Inflation is a huge factor in figuring out the best box office performers of all time. Bloomberg's new inflation-adjusted chart places Gone with the Wind at the top of the U.S. top box office list, along with Star Wars, The Sound of Music and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Where's the mighty number one b.o. grosser of all time, Titanic? After The Ten Commandments. Years ago, Variety's late A.D. Murphy told me the same thing: adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind handily beats every challenger.

Full Bloomberg b.o. chart is on the jump.

This reminds me of my current revelations on Flickchart, a new ranking site that doesn't ask you to rate movies with stars. No, it asks you to pick one movie over another. Most of the time it's easy to pick a good movie over a bad one, but as you play, you sometimes have to pick between two bad ones (hence The Da Vinci Code was high on my list at one point) or worse, between two good ones. How do you pick between Citizen Kane and Casablanca? I tend to be obsessive about this sort of thing. What if someone saw my chart with The Goonies or The Illusionist at number one? Toy Story recently beat out Braveheart at number one; it stayed there until Flickchart asked me to choose between Toy Story and something even better--Goodfellas.

I'm struck at how fast the entertaining blockbusters are moving up the chart--Pixar, James Bond, Spielberg, Burton, Zemeckis, Cameron, Hitchcock and The Godfather films. It doesn't surprise me that Lean, Kubrick, Welles, Kurosawa, the Coens, Scorsese and Wilder are strong, but The Exorcist and Zodiac are surprisingly high. Someone tweeted that Flickchart is like crack for movie addicts. Film School Rejects can't get enough. Neither can AICN's Mr. Beeks. Somebody stop me.

Here are Flickchart's top rankings, led by The Dark Knight over second place Star Wars.

Here's the Flickchart trailer:

Heartwarming news: forty years later, the iconic Woodstock couple who posed under a blanket are still together, reports the NYDN.

The special anniversary edition of Michael Wadleigh's doc, which deployed such directors as Martin Scorsese and Richard Pearce in a groundbreaking use of multiple roaming cameras, is available. Amid a lot of Woodstock hooplah, Focus Features is releasing Ang Lee's movie Taking Woodstock, set behind the scenes at the event, on August 28.

Adapting Elliot Tiber's memoir, screenwriter James Schamus (and Focus topper) and Lee explore the cultural moment that Woodstock crystallized—the ways that old and new were clashing and changing. The movie is utterly American, culturally sophisticated, sweet and tender, mood-shifting, and fun. “It was a time when people had t-shirts that didn’t have logos on them,” Lee told me at Cannes.

This behind-the-scenes drama focuses on a family dynamic: two uptight Jewish parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) and their vibrant, closeted gay son (Demetri Martin) who, when shoved up against the counterculture, breaks out of their world. Comedy Central star Martin never dreamed of a movie career, but the real discovery is radiant theater actor Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang. Lee and Schamus nail the period. Most of the time they found that hippie lingo didn’t play, and cut much of it out. But when Groff said words like “groovy” and “far out,” he did so with such conviction that they left them in.

Here's the trailer.

Like Kris Tapley, my father turned me into a cinephile. (Cineaste, as Dave Kehr is wont to point out, is strictly reserved for filmmakers.) Raising two (and later three) kids in Manhattan, my father took us to the movies every weekend at the local movie houses: the Riverside and Riviera, Symphony, Nemo, Olympia, Thalia and New Yorker.

His taste was eclectic: we saw The Mouse that Roared, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, Lord Love a Duck (three times--it must have been Tuesday Weld in those cashmere sweaters), To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, El Cid, A Hard Days Night, Singing in the Rain, Gypsy, Meet Me in St. Louis and Damn Yankees. (We drove into the Bronx for that one.) And he eagerly looked forward to every new James Bond--From Russia with Love was his fave.

Torry had a booming laugh. One night from the balcony at the New Yorker during a Marx Brothers marathon, I could hear him guffaw from the orchestra below. (He also loved W.C. Fields.) He taught me the phrases "they were rolling in the aisles" and "not a dry seat in the house." I used it once in a live CNN interview!

My father is responsible for my love for World War II movies such as Battleground and Tora! Tora! Tora!. He adored Angela Lansbury and Peter Sellers (The World of Henry Orient), Alec Guinness (Bridge on the River Kwai), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The List of Adrian Messenger), and had a healthy appetite for horror, from Hammer dracula flicks starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to The Haunting and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. We watched Chiller Theatre on TV every Saturday night over spaghetti and garlic bread. On our walls were movie posters: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Un Messe Pour Dracula and Le Bon, Le Brut et Le Truand.

Did I have any choice? But my father was a Cornell-educated snob who wanted me to become a high-falutin' academic (my brother Peter took on that mantle). He couldn't understand my decision to enroll in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. But he came around later when I worked at Film Comment and he donned a tuxedo as my date for the opening night of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. He was a proud father then.

Renowned UK cinematographer Jack Cardiff, BSC, passed away earlier today. He was 94. Here's The Guardian's obit. And the BBC.

Cardiff photographed The African Queen, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Vikings, Under Capricorn and The Barefoot Contessa. As it happens, perhaps his greatest achievement, The Red Shoes, will play at Cannes in the Classics section. It's a new restoration (backed by The Film Foundation, the UCLA Film Archive and Bob Gitt) of one of the most splendid examples of Technicolor film--on a par with such American classics as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

I always wondered why the studios didn’t want to sell their classic libraries online, in pursuit of the long tail. Well, Warner Bros., the first distrib to stick a toe in the water by offering some 150 titles starring the likes of Greta Garbo and Demi Moore, found out instantly how much demand there was. From the first day it went live last week, unexpected customers flooded Warners' new classic DVD archive, reports The New York Post's Lou Lumenick: within two hours of the site going live, "orders were placed for 140 of the initial 150 titles." Warner exec George Feltenstein, who plans to make available some 5000 titles from the WB, MGM and RKO libraries, told him: "If initial sales are any indication, we're in for a long ride."

Vanity Fair digs into the making of The Godfather. Again. The Aero Theatre in Santa Monica will run the restored Godfather Trilogy--new 35 mm prints--one film per night from February 27 through March 1, 2009 at 7:30 PM.

New York interviews the ubiquitous Clive Owen, star of Tom Tykwer's current release The International and Tony Gilroy's upcoming Duplicity, in which Owen rejoins his Closer co-star Julia Roberts.

The New Yorker has launched a new movie blog, The Front Row (just what we need!). Richard Brody's brainy cinephilia will likely appeal to folks who read Dave Kehr, GreenCine, IFC, Spoutblog and Some Came Running. How much more can we all absorb, anyway?

Billy Wilder is one of those tough unsentimental directors whose films get better with time. Years later, they still feel contemporary. And the Oscar-winning The Apartment, reviewed here on video by the NYT's A.O. Scott, is on my All-Time Top Ten List.

Scott picked up some video performance skills while guest-reviewing on Ebert & Roeper; he also recognizes that video reviews are where online criticism is heading. He should do more of these; it works.

Forget chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Here are my fave holiday rituals:

1. My first Christmas card, every year, is something tastelessly provocative from John Waters. Postmark: Baltimore, Maryland.

2. The second is a donation-in-your name card from Jerry Bruckheimer. Will his annual classic Christmas wreath follow? Suspenseful.

3. Christmas music. Diana Krall, Mel Torme and Louis Armstrong's Christmas jazz. Handel's The Messiah (see video on jump). Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Johnny Cash. And Sean, a fellow-DJ from WHCL-FM, the Hamilton College radio station, always sends a Christmas CD. They started out as audiotapes. After 30 years, they're really arcane.

4. Jim sends a Mrs. Grace's Lemon Cake. Yummyboo.

5. Tangerines in the toes of Christmas stockings. A family tradition, along with trimming the tree on Christmas Eve under the influence of hot buttered rum. We've moved it up to December 23.

6. A Christmas Story. We also watch, on occasion, It's a Wonderful Life, Meet Me in St. Louis, Holiday Inn (where White Christmas comes from) or Love Actually. But A Christmas Story we ALWAYS watch. Sadly, I can't get anyone to watch the Alistair Sim A Christmas Carol anymore, which my brother and I grew up on.

7. Aljean's Christmas brunch. She actually serves eggs bacon orange juice bagels lox cream cheese and coffee to three rooms of people sitting and talking on Christmas morning. But you better be on time.

8. Christmas movie. It's what we can all agree on. Maybe The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The last two years we couldn't get into the movie we wanted at the AMC and happily watched DVDs on Joan's giant flat screen instead--which tells you something.

9. Alessandra's Italian celebration, with home-baked pies and cakes. Italian Bingo. Wine. Tombola!

10. New Year's: Eve is chez Jane, who cooks a girls-only sumptuous dinner accompanied by plenty of high-end champagne; Day is at Julia's, who supplies a pianist, sheet music and lyrics so we can all sing, whether or not we know the tune.

For Howard Hawks obsessives, there's a Hawks Blogathon coming up from January 12-23 that will focus on his early films. More details here. It's a nice excuse to take the time to catch up on the early Hawks oeuvre, from Scarface to Twentieth Century. The cut-off is 1938's Bringing Up Baby.

This has nothing to do with Hollywood, I know, but there's a cool collector car contest at the NYT. Check out vintage classics like this Triumph Italia 2000 GT Coupé.

Check out this Flickr collection of The End titles.

[Hat Tip: Slashfilm]

The long tail prevails. My daughter Nora, 19, is more interested in renting old Kevin Smith comedies and Good Will Hunting than she is in going out to new movies. The perfect book for any cinephile is Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson's latest blue and red tome: "Have You Seen…?” , 1000 one-page reviews (of about 500 words each) of must-see movies, from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Z. Here's my review.

Based in San Francisco, Thomson considers himself to be an historian more than a film critic, although he's done reviews for Film Comment and Esquire and other publications over the years. He's idiosyncratic, entertaining, erudite and fun to read. Early on, he says, he persuaded Knopf to forgo both illustrations and a rating system. Photos would have made the book too weighty, not to mention expensive. "If I couldn't get what I thought about a film into 500 words..." he says. "This book is all about the text."

Thomson's thinking about changes for the revised version, he says: "I already have second thoughts." He might drop some titles and add new ones, like the 1945 Michael Redgrave horror film Dead At Night or Bette Davis in Dangerous. He admits that he erred on the side of older films rather than more contemporary ones because people need reminding, he says. "There's a tremendous amount of valuable old stuff."

Friends are indignant, he says, that he omitted Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. He left out plenty of Best Picture Oscar winners because "the Oscars serve their purpose, but they are an extremely unreliable reflection of what actually happened. The people awarding the Oscars do not have a laudable record. They've been wrong on more of them than they've been right."

“Have you Seen…?” is a book for anyone with a Netflix queue who seeks more depth than a Rotten Tomatoes score. And it's also available on Kindle.

Speaking of escapist musicals, 1000 folks crammed into the Academy Theater on Friday night to escape the financial crisis and fall happily into the giddy world of the 1958 Arthur Freed/Vincente Minnelli musical Gigi, which swept all nine of its Oscar nominations. It's the film's Golden anniversary, and star Leslie Caron flew in from France to be quizzed by critic Stephen Farber. Warners supplied a gorgeous digital restoration. Both Minnelli's Gigi and 1951's An American in Paris are coming out in special two-disc editions.

At the reception beforehand, the tiny, birdlike Caron was surrounded by elderly male admirers from her MGM days, including West Side Story star George Chakiris. Dancer Gene Kelly discovered ballerina Caron on the stage in Paris; she was 18 when she arrived at Metro to test for An American in Paris, and landed the role. Her first naive act was to shear her own hair short with nail scissors, horrifying everyone and delaying the start of production by several weeks. Kelly choreographed and placed the cameras during the dance sequences, she said.

After An American in Paris hit big, Freed asked the dancer what material she liked and she mentioned Colette's Gigi. Freed developed it for years, first as a drama, but eventually realized that the only way to get around the strictures of the Hayes Code--Gigi is in training to be a French courtesan--was to make it a musical. "I'm playing a hooker who made good," said Caron.

[Photo courtesy L.A. Times]

My father raised me on the Marx brothers; thanks to Jeff Wells for tantalizing me with with this too-short clip of the infamous State Room sequence from A Night at the Opera, probably their best film.

Here's another sample of their greatness: Thank Yaw! Thank Yaw!

Check out this list of top 100 westerns of all time from the Western Writers of America. They should be ashamed of themselves for these woeful rankings.

Here's the Top Ten:
1. Shane
2. High Noon
3. The Searchers
4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
5. Dances with Wolves
6. The Wild Bunch
7. Red River
8. Tombstone
9. The Magnificent Seven
10. Open Range

Where are Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, to name a few? (Farther down the list.)

Shane and High Noon are middle-of-the-road westerns that many people seem to love and I have never found interesting. I don't hate them. They're just not as resonant and well-made as so many others. John Ford's The Searchers is great (although I have to admit that the comedy sections aren't aging well). Howard Hawks' intense father-son drama Red River, which is devoid of sentimentality, holds up better. Many other Ford westerns are stronger than The Searchers, from Stagecoach to My Darling Clementine.

Butch Cassidy and Dances with Wolves were both entertaining, commercial products of their time. But not among the top ten best westerns! Unforgiven is down at number 16. Once Upon a Time in the West is at 37.

I'd be fine if Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was number one. This movie changed the face of cinema. It's one of the best movies ever made, period.

1993's Tombstone is an underrated western, and was far superior to Lawrence Kasdan's competing Silverado Wyatt Earp. But it does not belong in the top ten. Is it that much better than Gunfight at the OK Corral, which is way down on the list? The Magnificent Seven is fine. But there are so many others that are even better. Same with Open Range.

Follow the rest of the list on the jump and you will find scattered throughout great movies like the Eastwood and Leone westerns, other Fords, other Peckinpahs and Hawks, and the wonderful films of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Lonely Are the Brave is a great movie. So is the silent film The Wind. But Bend in the River and McCabe and Mrs. Miller are relegated to the 90s? Give me a break.

My alternative top ten westerns list? More like this:

1. The Wild Bunch
2. My Darling Clementine
3. Red River
4. Once Upon a Time in the West
5. Unforgiven
6. Bend in the River
7. Stagecoach
8. Ride the High Country
9. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
10. The Tall T

The rest of the Western Writers Top 100 follows, on the jump:

As a sign of the times, City Lights Entertainment is making Hector Babenco's Oscar-winning film Kiss of the Spider Woman available as an exclusive-to-rent or download on Amazon Unbox. It's well worth checking out.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was adapted by Leonard Schrader from the 1976 novel El Beso de la Mujer Arana by Manuel Puig. William Hurt won the Oscar as a man who unexpectedly learns to love another prisoner (Raul Julia) in a Latin American jail. Kiss of the Spider Woman, produced by David Weisman, was the first indie to nab four top Oscar noms, including best picture and best director for Hector Babenco.

There's also a new doc, Tangled Web: Making Kiss of the Spider Woman, available on DVD or Unbox download. You can now rent the pic from Amazon Unbox for $2.99 for 30 days, or download to own for $9.99. Or wait until July 22 to get the Standard Definition and Blu-ray Special-Edition DVDs.

Someone walking on the Universal lot picked up a piece of flotsam and it turned out to be a burnt, charred but recognizable frame from Back to The Future--one of the prints lost in the recent Universal Fire.

Many critics have compared writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. It's no secret that Shyamalan is a fan of the master of psychological horror.

What The Happening and The Birds have in common is also what made The Day After Tomorrow so effective: they tap into our fear that after messing with Mother Nature, she will turn on us. The idea behind The Happening, that trees and plants will revolt to protect themselves from humans, is chilling.

Given all the movie choices this freakily hot weekend, David, Nora and I agreed to see The Happening. My theory: we didn't know exactly what we'd be getting (which is good) but we figured it would be well-made, scary fun, and not dopey. Shyamalan is an original: he's not playing by studio formula rules, so his movies have a directorial stamp and personality.

In an ideal world, someone would tell him that Mark Wahlberg, while he is a likable everyman, can be stiffly unheroic, even whiney. And the scene when the grass comes whipping across the field in a line incites laughter (at least in me). But I screeched obediently during the Psycho-sequence with the deliciously over-the-top Betty Buckley.

In short, we got exactly what we expected. It's too bad that the right smart people didn't come together to make this movie even better. I suspect that's Shyamalan's fault; he doesn't seem open to other people's input. He's got to be the smartest man in the room.

Nora suggested that the stuff that didn't work was the R-rated material. I agree. Shyamalan seems uncomfortable with yucky spurting limbs. Interestingly, the director raised some funds from India on this picture, which was also produced by his long-time partners at Spyglass. (Asian investment in Hollywood is the wave of the future.)

Universal, Mandalay and Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay's company, are developing a remake of Hitchcock's The Birds; Martin Campbell and Naomi Watts are attached. I'm of two minds. It could go so wrong (they've already been through an impressive list of writers). On the other hand, with visual effects, it could be terrifying.

Here's Jodie Foster as The Birds' Tippi Hedron (who always resembled a Barbie doll) in Vanity Fair. And Mattel has created a new The Birds Barbie. Here's their sell:

Based on the classic movie! Includes real fake birds! High-quality head looks scared and has awesome hair!

Yes, Jack Nicholson showed up after the Laker game, slightly hoarse, to honor his bud, Warren Beatty, at the 36th annual AFI Life Achievement fete. Count on Beatty, 71, to attract smarter-than-average tributes. "You drag me in with all these politicos," said Nicholson, who earned an Oscar nomination for Beatty's historic drama Reds. "I'm representing all the fair-weather friends you have in the city who went to the Lakers game."

"When I'm working, I have a group of people whose good opinion I'm always trying to win," Beatty said during a taped video interview. Many of that group were on hand Thursday night. "I'm still a liberal when it's coming back in style," he said after accepting his award from last year's honoree, Al Pacino, who starred in Dick Tracy. Beatty thanked his older sister Shirley MacLaine for leading him to Hollywood, which in turn brought him to his wife, Annette Bening. (Variety's Steve Chagollan profiles Beatty here.) One ex-girlfriend, Reds star Diane Keaton, made an emotional appearance, while another, Julie Christie, appeared on video, praising Beatty for choosing a mate, Bening, who was his equal, "after a fairly thorough search."

Ishtar co-star Dustin Hoffman teased his friend with google trivia, much of it not true, while constantly asking if Nicholson was in the house. "And I was here for dinner," he reminded his friend of 40 years. Hoffman praised Beatty for taking good care of his friends, such as cancer-ridden Hal Ashby, who Beatty flew via Warner Bros. jet to Johns Hopkins for treatment.

Beatty's frequent writing collaborator Elaine May did a delicious stand-up routine about Beatty's wacky ideas for such movies as Heaven Can Wait and Reds. May finally talked Beatty into directing Heaven Can Wait himself after no one else wanted to do it. It was the launch of a directing career. "Warren gives crazy a good name," she said. "I feel he is still crazy after all these years."

She was followed by her ex-partner, Mike Nichols, on video, who delivered an hilarious joke about Beatty being Jewish. On video, Barbra Streisand said of Beatty: "He's an incredibly gifted...gentile."

A luminous Jane Fonda started out the evening saying that she knew Warren longer than anyone, 50 years, from his days playing piano bar in New York. "We did our first screen test together," she recalled, a love scene for a Josh Logan movie that never got made. She kicks herself for not realizing at the time that this great-looking man surrounded by smart gay friends was actually straight. "It's nice to know somebody else who shares the same chunk of this town's history," she said.

When Beatty descended from the Kodak stage to the theatre for the ritual walk through his admirers (accompanied by live Earl Scruggs), he greeted politicos George McGovern, for whom he invented the celebrity concert fundraiser in 1972, California attorney general Jerry Brown, and Gary Hart, who admitted later that contrary to myth, he didn't think Warren Beatty ever wanted to be him, but he had always wanted to be Warren Beatty. Republican John McCain paid tribute in a funny clip.

Bill Clinton took the stage and told the story of how at age 26 at the 1972 Democratic convention, he ran into Beatty in an elevator just after an Arkansas delegate told him she'd only vote for McGovern if Beatty walked with her for 30 minutes on a beach. Beatty agreed to the task; she voted for McGovern, and turned up years later on the campaign trail wearing a Hillary Clinton button. "Over all these decades, you have shared with us as moviegoers this insatiable hunger for life," Clinton told Beatty. "You have this unbridled hunger to know and to share."

Beatty joined Bening and his closest friends on the dais, including May and Stanley Donen, Barry Diller, MacLaine, David Geffen, Robert Towne, and attorney Bert Field.

AFI chair and Sony honcho Sir Howard Stringer said that Beatty was "one of the few actors envied when he was single who continued to be envied after he got married. He's America's leading man: actor, producer, writer, director. He quite famously does it all, but not often. Not since George Lucas has a man gotten away with doing so little for such a high honor. You embodied what we wanted in a leading man: handsome, charming, brilliant, perfectionist, always reaching for something greater."

Quentin Tarantino gave a heart-felt intro to Bonnie and Clyde, saying that the 1967 movie launched the great era of American movies, the 70s. "It was a gangster genre film, a Hollywood movie without the cliches."

Faye Dunaway read a rhyming ballad (modeled after Bonnie Parker), praising Beatty, among other things, for having the guts to grab a piece of the back end on Bonnie and Clyde.

Robert Downey Jr. brilliantly hallucinated an evening as a nine-year-old concocting the movie Shampoo with Beatty and Hal Ashby.

Shampoo scriptwriter Towne remembered that it took nine years to get Shampoo made. "I've never known you to hold a grudge, reveal a secret or forget a phone call," he said to Beatty. "In 45 years you never opened yourself up. After all these years I've come to consider you as wise as Benjamin Franklin, who is also a ladies man. You're part Fellini, part Machiavelli."

Don Cheadle described the many-take tortures of working under Beatty's direction on Bulworth. "He never lets the good be the enemy of the great," he said.

The tribute will air June 25 July 8 on the USA Network.

[Photos courtesy Getty Images]

Colin Firth not only leads my My Fair Lady poll on who should play Henry Higgins opposite Keira Knightley--by a huge margin--but he is also Jane Austen fans' fave Mr. Darcy. (Is he a model for Mr. Big?) Lead by Firth's sexy performance, the BCC's 1995 Pride and Prejudice continues to dominate all other entrants in the Austen field. I watched it again recently, and Firth does even better than Sir Laurence Olivier (in the 1940 film) at capturing Fitzwilliam Darcy's darkness and light. And Firth scored again in a Darcy-inspired role in Bridget Jones' Diary and its sequel.

I told an interviewer writing yet another story about women's pics in the wake of Sex and the City (here's Rachel Abramowitz's latest) that Jane Austen invented the romantic comedy formula that Hollywood has long relied on. Women are hardwired to believe that a good marriage leads to happily ever after, no matter what their brain tells them. No one has played on the wedding fantasy better than Austen. And Hollywood can steal her stories forever, as far as I'm concerned.

There's a reason romantic movies keep coming back to Firth, from Richard Curtis's Love Actually and Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me to the upcoming movie musical Mamma Mia! (Here's the trailer.) I'm there.

Last week I had lunch at the Universal commissary and walked across the lot to check out the scene of the fire that ravaged several blocks of the Universal backlot, destroying a print vault, last Sunday. As crews cleaned up the rubble, a security guard whisked me away--after I had grabbed a few shots.

Here are reports on the losses for the potentially devastating museums and rep houses around the country. Point is, Universal is relatively responsive to the needs of archivists around the country. It's not a hugely profitable business for the studio. But they have been in the habit of taking good care of their prints and negatives (which were also threatened during this fire) and history. The question is whether the studio will in fact replace the destroyed prints, which is expensive. A thorough inventory is under way.

Tonight I will see the first two parts of the four part, seven hour 1967 Russian War and Peace at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. I saw it for the first time when I was in high school at Manhattan's Elgin Theatre; it played from midnight to six A.M. in a dubbed version; my whole family went and we did not sleep a wink. It was one of the best movies I have ever seen. (It's based on one of the best works of literature, too.) We'll see how it holds up in this longer, subtitled version. Apparently the version the Academy screened back in 1967 was subtitled. It won the foreign film Oscar.

LACMA will screen War and Peace on three consecutive weekends, Friday and Saturday nights, so folks will have a chance to catch up with it. UPDATE: There is no way to rent this on DVD a PBS DVD of a six-hour subtitled version. There are probably old VHS copies of the dubbed one kicking around. Each of the four-part Russian TV series segments ended in a cliffhanger; they ran eight hours. Russian New Yorker Alla Verlotsky's Seagull Films finds undistributed Russian films and makes subtitled prints of them. When the Russians did their restoration of the 70 mm War and Peace, they made a 35 mm print.

According to LACMA film curator Ian Birnie, the Russians actually created an army unit of some 100,000 soldiers to act in the movie. "There are a lot of people on-screen," he says. "It must have been horrible to make."

UPDATE: Here's the LAT's interview with Verlotsky. She and Edward Goldman are a bit tough on actor-director Sergei Bondarchuk, who plays the role of Pierre Buzukhov, quite well. During the first two installments of this $100-million epic, even after a tough work-week, I remained alert. The mise-en-scene is a tad heavy-handed and very 60s, true, but the narrative carries the day. These are great characters. And the scale and scope of the CG-free battles, the vistas, the cannon-fire and fast-moving horses, is stunning.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
When critics inevitably say Dirty Harry looks better than ever on Blu-ray, they won’t be kidding (I wasn’t). Warner’s new hi-def edition is stunning in its clarity, to the degree that the word “gritty” (so much a staple of the Dirty Harry conversation in the past) no longer applies. These new hi-def transfers are so sharp, virtually no sign of film grain remains, a decision that surely reflects what the market currently demands, but also suggests a certain amount of very sophisticated tampering on the part of Warner Home Video.

Watching these films, I’m reminded of an interview with Eastwood’s longtime editor Joel Cox, who oversaw how the star’s films were being handled during the early days of homevid. Referring back to 1983, he told me, “We had just finished the film ‘Sudden Impact,’ and they put it through the process. They put the film out and changed the color and widened it and changed the sound around a bit. Clint had me go in and check it out, and we realized the people who did it took it upon themselves to make ‘corrections,’ figuring that we didn’t know how to time the picture or make the sound correct.”

Why Clint likes it gritty after the jump...

The official schedule for the Cannes Film Festival will be available online as of May 10. Here's the sked for Indy 4:

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL Out of Competition (USA)

Press screening: Sunday 18 May / 1.00pm / Grand Théâtre Lumière

Photo-call: Sunday 18 May / 3.00pm / Palais des Festivals

Press conference: Sunday 18 May / 3.30pm / Palais des Festivals

Official screening: Sunday 18 May / 7.30pm / Grand Théâtre Lumière

Film-team:
Steven Spielberg / director
Harrison Ford / actor
Shia LeBeouf / actor
Karen Allen / actor
Cate Blanchett / actor
Ray Winstone / actor
John Hurt / actor
Jim Broadbent / actor
George Lucas / producer
Frank Marshall / producer
Kathleen Kennedy / producer

Running time: 125 minutes

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL will be released worldwide by Paramount Pictures.

Cannes has announced its classics program, including Richard Schickel's tribute to Warner Bros., narrated by in-house star/director/producer Clint Eastwood. Early buzz on Cannes competition entry Changeling (Universal), a mystery Eastwood directed from TV writer-turned-screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski's script based on real events unfolding in the 20s, is quite good.

This April 2, 1959 clip from The Robert Herridge Theater Show at Studio 61 in New York City takes my breath away. The one time I saw Miles Davis play, at The Bottom Line in the Village, he was already so disgusted by performing that he turned his back on the audience and played for maybe 20 minutes max. But just look at him here! And the Gil Evans Orchestra: John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. Wow.

Frank Sinatra was a far better singer than he was an actor, but that doesn't mean he didn't leave a few great Hollywood performances behind--out of a slew of bad film choices. Here's a portrait of Sinatra as movie star.

My faves are the musicals: On the Town, Guys and Dolls, Young at Heart and The Tender Trap. But Sinatra did turn his sagging career around--and won the supporting actor Oscar-- with the drama From Here to Eternity. I have fond memories (misted in 60s nostalgia) of Von Ryan's Express and The Manchurian Candidate. But that's about it. Jean-Luc Godard was fond of Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running, which I need to look at again.

Posted by Peter Debruge:
At a time when most rep houses seem to be in hot water, Los Angeles’ New Beverly packed ’em in last night for the finale of “Dante’s Inferno,” two weeks of forgotten classics guest programmed by Joe Dante. While many of the director's picks were obscure, none could compete with “The Movie Orgy,” a marathon 4½-hour clip show Dante first assembled in 1968 with Jon Davison, then put on ice for nearly four decades.

Understand, The Movie Orgy isn’t a proper movie but an exercise in extreme film geekdom, as Dante and Davison spliced 16mm trailers, clips, newsreel footage, bloopers and old TV shows together to form a semi-linear commentary on/reaction against the time. Over the years, the project has earned a borderline apocryphal reputation, called by some the “Rosetta Stone” of Dante’s career — a glimpse deep into the filmmaker’s id — and it’s a testament to the city’s cult film scene that so many stayed for the entire show. (Full report after the jump.)

Whenever I washed the dishes in my old Manhattan apartment, I looked at Clint Eastwood in a giant French movie poster: Le Bon, le Brut et Le Truand. Later I discovered the great spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone with classic scores by Ennio Morricone.

This June, the Austin Drafthouse's 2008 Rolling Roadshow Tour is taking its tribute to Eastwood and Leone's Dollars Trilogy to Southern Spain, where the films were shot in the 60s. The showings of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, starring Eastwood as the iconic western anti-hero The Man with No Name, will unspool on June 6-8 in Almeria, Spain. It's the first Rolling Roadshow Tour to be held outside the U.S.

Check out these clips:

Here's more on Leone's Dollars trilogy:

The Leone "Dollars" Trilogy In 1964, Sergio Leone, an assistant director of Italian "sword and sandal" movies traveled to the Almeria region of Spain to shoot a small film based on Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure Yojimbo. The leading man was an unknown American bit-part television actor who at 34 years old was well past his matinee-idol potential. The film, was A Fistful of Dollars; the actor, Clint Eastwood. No one could have imagined the explosive force of this seemingly modest film. Sergio Leone is now considered by many film historians to be one of the most influential directors of all time. Few films have reshaped the visual style of cinema more than Sergio Leone's quintessential "Spaghetti Western" trilogy, and even fewer films elevate the filming location to the status on par with lead actor. Like John Ford's American southwest, Leone's Almeria region plays a vital role in shaping the emotion and spirit of his films. Leone's stylistic and graphic depictions of the Old West elevated a marginalized genre to an art form and influenced today's filmmakers.

Tuco Tours offer tours of all of the Sergio Leone locations in Spain.

The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard's annual film noir series has inspired food blogger 99 Cent Chef to post his recipe for rib eye steak. You got to dig the style of a guy who posts a recipe for Russ Meyer Lemon Chicken.

Sony's happy: 21 and Prom Night are doing well. Universal is less thrilled that George Clooney's Leatherheads took a steep decline. I didn't go to Street Kings after a pal told me that it's very close to Ron Shelton and David Ayer's 2002 Dark Blue, which I liked.

Instead, I watched my biggest Yankee crush, Mike Mussina, pitch a few innings of a Yankee game, some In Treatment episodes, and the new Bonnie and Clyde DVD. The 1967 collaboration of Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Robert Benton and David Newman holds up really well. I remember when Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate first came out; they were the first movies I went to with my Manhattan school pals instead of my family.

And I recommend my ex-EW editor Mark Harris's well-researched and elegantly written new book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, which paints a vivid portrait of the 60s period when both of these films were made. I had no idea that New Wavers Truffaut and Godard were interested in making movies in Hollywood, nor that they both flirted with making Bonnie and Clyde. Whenever I read one of these Hollywood books I am reminded that the more things change in Hollywood, the more thay remain the same. Check out this quote, from director Fred Zinnemann:

"If you go to France these days you are constantly involved in passionate discussions about the creative side of moviemaking. Here in Hollywood we are going in circles. We have moved into a trap, a self-imposed, self-induced trap with our dependence on best-sellers, hit plays, remakes and rehashes."

In the latest issue of New York celebrating its 40th anniversary, David Edelstein lists his fave the movies that most define New York, including Annie Hall (pictured).

The New Yorker is keeping its profile of the French New Wave's Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard behind its firewall, damn them. (I have a sub, but I can't link to the full profile.) Here's a slide show and audio interview with the writer Richard Brody.

I got a huge kick out of showing Godard's Alphaville to my USC film criticism class. Godard's reviews are fun to read, especially on Hitchcock. It's heady to see his pieces move from an enthusiastic embrace, appreciation and analysis of American movies to full-blown treatises on cinema, as Godard works out his ideas and starts to put them on film.

This ongoing debate about film criticism may be missing a crucial point. When the cinema was still a young medium--and the critics were figuring out their role in relation to it--everyone was making discoveries. The auteur theory was created so that critics addressing a backlog of movies accumulated over decades could codify and index them.

Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were battling over different ways to read movies. Sarris was the more learned and academic; he was really an historian. Kael was a popularizer and passionate advocate, and wrote far more entertaining prose.

We haven't seen their like since for several reasons. The explosion of movies in the 60s and 70s has subsided. Critics became more established, and they stopped arguing about their modes of discourse. In the end, Kael won the battle. Learned auteurist Dave Kehr is not a film critic at the NYT, although many point out that reviewing DVDs is a far better job. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is the quintessential reviewer as entertainer, where it's less about what he has to say than how he says it.

I grew up on rangy, masculine movie star Charlton Heston, who loomed large in the 60s big-screen spectacles my father loved to take me to, like El Cid, Khartoum, The Planet of the Apes and 55 Days at Peking. Heston finally succumbed after a long battle with Alzheimers Saturday. Here's the LA Times, Green Cine's wrap-up, and Dave Kehr. UPDATE: Richard Corliss tributes Heston in Time.

My favorite Heston movie, which showcases his skills as a stalwart, sexy leading man, is Orson Welles' 1958 border mystery Touch of Evil. Heston plays Mexican cop Vargas, just married to Janet Leigh; the movie takes them both down some nasty twists and turns before its conclusion. Was Heston underrated, or overrated? I was fond of him as a movie star, more than a great actor. But he acted in the style of the period.

Here's Variety's photo gallery, and the famous opening long shot:

Martin Scorsese has always used Rolling Stones songs in his films, so it made sense he would jump with both feet into the Stones concert documentary Shine A Light. This story goes back through Scorsese's oeuvre, Stones chapter and verse. UPDATE: Time's Richard Corliss explores Scorsese's love affair with docs and rock docs.

I particularly like this David Edelstein Shine a Light review. Edelstein also reviews Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, a movie I liked with reservations. She's a gifted, sensitive and compelling director; the movie is impeccably cast with some of the most riveting young actors working today. I cried at the tragedy of the trap these characters are in. UPDATE: Norman Lear reviews Stop-Loss.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who jumps for joy that the movie tanked, must not have seen it. Stop-Loss is 100 % on the side of the soldiers, even if it is critical of the government's "Stop-Loss" policies. (Mark Cuban and O'Reilly are having an ongoing battle over Iraq movies.)

But on one level O'Reilly has a point. As producer Jim Jacks (The Mummy) keeps saying, many of these Iraq movies are about victims, when audiences want active heroes, a competent military they can root for and believe in, even if our Iraq policy is a disaster. Peter Berg's The Kingdom was heading in that direction, but it was a complex FBI mystery thriller set in an unfocused past and it failed to resonate with people.

One of these Middle East movies will eventually hit the zeitgeist right. Most of them are victims of bad timing, really. While an ugly movie like Redacted was never going to find a following, most of these filmmakers were telling stories audiences just weren't ready to hear. It will be interesting to see what happens to Berg's upcoming Marcus Luttrell Navy Seal Afghanistan survivor story (if it ever gets made). For the moment Berg is going with a remake of the sc-fi fantasy Dune.

I'll never forget my first screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I went with a handsome kid from Andover who wanted to do what teenagers often do during movies. I made him stop. I didn't want to be distracted. Here's a lovely tribute with rich links by Ray Pride.

What took Hollywood so long to miss this clear marketing opportunity? Paramount, FanRocket, VooZoo and Facebook are joining forces to make thousands of clips from Paramount movies available on Facebook. Other studios may follow suit. I've been looking at more film clips on Facebook via Flixster, and I have no doubt that viral exposure to fave clips will boost DVD rentals and sales down the line. This is one sign that studios are prepping for the long tail world.

Meanwhile, at SXSW, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's key note speech was a huge sell-out, as rooms full of folks watched him on videoscreens. PaidContent has coverage and video. UPDATE: Zuckerberg's interlocuter got twittered by a hostile crowd.

Here's the 2002 Paramount logo with fanfare:

And a history of the Paramount mountain logo with stars:

Edward Copeland has posted his annual Oscar survey, this time on best and worst Best Actor Oscar wins; I participated. The results are fascinating. Who best stands the test of time? Who gets punished for winning for the wrong, hopelessly dated movie? Lots of folks. Movies that seemed fine at the time don't look so good in the here and now.

Still top of the world? Jimmy Stewart in Phaldelphia Story, Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, and character actors Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Paul Scofield, and F. Murray Abraham.

For those cinephiles who get New York's Channel Thirteen, critic and author Neal Gabler, New York Film Festival director Richard Pena and filmmaker Christine Turner will host Reel 13, WNET's new weekly Saturday night interactive cinema showcase. According to a press release, the show's weekly lineup of classic, short and indie pics is aimed at "anyone interested in watching, making, or discussing all genres of movies."

Gabler, Pena and Turner will each host one segment of the weekly broadcast. Gabler will introduce a classic film. Turner, whose films have screened at festivals and on TV, will provide background on shorts that will be submitted to Reel 13 and selected by viewers’ online votes. And Peña, who is Film Society of Lincoln Center program director as well as professor of film studies at Columbia University, will host the late-night indie features.

Reel 13 launches Saturday, January 5 at 9 p.m. on Thirteen.

Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander offers one of the great Christmas movie sequences ever:

[Hat Tip: Awards Daily]

When I was growing up, our family Christmas-watching rituals included A Christmas Carol, starring Alistair Sim as Mr. Scrooge, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Holiday Inn, featuring Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas.

But when you start a family, Christmas habits change. David added Bob Clark's A Christmas Story to our holiday ritual. And while Nora loves It's a Wonderful Life, she never responded to the black-and-white A Christmas Carol. And somehow, Richard Curtis's Love Actually has snuck into our regular Christmas viewing. Here's DVD Spindoctor's Christmas list.

And of course, no Christmas would be right without watching Judy Garland sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to the sobbing Margaret O'Brien in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis:

This is a strange 1963 TV reprise:

Anyone who likes old movies and freebies might want to check out Amazon Unbox's Free Classic Movie Week (ends Nov. 18). They're all digital downloads, most for rent, a few to own, all for free. Laurel and Hardy: Lost Films Volume 4 has skyrocketed up the Amazon Unbox chart to Number 8 bestselling download because of this sale.

Orson Welles directed the 1958 film noir classic Touch of Evil starring himself, Marlene Dietrich, Charlton Heston, and Janet Leigh. (Dennis Weaver and Mercedes McCambridge have memorable supporting roles.) Here's a clip of the masterful three-minute 20 second long-take opening shot which always takes my breath away. In the 1998 recut of the movie, based on Welles' infamous 58-page memo to Universal Studios, Henry Mancini's music and the credits were removed.

For more info, here's Roger Ebert and Filmsite. When you list your fave raves on Flixter (which is on Facebook), it supplies available clips and trailers.

This clip from the Howard Hawks 1938 classic comedy Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, is delicious, giddy fun. If there's anybody in today's acting pantheon who can do this kind of madcap slapstick comedy anymore, let me know. Maybe the Coens came closest with their acting ensemble in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The LAT bewails the lack of strong comedy roles for women. Brit Emily Mortimer does a good job in Lars and the Real Girl, which, happily, is picking up steam. Here's her New York Q & A.

William J. Mann's new book, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, features new material from the recently opened Hepburn private archives; he details her affair with macho director John Ford, and speculates on how close Hepburn got to crossing over to the lesbian side. (There are more than 20 books by or about Hepburn, whose account of shooting The African Queen with Bogey, Bacall and Huston is a must-read. There's also the gold standard, A. Scott Berg's authorized Kate Remembered.)

As for Howard Hawks, you won't do better than Todd McCarthy's engrossing biography, Howard Hawks; The Grey Fox of Hollywood. And here's Senses of Cinema on Hawks.

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) is a moodily atmospheric black-and-white sci-fi masterpiece starring tough-guy Eddie Constantine and Godard muse Anna Karina. In this clip they talk about love in a way that only Godard can:

This montage by critic Jim Emerson, inspired by the recent close-up blogathon, is very cool.

"I didn't think she could pull it off," said Kirk Douglas of outgoing American Film Institute chief Jean Firstenberg's feat of screening ten movies at the Arclight on one night, all presented by a star or filmmaker. George Lucas brought Star Wars, Tippi Hedron introed The Birds, Billy Crystal and Rob Reiner discussed When Harry Met Sally, Warren Beatty attended Bonnie and Clyde, Julie Andrews accompanied The Sound of Music, Jack Nicholson hosted One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Angela Lansbury talked Beauty and the Beast, Clint Eastwood spoke about Unforgiven, Sly Stallone came with Rocky, and Douglas introduced Spartacus.

The whole gang posed for one picture together, and at the AFI 40th anniversary lunch the following day, Douglas said, "I felt like a bobby soxer. Then when I introduced the movie, I felt like a movie star."

Here's one AICN report. And here's the LAT.

[Photo by LAT]

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner will screen at the New York Film Fest before playing in NYC. Here's an update on Blade Runner then and now. Here's Wired's uncut Ridley Scott interview.

At a recent dinner I got into a John Ford vs. Akira Kurosawa argument. It was about who was the best director of all time. It's damned close. Look at this fabulous list, organized by one of my favorite cinephile bloggers, Edward Copeland, of the top 100 foreign films of all time. I too voted for Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game as number one, and Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as number two. (My list is on the jump.) But I only allowed myself one movie per director on my list of 25. More Kurosawa films were nominated than any other director; the final top twenty boasts four of his films, and three by Ingmar Bergman. (When I made my final cut, I erred on the side of older films because I knew that more recent films from the likes of Werner Herzog and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu had an edge. I wasn't worried about them. I was right.)

[Posted by Peter Debruge]It was bound to happen: Cruising is back (in select theaters today, then DVD on Sept. 18), which meant some critic was going to come out and champion the movie as a maligned masterpiece, giving William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 thriller, set amid New York’s gay leather underground, a nice juicy writeup in some respectable publication. The Village Voice’s, Nathan Lee (who should really know better) took the bait this week, arguing that “Cruising’s lasting legacy isn’t political but archival” (but what film’s isn’t?).

Lee is generous to call the movie a “mediocre thriller,” and his faux nostalgia (we were both sucking pacifiers when the film came out, but those who were there know phony when they see it) for its “lurid fever dream of popper fumes, color-coded pocket hankies, hardcore disco frottage, and Crisco-coated forearms … when the naughtiest thing you can do in a New York gay club is light a cigarette” suggests he’s been hitting all the wrong parties.

So for Lee it’s a celebration of sorts, an outsider’s-eye-view of a bygone area, where homicidal danger presaged AIDS (as if that coincidence can be held to the film’s credit). Lee detects “a palpable sense of fun” where, “Nothing at the orgy is as shocking as the smile on everyone's face.” But this isn’t a Tom of Finland cartoon, made “for us, by us,” but a noxious exploitation picture. Yes, it was designed to shock, but the (nonexistent) smiles have nothing to do with it.

“I never made this movie as anti-gay or pro-gay. It was the background for a murder mystery,” Friedkin said last week (in a Q&A that wisely preceded a Hollywood screening with its share of walk-outs). But it’s clearly the background, not the murder mystery, that interested him at the time. [Before I get carried away, it’s worth reading GreenCine’ roundup of other cantankerous reactions.]

Here's Richard Corliss and Woody Allen. Todd McCarthy's appreciation. And Karina Longworth's collection of Bergman tributes.

Jon Swift, a proponent of the new school of film criticism called Derrierism, has a contrarian take on Bergman and Antonioni, which while I disagree with it, is provocative, well-written and represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films.

The more I think about it, the more depressed I am that so many ardent film fans will never watch the old classics, the silents, the great foreign films of Bergman, Antonioni, Murnau, Fassbinder, Dreyer, Eisenstein at al because they didn't grow up with them, their minds weren't shaped by them. They're too far away on some level.

Antonioni is an acquired taste. I certainly understand how tedious the films may seem to some. But Bergman is another matter. He's telling accessible and disturbing stories that probe and dissect human nature. And the films stand the test of time. Some Bergman films are impenetrable, while others have enormous impact. For me, The Magic Flute is sheer bliss, while Autumn Sonata hits me hard in my mother-daugher plexus. The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander boast the widest appeal, I think--I defy anyone to completely dismiss these films.

So I ask. Have the people making fun of Bergman actually watched the films?