The Last Laugh

Mar 5, 2018 — Along with 132 short films and a slew of masterclasses, installations, discussions, and other events, the Berlin International Film Festival presented 253 features this year. I managed to catch twenty-seven of them, and Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, winner of...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” reports Anita Gates...

Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...

Oct 26, 2020 — The very first romantic kiss between men on American television happens in Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. That kiss is between two Black men, and one of them is Riggs himself. As of this writing, if you look up...

Nov 4, 2014 — In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.

Dec 30, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin’s comedy has a secret ingredient that has bound us to him forever.

Aug 6, 2024 — Seventeen features are lined up to compete for the top prize in Locarno.

Jul 6, 2023 — The accomplished actor excelled at playing ordinary men facing down life’s most outrageous absurdities.

Dec 19, 2018 — The star of one of the biggest sitcoms in the 1970s directed three major hit films in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Jan 16, 2013 — Both sparkling and suspenseful, Alfred Hitchcock’s benchmark thriller is the perfect getaway, and it set the scene for much of the master’s later work.