I spend far too much of my day reading about silly movie projects – this absurd remake, that insulting franchise extension. Sometimes I forget how good film can be – how good it has been. A couple days ago, I sat down to watch Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" – a picture I'd seen several times before but never in its newly restored and remastered DVD form – and came away wishing, surely fruitlessly, that 2009 could deliver a thriller that even approached the twisty coolness of this 1959 masterpiece.

Even at the time of its original release, "Northwest" was ahead if its time, as co-star Martin Landau made clear in an interview with MTV News coinciding with the film's 50th anniversary. The actor played Leonard, a henchman assisting with his boss' criminal enterprise and attempting to eliminate a perceived threat from Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant). Read more...

When J.J. Abrams took on directing duties for "Mission: Impossible III," he tried to get Martin Landau – who played super-spy Rollin Hand in the original '60s TV series – to take on a cameo role in the movie. "[J]ust for fun," the director said recently, "and [I] was told that he had no interest in doing it."

Now we know why. In an interview with MTV News, Landau said he has no interest in appearing in an adaptation of a franchise of which he's fiercely protective and which he feels is not true to the original series. "I'm not interested in doing that," he explained. "Let the young Rollin Hand live on." Read more...