After seeing Michel Hazanavicius’s exuberant and playful French silent movie “The Artist,” I found myself thinking of Louise Brooks’s back—her bare back, which she employed to such devastating dramatic effect as Lulu, in “Pandora’s Box” (1929), the Germa

And yet this year's best picture nominees reek of futurism compared with the nostalgic tint of the first Academy Awards ceremony back in 1929. By 1929 the sound revolution had been waged and won. The public had spoken and demanded actors do the same. But

As we approach the 84th Academy Awards , the nominees for Best Oscar Trivia are... Most Surprising Loser Nominated six times, director Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar. Most Astonishing Winner The most votes for Best Actor at the very first Oscars in

Perhaps the most heralded collaboration between German expressionist director Josef Von Sternberg and his favorite star, Marlene Dietrich, 1930’s The Blue Angel deals frankly with the perils of sexual repression and moral hypocrisy. Emil Jannings stars a

This is Lola Lola, the seductive spider within the visual web of the Blue Angel nightclub, and it's the role that launched the career of screen legend Marlene Dietrich. Lola Lola isn't a definitive femme fatale: she seems genuinely touched by the mix of

This year's Berlinale is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Studio Babelsberg with a special film series. The 10-film series offers a look back at the oldest large-scale movie studio in the world -- and certainly the one with the most varied history. B

Perhaps the most heralded collaboration between German expressionist director Josef Von Sternberg and his favorite star, Marlene Dietrich, 1930’s The Blue Angel deals frankly with the perils of sexual repression and moral hypocrisy. Emil Jannings stars a

As dog actors go, Rin Tin Tin – aka “America’s greatest movie dog”, “the king of pets” and, our favourite, “the wonder dog of all creation” – takes some beating. don’t believe us? You be the judge. He was a war veteran. Admittedly, he started out on the

Today, Matthew Brandon Fullbright must decide whether he will play another part in the fourth day...- 10:53 pm As medical procedures advance, the surroundings in which they are performed must sometimes adapt.- 8:53 pm Tombstones that were knocked over or

Animals have been stealing scenes since movies began – but can Hollywood’s top dogs really act or is it all down to clever training? The Artist is being tipped to sweep the board at this year’s Oscars – but there will be no Academy Award for one of the s

The Academy appears to have had a downer on dogs since the first Oscar night in 1929 when, legend has it, German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin was voted best actor, only for the statue to be mysteriously handed to a human actor, Emil Jannings, instead. Some think

In Oscar's first year, Emil Jannings' cruel czarist general defeated Richard Barthelmess' noble ex-pug, while Janet Gaynor's loyal wife in "Sunrise" bested Gloria Swanson's wicked "Sadie Thompson." In short, the battle of saints vs. sinners has been a pa

Author Susan Orlean, whose latest book brings Rin Tin Tin back to life, thinks it’s time that the canine star be awarded the Oscar he was so rudely denied 83 years ago. In an recent interview with Deadline.com, she suggested the mistake be corrected, and

While researching her incredible book about Rin Tin Tin, (the Dog Files highly recommends it), Susan learned that Rinty received the most votes at the very first Oscar ceremony, but the Academy, thought that no one would take them seriously, so they awar

Orlean's new biography Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend gives credence to a longstanding Hollywood rumour that the canine star won the most votes at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929 only to be passed over in favour of the German actor Emil Jannin

The newest Oscar campaign isn't to get an Academy Award for a film released in the past year. It's also not to reward a human. At Deadline Hollywood, author Susan Orlean tells Mike Fleming that she thinks the four-legged subject of her new book, Rin Tin

The Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean has a Hollywood theft to report, and a suggestion how to remedy the injustice. During the exhaustive research that Orlean did for her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life And The Legend, she discovered that the true Best Actor

The Artist is a dream for film fans, a dilemma for movie-marketing executives. In an age of widescreen 3-D, rainbow-colored, star-driven spectacles, how do you sell a black-and-white film shot in a 2-D boxy format, with no A-listers and barely a word of