Jean-Christophe Novelli was born to play himself on TV. An acclaimed chef with restaurants in London, France and South Africa, Novelli has movie-star good looks, a thick French accent, a piercing gaze and a real talent for making cooking students feel intimidated, then adored, then unnerved, then undermined.

Criterion couldn't have chosen better than Wim Wenders' luminous Wings of Desire for Blu-ray release.

In celebration of Criterion's deluxe double-DVD and Blu-ray treatment of Wings of Desire , my Benten Films partner-in-crime Andrew Grant and I rewatched Wim Wenders ' 1987 masterpiece to discuss the film's elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully.

Lots of readers, perhaps gleening where this conversation was heading anyway, have already started sending me nominations for the worst remakes .

More than 25 movies rescued from the ravages of time and neglect will be featured in this year's edition of "To Save and Project," the Museum of Modern Art's annual festival of recently preserved films.

There was a farce comedy movie back in the 60s called "The Great Race". It starred Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn, just about anybody who was farcical comedies back then.

Our Racers leave Vietnam behind for Phnom Penh, Cambodia . We have an exotic Foreign Correspondents Club, a photo of Queen Elizabeth that's really Jackie Kennedy, reluctant Cambodians being grabbed by their scarves and monkey training.

Today is Wednesday, Sept. 16, the 259th day of 2009 with 106 to follow. The moon is waning.

Producer-director John Cassavetes began with a simple premise: Three married men attend the funeral of their best friend, go on a drinking binge and run away from all responsibility by flying to London in search of life's meaning.

Video Event of the Week: Is it Sony's new DVD of indie pioneer John Cassavetes ' mid-life crisis epic Husbands , with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara ? Could the Universal Blu-ray of Michael Clayton auteur Tony Gilroy 's hilarious Duplicity , with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, conceivably make the cut? Or -- and I'm just throwing this out as a ...

Gus , Harry , and Archie are long time best friends, living in the suburbs of New York.

I'm still trying to figure out whether it was a good thing to get into John Cassavetes' cinematic canon by starting off with "Husbands." Maybe I should've dipped into the late actor-filmmaker's more universally hailed movies, the ones that cemented his status as a pioneer of independent cinema: "Faces," "A Woman Under the Influence," "The Killing ...

TWO major films of the 1970s, John Cassavetes 's "Husbands" and Chantal Akerman 's "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" have recently reappeared on DVD, a coincidence that's almost an act of film criticism in itself.

James Toback's "Tyson" perfectly shows that picking the right subject is at least half the battle when it comes to making a successful documentary.

John Cassavetes continues to delve the depths of the human condition with this story of three men who embark on a journey to cope with the death of their best friend.

Director James Toback presents a view of fighter Mike Tyson's troubled life through interviews and archival footage.

H er name is Mabel Longhetti. She lives in Los Angeles in the 1970s and wears housedresses with big flowers on them.

A court has appointed the wife of US actor Peter Falk to control the affairs of the ailing "Columbo" TV star as he battles dementia, legal officials said Tuesday.

A judge placed former "Columbo" star's Peter Falk in a conservatorship Monday to ensure his daughter could occasionally visit the ailing 81-year-old actor.

Peter Falk's daughter and his wife of 30 years are fighting for conservatorship of the Hollywood icon, who suffers from dementia, court records show.