Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball comedy, the charming story of a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) and a down on his luck newspaper reporter (Clark Gable), was the first movie to win all of the five major Oscar prizes — Picture, Director, Actor, Actress an

By David Mermelstein Los Angeles The UCLA Film and Television Archive's decision to subtitle its ambitious Spencer Tracy retrospective "That Natural Thing" goes a long way toward explaining why this actor remains a potent screen presence almost 45 years

Valentine's Day is almost here, and a young man's fancy turns to ... trivia quizzes. If you are a fan of great romantic films, try this test. If you wouldn't be caught dead in a chick flick, maybe we'll do a "Rambo" quiz some day. For now, pucker up. 1.

I’m experimenting this year, putting up this list of movies I watched this past month that I didn’t talk about elsewhere. I find it fun to share my short thoughts on these; hopefully readers will too. Movies Arise, My Love (1940) — I’ve liked Ray Milland

The first film ever to sweep the Oscars in all five major categories (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Actress)—a distinction it shares only with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence Of The Lambs—Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night re

Mayor seeks $150,000 for facility Buy This Photo Middletown Mayor Joseph DeStefano and theater operator Nelson Page, above right at the theater, are asking an agency for aid to get The Paramount Theatre digital equipment. The switch would satisfy rising

In Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, silent-film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and unknown dancer Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) meet cute outside his movie premiere. He’s basking in public adoration; she’s standing in a throng of fans. But when she

"Oh no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again." Comedies do not usually perfor

This lol celeb picture was poste

In Act i, Scene 5 of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, bloodthirsty for her more weak-willed husband to kill Duncan and take the crown, calls out in a private moment: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to

"It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life" Alexandria lets you indulge in its collective allegories and epics. From one particular historical point of view

Hedy Lamarr, blessed with beauty, was cursed with the inescapable label "the most beautiful woman in the world." The Austrian-born star never got the roles or the praise that went to the great actresses of her era. "Any girl can be glamorous," she often

Last week the Criterion Collection released a very swanky prospect for your gift-giving and cinephiliac needs: DVD and Blu-ray editions of the Ernst Lubitsch adaptation of Noel Coward's "Design for Living," adapted - freely - by former Chicago newspaper

At one point in The Iron Lady, Thatcher complains: "It used to be about trying to do something. Now it's about trying to be someone." It's a nice turn of phrase, if a trifle glib. It's also a false distinction, and a rather ironic complaint to hear in th