In a statement posted on social media, the family said it was keeping the circumstances around his death private, but added that the 86-year-old was surrounded by his family and was at peace.
George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."
Released 85 years ago today, the black-and-white curio was also the only such film to give as much attention to the courtroom as the laboratory. As mild-mannered church organist Scot Webster (Philip Terry) finds himself accused of murdering a gang member, the first half largely plays out like a conventional legal thriller.
What does it mean to dig into the past, to uncover obscure facts about bygone decades or centuries and bring them to light in 2026? There's a lot of that in this rundown of February books, everything from a clear-eyed look at someone who history has depicted as a monster to investigations into the past situated a little closer to home.
AT FIRST GLANCE, the phrase "avant-garde advertising" might seem like a contradiction in terms: The avant-garde is assumed to be inherently anti-capitalist and the realm of advertising crassly commercial. But the involvement of avant-garde artists with advertising is in fact rich, complex, and long-standing, encompassing a full century of collaborations, critiques, and reworkings of all sorts. That entanglement-in all its diversity-is the topic
Nick Digilio has been a movie critic for 40 years, for many of those years on WGN radio, now with a popular podcast and hosting screenings in Chicago. And I've been talking to him about movies for 25 of those years. I still remember our first conversation, which included a discussion of "Donnie Darko" and the mid-century Hollywood director Douglas Sirk. He usually interviews me, but in honor of his new book, 40 Years, 40 Films, we switched, and I got to interview him.
Anderson's One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics ( The Ten Commandments) to musicals ( White Christmas) to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers ( Vertigo and North by Northwest).
1. The very first iteration of Ronald McDonald was created by Willard Scott in 1963: 2. The two people depicted in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" actually exist. This is what they looked like: 3. This is Margaret Gorman, the woman who won the very first Miss America competition in 1921: 6. This is Conrad Veidt, the man whose performance in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs inspired the look of the iconic villain the Joker:
"Resurrection," a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It's more like a love labyrinth-a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish. It's an ecstatic, extravagant work of artifice and imagination, and, from the start, Bi and his collaborators (they include the director of photography Dong Jingsong and the production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan) embrace their craft with a childlike sense of wonder and play.
Our insistent, perennial question is, "And then what happened?" But "what" only matters if we care about "who," and how they react and respond to what happens. The characters who stuck with me this year were on singular, propulsive journeys. They may have boarded a ship or hopped a train or ridden a spaceship, or stayed home and picked up a camera or a Ping-Pong paddle.
Toy Story was one of the most influential films in modern cinema. Directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar with release through Disney, it was the first fully computer-animated feature film, leading studios worldwide to pivot away from hand-drawn animation. The story features toys who spring to life when humans are not looking, notably Woody (Tom Hanks), a pull-string cowboy doll, and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a flashy new space-ranger who threatens Woody's status as Andy's favourite.
With Clint: The Man and the Movies, Portland author Shawn Levy provides the definitive biography of the iconic yet somehow ineffable Clint Eastwood, the 1950s TV cowboy who became a squinting big-screen megastar and a two-time Oscar-winning director and whose latest, last year's Juror #2, was released in his 95th year. The book has received rave reviews from A.O. Scott in The New York Times and Richard Brody in The New Yorker,
If you wish to become a cinephile worthy of the title, you must first pledge never to refuse to watch a film for any of the following reasons. First, that it is in a different language and subtitled; second, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow; fourth, that it is too long; and fifth, that it has no "story." These categories of refusal are what Lewis Bond, co-creator of the YouTube channel The House of Tabula, calls
Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
At first, film sim­ply record­ed events: a man walk­ing across a gar­den, work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry, a train pulling into a sta­tion. The medi­um soon matured enough to accom­mo­date dra­ma, which for ear­ly film­mak­ers meant sim­ply shoot­ing what amount­ed to stage pro­duc­tions from the per­spec­tive of a view­er in the audi­ence. At that stage, we could say, film still had­n't evolved past sim­ple doc­u­men­tary pur­pos­es, hav­ing yet to incor­po­rate edit­ing, to say noth­ing of the oth­er qual­i­ties we now regard as char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic.
A cofounder of New York's Anthology Film Archives, Sitney coined the term "structuralism" to identify the minimalist, formalist experimental film that arose in the 1960s, writing extensively about the form in a manner that was as clear and straightforward as his stated disdain for prestigious prizes.
Robert Altman's M*A*S*H introduced a new, immersive storytelling style, mixing gore and humor, while subverting traditional portrayals of war, establishing Altman as a unique voice in cinema.
