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The films “Anora” directed by Sean Baker and Federico Fellini’s classic “Nights of Cabiria” both focus on sex workers navigating harsh worlds. While made over half a century apart, the films share many similarities in their exploration of hope, relationships, and societal treatment of vulnerable women.

“Anora,” starring Mikey Madison, tells the story of the title character, an exotic dancer in New York City. The film opens in the dressing room of a strip club called Headquarters, setting the scene for Anora’s transactional work. When she meets Ivan, the son of a wealthy Russian businessman, Anora sees a chance to escape her current life. Fellini’s 1957 film “Nights of Cabiria” also centers on a sex worker, portrayed by Giulietta Masina, trying to survive on the streets of Rome.

Both movies examine themes of dreams, romantic fantasies, and power imbalances between social classes and genders. However, they reach different conclusions about maintaining hope.

Our forum posters, many of whom are Hollywood insiders shielded by clever screen names, didn’t waste any time voicing their opinions regarding the 2023 Oscar winners. As the awards were handed out during the March 12 ceremony, they celebrated the success of their favorite films while lamenting several painful losses.

As has been true over 94 years of Academy Awards history, it would have been impossible to please everybody this time. Below is just a sampling of the brutally honest comments of our sassy forum posters concerning the 2023 Oscar winners. Take a read and then jump in here if you’re brave enough.

Best Picture

“All Quiet on the Western Front” – Malte Grunert, producer

“Avatar: The Way of Water” – James Cameron and Jon Landau, producers

“The Banshees of Inisherin” – Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin, and Martin McDonagh, producers

“Elvis” – Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, and Schuyler Weiss, producers

X – “Everything Everywhere All at Once...

Natasha Lyonne has been a star since she was a teenager, from her roles in “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998), “American Pie” (1999) and “But I’m a Cheerleader” (1999) to her recent turn as prison inmate Nicky Nichols in “Orange is the New Black.” But she outdoes herself in her new Netflix series “Russian Doll,” which starts with a high-concept premise and then spirals out into new, bizarre, absurd and often moving directions. And she’s not only the star of the show, she’s also a co-creator, writer, director and producer.

Lyonne created “Russian Doll” with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler (“Parks and Recreation”), and she stars as Nadia Vulvokov, a video game designer celebrating her 36th birthday. But Nadia keeps dying in calamitous ways, and every time she does she returns to the same moment to start again, respawning just like a video game character. Why is she stuck in this time loop,...

For Natasha Lyonne, spending seven years working on “Orange Is the New Black” was more than a job. “I really grew up there in many ways,” she told IndieWire, just as the show was getting close to wrapping its final season.

When asked how she felt about the show ending, the actress and director’s first response was to talk about her castmates. “We’re very tight. Not a day goes by where I’m not in touch or FaceTiming, texting, or something with Uzo, Samira, Danielle, Taylor. I’ve spent some of the holidays with Kate Mulgrew. We’re really a pretty tight tribe,” she said.

It’s a tribe that Lyonne, whose career stretches back to 1986, continues to surround herself with, as seen by the casting of Dascha Polanco — or as Lyonne referred to her, “Dash” — in the series “Russian Doll.” Lyonne created the show with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland for Netflix,...

The most influential movie has officially been named.

Researchers at the University of Turin in Italy have given the title to Wizard of Oz after studying more than 47,000 movies, according to Yahoo! The movie was crowned the winner after findings showed it had the most references made to it in other movies, and the most spin-offs.

According to the study, Oz beat Star Wars and Psycho, which came in second and third, as well as fourth and fifth place finishers King Kong and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“We propose an alternative method to box office takings, which are affected by...

Tim here, asking the most burning question of them all: who’s ready to talk about Italian silent film?!?!

(Blogging pro-tip: italics and interrobangs make people excited to discuss things that they are not, in fact, excited to talk about).

But actually, we do need to talk about Italian silent film a little bit. Because this weekend marks the centennial anniversary of one of the greatest milestones in film history: Cabiria, a massive historical epic produced and directed by Giovanni Pastrone, and written by literary celebrity Gabriele D’Annunzio. It’s a film in which the title character, played by Lidia Quaranta as a young woman and Carolina Catena as a child, escapes the eruption of Mt. Etna, is captured by Carthaginian pirates, is rescued by a great Roman warrior Fulvio Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) and his muscular slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano), who are themselves then caught up in the Second...

Ray Harryhausen—no, make that The Great Ray Harryhausen— one of the most wondrous craftsmen and peerless special effects artists in the history of cinema, died on Tuesday, May 7, in London, where he had lived for years. He was 92 years old.

Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

Though Ray Harryhausen utilized all kinds of Diy effects over the years in such films as Mighty Joe Young (1941), The Beast from 20th Fathoms (1953), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One Million Years B.C. (1966), Clash of the Titans (1981) and a bunch of others (if you’re not familiar with at least a couple of these, you’re from another planet), he was best known for his work in the field of stop-motion animation.

Out of deep respect for Mr. Harryhausen and the stop-motion artistry of which he was the undisputed king, let me quickly explain what it all was...

Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...

I remember seeing clips from Cabiria as a kid, in some silent movie clip show—I was terrifically impressed by the hulking slave Maciste, played by Bartolomeo Pagano, the closest thing I'd seen to a flesh-and-blood Jack Kirby superhero. The fact that Pagano had been a longshoreman, acquiring his musculature through actual physical labour rather than gymnasium-based masturbatory activities made him all the more impressive. Somehow you can tell honest muscle from the inflatable Schwarzenegger kind.

Well, Maciste was too popular a character for the screen to abandon, but Cabiria was a very expensive historical epic with massive sets and many costumed extras. Since the logic back in 1914 /15 was that sequels would gross less than originals (which proved generally true until recent years), some way to reduce the below-the-line was needed.

Above: "Like so?"

So, in Maciste (1915), Pagano plays himself, musclebound movie star, getting involved in a real-life crime caper...

I come to praise Sword & Sandal movies -- not to bury them. But with Wrath of the Titans and the Sword & Sandal/sci-fi mash-up John Carter not exactly setting the world on fire -- along with recent disappointments like Immortals and Conan -- it's getting more difficult by the day to believe that the Sword & Sandal movie can survive the recent fumbling of this otherwise great genre. And that's a shame, because the Sword & Sandal movie -- known for its gladiatorial games, pagan orgies, depraved emperors, and the occasional snarling cyclops -- may represent the most colorful and enduring movie genre of all time. So for the uninitiated, what exactly is a Sword & Sandal movie? Like its cousin the Biblical epic, a Sword & Sandal movie -- or 'peplum,' named after a type of ancient Greek garment -- is typically set in the ancient Mediterranean world, and dramatizes the fight for freedom.

Cabiria (1914) was the seminal Italian historical epic, adding to the gigantic sets and overplayed melodrama of predecessors like Nero and The Fall of Troy, with elegant camera moves (using Segundo de Chomon's first purpose-built dolly) and celebrity cameos for Hannibal and Archimedes. "It had everything but a story," observed Karl Brown, Dw Griffith's camera assistant. Giovanni Pastrone and Gabriele D'Annunzio's historical pageant influenced movies from Intolerance to Metropolis to Conan the Barbarian, and Fellini borrowed its heroine's name for his wife's role in The White Sheik and Nights of Cabiria.

But the figure who caught the public imagination was not the titular heroine, but Maciste, the heroic slave, played by Bartolomeo Pagano, a Genovese longshoreman with a spectacularly muscled physique. Maciste/Pagano went on to star in twenty-four more movies over the next fourteen years, of which the most famous (and the only one available, albeit in somewhat...

COLOGNE, Germany -- A rediscovered and now restored color version Hamlet (1920/21), featuring silent film diva Asta Nielsen as the cross-dressing prince of Denmark, will have its world premiere at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival.

Several black-and-white copies of the film exist but the full-color version has never been shown since the movie's initial release.

Hamlet will have its premiere Feb.10 at Berlin's Volksbuehne and features a new score from composer Michael Riessler.

Berlin will hold a special screening of another recently rediscovered work, Giovanni Pastrone's epic Cabiria. The Berlin Festival will show both versions of the Italian classic, the 1914 silent version and the 1931 sound version, which had been thought lost, on Feb. 17 and Feb. 18. The films have been restored by Turin's Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Both films fit nicely with Berlin's Retrospective this year, which focuses on images of women in the silent film era.

The 57th Berlin International Film Festival runs Feb.