Apocalypse Now (movie)

Richard Wagner -- the 19th century composer whose epic operas are considered to be among the greatest ever written and whose anti-Semitic views still cause controversy -- was born 200 years ago Wednesday in Leipzig, Germany. The composer's...

Movies about the difficulty of making movies shouldn't work at all, really. The potential for navel-gazing is immense. The narcissistic insularity of the topic is potentially galling. Yet the best of these films, especially in the documentary realm,...

Philip X. "Phil" Kaltenbach, a former high school English teacher who later became an expert in the field of collectible comic books, died Tuesday at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Fla., while recovering from foot surgery. He was 63. The son...

"I was a beatnik, and then I was a hippie, and before that I was a bohemian," a sky-high Dennis Hopper confided to Merv Griffin on television one night in 1971, in a clip you can see on YouTube. On the opposite couch, Willie Mays uncomfortably refilled...

MUNICH, Germany — Wagner's "The Ring of Nibelung" is no picnic. The epic four-evening mythic drama is the macho challenge with which operas prove themselves. It practically did in Los Angeles Opera when the company finally got around to mounting...

Oscar-winning writer-director-producer Francis Ford Coppola makes movies to understand himself. "When you make a film it is like asking yourself a question," Coppola said over the phone from his home in Northern California. "When it's finished, you know...

In 2008, the screenwriter Mark Boal sought an appointment with a retired special-forces operator. Boal was researching a movie about the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora six years before, and he wanted insight into how U.S....

How do you write Lin's Bin? Lin's Bin starts with a question. Is it OK to compliment a woman on her breasts? Where does the time go? Why are teenagers so cranky? The questions come from clueless frat boys, from wistful mothers, from grade school kids...

London is hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics from July 27 to Aug. 12. While the Games are sure to be a spectacular event, there are plenty of other options for those travelers who couldn't get tickets, blew that 100-yard dash or just happen to be in...

Martin Sheen was a struggling 21-year-old stage actor when his first son Emilio was born. Sheen, seventh of 10 children in a family that knew him as Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez instead of his stage name, was more accustomed to having siblings than being...

On Sunday, Hollywood celebrates itself and honors its own. All eyes (or most of them anyway) will be on the presentations of the Academy Awards. But do the Oscars always end up in the right hands? Opinions abound on this topic, and what follows is only...

As founder, chairman and chief executive of National Research Group Inc. from 1978 to 2003, movie market researcher Joseph Farrell introduced the concept of market testing to Hollywood, originating now-standard industry practices such as audience tracking...