Sam Peckinpah

Hollywood, as everyone knows, is teeming with liberals of every shape, size, creed and color. Away from work, the legions of Prius-driving actors, filmmakers and studio executives are always busy ardently promoting some desperately important progressive...

Willa Holland plays Janice, the young wife who gets strangled in the remake of "Straw Dogs." The Ford model/actress and stepdaughter of director Brian DePalma was encouraged by Steven Spielberg to work in front of the cameras. She became a......

Last night, as part of an awards season film series sponsored by my newspaper, I hosted a screening of "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" with its filmmaker, Wes Anderson, and Jason Schwartzman, who voices Ash, Mr. Fox's ungainly, often not entirely......

Clive Owen and Jason Statham will take on the remake of an iconic Sam Peckinpah  actioner — The Killer Elite. Back before assassins and professional “shooters” were common as movie dirt, the 1975 Peckinpah film about spies and killing...

He's got a funny supporting role in the all-star spy actioner RED, opening in Oct. He's slated to be in Orlando for the FXShow convention in mid October, too. And in January, Ernest Borgnine, Oscar winner, will be honored by the Screen Actor's Guild at...

Tom Runyon, who shared his family name with a Hollywood Hills canyon and his simple fare at his rough-hewn roadhouse on Mulholland Highway with the famous and famously interesting, has died. He was 89. Runyon, a fiction writer and occasional actor,...

"True Blood's" enigmatic Eric just can't escape the Deep South. Alexander Skarsgard, who plays the Louisiana vampire on HBO, has joined the remake of Sam Peckinpah's 1971 classic "Straw Dogs," according to Variety. That movie showed an everyday man's...

Arnold Laven, a film and television director and producer who was a partner in the production company that produced the TV series "The Rifleman" and "The Big Valley," has died. He was 87. Laven died of complications of pneumonia Sept. 13 at Tarzana...

Writing about the past four seasons of HBO's The Wire has been one of the great pleasures of this job. But reviewing the fifth and final season, which begins next Sunday on the premium cable channel, is more of a mixed blessing. It's not that the...

BEFORE a morgue culture determined to hang a tag on every toe, Cormac McCarthy stands defiantly alive and untagged. Born in New England, he came of literary age in the South with 1965's "The Orchard Keeper" and thus was a "Southern writer" in the eyes...

Many a great film director is tethered artistically to a trusted actor: John Ford had the Duke, Fellini had Mastroianni and Scorsese had De Niro. For Sam Peckinpah, the volatile maverick who reinvented the western as a hyperviolent, nihilistic...

After the deaths last year of filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Edward Yang, and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, organizers of the 2007 AFI Film Festival created a "Milestones" programming block to honor them. "These were the people...