is a TCM premiere. 'Gone with the Wind' Seemingly all...

Robert Redford: 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Way We Were' tonight on Turner Classic Movies Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month Robert Redford returns this evening with three more films: two Sydney Pollack-directed efforts, Out of Africa and The Way We Were, and Jack Clayton's film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. (See TCM's Robert Redford film schedule below. See also: "On TCM: Robert Redford Movies.") 'The Great Gatsby': Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby Released by Paramount Pictures, the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby had prestige oozing from just about every cinematic pore. The film was based on what some consider the greatest American novel ever written. Francis Ford Coppola, whose directing credits included the blockbuster The Godfather, and who, that same year, was responsible for both The Godfather Part II and The Conversation, penned the adaptation. Multiple Tony winner David Merrick (Becket,...

Watch the Digital Spy team discuss their favourite Christmas movies above, then find out the best films on TV today for your festive entertainment.

Bridge to Terabithia - 11am, BBC One

The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson stars as an awkward preteen in this fantasy film. When Jesse (Hutcherson) befriends Leslie, the new girl in school (AnnaSophia Robb), they imagine a whole new world to escape reality.

The Simpsons Movie - 11am, Film4

Homer and the gang make the transition to the big screen in this 2007 family flick. When pollution in the town reaches crisis level, Springfield's residents are confined to life within a government-sanctioned dome.

Chicken Run - 1.45pm, BBC One

In this comedy escape drama, the chickens, hens and roosters decide to rebel against farm owners Mr and Ms Tweedy, before they end up in tomorrow's meat pie. Mel Gibson stars as newcomer Rocky the Rooster.

The Lavender Hill Mob - 2.35pm,...

Best British movies of all time? (Image: a young Michael Caine in 'Get Carter') Ten years ago, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a dangerous-looking London gangster (see photo above), was selected as the United Kingdom's very best movie of all time according to 25 British film critics polled by Total Film magazine. To say that Mike Hodges' 1971 thriller was a surprising choice would be an understatement. I mean, not a David Lean epic or an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller? What a difference ten years make. On Total Film's 2014 list, published last May, Get Carter was no. 44 among the magazine's Top 50 best British movies of all time. How could that be? Well, first of all, people would be very naive if they took such lists seriously, whether we're talking Total Film, the British Film Institute, or, to keep things British, Sight & Sound magazine. Second, whereas Total Film's 2004 list was the result of a 25-critic consensus,...

Bill Hader has come a long way since his stint on Saturday Night Live, creating many popular characters and impersonations such as Stefon, Vincent Price and CNN’s Jack Cafferty. He is one of the highlights in such films as Adventureland, Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express, and so it is easy to see why author Mike Sacks interviewed him for his new book Poking A Dead Frog. In it, Hader talks about his career and he also lists 200 essential movies every comedy writer should see. Xo Jane recently published the list for those of us who haven’t had a chance to read the book yet. There are a ton of great recommendations and plenty I haven’t yet seen, but sadly my favourite comedy of all time isn’t mentioned. That would be Some Like It Hot. Still, it really is a great list with a mix of old and new.

Today would have been Audrey Hepburn's 85th birthday, as recognised by Google's doodle. After a bizarre and traumatic childhood she went on to be a Hollywood great. We profile a singular star

It used to be said that you can't be too rich or too thin. We now no longer believe this. Bankers and hedge fund managers are too rich; and now the celebrity magazines and tabloids lead the choruses of "Look how skinny's she's got!" The nicer way of saying the same thing, and making it a compliment, is to call the person elegant.

Audrey Hepburn came to be synonymous with this form of elegance. Even in her early films, her height, her skinniness and her wistfulness combined to get her noticed. In the unhelpful role of Chiquita in The Lavender Hill Mob, she attracts the attention both of Alec Guinness and of the camera: a woman visually...

A comic crime caper stuffed with eccentric supporting characters, A Fish Called Wanda is in the best tradition of British comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob. That should be no surprise because the director, Charles Crichton, is responsible for both. Crichton’s amazing career began in the thirties as an editor on Things To Come and Thief Of Bagdad and ended in 1998 with Wanda, co-written with star John Cleese. The film was enormously successful winning an Academy Award for co-star Kevin Kline and BAFTA Awards for Cleese and Michael Palin for Best Actor and Supporting Actor.

The post A Fish Called Wanda appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

★★★★★Collated for the first time on Blu-ray are three films from Britain's Ealing Studios, each starring its most renowned star, Alec Guinness. In Kind Hearts and Coronets' (1949), lowly sales assistant Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) reeks terrible revenge on his mother's aristocratic relations the D'Ascoyne family (all played by Guinness), whilst The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) tells the story of Henry Holland (Guinness) an unassuming clerk at the Bank of England who plots to relieve his bosses of a small fortune. Finally in The Man in the White Suit (1951) humble inventor Henry Stratton (Guinness) creates a fibre which never gets dirty or wears out.

At one time it was the game industry that wanted to emulate films. But now the movie industry is adopting the technology of video games

Amid the debate about television stealing the film industry's thunder, another entertainment form has crept up unnoticed, further threatening Hollywood's creative hegemony: video games. With a new, much more powerful generation of games consoles poised to arrive – Microsoft's Xbox One goes on sale on Friday, with Sony's PlayStation 4 due a week later – the games companies reckon they finally have the ammunition to shake off the perception that their digital epics are inferior to movies.

I'm in a place that could not reinforce that impression more emphatically: the historic Ealing studios, where classics such as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers were filmed. But I'm here to experience the process of making a video game called Ryse: Son of Rome, an epic tale charting the Roman conquest of Britain,...

Having worked on a total of 84 feature-length productions during his 47-year career as a cinematographer, including three Indiana Joneses, The Italian Job and Ealing comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob, Douglas Slocombe photographed films for almost as long as Philip French has been reviewing them. French has described his camera work as "graceful", "versatile" and "superbly atmospheric".

I've long been an admirer of Philip French's way of writing, as well as his knowledge of films. He was one of the few critics to be aware, and make audiences aware, of the work of people on a film set other than the director. He would draw attention to the work of the cinematographer, or the editor, or the art director who, in the earlier days, were usually almost entirely ignored from the critics' point of view. He has been particularly kind to me, mentioning me so many times in his articles,...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

(Charles Crichton, 1950; StudioCanal, PG)

Made during Ealing Studios's peak period from the early 40s to the mid-1950s, Dance Hall is virtually the only movie produced by that male-dominated studio that might be considered a feminist work. Co-scripted by Diana Morgan, the sole woman admitted by Ealing boss Michael Balcon to his elite creative team, it looks at the world from the point of view of four young working-class women (Natasha Parry, Petula Clark, Jane Hylton and Diana Dors). They live in council flats, work in the same west London factory, and find romance and an escape from their drab lives at the local dance hall. Except for the middle-class accents, the film presents an honest, down-to-earth portrait of Britain in the postwar age of austerity. Typically for its time, Parry (future wife of the director Peter Brook) is torn between glamorous sports car-driving spiv Bonar Colleano and dull,...

Sir Alec Guinness's personal diaries and letters are to be made available to the public in 2014.

The British Library has obtained the personal archive of the late Oscar-winning actor, known for his roles in Star Wars and the Ealing comedies.

The archive will include over 100 volumes of diaries and letters charting his long career as an actor from the late 1930s up to his death in 2000.

It also chronicles his experience at war and the death of Sir Laurence Olivier.

An extract from his diary on July 12, 1989, the day after Sir Laurence's death, reads: "His 'I defy you, stars' in Romeo was memorable. And so was his Poor naked wretches etc in Lear. But his famous howl in Oedipus I thought just tiresome.

"He knew every trick of the trade and used every one, including, when he made his first entrance the lights coming up a few points and...