Happy Birthday, Laura Dern!

by Cláudio Alves

Laura Dern has been blessing us with her existence for 55 years. The Oscar-winning actress started young, being the daughter of two screen titans in their own right – Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. Indeed, one of her earliest big-screen roles was by her mother's side in Martin Scorsese's 1974 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Since then, Dern has flourished into one of American cinema's most important modern performers. Often driven to auteurs with bold visions, she's a director's actress whose commitment to her roles is never in question. She's never in danger of dispassionate acting, giving it her all 100% of the time and often twisting her visage into terrifying extremes. She really is 'The Face.'

To celebrate the occasion, a list of favorite Laura Dern film performances…

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How Had I Never Seen..."Blue Velvet"

We're revisiting 1986 this month leading up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. 

by Ben Miller

I’m not a David Lynch person.  My first exposure to anything he made was The Straight Story, the most un-Lynchian thing he ever did.  I wasn’t around the people who cared about Twin Peaks the television show, the film or the subsequent revival series.  I enjoy the levels of surreal like David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos, but Lynch is a level of bizzare I wasn’t willing to commit myself to caring about.

But, being the Oscar completist that I am, I gave a shot to Mulholland Drive, and I really took to it.  It was during the viewing of Mulholland Drive that I realized what made Lynch different from other filmmakers...

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Showbiz History: Shirley & Bill, Julianne & Eddie, Slumdog & Oscars

6 random things that happened on this day, February 22nd in showbiz history...

1921 Fellini's muse Giulietta Masina (Nights of Cabiria, La Strada) is born in San Giorgia di Plano, Italy. But more on her tonight for her Centennial.

1935 The Little Colonel opens in theaters. The movie featured the first interracial dance in an American movie in the famous staircase tap dance scene between tiny Shirley Temple and trailblazing entertainer Bill Robinson. The innocuous scene was somehow controversial (the 1930s, natch) and was reportedly cut out of the movie when it played in the South...

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Would you rather?

Since everyone is bored inside, let's fantasize about being quarantined with celebs. Would you rather...

• do a Ghibli jigsaw puzzle with Connor Jessup?
• dance with Pedro Pascal and Miguel Angel Silvestre?
• cook with Florence Pugh?
• foster a pet with Gilles Marini?
• cut Ted Danson's hair with Mary Steenburgen?
• devour a bottle of khilji with Deepika Padukone?
• skateboard with Liam Hemsworth? 
• get blue with Jamie Dornan?
• play with your food with Laura Dern? 
• self grooming with Leslie Jordan? 
• meditate with Marion Cotillard? 

Pictures are after the jump to help you decide...

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Doc Corner: David Lynch and the Allure of 'Blue Velvet Revisited'

By Glenn Dunks

The massive DOC NYC festival continues this week in New York City until the 16th, showcasing over 250 films and events. We have one more capsule collection to go up the coming days to close out the festival, but today we're entering the wonderful and strange world of David Lynch in Blue Velvet Revisited, which screens tonight at Cinepolis Chelsea at 9.30pm.

I don’t know about you, but 2017 hasn’t been the strongest year for movies in my eyes. Part of that may have to do directly with the product itself. But a more significant part is that quite literally no movie I have seen this year has had quite the gravitational pull of Twin Peaks. The return of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s classic 1990s television series was maligned by many, but found a dedicated collection of fans for whom it was 18-hours of pure Lynchian madness, the likes of which have been frustratingly missing from our lives since the magically-coiffed master packed up his lawn chair on Sunset Boulevard after trying to milk a much-deserved Oscar campaign for Laura Dern’s performance in Inland Empire in 2006. The series was, simply put, working on a whole different level to every movie I’ve seen in the last 12 months.

Lynch’s mystique is almost as famous as his film and television projects...

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