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Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba, who co-directed “They Shot the Piano Player,” first encountered the work of the film’s subject, Brazilian keyboardist Francisco Tenorio Júnior, in a record store twenty years ago. Trueba was so enraptured by the music that he looked Tenorio up online to see what else he’d done, and was horrified to learn…

My late husband Roger Ebert noted potential in Harold Ramis from the moment he awarded four stars to the first film that the “SCTV” star co-wrote, 1978’s hit comedy, “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” “The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological,” wrote Roger. “It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made ‘The Producers’ (1968).…

Director Tom Hooper had just won an Oscar for “The King’s Speech” and now he had his sights set on an even more technically ambitious undertaking, a big-screen, live-singing version of the beloved musical war horse “Les Misérables.” Casting Broadway veteran Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, the show’s tortured, noble reformed criminal, was a no-brainer.…

(Pictured: Portraits of Martin Scorsese at the Berlinale Palast. As filmmakers and cast members enter the theater for screenings, they autograph the photos—a process that the audience inside watches on the big screen.) Keeping up with Martin Scorsese at the Berlin Film Festival has been a full-time job. On Tuesday night, the director received an…

Everybody lies. Whether with malice, for self-preservation, or to spare another’s heart, fabrications lubricate or erode social interactions. But it’s in the liminal space between the idea of absolute certainty — an unattainable utopia — and the most outlandish of falsehoods where what matters most resides: how an event makes us feel overpowers the importance…