Waiting For Link Man

efilmcritic Erik Childress's wonderful annual list of Blurb Whores of the Year
THR August Osage County wins big at the Capri festival in Italy, winning four prizes. Harvey Weinstein and Chris Cooper were also honored at the festival. In non Weinstein awards they honored 12 Years a Slave, Saving Mr Banks, and The Great Beauty as well as Valeria Golino (remember her?) as European actress of the year
EW Downton Abbey on the cover. Can't wait for its return this weekend
Variety 3 time Oscar winning producer Saul Zaentz (Amadeus, Cuckoo's Nest and The English Patient) has passed away
i09 Disney Princess themed lingerie from Japan! 

MNPP vicious but true takedown of Ron Howard's Rush
Cinema Blend The Rock for a new iteration of Green Lantern? There are worse ideas, casting-wise I suppose but DC movies are so hopeless!
The Guardian finds that The Wolf of Wall Street uses the naughty F word 506 times, which "breaks down to Scorsese giving 2.81 fucks a minute." LOL. But who spent the three hours counting? That's what I want to know.
USA Today Character actor Joseph Ruskin (Prizzi's Honor, The Magnificent Seven) has passed away
The Wire as we move into the dumping ground of each film year (that'd be new January releases, not platformed holdovers) Joe Reid looks back at ten January releases that didn't suck
Vanity Fair funny Proust questionnaire with T Bone Burnett whose latest movie music work I can't stop listening to. That'd be Inside Llewyn Davis

Hitchcock with Barbara Harris on "Family Plot"Finally...
My friend Matthew Rettenmund who writes Boy Culture has compiled a list of all of Hitchcock's leading ladies who are still alive. (Make sure to note the punny captions). I found this list of ten surprising even though I recently made that oldest 100 screen actors of note list. He's right though that at least two of the major leading ladies (Doris Day & Julie Andrews) don't seem like Hitchcock heroines at all. I forget every time that they headlined one. Those moments were just so atypical in their careers, don't you think? 

Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)

First Peter O'Toole, and now Joan Fontaine (née Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland)? It's going to be a rough week. Hollywood lost another of its living giants this weekend when Ms Fontaine passed away of natural causes at 96 years of age. The two-time Hitchcock heroine, bizarrely the only actor to ever win an Oscar in one of his films, is survived by her daughter Debbie and her older estranged sister Olivia. Though Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland are the most successful sister movie stars of all time (both A listers, Oscar winners, and stars of at least one immortal classic) they were famously competitive, never got on well, and haven't spoken since 1975!

The actress would undoubtedly shoot us one of those delicious cocked eyebrow looks to hear her sister mentioned so prominently in all of her obituaries but Old Hollywood Mythology is too enticing to ignore. 

Though her career was very successful in the 40s, the 50s weren't as kind and like many Oscar winning actresses of her time she went Grande Dame Guignol in the 60s (American Horror Story didn't invent the stunt casting tradition of aging Best Actress winners in horror flicks); her last film was the Hammer Horror The Witches (1966). Have any of you seen it?

Five Must-Sees For Your Queue: The Women (1939), Rebecca (1940, Best Actress nomination, Best Picture winner), Suspicion (1941 Best Actress Oscar), The Constant Nymph (1943, Best Actress nomination) and Letters from an Unknown Woman (1948)

Curio: The Conde Nast Collection

Alexa here. In searching for holiday gift ideas this year, I keep coming back to The Conde Nast Collection. For a reasonable price (under $150), you can buy photographic prints of the work of some amazing photographers, including Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst and others.  Their collection from Vanity Fair is especially fine when it comes to the world of cinema. I've chosen some standouts to entice you if you feel like beautifying your walls or someone else's for Christmas... 

Click to read more ...

Where My Girls At: Post-Halloween Edition

TWO DAYS LATER... I've sucked at Halloween lately which is why I'm having trouble letting it go this weekend. I mean I really have. It was once my favorite official holiday (I'm still petitioning for Oscar Night to be a Federally recognized holiday because, duh, that's the best one) but for the past couple of years I haven't dressed up or celebrated and just haven't been feeling it. So Imma have to start planning my costume for 2014 now just so there's no backing out. If you've ever lost the love for a holiday and reclaimed it, do help me out in the comments. What to do???

Since the clock falls back one hour tonight (daylight savings endeth) I'm using that an excuse to pretend time and calendares are completely fluid/meaningless and it's not too late to post these pictures of two of TFE's most favorite ladies/actresses/divas/witches Nicole Kidman and Angela Bassett doin' the holiday up... and Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy co-starring again post The Heat for a little trick-or-treating

Click to read more ...

Team Top 10: Horror Films Before "The Exorcist"

It's Amir here, brining you this month's poll. It's October so we're obligated to take you to the dark depths of cinematic greatness with a list of horror goodies. We're looking at the best horror films of all time, with a twist. We chose The Exorcist (1973) as our milestone since it's the first horror film nominated for the best picture Oscar and about to celebrate its 40th anniversary. So we've split the Best list in half, with The Exorcist as cleaver. Part two comes next Tuesday, but for now

The Top Ten Best
Pre-Exorcist Horror Films

There really isn't much I can add by way of introduction, aside from pointing out that the boundaries of what is or isn't within the limits of this particular genre are blurry. Can Freaks still be considered a horror film today, removed from the initial shock of seeing circus performers with deformities on the screen in 1932? Cruel and unreasonable as it is, the appearance of the protagonists is the chief reason why such a passionately human piece of film history is considered scary at all - though as you will see below, one of our contributors has other ideas. No such questions would apply to Night of the Living Dead but what about Night of the Hunter? Hour of the Wolf? So on and so forth. The point is, take the genre categorizations with a grain of salt, but the suggestions to watch them very seriously. If you haven't seen any of these eleven films -- why is there always a tie? -- here's hoping this list persuades you to do so this October.

10. = Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dryer)
There’s never been a horror movie with stronger art film credentials than this one, made according to the then in-vogue Surrealist style by a director who’d already created The Passion of Joan of Arc and had Ordet yet to come. But just because Carl Theodor Dreyer was a proper “artist” doesn’t mean that Vampyr’s pleasures are exclusively aesthetic. In fact, the same dictatorial control over image and space that makes Ordet a spiritual masterpiece makes this familiar story of one man’s journey through a creepy rural town living in fear of a bloodsucking old woman one of the most thoroughly unsettling things you will ever experience. It's more of a walking tour through a nightmare than a clear-cut narrative, with eerie shadows and shapes every which way and a profoundly moody score by Wolfgang Zeller that jangles one’s very last nerves.
-Tim Brayton

ten more spooky films after the jump

Click to read more ...