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Curtis Lovelace seemed to go into a downward spiral after his wife Cory died on Valentine’s Day in 2006. For friends and family of the popular couple, murder was the last thing on their minds.

That changed after a new detective in the couple’s hometown of Quincy, Illinois, took a fresh look at the case in 2013. The original coroner had left Cory’s cause of death as “undetermined,” but experts who re-examined the evidence believed a crime had been been committed.

Friends and family were stunned when Curtis, a former criminal prosecutor, was charged in August 2014 with killing his...

After a two-week trial and 16 hours of deliberations, jurors in Quincy, Illinois, could not settle the guilt or innocence of one-time local golden boy Curtis Lovelace in the death of his wife, Cory, reports Wgem. The mistrial declared Friday by Judge Bob Hardwick sets the stage for a May 31 retrial for Curtis, a former local football hero, ex-school board president and assistant state's attorney who drew headlines when - eight years after he reported his wife dead on Valentine's Day 2006 - he was arrested in 2014 and charged with her suffocation murder. In the Adams County courthouse where Curtis, now 47, had once practiced law,...

After a two-week trial and 16 hours of deliberations, jurors in Quincy, Illinois, could not settle the guilt or innocence of one-time local golden boy Curtis Lovelace in the death of his wife, Cory, reports Wgem. The mistrial declared Friday by Judge Bob Hardwick sets the stage for a May 31 retrial for Curtis, a former local football hero, ex-school board president and assistant state's attorney who drew headlines when - eight years after he reported his wife dead on Valentine's Day 2006 - he was arrested in 2014 and charged with her suffocation murder. In the Adams County courthouse where Curtis, now 47, had once practiced law,...

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in ‘Mata Hari’: The wrath of the censors (See previous post: "Ramon Novarro in One of the Best Silent Movies.") George Fitzmaurice’s romantic spy melodrama Mata Hari (1931) was well received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by moviegoers. The Greta Garbo / Ramon Novarro combo — the first time Novarro took second billing since becoming a star — turned Mata Hari into a major worldwide blockbuster, with $2.22 million in worldwide rentals. The film became Garbo’s biggest international success to date, and Novarro’s highest-grossing picture after Ben-Hur. (Photo: Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari.) Among MGM’s 1932 releases — Mata Hari opened on December 31, 1931 — only W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan, the Ape Man, featuring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, and Edmund Goulding’s all-star Best Picture Academy Award winner Grand Hotel (also with Garbo, in addition to Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and...

To mark the release of classic movie based on the Charles Dickens novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby on DVD 14th May, we’ve been given three copies to give away. It’s directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and stars Derek Bond, Cedric Hardwicke & Stanley Holloway.

Derek Bond plays the title character, a resourceful young Britisher forced to protect his family against the demonic machinations of his wicked Uncle Ralph (Cedric Hardwicke). Cast out into the cold cruel world, Nicholas Nickleby deals adroitly with friend and foe alike, eventually coming full circle to mete out just desserts to his unspeakable uncle.

Special Features:

New Interview with BFI Dickens Season Curators Adrian Wootton & Michael Eaton New Interview with Dickens biographer Michael Slater Nicholas Nickleby, a silent film from 1912 directed by George O. Nichols Behind the scenes stills gallery

To be in with a chance of winning this great prize, simply...

Fake Fruit Factory from Guergana Tzatchkov on Vimeo.

"Every year, Librarian of Congress James H Billington personally selects which films will be added to the National Film Registry, working from a list of suggestions from the library’s National Film Preservation Board and the general public," reports Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. This year's list of 25 films slated for preservation:

Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961) Bambi (Walt Disney, 1942) The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) A Computer Animated Hand (Pixar, 1972) Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963) The Cry of the Children (George Nichols, 1912) A Cure for Pokeritis (Laurence Trimble, 1912) El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992) Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968) Fake Fruit Factory (Chick Strand, 1986) Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Growing Up Female (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971) Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975) I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977) The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler,...

Porgy & Bess, in which Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge both lipsynched is one of the 25 inductees.The film is rarely screened, not all that well and regarded but badly in need of restoration. Is that what did it?Each year I read the press release list of the films admitted to the National Film Registry and promptly forget them. I guess I've never absorbed just what this does for the films beyond being an obviously prestigious honor. So this year rather than doing the usual read the titles and forget, I stopped, actually took a breath (a rarity on the web), wondered, and googled a bit. I stopped being lazy about it so you don't have to be either. I didn't just list titles below but actual information!

However I am still a bit confused as what the honor actually means beyond admittance into the Library of Congress. If this...

Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat Forrest Gump, Bambi, The Silence Of The Lambs: National Film Registry 2011 Movies Besides the aforementioned Hester Street and Norma Rae, women are also at the forefront of Julia Reichert and Jim Klein's Growing Up Female (1971); Chick Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory (1986), a documentary about Mexican women who create ornamental papier-mâché fruits and vegetables; and the recently deceased George Kuchar’s experimental short I, an Actress (1977), which is available on YouTube. I couldn't find any titles focusing on gay, lesbian, bisexual, multisexual, etc., or transgender characters. As so often happens, political correctness will go only so far. Anyhow, more interesting than p.c. choices was the inclusion of A Cure for Pokeritis (1912), an early comedy starring then-popular (and quite odd) couple John Bunny and Flora Finch; and what may well be my favorite noirish crime drama, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame.

The Goose Woman (1925) Direction: Clarence Brown Cast: Louise Dresser, Jack Pickford, Constance Bennett, Marc McDermott, George Nichols, Gustav von Seyffertitz Screenplay: Melville W. Brown, titles by Dwinelle Benthall; from Rex Beach's story Highly Recommended Louise Dresser, Jack Pickford, The Goose Woman At the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Clarence Brown-directed 1925 Universal release The Goose Woman was introduced by author and film historian Kevin Brownlow. For me, Brown's family drama was the best film I saw at this year's festival. [Spoilers ahead.] Based on a Rex Beach story (itself inspired by a real-life murder trial), The Goose Woman stars future Best Actress Academy Award nominee Louise Dresser as Mary Holmes, a former opera star known as Marie de Nardi. Once the toast of Paris, Mary is now a drunken slattern, living in an old farmhouse where she raises geese. She openly resents her son, Gerald (Jack Pickford), whom she bitterly...