Casablanca

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeLook over the list of Best Picture winners over the years and you realise that almost every film selected is still in circulation.William Wellman’s Wings, the very first winner in 1927, is readily available on DVD and Blu-Ray, as are such other early winners as Cimarron and Broadway Melody.Most of the other Best Picture winners are titles that any film lover will recognise instantly.…

When Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, was recently extolling the capabilities of artificial intelligence, he turned to “Game of Thrones.”Imagine, he said, if you could use AI to rewrite the ending of that not-so-popular finale. Maybe even put yourself into the show. “That is what entertainment will look like,” said Brockman. Not six months since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is already prompting widespread unease throughout Hollywood. Concern over chatbots…

When Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, was recently extolling the capabilities of artificial intelligence, he turned to "Game of Thrones."Imagine, he said, if you could use AI to rewrite the ending of that not-so-popular finale. Maybe even put yourself into the show. "That is what entertainment will look like," said Brockman. Not six months since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is already prompting widespread unease throughout Hollywood. Concern over chatbots…

Aficionados of ’70s pop will fondly remember Casablanca Records as the home of KISS, Donna Summer, Parliament and more. Unfortunately, the biopic about its founder intentionally remembers him too fondly, hitting more wrong notes than right ones.“Spinning Gold” traces the story of gamblin’ dreamer and “record man” Neil Bogart (Jeremy Jordan), the singer-turned-music executive who audaciously launched the independent label, betting heavily on himself. The bet eventually paid off, providing parts of the soundtrack of the…

Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose. Humphrey Bogart is the tough, cynical American with a broken heart, brooding over chess problems in the private room of his bar in the Vichy-controlled Moroccan capital. Ingrid Bergman is his former lover Ilsa making a fateful reappearance; Paul Henreid is her husband, the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo to whom Rick gallantly concedes first place in Ilsa’s heart.It…

Many of the greatest films of all time have some triumph-over-adversity story to buffer their mythology: a chaotic production, weak box office, critics that didn’t get it at the time, a loss to some forgettable film during awards season. Their greatness has to be elusive and mysterious, in other words, something that couldn’t be comprehended until later, when they finally got the full appreciation they always deserved. The path to canonization tends to have its own, often formulaic narrative.That’s not what happened with…