Lore in my wife’s family says that her mother, a beautiful Jewish immigrant fleeing grief in the Ukraine about a century ago, ran into someone named Carl Laemmle on a ship crossing the Atlantic. As the story goes, Laemmle asked her to check in with his still-young Universal film company, as she might have a future in…

Will there ever be another great journalism film? Given the chaos in both movies and the news media—audiences polarized, anonymous sourcing resurgent, Twitter rampant, prevailing narratives debunked (or not)—the temptation is to say, no, probably not.

But common sense says the next great media movie is bound to happen,…

In the mid-1980s, a common complaint among studio film distribution executives claimed there were just too many movies. What those moguls meant was that upstart independents, fueled by easy bank lending, junk bonds, and a seemingly bottomless well of home video revenue, were crowding screens with a sudden flush of, say…

Ostensibly, a brewing battle at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over possible new rules limiting Oscar eligibility for films that go straight from a couple of theaters to a digital streaming service like Netflix or Amazon is about technology.

Elementally, it is about a crisis in storytelling.

Hollywood …

A minor note on Sunday's much-discussed, host-free, wonderfully diverse Oscar ceremony: It was awfully rough on collaborators.

Time and again, the stage was filled with winners who smiled, nodded and got barely a word in edgewise, as a colleague sopped up the limelight.

Maybe there was a designated speaker rule. But if…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday sent members its annual report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2018, along with a video review of the year. As predicted, the big number was really big: Total assets of the nonprofit rose to $1,073,953,000, up almost 12 percent from 961,531,100 a year earlier…

It's that time of year again—not just for the Oscars, but for an annual financial report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which grants them.

Based on recent practice, it's likely that Academy members will get a look at their yearly report this month, before the February 24 awards presentation. We'r…

Is Roma about to hit The Wall? At the moment, it certainly looks that way, and a collision could mean yet another headache for the Oscars.

With 10 Oscar nominations and an often-predictive Critics’ Choice award under its belt, Alfonso Cuaron's Netflix drama about a housekeeper in Mexico City appears to be holding at…

The most fascinating part of Tuesday's Oscar nominations announcement will be watching to see whether someone, anyone, pops out of the bunker to say something, anything, about the issues afflicting the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of late.

In the best of circumstances, Hollywood's film Academy is about a…

Every day, in every way, the movies are getting better and better. Or so you might think, based on a steady increase in RottenTomatoes.com critical scores for wide film releases during the past nine years.

In a simple but intriguing exercise, movie marketing consultant David A. Gross recently calculated Rotten Tomatoes…

Here's a sobering thought as we turn toward the Golden Globes, wherein Adam McKay's Vice is the most-nominated film: All of last year's political movies combined have sold about as many tickets as one upper-middle horror hit.

In a year of partisan intensity, the top performer among movies with overt political themes wa…

When last seen (by me, anyway), Steven C. Barber had just decided to defer buying a Lexus. Instead, he invested his savings in a Variety "for your consideration" ad to boost his 2012 film Until They Are Home, about the recovery of military remains from the World War II battle of Tarawa.

Barber still doesn't have that n…