Akira Kurosawa

Economies around the globe are melting down. The U.S. is embroiled in multiple armed conflicts with no easy exits. So who cares what five Oscar winners have played superheroes in their careers? Chances are, you do. That's why you're reading this. Test...

You now have no excuse not to have seen some of the greatest classics of film. No more mumbling vague generalities in conversations with your cinéaste friends, then scrambling to catch up with the DVDs, because this weekend the American Cinematheque is...

++++++++++++++++++++ || || ++++++++++++++++++++ How ironic -- yet oddly fitting -- that Michelangelo Antonioni should die in Italy, at 94, the day after Ingmar Bergman died at 89 in Sweden. At the time of their deaths they were arguably Europe's two...

Charles Teitel, who operated one of the first foreign art houses in Chicago, screening such seminal films as "The Bicycle Thief" and "Z" as well as movies that city censors tried to ban for racy content, died of congestive heart failure April 4 at his...

Moral ambiguity and human complexity aren't qualities usually associated with action films, but for German director Tom Tykwer, they're essential parts of the mix. Great thrillers must not only work on a genre level but also contain moral perspectives as...

Bob and Harvey Weinstein are bringing the East to the West, with the help of some friends, including filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. The Weinstein Company announced that they are launching the label Dragon Dynasty, under which their Asian titles will be...

Boarded up for renovations for five long years, the Museum of the Legion of Honor in Paris has opened again. It faces the Musee d'Orsay on the Left Bank and occupies a wing of one of the city's finest palaces, the Hotel de Salm, completed in 1788 and much...

If you're new to Los Angeles or too young to remember revival houses, the New Beverly Cinema may not be on your radar. Located on Beverly Boulevard, a block west of La Brea, it's an old-school, single-screen movie theater dedicated to thematic and auteur-...

"Curse of the Golden Flower" is great news for admirers of director Zhang Yimou and actress Gong Li. Between 1990 and 1996 they made a series of richly varied films, including "Ju Dou," "Raise the Red Lantern, "The Story of Qiu Ju," "To Live" and...

Make way for "The Warrior," the latest in a venerable tradition of arty slice-'em-ups that prostrate before the slaughter churches of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, filmmakers who have ritualized movie violence into a kind of religion. The feature...

Yup, that's the big important date to remember, when TCM will devote its full Sunday schedule to Paul Newman classics, including ...Cool Hand Luke (1967), Somebody up There Likes Me (1956), Torn Curtain (1966), Exodus (1960), Hud (1963), and......

When the Oscar nominations come out Tuesday, there are bound to be cries of injustice -- and in many cases, those charges will have merit. Can anyone really defend the exclusion from the Oscar nominee list in various years of movies such as "Some Like...