Ernst Lubitsch

Contemplating the fragility of life at the individual, racial and species levels, EM Lewis' new drama, "Song of Extinction," artfully balances its theme of mortality between the intimate and the macroscopic. Revolving around the tenuous connection...

"To be or not to be" is not the question. Why? Now that's the question. The Manhattan Theatre Club has laboriously put together a pointless stage version of "To Be or Not To Be," the backstage Nazi-spy farce about a Polish theater company oppressed by...

MOVIES W. Oliver Stone's biopic features Josh Brolin as our current president and Elizabeth Banks as his wife. Opens Friday. See story on C8. WHAT JUST HAPPENED. Robert DeNiro plays a Hollywood producer in this film based on a book by Hollywood producer...

THE six nominees for this year's best director Academy Award have made a total of 23 feature films. To put that meager number into perspective, consider this: "The Departed," which finally won Martin Scorsese his directing Oscar last year (on his sixth...

The UCLA Film & Television Archive is no small place. The Library of Congress aside, it's the biggest collection in the country, with film holdings alone numbering a staggering 85,000 titles. Wouldn't you like to take a peek at the rarities hidden in...

The fetching comedy "Priceless" ("Hors de Prix") weighs about as much as its star, Audrey Tautou, but like Tautou's pleasingly craven heroine it knows exactly what it's doing. Tautou plays a gold digger working her way through a series of sugar daddies in...

Funny people would rather be funny than talk about how to be funny. As a result, the promise by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that writers Judd Apatow, James L. Brooks and Larry Gelbart would “crack the code of contemporary screen...

Today, Andrew Breitbart and David Ehrenstein discuss what role filmmakers should and do play in the domestic debate. Yesterday, they pondered the fall season of antiwar flicks. Later in the week they'll attempt to define Hollywood values, locate Hollywood...

4 stars (out of four) "Private Fears in Public Places" is a film about love and blunders done from the perspective of age, crafted by writer Alan Ayckbourn, 68, and director Alain Resnais, 85. Our younger directors and screenwriters should show this much...

BILLY WILDER HAD THREE GREAT LOVES — his wife, Audrey, cinema and collecting art. So it only seems natural that UCLA Film & Television Archive's new home, titled the Billy Wilder Theater and made possible by a $5-million donation from his widow,...

4 stars (out of four) Few movie goddesses can break your heart like saucy, black-banged Louise Brooks, whose centennial comes this year and whose best film and performance, as Lulu in G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box," plays this weekend at the Music Box...

Here is your starter question. In the following four trios, explain what the three people have in common, and identify what unifies each of the groupings: a. Alan Hale; Henry Blanke; Sid Hickox b. Arthur Freed; Joseph Ruttenberg; Frank Morgan c. Travis...