Latest in The Graduate

Now that we're entering Year 2 of our pandemic purgatory, here's at least one positive takeaway: We're coming to terms with our past — our movie past, that is. Two films circa 1951 and 1966 represent a personal case in point. Miracle In Milan (1951) starts with a lost baby and an operatic cop, but it's touching and…

Author Charles Webb, whose first novel The Graduate inspired the 1967 film, died June 16 in Eastbourne, England of a blood condition, according to his friend, journalist Jack Malvern. The Graduate was published in 1963, and was adapted into the Mike Nichols film starring Dustin Hoffman just four years later. The book…

Buck Henry, the legendary screenwriter behind The Graduate and What’s Up, Doc? who also co-created Get Smart and was a regular presence in the early years of Saturday Night Live, died tonight of a heart attack at Cedars-Sinai Health Center in Los Angeles. He was 89. A family member confirmed the news to…

The reviews were strong. Filmgoers in key markets lined up around the block. Enthusiastic media coverage of the $3.2 million dark horse stunned industry veterans. Given this reception, the confrontation between producer and distributor was inevitable: With the Oscars looming, there surely had to be a campaign to…

I already had a headache from fretting about the ballot measure to split California. Who gets the water? What happens to Prop 13? Where's Yosemite? Can we still repeal the gas tax? Are the prisons in one state, the criminals in another? What about the bullet train? How do we divvy up Jerry Brown's legacy? Then I came…

Sex is getting a raw deal in movies and TV. That rather unoriginal idea occurred to me this week as I revisited two sterling late-'60s movies, Goodbye Columbus and The Graduate, which treated sexuality both humorously and, well, lovingly (more on that later). No one would employ those terms today to describe sex as…

While Hollywood studios are raking in the bucks but not elevating the quality of cinema with summer sequels and superhero fare including this weekend’s July 4 openers Magic Mike XXL and Terminator: Genisys, Dustin Hoffman is getting notice for a comment that we’re sure is common among his peers who came up before…

UPDATED: Legendary film and theater director, writer and producer Mike Nichols has passed away. An Oscar winner for 1967’s seminal The Graduate, he also was nominated for such films as Working Girl, Silkwood and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? For his stage work, he amassed 10 Tony Awards including as director for…