Nicholas Ray

WESTERN SMACKDOWN! Joan Crawford squares off against Mercedes McCambridge in 1954's "Johnny Guitar" (10 a.m. and 8 p.m., Encore Westerns) - a lurid western for which the word "subtext" was invented. Directed like some fever dream by Nicholas Ray, the...

One of the many prescient lines uttered by Corinne Burns, the New Wave Lolita played by Diane Lane in 1982's "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains," comes after the drug-induced death of a has-been bass player in the ladies room of a scummy...

Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a...

BASIC CABLE "KING OF KINGS" *** 7 p.m., TCM After the chaos of unwrapping, gorging and socializing, sit the family down for this reminder of the reason for the season. Director Nicholas Ray's 1961 biography of Jesus stars Jeffrey Hunter -- whom "Star...

Maybe Andy Warhol didn't make the quintessential Pop Art masterwork. Maybe Jean-Luc Godard did. The filmmaker's sly, casually gorgeous 1967 film encapsulates a place and time--Paris, just before the spring of 1968--with droll acumen, as Godard nails...

So what do we have here? Mom seduced her stepson, who now wants little or nothing more to do with her. Dad found out about her fling and seeks payback by slowly and deliberately poisoning her. One of the other sons finds out about Dad's plan and wants...

The American Cinematheque's fourth annual "Screwball Holidays" series continues at the Egyptian Theatre tonight with one of Bob Hope's best films, the 1940 comedy-chiller "The Ghost Breakers." Hope and his co-star Paulette Goddard had scored a big...

MAY 13 A Hole in One Drama. The idea: A young woman considers a lobotomy to solve her problems in 1953. With: Michelle Williams, Meat Loaf, Bill Raymond. Writer-director: Richard Ledes. So? Extreme solution Kicking and Screaming Sports comedy. The idea:...

NOIR is the indigenous Los Angeles form: It was created here, it grew up here and from here it spread, not only as a genre but as a way of looking at life, character and fate. As a framing lens, it's now so powerful that it seems not only to be a strategy...

"East of Eden," directed by Elia Kazan from Paul Osborn's adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel, and Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause," screen at the Nuart this week in a 50th anniversary double feature representing two-thirds of James Dean's...

Nobody writes songs about January in Paris. It's cold and bleak, and the impenetrable rain clouds make 8 a.m. as dark as midnight. It's perfect weather for going to the movies, which is what I do. But I also go to the movies in Paris in April, May and...

Ever since his mother went to work on Sept. 11 and did not come home, Brian Muniz has peppered his aunts with questions about heaven. What is heaven like, the Ridgewood 7-year-old wants to know. If the angels sing, do they play guitars? And the zinger:...