The Hollywoodland Revue

Every year there is at least one movie that becomes a love-it or hate-it phenomenon. People will walk out of theaters wondering what they just watched and talk about it for years to come. Bugonia was that movie for 2025. The film, a weirdly hilarious sci-fi thriller from provocateur director Yorgos Lanthimos, was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture. Continuing Lanthimos's body of work that explores the absurdity of people, paranoia, and moral ambivalence, Bugonia was perhaps predictable for people who have seen his previous works with Emma Stone Poor Things and The Favourite. The film represents another bold and unsettling cinematic experiment.

At his death in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1930 newspapers around the nation reported the passing of a man whose life sounded almost mythical. William H. Taylor, known in movie colony circles as “Billy the Scout,” had been reported age 103. He was said to have been a veteran of both the Civil War and the westward Indian campaigns and had been one of the oldest people associated with motion pictures in their earliest years. Taylor's life had spanned the bloody violence of the nineteenth century frontier and the development of the motion picture industry which would in turn dramatize that era.

Few icons are as instantly identifiable as the shimmering gold statue familiarly referred to worldwide as “Oscar.” Clasping his sword in front of him and perched atop a movie reel, the Academy Award trophy has become synonymous with movie greatness. But the journey to its creation is as intriguing as the films it honors, dating back to the birth of Hollywood and the film industry’s efforts to gain prestige, professionalism and artistic credibility.

Timothée Chalamet’s latest controversy did not begin with a manifesto, a feud, or even a calculated provocation. It began, as so many modern celebrity flare-ups do, with an offhand remark delivered in a live conversation, clipped for social media, and then detached from the room in which it was said. During a CNN and Variety town hall taped before students at the University of Texas at Austin and aired on February 21, 2026, Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey were discussing audience attention spans, the marketplace for “serious” films, and whether art should survive because institutions insist on preserving it or because audiences actively demand it.

By the time dawn broke over Hollywood on Christmas morning, 1928, the house at 6622 Iris Drive in Whitley Heights had already passed into local legend. What had begun as a holiday gathering at the home of actress Lottie Pickford—sister of Mary Pickford and once a familiar name in silent-era cast lists—ended instead as a police blotter bonanza, complete with fistfights, bloodied hands, frantic neighbors, and headlines that blared of Hollywood excess spilling into violence.

It's one of the great lost films of silent cinema. Four Devils (1928), F. W. Murnau's second American film and his most obscure Hollywood endeavor, was made in the immediate aftermath of Sunrise and released right before the sound revolution began. Because of its timing, the film hit theaters at exactly the wrong moment to succeed as a movie that valued poetry over gimmick. It's doubly unfortunate because Four Devils wasn't forgotten or unpopular upon release—it was praised, debated, and considered by most people to be a major success.

In the early 1930s, when beauty contests still promised fairy-tale ascents and the line between art, fashion, and show business blurred nightly under marquee lights, Alice Anthon briefly became a name to watch. Newspapers described her with a mix of reverence and amazement: “the perfect artist’s model,” “New York’s most beautiful artist’s model,” a young woman whose form was judged so classically ideal that painters, sculptors, and photographers competed for her presence. Her career flared brightly, crossing from the studios of Manhattan to the stages of Broadway and, finally, to Hollywood—before ending with tragic suddenness at just twenty-one.

For generations it has been one of America's most identifiable residences. A humble ranch nestled on a quiet street in Studio City; it's been known to millions of television viewers around the country as the home of TV's most notorious blended family. Now the house made iconic by The Brady Bunch has been officially deemed a Los Angeles landmark. In early March 2026, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to recognize the home as a Historic-Cultural Monument, ensuring its preservation as an integral piece of pop-culture history.

Moviegoers heading to theaters this weekend will find an eclectic mix of films competing for their attention, ranging from a lavish gothic reimagining of a classic Universal monster to Pixar’s latest animated adventure and a big-screen continuation of one of television’s most celebrated crime dramas. The first weekend of March is not traditionally one of Hollywood’s biggest release windows, yet the lineup arriving in theaters offers enough variety to satisfy audiences looking for everything from family entertainment to darker, adult-oriented storytelling.

Tucked into the narrow slope of West Hollywood’s Norma Place stands a building that has long traded in rumor, memory, and the durable afterglow of silent Hollywood. Today it reads as an apartment house, its clapboard and porch details evoking the early 1920s domestic optimism that once defined the Sherman district. But in the earliest days of the movie colony, locals claimed that it sat at the westernmost boundary of the Norma Talmadge studio lot, located at 812 North Robertson Boulevard. In the years since, the cottage has been rumored to house Hollywood's residual ghost population both figuratively and literally.

For decades, the 61st Academy Awards has occupied a notorious place in Hollywood lore—an evening whispered about with the same mixture of disbelief and theatrical shudder usually reserved for colossal box-office bombs. It was the night Snow White flirted with Tom Hanks, Rob Lowe crooned “Proud Mary,” and producer Allan Carr’s bold, glittering dream came crashing down in full view of a bewildered global audience. The evening was swiftly branded a fiasco, a cautionary tale in how not to produce the Oscars.

Terence Edward Kilburn—forever “Terry” to film lovers who met him first as a wide-eyed Victorian waif—was born November 25, 1926, in West Ham, Essex, then a working-class pocket of greater London that produced more grit than glamour. Yet the story of Terry Kilburn is not merely the story of a child actor plucked from Britain and set down beneath the klieg lights. It is also the quieter, longer story that followed: the one in which an MGM juvenile player grew into a serious stage artist, a director, and a shaping force in American regional theatre—an “after” chapter many former child stars never get to write.