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Shirley Anne Field, the British leading lady who starred alongside Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Kenneth More in Man in the Moon — all in 1960 — has died. She was 87.

“It is with great sadness that we are sharing the news that Shirley Anne Field passed away peacefully on Sunday, Dec. 10, surrounded by her family and friends,” a spokesperson announced.

“Shirley Anne will be greatly missed and remembered for her unbreakable spirit and her amazing legacy spanning more than five decades on stage and screen.”

For her first Hollywood film, Field passed up John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving to star opposite Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner in the World War II drama The War Lover (1962). It was a decision she would regret, she explained in a 2009 interview.

“I finally had a chance to go to Hollywood and become a worldwide name.

Cinematography retrospectives are the way to go—more than a thorough display of talent, it exposes the vast expanse a Dp will travel, like an education in form and business all the same. Accordingly I’m happy to see the Criterion Channel give a 25-film tribute to James Wong Howe, whose career spanned silent cinema to the ’70s, populated with work by Howard Hawks, Michael Curtz, Samuel Fuller, Alexander Mackendrick, Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, and Raoul Walsh.

Further retrospectives are granted to Romy Schneider (recent repertory sensation La piscine among them), Carlos Saura (finally a chance to see Peppermint frappe!), the British New Wave, and groundbreaking distributor Cinema 5, who brought to U.S. shores everything from The Man Who Fell to Earth and Putney Swope to Pumping Iron and Scenes from a Marriage.

September also yields streaming premieres for the recently restored Bronco Bullfrog, Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands,...

It’s that time of year again. While some directors annually share their favorite films of the year, Steven Soderbergh lists everything he consumed, media-wise. For 2021––another year in which he not only released a new film, but shot another (and produced the Oscars)––he still got plenty of watching in.

Along with catching up on 2021’s new releases, he took in plenty of classics, including Jaws, Citizen Kane, Metropolis, The French Connection, and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka and Design For Living. Early last year, he also saw a cut of Channing Tatum’s Dog, which doesn’t arrive until next month. He also, of course, screened his latest movies while in post-production, with three viewings of No Sudden Move and three viewings of Kimi, which arrives on February 10 on HBO Max and the first look of which can be seen below.

Check out the list below via his official site.

John Schlesinger decided not to attend the Academy Awards in 1970, even though his film “Midnight Cowboy” had been nominated for Best Picture and he was up for Best Director. On the evening of April 7, 1970, otherwise known as Oscar night, the British director remained in London with his American boyfriend, the photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger didn’t want to make the brutal 24-hour roundtrip flight to Hollywood and back, and besides, he was well into production on his follow-up film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” For him, it was a very personal project, and, in some ways, an even more controversial film than “Midnight Cowboy.”

As Schlesinger explained it, the genesis of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” went back to the early 1960s when he was directing his first play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “At the time, I had a very intense affair with one of the actors, a man who was bisexual,” Schlesinger recalled.

Above: Hungarian poster for The Sleeping Car Murders. Designer: Sándor Benkő.Last summer I wrote about my discovery of Hungarian movie poster design and featured a number of posters for very well known films from The Wizard of Oz to The Elephant Man. Those posters highlighted the distinctly different graphic approaches taken by Hungarian designers compared to their country-of-origin counterparts. But while delving deeper into the world of Hungarian poster design—mostly via the auction site Bedo—I have come across many even more remarkable designs for films that are less well known. The fifteen posters that I’ve chosen to highlight here were all made in the ’60s and ’70s and there is a distinct pop art sensibility at work: a lot of bold, primary colors and almost cartoonish illustrations, but always in the service of bold, striking graphics. Distinctly upbeat, while perhaps not expressly joyful, they do give...

Lyon, France – Since its launch in 2015, Talking Pictures TV has become the fastest-growing independent channel in the U.K. with a growing library of British film and TV titles that span five decades, according to founder Noel Cronin.

Noel Cronin attended the Lumière Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France, where he took part in a roundtable discussion on distribution of heritage cinema.

His 24-hour channel offers feature films and TV series from the 1930s to the 1980s, reaching some 850,000 viewers a day and 2.6 million a week. Talking Pictures TV is available in the U.K. on the Sky digital satellite platform, Freeview and other satellite outlets.

Talking Pictures TV grew out of Cronin’s DVD distribution company, Renown Pictures.

“We acquired several old libraries – mostly B-features, but good ones,” Cronin explains. “We started to release them on DVD and they sold quite well. … We felt there...

Nothing But the Best (1964) signifies a turning point in the British new wave: a sudden flip from grim northern drama to swinging London archness, here under the controls of three masters of that tone.1. Frederic Raphael is best known for writing Two For the Road (impossibly arch) and Eyes Wide Shut (strange... very strange), and this film does have some kind of commonality with those: glamorous young people, sporty cars, hard-to-get-into parties in sprawling country houses... but in essence it's more like a glib black comedy version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Raphael had previously adapted the source story (by American crime writer Stanley Ellin) as a TV play, and in expanding it for cinema he threw out the ironic twist of fate that dooms the murderous, social-climber anti-hero, perhaps seeing it as an old-fashioned harking-back to Kind Hearts and Coronets (whose ironic twist was imposed by the censor). Now...

May 7th is a relatively quiet day of genre-related Blu-ray and DVD releases, so I’ll keep this installment of our ongoing home media column series on the short and sweet side. If you dig creepy kid horror and you happened to miss it in theaters earlier this year, Nicholas McCarthy’s The Prodigy comes home on Tuesday, and for those of you who might be more into nunsploitation stories, St. Agatha is set to arrive on both formats this week. Cult film fans can finally add The Nightcomers and The Man Who Haunted Himself (featuring Roger Moore) to their Blu-ray collections, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army is making its 4K debut on May 7th as well.

The Nightcomers

Two Children… Two Adults… One Unspeakable Crime! Captivating and disturbing, this highly intense psychological drama with its haunting, twisted notion of sexuality puts a new spin on the characters from Henry James’ celebrated ghost story,...

Above: UK one sheet for The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, UK, 1978)One of the greatest but perhaps less heralded of British actors, Sir Alan Bates (1934-2003) is being deservedly feted over the next week at the Quad Cinema in New York with the retrospective series Alan Bates: The Affable Angry Young Man. The title makes sense: before he had acted on film Bates was in the original West End and Broadway productions of Look Back in Anger, but he played not the disaffected anti-hero Jimmy Porter, made famous on film by Richard Burton, but the amiable Welsh lodger Cliff. Though a performer of great virility, intelligence and passion, he often played second fiddle to his more demonstrative co-stars—whether Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (1964), Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (1966), Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), or Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978). Consequently, he is...

The L-Shaped Room

Blu ray

Twilight Time

1962 / 1:85 / 126 Min. / Street Date December 19, 2017

Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters

Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe

Written by Bryan Forbes

Music by Brahms, John Barry

Edited by Anthony Harvey

Produced by Richard Attenborough

Directed by Bryan Forbes

The winter of 1962 found British films at their most grandiose and self-effacing. Opening at the Odeon was Lawrence of Arabia, using every inch of that cavernous theater’s wide screen. Five minutes up the road Dr. No had just premiered in the smaller but no less lofty London Pavilion.

On the other side of the tracks art houses were bringing starry-eyed Brits back to earth with austere fare like John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Those sober-minded dramas, shot in low key black and white with ramshackle flats and grey skies as their backdrops,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) is playing July 16 - August 15, 2017 in the United States as part of the series John Schlesinger's First Masterpieces.Billy Fisher, a cheerful twenty-something lad from Yorkshire, is going to have a great future. For now, he only has a small office position in his dull small city, but Billy has already landed a job in London writing for a popular TV comedian. He is also working on a novel that soon enough will bring him fame and fortune. He is also engaged to a girl. Actually, two girls. And he doesn’t really want to marry any of them. Also, the TV star doesn’t really know that Billy exists. And he hasn’t started on the novel. Billy just has a vivid imagination and speaks before he thinks—some people prefer to call it compulsive lying.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)

Kirsten Johnson brings us her memoirs by way of a videographic scrapbook. Bits and pieces of the numerous documentaries she’s shot in her years as a Dp have been woven together into a travelogue / ethnographic study / commentary on the nature of cinematic framing. What was an establishing shot in one doc becomes, here, a study of the vagaries of a camera operator’s job. Documentary...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Kings Theatre

Barry Lyndon will screen with a live orchestra on Saturday night.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Color of Pomegranates, The Red Shoes, and an avant-garde program will show this Sunday as part of Scorsese’s restoration series

Metrograph

“The Singularity” continues with more sci-fi essentials.

Two Altman films screen on Saturday.

Newman,...

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out.

Three New Movies May Have Trouble Making Much of a Mark

After a couple impressive March weekends with one new box office record, and a couple impressive openings, we’re now into April, and of the new movies, there just doesn’t seem like anything can defeat last week’s powerful duo of DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby--which exceeded all predictions with $49 million, taking the top spot from Beauty and the Beast. Ghost in the Shell didn’t even do as well as I thought it may, opening with just $19 million, those late reviews helping to kill its weekend.

Sony Pictures Animation are giving the loveable blue Smurfs a third go at American audiences with The Smurfs: The Lost Village (Sony), after two previous movies,...

StudioCanal UK has released the brand new (and shiny) trailer for the restoration of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” Last August, the BBC conducted a poll of more than 177 film critics around the world to determine which were the best films of the 21st century, and Lynch’s iconic 2001 film topped the list. Now, 16 years after its premiere, the mystery/thriller has gotten a 4K restoration under the supervision of Lynch himself, and it’s ready to hit UK theaters.

Read More: David Lynch Revisited: Why We Need His Genius Now More Than Ever — Critics Debate

The surrealistic film follows a woman (Laura Harring) who becomes amnesic after a car accident on Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive and an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts). The two embark on a search for clues throughout the city, where dreams and reality intertwine.

Read More: David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan Start the ‘Twin Peaks’ Reunion...

Get ready, John Schlesinger fans, as the filmmaker’s debut feature “A Kind of Loving” has gotten the full restoration treatment, and will next be screened following Film Forum’s Brit New Wave festival, which aims to spotlight British films of the 1960’s. Though not an official part of the festival, it’s a canny topper to the ambitious slate.

Alan Bates, in his first starring role, along with June Ritchie and Thora Hird star in this classic romantic drama that took place just before the Beatles revolution. Vic and Ingrid have a shotgun civil wedding when she becomes pregnant after their one-night stand (because he was too embarrassed to buy condoms from a woman at the drugstore, what a time!) and move in with Ingrid’s vengeful, disapproving mother.

Read More: Brit New Wave Classics ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Alfie’ and More Get Swinging at New Festival — Watch...

Screen Media Films has released the first trailer for The Void, which is slated to hit theaters in limited released and arrive on VOD platforms April 7. This terrifying thriller has been winning rave reviews from hitting the festival circuit, after making its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas back in September. If this new footage is any indication, which features some of the critical praise from the festivals, fans of 80s horror films will be in for one hell of a ride.

In the middle of a routine patrol, officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Carter) happens upon a blood-soaked figure limping down a deserted stretch of road. He rushes the young man to a nearby rural hospital staffed by a skeleton crew, only to discover that patients and personnel are transforming into something inhuman. As the horror intensifies, Carter leads the other survivors on a hellish voyage into the...

Shot and set in Manchester in 1962, A Kind of Loving was one of the seminal kitchen sink dramas of post-war British cinema. Made before Darling and Billy Liar, the film stars Alan Bates as a young draftsman in pursuit of fellow factory worker June Ritchie, making her screen debut. In this exclusive clip, he pursues her on the bus trip back home

• The restored print of A Kind of Loving screens as part of the Cinema Rediscovered season at Watershed, Bristol on July 29 and is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 1 August

Continue reading...

Miscasting in films has always been a problem. A producer hires an actor thinking that he or she is perfect for a movie role only to find the opposite is true. Other times a star is hired for his box office draw but ruins an otherwise good movie because he looks completely out of place.

There have been many humdinger miscastings. You only have to laugh at John Wayne’s Genghis Khan (with Mongol moustache and gun-belt) in The Conqueror (1956), giggle at Marlon Brando’s woeful upper class twang as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and cringe at Dick Van Dyke’s misbegotten cockney accent in Mary Poppins (1964). But as hilarious as these miscastings are, producers at the time didn’t think the same way, until after the event. At least they add a bit of camp value to a mediocre or downright awful movie.

In rare cases,...

by Ryan Rigley

There have been a number of huge DC character cameos throughout this season of "Arrow," but none of which have had anything to do with Oliver Queen's most trusted superhero partner: Hal Jordan, a.k.a. Green Lantern. However, with a recent statement from "Arrow" producer Marc Guggenheim, it seems like all of that is likely to change at some point in the not-too-distant future, starting with the Ferris Air jet logo from the "Green Lantern" film making an appearance in the season finale.

"I would never say never, it's certainly something that we've talked about," Guggenheim reveals in a recent interview with TV Guide. "As with all DC characters, we have to figure out a way for those characters to fit within our 'Arrow' universe, but when you consider the importance that Hal Jordan plays in the Green Arrow comics, it's certainly one of...

(John Schlesinger, 1963, Studiocanal, 15)

One of the key movies of the British new wave, Billy Liar began life in 1959 as a brilliant comic novel by Keith Waterhouse (clearly influenced by James Thurber's 1939 New Yorker story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), and in 1960 Waterhouse and his regular writing partner Willis Hall turned it into a play that Lindsay Anderson directed in the West End. It was filmed 50 years ago this month under the direction of former actor and documentary maker John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay (who took over the title role on stage from Albert Finney) is superb as the sad 19-year-old Billy Fisher, who escapes from his dreary lower-middle-class background and dead-end job as an undertaker's clerk through his dreams of becoming a writer, his habitual lying, and his fantasies about being a hero in the imaginary country of Ambrosia.

The film takes place over a single busy Saturday during which he juggles two fiancees,...

Versatile actor who brought depth and humanity to supporting roles

The actor Pat Keen, who has died aged 79, had a successful career in supporting roles for more than half a century. She possessed an uncommon versatility, as happy in Chekhov and Ibsen as she was feeding lines to Les Dawson, whom she adored. For all that she was in demand in later years to play harridans and busybodies, she never resorted to caricature. She believed in the people she portrayed, breathing life into the stereotypes beloved by too many writers of comedy for television. She refused to take the easy route of playing for laughs, whether on stage or screen.

Pat was born and raised in Willesden, north-west London. She left school after taking A-levels, and it was because of her ability to speak very good colloquial French that she secured a post at the Foreign Office when she was 18. Two years later,...

I saw this movie for the first and only time crossing the Atlantic in 1957, on the Mauritania, on the way to the States. My fellow English Speaking Union scholars and I, still in the grip of Look Back in Anger and seething from the moral and political debacle of Suez, regarded it with mirthful contempt. It was the kind of stilted, patronising British movie about working-class and lower-middle-class life we were in flight from after we'd just embraced Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, The Catered Affair and The Bachelor Party, and been thrilled by Ealing's Alexander Mackendrick making his American debut with Sweet Smell of Success. It's now being revived, or disinterred, as a major harbinger of British kitchen-sink realism, a term coined in the mid-1950s by my future mentor David Sylvester.

The movie turns upon a lower-middle-class clerk (stiff-upper-lip specialist Anthony Quayle) preparing to leave his loving, depressed, slatternly...

Writer whose novels signalled a sea-change in British literature

Stan Barstow, who has died aged 83, belonged to a generation of working-class writers who became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like his peers Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Keith Waterhouse, he was born in the depression years of the interwar period and flowered as a novelist in the booming welfare state of postwar Britain. Barstow and his fellow, primarily northern, writers were products of this remarkable transformation in the social landscape of Britain, and their creativity was fuelled by the opportunities and anxieties that such an enormous process of change inevitably generated.

Barstow arrived on the literary scene in 1960 with his first published novel, A Kind of Loving. An unsentimental and unpatronising portrayal of an unhappy marriage, it struck a new note of sombre and sensitive realism. He was riding the crest of a wave: Braine's...

Channel kitchen-sink drama A Taste of Honey as you stroll down the Manchester ship canal or gaze wistfully from Barton Road Swing Bridge

Nothing says "Who needs Koh Samui?" quite like a few days' isolation in a poky bedsit on the outskirts of town, right? Which is why you've wisely plumped to spend your holiday abiding by the rules of the gritty British kitchen-sink drama. And why not? As Joy says at the beginning of Ken Loach's Poor Cow: "The world was our oyster … and we chose Ruislip."

Now, the good news is that you don't have to go to Ruislip. However, the bad news is that you do have to go somewhere that's not exactly known for sun, sand and surf. The east Midlands (Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Yorkshire (Billy Liar, This Sporting Life) and Lancashire (A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey...

A rude, bracing slice of East End life that dropped off screens for decades, Bronco Bullfrog is finally back. Xan Brooks talks to the survivors of a British classic

One night in November 1970, Princess Anne tripped along to Oxford Circus for the London premiere of Three Sisters, a film starring and directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, who had recently been made a life peer in the birthday honours list. A pleasant evening lay in store – except that there, on the red carpet, the princess found herself face-to-face with the hoi polloi, the great unwashed. Some 200 members of the Beaumont youth club out in Leyton, east London, had shown up to jeer her. Some were reported to have chucked tomatoes at her head. These protesters did not think the princess should be on her way to see some stuffy Chekhov drama by a peer of the realm. They wanted her to...

The creators of The Office revisit the suburban 70s for a coming-of-age tale involving three unlikely lads

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the specialists in embarrassment comedy who created the TV series The Office and Extras, revisit the suburban Thames Valley of their youth in the early 1970s for a coming-of-age tale involving three unlikely though not implausible working-class lads.

One is a charmlessly aggressive factory worker, the second is bent on social advancement by way of a steady job in insurance, the third is a dim-witted, maladroit railway porter. They get drunk, chase girls, pick fights, and are as aimless as the society they inhabit. All three have their prototypes in the British films of the 50s and 60s, which Gervais and Merchant set out to emulate, most notably Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Billy Liar and A Kind of Loving. But by the time...

Celebrated author and playwright Keith Waterhouse has died at his home in London.

The Billy Liar and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell writer passed away in his sleep on Friday morning. He was 80.

His death comes after a short undisclosed illness.

Born in Leeds, England, Waterhouse started his career as a clerk in an undertaker's office, which inspired his first bestseller and play, Billy Liar.

He served in the Royal Air Force and then signed on as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post newspaper.

He became a Daily Mirror journalist in the early 1950s and his literary skills were so renowned he frequently wrote speeches for top politicians like Harold Wilson.

He wrote his first novel, There Is A Happy Land, in 1956 and went on to create one of the West End's favourite shows Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on his friend Bernard's weekly Low Life columns in the Spectator magazine.

Waterhouse and Bernard also co-scripted two beloved British films, Whistle Down The Wind and A Kind Of Loving.

He was nominated for the Best British Screenplay BAFTA three years running in the early 1960s.

Actor Alan Bates, who came to fame as one of British cinema's "angry young men" of the 60s and whose heralded stage and screen career was marked by a love of acting as opposed to fame, died Saturday night in London after a long battle with cancer; he was 69. Educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bates indeed helped launch the genre of angry young men plays by starring in John Osbourne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, which started him on a stage career that was marked by innumerable roles created by classic playwrights. His first major film role in 1960 was opposite none other than Laurence Olivier in Osbourne's The Entertainer, in which Bates and a young Albert Finney played the sons of Olivier's shabby vaudevillian. Roles in Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and The Running Man followed, but it was Bates' two successive performances in Zorba the Greek and Georgy Girl that helped make him a film star; the former film, in which he played a repressed Englishman opposite Anthony Quinn's life-affirming Zorba, received a Best Picture nomination. Bates himself received a Best Actor nomination for John Frankenheimer's The Fixer (1968), and a year later earned more fame and a bit of notoriety for Ken Russell's erotic adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, in which he wrestled naked with Oliver Reed. Notable film roles also included Far From the Madding Crowd, An Unmarried Woman, The Rose and his turn as Claudius in Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Bates also won a Tony award in 2002 for Turgenev's Fortune's Fool and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1995 and knighted last year. Most recently, Bates was seen onscreen in the thriller The Sum of All Fears, Robert Altman's Oscar-winning Gosford Park and this year's drama The Statement. Bates, whose son Tristan died in 1990 and wife Victoria Ford died in 1992, is survived by two brothers, son Benedick, and a granddaughter. --Prepared by IMDb staff...