f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

Forty-seven years after its premiere, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) has finally returned to its iconic setting of Los Angeles; a newly restored print begins a week-long run at the UCLA film archive tomorrow and is being used to promote at least one historical tour of Bunker Hill. Although the new print premiered in [...]

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The Round-Up (1966)
Just as I was grumbling that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent announcement of a Rohmer retrospective in September includes less than a dozen films–all of them readily available on DVD (not even The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque?)–LACMA has unveiled its October line-up, which more than makes up for [...]

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Michael Giacchino and Normand Roger
I sometimes complain about events at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (mostly for its industry-heavy programming, security procedures, and scary metal detectors), but the Academy provides more interesting fare than you might imagine. Last Sunday, they completely outdid themselves: for $5, the public was treated to catered [...]

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A few weeks ago, e-tailers announced a long-awaited two-disc DVD collector’s edition of The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s expressionist masterpiece about the resiliency of children in a nightmarish adult world, but as quickly as cinephiles could get excited, the release was abruptly postponed. The movie is well-deserving of special edition treatment, [...]

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For decades, the great visionary of film preservation and exhibition, Henri Langlois, dreamed of building a museum of the cinema despite exorbitant costs and dwindling resources, so he obsessively collected scripts, props, costumes, models, art work, and defunct equipment in the hopes of providing a space to honor the hallowed detritus of film production. [...]

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Now that the Moving Image Institute is over, some lingering images and quotes:
ïIndie publicists telling us they have no idea how three of their favorite films at Sundance–Sugar, Ballast, and Trouble the Water–could possibly be marketed to an ideal audience of young black viewers.
ï Gratitude toward Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum for being the only [...]

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More than once this weekend at the Moving Image Institute, we’ve been told that filmmakers have an intense, almost irrational desire to have their work exhibited theatrically rather than on video, even if that means losing considerable sums of money. Distributors shake their heads while describing filmmakers turning down straight-to-video deals or spending virtually [...]

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The last few days have been a true whirlwind at the Moving Image Institute in New York City, and I’ve only got a couple of hours before we’ll be seeing Gerald Peary’s new documentary on American film criticism. Rochelle Slovin, David Schwartz, Dennis Lim, and Livia Bloom (who just published an interview with Errol [...]

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When the Day Breaks
This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual animation tribute. It was devoted to five Canadian animators, all of them women, and it screened some of their definitive works produced at the National Film Board: Janet Perlman (The Tender Tale of Cinderella Penguin, 1981), Caroline Leaf [...]

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After a slow winter season for cinephiles in Los Angeles, the new Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood–the site for UCLA Film & Television Archive screenings–is in full operation; that is, if you overlook the late film starts, the mistimed electronic subtitles, and the misplaced DVD remotes. (The inaugural screening [...]

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