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Another great gone, They Live By Night is one of my favorite movies period, and it's largely because of his and Cathy O'Donnell's chemistry.

Novelist Craig Thomas, whose Firefox provided the source for the Clint Eastwood movie.

That's sad news. He was one of the first directors I got into when I first started watching films. Hopefully Criterion was able to get some interviews or at least input from him on anything of his they're planning to release soon. (They're supposed to be working on 12 Angry Men at least.)

He had as good of a run in the '70s as any of the New Hollywood crowd.

Tom Hagen wrote:He had as good of a run in the '70s as any of the New Hollywood crowd.

Absolutely. He was considered a mainstream director, but his best films were never tidy or formulaic. I'm happy he was able to end his career with something like BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD. Even though the subject matter was straight-forward, Lumet's approach gave it an edge that was unexpected in a 21st century film of this sort.

Sad news indeed. I admired 12 Angry Men more than genuinely liking it but I found Dog Day Afternoon brilliant and The Pawnbroker very moving. Added Before The Devil Knows You're Dead to my lovefilm Queue.

Sad news. IMO, Lumet is one of the giants of 20th century American cinema. Network is easily one of the best films of the 70s, perhaps the best, and the catalog of his film's contains quite a few deservedly canonized films. RIP.

Salon.com has a very nice piece on his career.

It should also be said that Making Movies remains a compulsively readable book, albeit too short for such a prolific director. It's too bad that no one ever produced a Hitchcock/Truffaut or Conversations with Billy Wilder-style book on his remarkable career.

Gerald Perry Finnerman, the primary cinematographer for the original Star Trek and Moonlighting. Reported on the Archive of American Television's Facebook page, but I can't find a real obit yet.

Billy Bang

Another Free Jazz giant passes. His violin seemed to literally bleed the Vietnam War.

Trevor Bannister

An actor mostly seen on British television, with some very occasional film roles, undoubtedly best known as Mr Lucas in Are You Being Served?

Janus Films founder, Cyrus Harvey

I'm actually going to a triple feature at the Brattle Theater tomorrow- I hope there will be some kind of a memorial.

Criterion doesn't seem to have noticed the news. RIP, Harvey.

Elisabeth Sladen.

MichaelB wrote:Elisabeth Sladen.

Now that is a shock - she was only 63. I've recently rewatched (for review) Planet of the Spiders, and she features quite heavily in the extras, as you might expect.

MichaelB wrote:Elisabeth Sladen.

No, not her! First the Brigadier and now this! I'm so sad. She was far and away my favorite Who companion. Aged 63, shock indeed. RIP.

antnield wrote:Michael Sarrazin

That's a shame - he was excellent in They Shoot Horses, Don't They and I recently caught a screening of The Gumball Rally (which seems to have been an uncredited inspiration for Cannonball Run) in which he was obviously set up as the lead character, although he was slightly lost amongst the rest of the more colourful ensemble cast. (Nerdy point: I also find that film to be valuable for having a scene filmed in the same San Francisco location that the car chase in THX-1138 had been shot in, something which can be briefly seen in the attached trailer!)

He was also a very good Frankenstein's monster in a surprisingly good TV movie.

EDIT: I also noted one of his more recent film appearances was in the 2002 horror film Feardotcom - it is a rather derivative horror film (mostly following the arc of Ring, though Feardotcom I think just beat the official US remake of that film into theatres. Stephen Rea's serial killer broadcasting his murders over the internet to an appreciative audience also has some tropes that anticipate the torture porn subgenre by a couple of years, though My Little Eye is a far better 'internet horror' film) but it has some compensations in its gorgeous (but very, very dark!) photography and an excellent, though rather under utilised, cast. In particular Udo Kier and Nicol Williamson appear looking rather haggard as victims of the ghostly website, and Sarrazin has an amusing scene to himself as a drunken new media guru who gets to 'explain the spooky power of the internet' to our intrepid investigators!

This caused a vocal response from me. It's unfortunate when anyone dies in this manner.

That is horrible. And I've met one of the other photographers who was injured a few times, so the incident hit home for me as well.

(And I haven't seen Restrepo ... do I need to? I'm so anti-war that a doc focusing on the soldiers triggered some visceral resistance.)

Restrepo is definitely worth seeing. I couldn't even process it in filmic terms; it's such a visceral document of the chaos that we have all so long feared it going on over there.