Few motion-picture stars have been written about as often as Greta Garbo, yet she remains trapped inside a handful of familiar clichés. She was “the Divine,” the mysterious Swedish beauty, the reluctant celebrity who supposedly wanted only to be left alone. Over time, the legend became so powerful that it nearly erased the woman herself. Scott Reisfield’s Greta Garbo and the Rise of the Modern Woman attempts to restore that woman to the story. His Garbo is not merely an elusive star or a face designed for the camera. She is a disciplined actress, an ambitious professional, a forceful negotiator, and a cultural figure whose screen performances helped redefine how modern women could be represented.

On the 23rd of August, at about the time when Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, Hollywood takes a moment—briefly and with respect—to pay tribute. The event is small when measured against the scale of celebrity gatherings but huge in historical terms since it is not a premiere nor a nostalgic exhibition; it is a memorial service—the oldest annual tradition in Hollywood, and for nearly twenty years the consistent emcee has been Tracy Ryan Terhune: an author, collector, and guardian of a legacy which would otherwise vanish into myth, cliché, or silence.

The summer movie season may be winding down, but theaters aren't giving up yet. Friday, August 14, brings an eclectic assortment ranging from big-screen dinosaurs and an offbeat Matthew McConaughey crime drama to stoner comedy, Cold War history and a Broadway phenomenon. Here's a quick look at what's new and whether it's worth leaving the house for.

Very few people who visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery know that an important individual in Rudolph Valentino's early years in Hollywood is interred just a few feet from the famous crypt of the silent film idol. Although thousands go there every year to pay their respects to Valentino, they usually fail to recognize the crucial part that Maxwell Karger played in launching the career of one of cinema's first international superstars.

In 1956, thirty years after Rudolph Valentino's death, his name could still draw a crowd. This time there was no movie premiere, memorial service, or anniversary observance. The attraction was a room in a doomed Hollywood landmark and the ordinary furniture being auctioned from inside it.

Emily Wortis Leider, a highly respected author and cultural historian who had written biographies of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Myrna Loy and Gertrude Atherton in order to examine the complex human beings underlying the carefully crafted public images of these individuals, died in San Francisco on July 16, 2026, and was 88 years old.

After multiverses, alternate realities, collapsing dimensions, celebrity cameos and universe-threatening catastrophes, Spider-Man: Brand New Day does something that almost seems revolutionary for a modern Marvel movie: it remembers that Peter Parker is most interesting when his problems are personal. And I loved it. The film isn't perfect—it occasionally tries to carry more characters and storylines than it needs—but director Destin Daniel Cretton has given Tom Holland's Spider-Man exactly what he needed after the enormous spectacle of Spider-Man: No Way Home: room to grow up.

On August 23, 1926, Hollywood suffered the loss of its first genuine superstar. Thousands of sorrowful fans gathered on the streets outside New York's Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. Some women collapsed, men scaled the cars in order to get a better view, and the police had great difficulty in managing the growing crowd. Reporters were sent by the newspapers to report on the event as though it were a national emergency. The man who had died was not a president, a military hero, or an industrial giant. He was an actor. Yet no film star had previously aroused such devotion, and maybe no silent-screen idol has ever held a position so prominent in the public mind. A hundred years after his death, Rudolph Valentino is still one of Hollywood's most lasting legends—a man whose fame was so great that it contributed to the formation of the modern idea of movie stardom.

After a busy July dominated by blockbuster releases, the first weekend of August offers a more eclectic mix of films. Comedy fans finally get a long-awaited sequel to a beloved cult favorite, romance enthusiasts are treated to an unconventional love story with a science-fiction twist, and horror devotees can indulge in Eli Roth's latest nightmare. While none of these films is expected to dethrone Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the box office, each offers something distinctly different for moviegoers looking for an escape from the summer heat.

Rosa Rosanova was never regarded as a glamorous screen star or a romantic leading lady; rather, she established a remarkable career in the silent film era by portraying women who had already lived through hard experiences—such as immigrant mothers, widows, servants, and family matriarchs who were struggling to protect their children in a changing world. Because of her expressive face, her theatrical background, and her natural air of authority, she gave these characters a sense of warmth and dignity that would otherwise have been missing.

In the summer of 1926, when he was at the peak of his fame, Rudolph Valentino was promoting The Son of the Sheik, the film that was to be his last appearance in a Hollywood movie. Although the public continued to adore him as Hollywood's "Great Lover," Valentino was still a frequent subject of criticism from writers who disliked his foreign origins, his elegance, the fact that he was popular with women, and his refusal to fit in with the narrow American concept of masculinity. This resentment came to a head when the Chicago Tribune published an editorial called "Pink Powder Puffs", a sarcastic attack which did not simply question Valentino's appearance but his manhood; the article led him to launch one of the most well-known challenges in the history of Hollywood.

When Albert Einstein arrived in Southern California at the end of 1930, Los Angeles greeted him with an unusual combination of sunlight, scientific reverence and Hollywood stardust. He had come primarily to work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, but Einstein was already more than a physicist. Since the dramatic confirmation of his theory of relativity in 1919, he had become one of the most recognizable men in the world.