The pairing of Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty failed to attract audiences and repelled critics, but the biggest casualty was the career of director Elaine May In October 1985, Elaine May, Warren ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty are stranded in the desert in the legendary 1987 box-office bomb Ishtar. (Photo: Columbia ...

The latest in our series of writers defending maligned films is an ode to Elaine May’s lambasted 1987 flop starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman It’s a rare movie bomb that’s such a catastrophe it ...

The 1987 film “Ishtar” has long held a cultural status much larger than that of just a single movie, as shorthand for the utter worst, an epochal flop with audiences and critics alike and a huge ...

“The only safe thing is to take a chance.” That was Elaine May’s motto, according to her one-time comedic partner Mike Nichols, and it served the trail-blazing comedian, actress, screenwriter and ...

Famously, the great French director Robert Bresson often shot enormous numbers of takes of his actors—who, in his later films, are almost all nonactors—reportedly, as many as fifty takes, in order to ...

Alex Nguyen is a freelance entertainment writer. He writes about film and music at Spectrum Culture, The Line of Best Fit, Beats Per Minute, and more. Thirty-five years ago to the day saw the release ...

It has been 4 1/2 years since moviegoers have had a chance to see Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman on the big screen. Each won an Oscar that year: Hoffman as best actor, for ”Tootsie,” Beatty as best ...

As a viewer, I greet the arrival of a new film directed by a woman with anticipation. I love Nancy Meyers’ intrepid heroines and Kathryn Bigelow’s tense set pieces and Ava DuVernay’s human moments.

For the three-hundredth installment of Movie of the Week, something special: Elaine May’s “Ishtar.” It’s one of my favorite films, and it’s the victim of enduring misunderstandings—which are ...

When is a big-budget cinematic comedy also a punchline itself? When that comedy is Ishtar, the notorious box-office bomb that became the literal poster child for expensive Hollywood flops. Released in ...